At Oxford University, debate continues to rage over whether to remove from Oriel College a statue of Cecil Rhodes, the 19th century colonialist and businessman, to help combat racial discrimination.

The organisers of the Rhodes Must Fall Oxford campaign have said their move will “improve the representation of black voices” and a decision is going to be made soon on the fate of the statue, raised in recognition of the financial contribution he made to the college.

Will removal of the statue improve anyone’s life in any significant way? I doubt it. Britain is one of the least racist countries in the world, although racism and racist acts do still take place here, and Rhodes lived in a very different era, with very different attitudes.

You may as well call him sexist as well as racist, because by today’s standards, every Victorian man was sexist. And why pick on him when every man in history, under close examination, would not pass muster in his attitudes to everything and everyone in today’s censorious world?

Rhodes’s thoughts and deeds, indeed his life, took place well over a century ago and it’s surely redundant to campaign against a man’s thoughts and words uttered so long ago and in a different context. It’s not as if the campaigners can change who he was and it does seem such a waste of their time and energy to obsess over the views of a long-dead man.

I wish students, who appear to be concerned only with their own self-obsessed issues such as sexism, could look beyond themselves and redirect their passionate to bigger causes.

Compare and contrast the students at Oxford today with those of the 1960s, when they took part in protests against, yes, racism and also sexism, but also about wars. They saw the bigger world picture and truly believed they could make a difference to lives around the world.

Today, it’s a different story. Instead of banging on about a bit of sexist banter from male students that could be put down with a few tart retorts, why aren’t female students up in arms about the appalling treatment of women and girls by ISsis? Why aren’t they staging protests about female genital mutilation in Africa or doing something to find out the fate of those 276 schoolgirls abducted by Boko Haram in Nigeria in 2014?

And why aren’t male students shocked into action by the dreadful fate hanging over Ali Mohammed Al-Nimr and other young men in Saudi Arabia? This young man is one of several teenagers arrested aged 17 for taking part in anti-government protests. Although a minor at the time of his arrest (an arrest allegedly carried out by secret police hitting him with their car at night and causing him multiple injuries), he has now spent several years in jail and has been sentenced to beheading and crucifixion, which could take place any day now.

Can any of the young men enjoying life in our comparatively free and democratic country imagine what he has been through and what he faces? Can they imagine protesting against the Government here and suffering a similar fate? Or are they and their female counterparts so taken up with their trivial and selfish causes they simply don’t have the time to spare or care? Perhaps they get a distorted view of the importance of their issues because they judge it on the feedback they receive online and genuinely believe we all care.

They’re wrong. I would respect them far more if they believed they could change the world instead of only believing they can change their own little worlds. Get out there protesting.

The Argus:

I find the idea of the prospect of lynx being reintroduced to the countryside exciting.

The Lynx Trust is asking the Government for permission to allow the cats to roam free around forests of parts of England and Scotland by the end of the year.

I can hardly imagine the thrill of seeing large wild cats in a natural habitat in this country and I would certainly pay good money to go to those forests in the hope of catching a glimpse of them.

Farmers are worried they will decimate their livestock and I can certainly understand their fears. Farmers are under increasing pressure and to lose animals to a new predator on the block would be yet another blow to their livelihoods.

Yet I don’t think this alone should stop the plan. In this country, many wild animals are sacrificed to protect livestock – badgers, for instance, and foxes – and while livestock out in fields will always have predators, perhaps the biggest threat is man: around 80-90,000 sheep are stolen every year.

Man has meddled with the balance of nature for millennia. With the prospect of real wild animals out in our countryside, this is one I heartily approve of.