Sam Ashworth-Hayes Sam Ashworth-Hayes

What happens now that Rhodes didn’t fall?

(Getty Images)

Oriel College, Oxford’s decision to retain the statue of Cecil Rhodes has generated the usual voluminous fury. It has also shown it to be just that: noise. The university’s willingness to face down activists could mark a turning point in proving that when campaigners don’t get their way, the world continues to turn.

This might sound obvious but it marks a welcome change to the often depressing cycle of inevitability of protest-social media storm-surrender. All too often, it seems power really does lie with the various campaign groups, charities, and commentators pushing for change. The fact that Rhodes hasn’t fallen, whatever you might think of the man himself, shows that it doesn’t. This is why they are activists rather than policymakers.

What interests Westminster is not what interests Westmorland

Rhodes is staying over Oriel’s doorway because the government effectively turned around and said ‘no’, and that put an end to the matter. For all the claims to be on the right side of history, if the government is willing to put up with a week or so of bad headlines before the press loses interest and changes focus, the repercussions are minimal.

The observation that Twitter is not the real world is old, but worth bringing up once more. The panic about social media undermining democracy focused on the threat posed by populist disinformation, most notably Donald Trump’s ability to express himself without the filter traditionally provided by the press. A more subtle danger is that because our political and journalistic classes are avid users of Twitter, which is not a representative sample of the population, they can start to mistake the simulation for reality.

The group described by More In Common as ‘progressive activists’ may be an outsize presence on social media – making up about half of those who say they shared political content online – but they form only 13 per cent of the population as a whole.

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