Look Left MT21 by Oxford University Labour Club

PAGE 2: CONTENTS

CONTENTS

PAGE 3: EDITORS’ NOTE PAGE 4: CO-CHAIRS’ REPORT

LOOK BACK PAGE 7: JAMES CALLAGHAN AND ME PAGE 9: WHAT ANTHONY CROSLAND CAN TEACH LABOUR PAGE 11: LABOUR GOVERNMENTS AND SOCIALIST HEGEMONY PAGE 13: THE FEMINISM OF BARBARA CASTLE PAGE 16: A CENTURY OF PPE: A MODERN GREAT? LOOK FORWARD PAGE 20: WHY LABOUR NEEDS MORE SCIENTISTS IN POLITICS PAGE 22: LET’S LEGISLATE BY LOT PAGE 27: IT’S TIME TO UNIONISE OXFORD PAGE 29: FIGHTING THE FOSSIL ECONOMY PAGE 32: MIDDLE CLASS MINDFULNESS

LOOK AROUND PAGE 35: THE FUTURE DIRECTION OF EUROPEAN SOCIAL DEMOCRATIC MOVEMENTS PAGE 39: A NORTHERN IRISH LABOUR? PAGE 41: OSTROM SHOWS US HOW TO SAVE THE COMMONS PAGE 43: THE PROSPECTS FOR FUTURE DEMOCRATISATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST PAGE 47: COMMITTEE LIST MICHAELMAS 2021

EDITOR'S REPORT

OTTO BARROW

It’s been a delight to oversee the return to the first in-print edition since the start of the Coronavirus pandemic last year. The pandemic has and will be a defining feature of my degree, and its consequences will likely define my 20s and the youth of those who study with me. This term in particular has represented a return to normality, with all of the intensity that this brings back to the Oxford experience and politics more generally.

As editor of Look Left this term, I’ve tried to reflect that with the breadth of articles you will find in this term’s edition. This edition looks back at some of the heavyweights of our movement’s past from Barbara Castle to Anthony Crosland. We also look forward, thinking about how we can develop our societies sustainably and in those we seek to elect more generally, to suggestions of how we might reform the House of Lords. Finally, we have a chance to look around at events happening across oceans to the other side of the Irish Sea, and reflect on what these developments mean here in Oxford. I’d like to take a moment to offer my thanks to all those who contributed to this term’s edition. Thank you to everyone on the committee this term for their enthusiasm, with Olly and Anjali leading us back to normality. In particular, may I thank Zed Nott for their tips on how to throw myself into OULC and gave me lots of resources from previous terms and Ciara Garcha who inspired me to stand for the role of publications officer in the first place. Last but certainly not least, I’d like to thank my Graphic Designer, Ella Staddon, who helped me compile this issue hours from the printer’s deadline over cups of tea and chocolate, livened with anecdotes about Shirley Williams’ take on logical positivism and how Yvette Cooper got her first break in politics with Harriet Harman after messing up her tights. In solidarity,

Otto Barrow is a 3rd Year PPEist at Magdalen College.

CO-CHAIRS' REPORT

O L LY B O Y L A N D & A N J A L I K A W A

Overall, it has been a great Michaelmas for the Oxford University Labour Club and has been fantastic to return to relative normality. In particular, it has been great to introduce new freshers into the club and meet second years in person rather than on Zoom like last year! Despite being affected by a couple of postponements, our events have been extremely popular this term. Some of the greatest highlights for us have been visits from the Abolish Eton campaign and the Labour Campaign for Drug Policy Reform, where we not only got to hear the opinions of experts but also of OULC members. Moreover, it has been heartening to see lots of new faces at our fortnightly campaigning sessions across Oxford. With local elections now just six months away, we hope that OULC’s efforts can make a real difference in their outcome. We have also sought to make our presence known at non-party political campaigning events. The activism of students through campaigns like Girls Night In offers real hope for the future and we hope OULC can contribute to these efforts.

Socials have been another really positive aspect of this term. Our staple social event, Beer and Bickering, has gone from strength to strength, providing an opportunity for members to debate a myriad of political issues.

We want to finish by thanking everyone for making Michaelmas 2021 such a success. Whether you helped organise an event as part of a committee, attended a campaigning session, or came along to a social event, it is you that makes this club the vibrant force that it is. We look forward to handing over the reins to the capable hands of Danny and Amy, who we’re sure will guide OULC to even greater success.

Olly Boyland and Anjali Kawa are both 3rd Year PPEists at University College.

JAMES CALLAGHAN AND ME M AT T H E W H O L L A N D

Capitalism is based on two principles: opportunity and possibility; if we are presented with opportunities and our goals seem possible, we pursue them with unthinking enthusiasm. For this reason, we tend to revere those historical figures with whom we feel a tangible connection, because we feel that their success makes our success even more possible. Being from Portsmouth, I was spoilt for choice by local figures who went from rags to riches: Charles Dickens, who is so revered in Portsmouth that a council ward is even named after him, Arthur Conan Doyle, who played goalkeeper for Portsmouth Football Club; actor Peter Sellers, who made his debut at the Theatre Royal, where I watched the annual pantomime; and the man who is the subject of my interest and this article; James Callaghan, nicknamed Sunny Jim by his contemporaries, whose only recognition in Portsmouth is a road named after him as far from the centre of Portsmouth as possible, that still has a postcode beginning with the letter P. Most historians have a similar opinion of James Callaghan, that he was an incredibly important and influential man in an incredibly historic government, renowned for the liberalisation of abortion, divorce and homosexuality, the abolition of the death penalty, Equal pay for women and greater legal protections against racial discrimination. Callaghan rose to prominence in the Labour Movement as a Trade Union official and serving predictably as an officer in the Royal Navy during the Second World War. While maintaining strong Union links throughout his political career, it was the irony of his fate that the Unions would

contribute to his downfall with the Winter of Discontent in 1978-9 showing his impotence at controlling the militancy of Unions, which provided the justification for Margaret Thatcher’s ascendancy. Looking at Callaghan’s career within the Wilson Governments, his legacy seems even more chequered. While Chancellor between 1964-7, he failed to deal effectively with the issue of ‘stagflation’ which led to the embarrassment of the devaluation of the pound.

When he was then shuffled to Home Secretary in 1967 as a result of his incompetence, he would then perform that job even worse by sending in paratroopers to Northern Ireland in 1967 which would lead to a heightening of tensions and Bloody Sunday just 5 years later, while also instituting bans on immigration from non-white countries in response to Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech. His time as Foreign Secretary when Labour returned to office in 1974 was too short to be controversial, although his support for a referendum on membership of the EEC proved a smart political move that silenced Euroscepticism for decades afterwards.

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Considering his bizarre record in various Ministerial roles and as Prime Minister, you may be asking why anyone would consider James Callaghan to be worthy of reverence or inspiration. However, outside of his Ministerial commitments, Callaghan faithfully served his constituencies in Cardiff from Labour’s landslide victory in 1945 until his retirement in 1987, surviving two boundary changes, countless electoral defeats and Labour decimations and even continuing to serve his constituency for 7 years after resigning as Labour leader. Indeed, Callaghan served for so long that he even became Father of the House for his final 4 years in Parliament, which helped to inform his reputation as one of the most experienced and hardest working politicians of the 20th century. He also holds a number of records for Prime Ministers, of course the only Prime Minister from Portsmouth, one of the few from a genuinely working-class background, one of only 11 Prime Ministers to not go to University, the longest ever lived Prime Minister and the only Prime Minister in history to lose a vote of no confidence. I grew up on stories of James Callaghan as someone to be proud of, someone who was born just around a mile away from where I was and yet was able to be in all the most important political roles available in the UK. My family like his were involved in Portsmouth’s most famous industry; the maritime industry.

My bias may be in part due as well to family links to Callaghan, my great-grandmother lived next door to him in Southsea and was a friend to his family, until they were forced to move away due to financial constraints. My mum used to tell me stories of how she would talk to her grandmother about Callaghan whilst he was Prime Minister, in fact he was the first Prime Minister my mum can even remember. But the lessons I have cherished most from James Callaghan are not these personal ones of my family connections, and not even excl-

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usively of the idea that he has presented this possibility for me to achieve what he did, but instead of all the mistakes he made. Callaghan may have been one of the most experienced and wizened Prime Ministers if not of history then certainly of the 20th century, but his time as Prime Minister is marred by his poor decision-making.

This problem was demonstrated to the full by his failure to call an election in 1978 when his poll ratings were still relatively high, his failure to effectively criticise Thatcherism and render Thatcher’s policies redundant by controlling Union militancy and most importantly of all, his failure to effectively defend the Keynesian policies that had been the inspiration for British politics since the Second World War and which had produced a society which was by no means perfect but was certainly much more egalitarian than the one we are currently blighted with. For these reasons, I continue to revere James Callaghan and I will continue to preach his failures and mistakes as a guide to what not to do in order to be a successful Prime Minister.

Matthew Holland is studying for a DPhil at Exeter College, in the group of Professor Paul Brennan at the Center for Medicines Discovery, and Professor Fernanda Duarte in the Department of Chemistry.

WHAT ANTHONY CROSLAND CAN TEACH LABOUR DAN HARRISON

Today, the Labour Party suffers from a blatant deficiency. We lack a moral mission. Our leader lacks a clear goal that he seeks to achieve. Sir Keir Starmer often quotes his favourite Labour Party leader Harold Wilson when he says that "The Labour Party is a moral crusade or it is nothing", but there is still insufficient evidence that Starmer is leading a moral crusade. Starmer should draw attention to another Wilson quote. During the Labour Party conference in 1963 Wilson, using exciting rhetoric, spoke of the need to forge a new Britain in the "white heat of this revolution". Boldly declaring that 'we are redefining and redefining our socialism in terms of scientific revolution', Wilson illustrated how the Labour Party could be nimble and adaptable, not by trying to stem the tide of change, but by shaping it so that those changes reflected our socialist values.

But in this article I want to focus not on Wilson but on Anthony Crosland, Labour's greatest intellectual and author of The Future of Socialism, published in 1956. I believe that Crosland offers relevant lessons to today's party. Crosland may not have been a serial election winner like Wilson or Blair, but he was a profound thinker who thought about the Labour Party not only in political or economic terms but also in cultural, sociological and anthropological terms. He combined his fierce intellectualism with practical ministerial experience, holding posts as minister of education, environment, local government and foreign affairs. After the Second World War, he graduated with a first-class honours degree in PPE in just twelve months and became a professor at Oxford, teaching economics. In 1959, 8

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he became MP for Great Grimsby and served that constituency until his sudden death in 1977. He was the epitome of the coalition that held the Labour Party together, the Hull-Hampstead alliance, as this Oxford don represented the industrial fishing port of Grimsby. His seminal work, ‘The Future of Socialism,’ must be re-examined today so that Labour can restate its socialism and make it a doctrine of ideas fit for the twenty-first century.

Firstly, Crosland demanded that the party adopt a revisionist way of thinking. He wrote that "revisionism draws attention to a new reality. When society lacks "certainty" and "simplicity", and mistakes are no longer as obvious as before, and the problems facing society are "complex" and "ambiguous", Crosland believed that the response of the left should not be to "seek refuge in the slogans and ideas of 50 years ago", but to face up to the new reality. This approach can be applied to Britain today. The country faces daunting challenges: a

productivity conundrum, the highest regional inequality in the OECD and an anaemic economic growth rate. From 1990 to 2007 the UK had an average annual growth rate of 2.5%, but since the global financial crisis the average growth rate has been 1.3%. These statistics demonstrate the toughest test of all: how can any government provide a strong welfare system and well-resourced public services at a time when the population is ageing significantly and the UK growth rate is only just over 1%? The UK economy has been trapped in a spiral of low productivity and low growth and any economic strategy of the left must first and foremost focus on increasing productivity in the UK as this is the surest way to improve living standards. The party's socialism must be redefined with this objective in mind.

Too often in its history the Labour Party has been divided, riven and ravaged by factionalism. Factionalism is inevitable in a democratic political party, but factions need not be self-inflicted or self-destructive. In his book, Crosland reminded readers that while the means to achieve change must have a protean quality, the Left's desired ends remain unchanged. This serves as a powerful reminder to the Labour Party, as many on the Left feel betrayed by Starmer's leadership. The definition of socialism should not be based on a specific political prescription, but on our shared values. These are ethical ide

http://www.elisarolle.com/queerplaces/a-b-ce/Anthony%20Crosland. html

als that are partly oppositional, as the left responds to the worst excesses of capitalism, and partly positive, as socialists seek to build a more equal, just society. As Crosland stated, these values are based on opposition to the poverty and injustice generated by the worst excesses of capitalism; concern for the welfare of society; a belief in equality and social justice; a desire to improve the rights and position of the worker and a belief in cooperation and brotherhood. That is our socialism, and these values are as relevant in 2021 as they were in 1956. That socialist values remain relevant can be seen in the fact that there is still too much insecurity and unsustainability in the workplace as the gig economy sprawls and there is still the structural racism that exists in institutions from English cricket to our criminal justice system. The ethical ideals of the Labour Party remain unchanged; this should unite the party.

There is no doubt that Boris Johnson lacks foresight. His character only allows him to foresee four or five years ahead, because what motivates him is to be Prime Minister, and being Prime Minister is enough. Nevertheless, I believe that closer to the next general election he will try to formulate his vision as the political pressure from Labour, the media and especially his own backbenchers, especially in 2019, will lead to this. This will be his version of the vision; it will not represent a coherent political vision. He will talk about the importance of 'equalisation' and ensuring equal distribution of opportunities across the country. Mr. Johnson will proclaim the importance of an 'opportunity society' and meritocracy. He will seek to present the Conservative Party as a party of ambition and aspiration and as a party of equal opportunity. Labour must challenge this charade, and Crosland's ideas can help to do so. Crosland acknowledged that there is much merit in the idea of equal opportunity, but he wrote about the problems of creating a society based solely on this principle.

The main problem is that in such a society, those who have failed to realise their ambitions suffer a loss of self-esteem and self-confidence, they too often label themselves as losers and undesirables, and those who have achieved high results believe that they have succeeded only because of their talents and hard work. A society based on this single principle becomes 'insecure, aggressive and acquisitive'. Social status, self-esteem and self-respect become solely dependent on how an individual behaves in this competition. Labour must emphasise the shortcomings of such a society and stress that society must be based on cooperation, fraternity and the functioning of a network of mutual obligations and responsibilities, rather than on the atomisation of the individual.

https://twitter.com/labour_history/status/971667934383935489

Anthony Crosland can teach the Labour Party much, but there is one thing that he cannot pass on: courage. The party must have the courage of its convictions to state that our values remain timeless, but that the means to achieve are desired ends must always be responsive to the times we live in. The party must restate its values to remain united. The party must refute the idea that equality of opportunity is enough on which to build a society. The Labour Party must once again think about the future of socialism.

Daniel Harrison is a 2nd year student of BA History & Politics at Worcester College.

LABOUR GOVERNMENTS AND SOCIALIST HEGEMONY DANIEL LEACH

The behaviour of the last Labour government is, to put it mildly, far from uncontroversial - especially as the current and last former Labour leaders were heavily involved in challenging the government's foreign policy in Iraq. However, there has been a reassessment of their domestic policies within the party, beginning under Corbyn and continuing under Starmer.

Perhaps this should come as no surprise. While Blair and others seemed indestructible, the question was how they could do more. Making any kind of policy seems a distant dream for Labour these days; very few frontbench members were MPs before 2010. Being able to make any kind of policy would be an improvement over the current situation. Indeed, it seems that it is the dire current situation that has triggered a wave of nostalgia within the party for the more electorally successful days. This raises an interesting question. If Labour has been so successful in government - in domestic politics they have indeed achieved so much - why is there so little left today? Like the Ozymandias statue, New Labour's political programme lies in tatters after a decade of austerity. The Sure Start programme has been terminated, tax credits and child benefit have been cut, funding has been cut across the board, and, perhaps worst of all for a government whose mantra was 'education, education, education', school funding is worse than ever, buildings are crumbling and teachers are leaving the profession. It is not enough to say that these things would have been better had we been in government: of course they would have been better, but defeat is inevitable in electoral

politics. Even the Japanese Liberal Democrats and the Swedish Social Democrats were in opposition. There was always going to be a time when Labour would be driven out of government.

However, it is not at all inevitable that outgoing governments have the next abolish their programs. In fact, Labour had more long-term ministries that lasted far less time than New Labour: Attlee's post-war government lasted only 6 years, including only 5 years with a substantial majority. But the policies pursued by his cabinet, including schooling under 15, nationalised industry and, of course, the NHS, survived for decades. Yes, the Tories reversed the nationalisation of the steel and road industry, but they allowed the railways, coal, telecoms, energy and many other industries to remain under government control. This did not change until the Thatcher government. In fact, the 13-year period of Tory rule that followed Attlee continued a number of his policies, such as building more council houses. If that's not convincing enough, just look at Thatcher to see what the right has achieved in 11 years in power.

Thatcher once said that her greatest achievement was Tony Blair. No doubt she was trying to wind up the left, but there is some truth in that. Thatcher privatised all the industries that Attlee had fought to bring under state control. She broke the link between pensions and earnings, with the result that the elderly are still living worse off to this day. She introduced the right to buy, a policy that still causes housing problems in this country, and destroyed the power of trade unions, making workers more disen

franchised than they were before the war.

Overall, she followed a hard right economic doctrine. However, much of its programme outlived New Labour, including all of the above. It would be easy to blame New Labour for this. It might be argued that the reason for their failure to make a lasting impact on society was their willing capitulation to Thatcherism and neoliberalism. However, there is more to it than that. It would have been politically very difficult to re-nationalise industry and stop the right to buy because Thatcher had created a large class of voters who benefited greatly from these changes and did not want them to stop.

What Thatcher achieved was nothing short of political hegemony. She got the chance to define politics for a generation to come, as Attlee did in the years after the war. That's the difference between those ministries and the last Labour government. Suffice it to say, New Labour’s defining an agenda around the concept of 'being at the centre', rather than seeing government as a project to reshape the state, is part of why they failed to seize the opportunity to reshape politics as others did. Ultimately, their policies were liberal welfare state policies, mostly in the form of modest tax increases or benefit increases, and were often more akin to managerial objectives. Yes, they had a huge impact and did a lot of good, but if you treat the state as an organisation to be managed, another manager can come in and undo the policy without too much difficulty. To achieve the kind of long-term hegemony that Thatcher and Attlee enjoyed required a change in people's thinking. Attlee did that job for him in part during the war: everyone helped, had to eat and contribute to the effort, which created a solidarity at the time that we probably haven't seen since.

Although we don't know under what circumstances the next Labour government will be elected, we can still say what can be done to create socialist hegemony once in power. The repeal of anti-union laws, encouraging

a boom in union membership, will create an atmosphere in which unions can grow and ultimately give workers a strong voice in society, regardless of which party is in power at the time.

Extending collective bargaining to entire sectors will increase solidarity and show frustrated workers the power of the union. Encouraging cooperative entrepreneurship will enable more workers than ever to have a stake in their workplace and democratise the office or workshop. The creation of a new boom in high-quality municipal housing and a significant expansion of tenant rights could lead to a new democracy in housing with a much smaller power imbalance. This employee dignity cannot simply be granted in the form of tax breaks. Would Labour have lost office in 2010 if they had pursued such policies? Perhaps, and indeed, the Conservatives would probably still be trying to cut whatever they could from the state. However, it's not easy to strip well-organised people of their rights, jobs or benefits.

When organised people are angry, they can create problems for the government. Coming to an agreement with the unions looks much more attractive when you are faced with a major multi-sector strike. Any Tory government obsessed with cuts would have had a much harder time, and Labour's return would probably have been only a brief matter of time. Workers' power would have been secured for at least a generation, and voters' priorities would have been changed by being part of a solidarity organisation rather than just looking out for themselves. Next time Labour is in government we need more than just superficial fixes. We can't satisfy ourselves just by making good headlines the next day. We need to do more than capitalist management and we need to be bold. We need socialist hegemony.

Daniel Leach is a 2nd Year PPEist at Pembroke College. This term, he is one of the OULC Co-Chairs Elect.

THE FEMINISM OF BARBARA CASTLE E L L A S TA D D O N

“I want you to forget two things: the first is that I am just out of hospital. The second is that I am a woman. I’m no feminist. Just judge me as a socialist.”

Barely recovered from appendicitis, Barbara Betts travelled across war-torn Britain to stand for parliamentary selection. After declaring that she was 'no feminist', she was selected on condition that she stopped using her maiden name.

Unlike many of her left-wing allies, for Castle, feminism was a part of socialism, and the fact that women were not seen as equal horrified her. She therefore took it upon herself to fight, "in the teeth of opposition from her colleagues", to advance the cause of women, arguably doing more than any other politician in history to change and improve the lives of women in Parliament and beyond.

Climbing the walls in Oxford

Much of Castle's feminist ideology originated in Oxford. She arrived on a scholarship less than ten years after women first enrolled, and found herself subject to curfews and chaperones. Unsurprisingly, women were barred from political involvement at a university level, with the Labour Club the only place where women could take an active part in politics - even though they were not yet allowed to run for committee leadership positions. Her response was to rebel. Instead of being chaperoned, she climbed the fence. She climbed as high in the committee as the OULC would allow. She had her JCR buy a book on contraception that advocated equality in relationships. And she boycotted the Oxford Union. Even after the OU changed

its rules for women's membership, she was not convinced that this attempt at modernisation was permanent, arguing that “there is a strong undercurrent of masculine chauvinism only too anxious to put the clock back.”

The battle for equal pay

Castle had been involved in the equal pay debate from the beginning of her career, and in 1954 organised a petition with over 80,000 signatures calling for equal pay. Castle and her cross-bench allies kept up the pressure and in 1955 the Chancellor announced that equal pay would be introduced in the civil service in 1960.

The 1964 Labour manifesto promised the introduction of equal pay, a fact Castle regularly reminded the Cabinet. She was confident that government inaction would lead to women turning militant, and it was not long before she was proved right. In June 1968, Rose Boland led a walkout of women machinists at Ford's Dagenham plant. Castle made no secret of her support for the women and within hours of meeting them she negotiated a pay rise to 92% of the male rate of pay and promised the nation to introduce equal pay legislation. Unfortunately, the majority of the cabinet, union leaders and industry were against her. Roy Jenkins, Tony Crosland and Dick Marsh publicly opposed the bill, and Frank Cousins of TGWU was heard saying "of course I'm opposed to equal pay". Like everything else Castle did, it was going to be a battle. In June 1968, Lena Jeger tabled an equal pay amendment to Roy Jenkin’s prices & incomes policy. Labour’s majority of one meant every MP had to be in support of the bill.

Castle, sat next to Jenkins on the frontbench, informed him that if Jeger’s amendment failed, she would bring down the government by voting against the bill, unless he agreed to her Equal Pay Act. The threat worked, and on the 9th February 1970, Castle put the Equal Pay Act to Parliament. She declared that “equal pay for equal work is so self-evidently right and just” and that the act would “take women workers progressively out of the sweated labour class.” It received royal ascensent 3 months later, and on 1 January 1976, equal pay for equal work became enforceable by law.

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Updating Beveridge

When Castle returned to the Cabinet in 1974, her aim was to update the Beveridge Report and remove Beveridge's 'concept of women's dependency'. SERPS was a key part of this plan. SERPS took into account the best 20 years of earnings and each year the pension rate increased in line with the increase in national earnings. This meant that even if women took time out of their careers for motherhood, they received a similar pension to male workers who did not. The 'married women's option' was also removed, ensuring that every woman had her own pension.

Another reform was the introduction of child benefit paid directly to the mother. While child benefit was a bipartisan effort, ensuring it replaced married men's tax allowances was not. When Callaghan sacked her, he tried to abandon the bill, but his attempt failed. From the backbenches, Castle defeated him.

“You will not set free all the dynamic capacity of our country if this little masculine, self-contained club of government is going to be able to continue to keep women out.”

Castle knew that the only way to end the male dominantion of politics was to support her female colleagues, whatever wing of the party they belonged to. Many of the women who worked for her became MPs, including Betty Boothroyd, Janet Anderson and Hazel Blears, and despite occasional political differences, Castle travelled the country campaigning for them. Castle was also behind the installation of the majority of women's bathrooms in Whitehall and Westminster, and launched the campaign for a crèche in Parliament to make the job of MP accessible to mothers with young children. And, at Castle's demand, in 1964 women began to be employed by the government as drivers for ministers.

In 1968, Judith Hart was promoted to the cabinet. The two women were already good friends, and would team up on foreign policy issues and exchange notes scribbled down in meetings. When Hart was sacked in 1975, Castle was furious and stormed into Harold Wilson's office to demand an explanation. Although Castle saved her job, Hart resigned the next morning. Afterwards, they continued to attend events together, once sharing a coat because neither had dressed appropriately for the weather. Shirley Williams was another cabinet minister Castle supported. They ‘officially’ leaked information between their factions through each other and annoyed their colleagues by (accurately) calling out their sexism. Having gotten drunk at the 1975 Labour/TGWU Christmas party, they fell down the stairs- Castle fracturing her leg. Williams carried Castle back to parliament to find a sober first aider, neither willing to go to hospital while the nurses were on strike.

In 2016, Harriet Harman spoke of the support Castle gave her: “she was very supportive of me. I found it slightly overwhelming because she was such an icon for me, and she gave me a copy of her diaries before they’d been published, and she wrote on the flyleaf ‘To Harriet Harman, on whom I’ve got such high hopes’ and I thought ‘no I can never live up to these hopes!’ […] When I got sacked from the government, she invited me to come and have tea with her in the House of Lords and she said ‘you’ve just got to remember one thing Harriet: all Prime Ministers are bastards’. She was ready to pick me up and dust me off and set me on my path again.” As Frances Crook has argued, Castle was a feminist in all but name. She supported women, promoted women and, in the face of opposition, took a giant step towards economic equality for women. Her feminism was evident in everything she did: on her first day as a local councillor in 1937, she told off a Tory colleague for his 'patronising chauvinism'; her first party conference speech began by calling out the sexism of the national executive committee; as transport minister, she was determined to save public transport for women who depended on the bus to get to work, and justified In Place of Strife by pointing out that while management was being hurt by wildcat strikes, so were the women waiting for a bus that would never arrive. Unsurprisingly, her favourite suffragette was Sylvia Pankhurst, who had a similar outlook on feminism and socialism. Perhaps it is fitting that Castle's last battle was to fight for Sylvia to get a memorial in Westminster, a battle which, like many others, has been left to us to finish.

Ella Staddon is a 1st Year Historian at Merton College. She is the Graphic Designer for this term’s issue of Look Left.

https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/1034738.Barbara_Castle

Sources Used:

Barbara Castle, Fighting All The Way, (London, 1993) Barbara Castle, The Castle Diaries 196470, (London, 1984) Barbara Castle, The Castle Diaries 197476, (London, 1980) Paula Bartley, Labour Women in Power, (Stratford-upon-Avon, 2019) Anne Perkins, The Honourable Ladies: Women MPs 1919-96, ed. Iain Dale and Jacqui Smith, (London, 1919) Fabian Women’s Network, Women of History: A Celebration of Barbara Castle https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FMYRjvbnROM&t=813s (accessed 18/11/2021) https://tidesofhistory.com/2017/05/29/ of-course-i-am-opposed-to-equal-pay-howbarbara-castle-bounced-the-labour-party-into-equal-pay/ (accessed 18/11/2021) https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1970/feb/09/equal-pay-no2-bill (accessed 18/11/2021) https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/ b084thlc (accessed 18/11/2021) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydw1ZHk0Tmc (accessed 18/11/2021) https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/ b068w44x (accessed 18/11/2021)

A CENTURY OF PPE: A MODERN GREAT? CHARLIE WEST

A hundred years ago this Michaelmas, the first students of Philosophy, Politics and Economics arrived in Oxford. The choice of Oxford to offer this course was a controversial one. Called “Modern Greats” for a while, the idea behind the degree was to offer a more practical version of Classics for the sake of training Civil Servants to run the country and the Empire. A hundred years later, and it certainly feels as though this has come to fruition. But how should we view PPE? Is it a good, rigorous course that helps produce some of Britain’s and the world’s finest politicians, journalists, civil servants and economists, or is it an over-valued one-way ticket to power? Before this article starts in earnest, I think it’s worth saying that I do not study PPE, or anything remotely related to it. I study Spanish and Italian, which means the most famous graduates of my faculty are Susie Dent and Nigella Lawson. Admittedly, both of these are icons, but it hardly compares to Prime Ministers and top political journalists. I hope, however, that this distance I have from the dizzying heights of Oxford’s most (in)famous degree will allow for some perspective.

dominate, the committees of OUCA, OULC, the Union, the student papers, and often JCRs.

The prevalence of PPE within public life is, of course, part of a wider issue of the massive role that Oxford graduates more generally have at the top of the country’s most important organizations. In Johnson’s current Cabinet, for example, there are two PPE-ists, Chancellor Rishi Sunak and Foreign Secretary Liz Truss, out of the seven Oxford graduates, while four out of the nine Oxonians in Starmer’s Shadow Cabinet studied the subject: Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves, Nick Thomas-Symonds, Ed Miliband, and Anneliese Dodds. So, while the PPE-ists are not as dominant as they were, say, between 2010 and 2015, they still make up a sizable minority of the Oxford-educated front benches.

As mentioned, the list of people who studied PPE is formidable: Prime Ministers Ted Heath, Harold Wilson and David Cameron, Leaders of the Opposition Ed Miliband, Michael Foot and Hugh Gaitskell, journalists David Dimbleby, Ian Katz, Robert Peston and Nick Robinson, and countless Civil Servants. The original aim, it can be said, has been met then: wherever you look in public life, there’s a PPE-ist. Oxford itself is a microcosm of this, with PPE-ists dominating, or attempting to 16

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rachel_Reeves https://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Ed_Miliband https://mobile.twitter.com/nicktorfaen https://www. oxfordstudent.com/2018/05/06/anneliese-dodds-oxfords-labour-mp/

The defenders of the role of PPE and Oxford more generally in public life can point to the fact that it is hard to get in and even harder to do well. Between 2018 and 2020, according to the University’s Admissions Report, domestic PPE applicants had a 17.2% chance of being admitted. From an access point of view, it is far from the best, but nor is it as bad as some other humanities. It is made up of 62.4% state school students, which is slightly below the University total of 68.6% yet still up on my own Faculty’s 53.3% , and far better than Classics’ 35.6%. To be fair to PPE, it has a fairly left-wing history. Originally fielded as a more modern equivalent to Classics, it appealed to the relatively disadvantaged applicants who were more interested in politics than Pliny, such as Harold Wilson and Barbara Castle, who were educated by some of the top left-wing economists of the time. Even more recently, Ed and David Miliband both read PPE under the tuition of Marxist economist Andrew Glyn.

PPE as a degree for the training of politicians and civil servants somewhat flew in the face of what Oxford did and, to a certain extent, continues to push: education for education’s sake. Satirising the view of 1920s’ traditionalists, a character in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited memorably said: “You’re reading History? A perfectly respectable school. The very worst is English Literature and the next worst is Modern Greats”. But what is the point of PPE today? It is fair to say that we hardly view it as a revolutionary left-wing factory anymore. Rather, PPE-ists are mocked as generalists with a relatively light workload who are only here for the sake of a good graduate job. Speaking to a friend of mine who is in her final year of studying PPE, she has anonymously admitted that she “wanted to make lots of money and PPE sounded like it would get [her] there, no love for the course but [she] did get a nice job, so can’t complain…The course does look nice on [her] CV though”.

https://mobile.twitter.com/jwhandley17/status/1247357621893353472

With two essays a week, she says, it is possible for people to put in a lot of work and do fantastically academically, but it also allows for people to do quite well without fully dedicating themselves to studying. She also criticises the method of teaching the papers, whereby there is very little communication let alone cross over between the three individual departments; this is quite distinct from the original ethos of the course, whereby the three individual subjects were seen as complementary. This is quite a pessimistic and cynical view of the degree, but it does raise the question of whether PPE has become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Do PPE-ists do well because their course is actually a rigorous overview of centuries of thought with a meritocratic entry process? Or is it because this is how employers perceive the degree? This is, frankly, a case of the chicken and the egg, but one thing that I’m sure the majority of Oxford humanities students can relate to, and probably the multi-disciplinary PPEists more than most, is that we are made to be good at making things up on the spot . We have all been in tutes and had a tutor ask us that one thing we didn’t properly read about or understand, but we still try and put up a good fight. This is cultivated further in the PPE-ist’s natural environment of Port and Policy or the Union debating chamber, when rhetoric wit and confidence are far more prized than actual reasoning or, dare I say it, truth. By knowing a little about a lot yet having the self-confidence to be able to act like a world expert, aided by that prized “PPE, MA (Oxon)”, the PPE-ist is in the perfect position to dominate public life, regardless of political persuasion. There seems, however, to be quite a bit of complacency about this. Yes, every few years there’ll be a Guardian article about it, but we just seem to accept it.

Compare this to France, which has its National Administrative School, alma mater of Emmanuel Macron, and specifically founded in 1945 as a gateway to the French Civil Service. It is a point of national discussion

and disgust in France. This could simply be due to the nature of the French to relentlessly criticise their national systems, which is hardly a bad trait. But it could also be that this school is officially for that purpose, founded by Charles de Gaulle in 1945. Oxford’s PPE course, and Oxford more generally, is able to avoid this criticism by being an independent organization free from official government links, open to applications from all, and students who choose their own career paths. This is far harder to criticise, despite having basically the same consequences. So, how should we view PPE a century after its first students matriculated? It has quite a mixed but undeniably substantial legacy. On one hand, it attracts would-be career politicians and money-makers who believe that knowing how to charm their way onto a committee position and reading about constitutional history is tantamount to knowing how to run a country full of working people. On the other, it has allowed generations of disadvantaged students to have access to knowledge and tutors that would have otherwise been completely inaccessible. Overall, however, I believe that it is the embodiment of the more general problem with Oxford’s role in our country: the most important lesson taught to us is less the substance that we put into our essays and more how well we can persuade others that we are right.

Charlie West is a 3rd year Spanish and Italian Student at Jesus College.

WHY LABOUR NEEDS MORE SCIENTISTS IN POLITICS - LEARNING FROM SCIENTISTS FOR LABOUR. ISABEL CREED

Go into any Labour university club around the country and you will find that most of the students you meet are studying subjects such as classics, PPE, history and so on. Perhaps not surprisingly, most of the politicians who went to university also studied these subjects. While there is certainly nothing wrong with these subjects, the UK could do with more politicians who have studied and, more importantly, understood science. As many of you reading this know, even though I am studying for a PhD in theoretical chemistry, my ambition is to eventually become a Labour MP. I'm currently on the programme for future Labour Party candidates so that I can one day become an MP (if they accept me)!

Usually when I mention that although I'm studying chemistry, I want to get into politics, I usually get one of two reactions. I am either reminded of a famous, or rather infamous, Oxford chemist who became the first female Prime Minister of the UK. Or people remind me that German chancellor Angela Merkel also has a PhD in quantum chemistry. . However, I think the role of a scientist in politics goes beyond these examples. The UK

https://twitter.com/scientists4lab 20

as a country should hope that more people with a scientific background enter politics, as many of the qualities that make people great scientists also make them great politicians.

In this article I want to explain the power of science in politics using the work of Scientists for Labour (SfL) as an example. I hope it will encourage many members of the Oxford University Labour Club to join SfL and help us in our cause. For those who don't know, SfL is a socialist society affiliated to the Labour Party which has two main aims. To promote science in politics and to promote Labour values in science. We have some famous patrons, including Gordon Brown!

If you think of the many major crises facing our society at present, many of them have to do with science and scientists will play an important role in overcoming them. For example, the climate crisis, the development

of drugs for diseases such as cancer and Alzheimer's, COVID-19, education, etc. However, science can only go so far and we need politicians on board to implement scientific solutions and ensure research cooperation

between

different

countries.

Scientists for Labour, led by Ben Fernando, a former postgraduate student at Oxford and current researcher, has played, at least in my view, a huge role in the fight against the pandemic. I will briefly tell you my story of working as a volunteer and then on the executive committee during these times.

Early in the pandemic, Scientists for Labour realised the seriousness of the situation in the UK at the beginning of March and began to set up the infrastructure for the daily briefings. The daily briefings were short 2-3 page briefings in which Labour and MPs summarised the current research emerging that day on COVID-19. The mechanism for allowing the daily briefings to take place was incredible! It was a tremendous testament to the work of the entire Executive Committee of Scientists for Labour and the team of volunteers. Every day, teams of scientists would start the day by sorting through papers before breakfast. Then they summarised each report, trying to do this before lunchtime. Later in the day, at the beginning of the day, they would write a summary report. Once the summary report was ready, usually mid- to late-afternoon, it was sent to the research team in Edinburgh for fact-checking and then sent out in the evening to fellow Labour MPs and MPs.

certainly liamentary

helped Labour

the

ParParty!

The pandemic, it seems to me, has taught Britain many lessons. These include how proud we should be of our national health service and how it should be protected. How much we should value our nurses, social workers and other key workers. Or how much we should fight against inequalities in our society, the very inequalities that climate change will reveal. It has also taught us the importance of good science in politics.

As SfL moves from helping with COVID to many other issues, for example we recently had a weekly briefing before COP26, we need a wide range of scientists and non-scientists to help us in our cause. I hope that OULC will seek to support this idea.

Isabel Creed is a postgraduate student reading MSt Theoretical & Computational Chemistry at St. Edmund Hall. She is the Secretary of Scientists for Labour, https://www.scientistsforlabour.org.uk/

Later, as the pandemic progressed, SfL began to do longer reports on various topics, for example, I led a report on the impact of the pandemic on educational inequalities and on mental health. As part of these reports, SfL members meet with Shadow Cabinet members, backbenchers and Labour colleagues to discuss the reports.

These reports and the daily briefings were incredibly useful. This was evident from he number of letters of thanks the team received from everyone from MPs to party to leader Keir Starmer. With the civil service being overwhelmed by COVID, SfL has

TORY SLEAZE MANIFESTS OUR DEMOCRATIC DEARTH: LET’S LEGISLATE BY LOT CHRISTOPHER O'NEIL

Venalism infects our institutional processes, as evidenced by the reporting onslaught the government has undergone over the past month. Hell seemed to freeze over earlier this month when Andrew Neil (1) and commentators at The Times (2), FT (3), The Guardian (4) and The New Statesman (5) all agreed on one thing: the stench of sleaze emanating from Boris Johnson's administration, particularly the peerage scandal when it emerged that 15 of the last 16 Conservative Party treasurers won a seat in the House of Lords after donating over £3 million to the Tories, can only have one solution: abolishing our undemocratic upper house.

Abolition is an interesting idea with consequences that I don't think any of the above experts have considered. The word itself comes from the Latin abolere, which means "to destroy" or "to cause to die out". One option for what the abolition of the House of Lords might look like is just that - the destruction of it as a political entity. However, in my view, this is a rather superficial analysis. When abolitionists who fought the deep evil of slavery in the American South called for the abolition of slavery, they certainly demanded much more than what the freed Southern slaves and their descendants were endowed with: in the words of Martin Luther King Jr. "freedom to hunger, to the winds and rains of heaven... freedom without food to eat and land to cultivate, and therefore freedom and hunger at the same time" (6); freedom only in the abstract, freedom to share the harvest, racist prison slavery, racial discrimination, Jim Crow and segregation.

Abolitionists fought for the exclusion of race from the set of characteristics that

determine our chances of a prosperous life, for a society in which the harm of racial discrimination is as limited in everyday life as it is in institutional life, for the destruction of the sources that make this state of affairs possible - the enslavement of an entire racial group by society. Recognising slavery as illegal is part of ending the objectification of this enslavement, but without a society freed from racism, slavery of one class to another will inevitably emerge in more subversive forms that we have not yet eradicated; as Marx wrote, "the state can free itself from restriction unless man himself has freed himself from it" (7).

Considering the possible abolition of the House of Lords through this prism requires an analysis of what a fundamental convention in British political life is the institutional manifestation of our undemocratic upper house. This, I believe, is rooted in thehttps://www.democraticaudit.com/201 ic-is-the-house-of-lords/ rejection of popular democracy prevalent in our political elite - as found most strongly in the writings of the famous British conservative Edmund Burke - because of the ignorance and ineptitude of ordinary people and their exposure to demagogic suggestion, whose whirlwind, to paraphrase Alexander Hamilton, can be directed at the cherished traditions and structures Burke's conservatives hold dear. After that, given the remnants of hereditary rule in an already sprawling House, the shocking levels of inactivity, given the high sitting fees paid to many lords who are increasingly overextended, and the recent and historical examples of cronyism in the

appointment process (8), it becomes simply obvious that the purpose of the House is to hinder democracy, to suppress the impulse will of the people as expressed in a more representative but still eliterun and weakly democratic parliament. Therefore, I believe that abolishing the undemocratic House of Lords without trying to eradicate the anti-democratic spirit omnipresent in our institutions would be a pointless exercise in aesthetic reform; parliament would remain full of unaccountable bourgeois elites and the people would remain de facto excluded from participating in the affairs that govern their lives.

The House of Lords is merely an institutional manifestation of our socio-cultural democratic deficit, which cannot be revolutionised simply by removing our most overtly undemocratic structures. On the question of reform, I believe that democracy must deepen and strengthen.

On the question of how to make our democracy deep, pervasive and strong, I subscribe to Dewey's position: the best solution to democracy's problems is more democracy, more account18/10/02/audit2018-how-undemocratability and subsidiarity in decision-making, more popular participation in the institutions that govern our lives, so that we foster "an ever expanding and self-critical community of scholars, operating on pragmatic principles and constantly revising our beliefs in light of new evidence." (9) Without this, the decisions made for us are doomed to be tainted by the often partisan, divisive and irrational ideology of the elite, instead of being made independently, in the interests of all. In that spirit I propose, according to C.L.R. James and Eric Olin Wright, as a practical, egalitarian replacement for the House of Lords, a legislative body based on triage, with voting representatives chosen by lot.

(As an aside, this lot could be entirely random, but stratifying the sample by relevant criteria - gender, age, socioeconomic status, race/ethnicity/indigeneity, and geography - would certainly increase the representative legitimacy of the legislature.) The term sortition legislature goes back to the method the ancient Greeks used to select legislators, juries and municipal officials. In today's world, the idea is gaining momentum and was recently endorsed by former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, who believes that "the ancient Greek practice of choosing parliaments by lot instead of by election... would prevent the formation of self-serving and autocratic political classes alienated from their constituents". (10)

This would be, in effect, a fully empowered chamber emulating a citizen’s assembly on a grander scale, with each representative serving a four-year term - a quarter being replaced each year, ensuring that there would always be a mix of adept and novice citizen legislators in the assembly while allowing for experience to accumulate within the chamber constantly and to a sufficient degree – paid at several multiples of the median earnings and granted legal protections against employer retaliation – ensuring a proper incentivisation structure for those from all backgrounds - buttressed by expert empirical and legal professionals, in order to prepare and assist the citizen legislators for their time in office through a particular sequence of mandatory orientation and training, as well providing the benefits of their expertise to the deliberative process.

Some more niche, yet imperative institutional arrangements: the need for an Oversight Commission, made up of a mix of current and former sortition legislators, with additional members from the lower chamber and some legal expert appointed by an independent committee, ‘which periodically reviews the process for random selection, manages staff hiring and firing, and oversees

new member orientation and training’ (11); the need for some amount of legislator privacy - in particular a private space for straightforward and reflective deliberation - secret ballots, and an extremely limited accountability mechanism, used to dismiss those maliciously incapable of contributing to a full discourse, in order to support the honest, sincere discussion needed to sustain the chamber’s principles as a rational, deeply democratic institution.

There are, I, following Wright, think, four distinct reasons why sortition might produce better outcomes. First, ‘elected bodies favour the ideological and class interests that gave the governing parties a financial advantage in elections’ (12), particularly those with limited public funding of electoral campaigns. Money plays no role in selecting sortition assembly members.

Second, re-election pressures and party discipline constrain deliberation in elected bodies, through the exhaustion, party-political dogmatism, and, frankly, the ambition, stubbornness, egotism of politicians caused by campaigning, but a sortition legislature is more likely to study problems rationally and open-mindedly, in order to discover creative solutions that transcend conventional electoral divides. Third, the demographic diversity in a sortition assembly further increases the prospects for robust deliberation by ensuring a magnificent diversity of experiences and perspectives, particularly if the lot is stratified in order to ensure representation. ‘Direct contact with diverse participants can lead to recognition of marginalized voices, as has been observed in previous large-scale deliberative processes using lay citizens.’ (13)

Lastly, the empirical and legal expertise and training provided, which buttresses the deliberation, assures that a dearth of high-quality media coverage will be less like24

ly to impede the legislative process through, often elite-controlled, ‘fake news’ or ostensibly impartial yet often feeble state media.

However, I did not write this article in order to offer my praise to this great system, I wrote it in order to extol its virtues as a deeply democratic, egalitarian replacement to the House of Lords, which allows for radi-cal opportunities of departure from the status-quo and as its potential to offer great theoretical insight into how a totally democratic polity could look in the far future, with sortition legislatures full of publicly minded citizens governing local and regional councils, national parliaments, and supranational bodies. I will end by connecting the above discussion to Marx’s conceptualisation of the Paris Commune as the institutional form of the dictatorship of the proletariat and C.L.R. James’ ruminations on the ‘communist man’ evinced by the Athenian citizen.

For Marx, the model for a radically democratized socio-political order was intimated in the institutional form of government that emerged in the Paris Commune, with its ‘municipal councillors, chosen by universal suffrage… responsible and revocable at short terms’ where ‘the majority of its members were naturally working men’ and ‘public service had to be done at a workman’s wage’. This form of organisation would become the universal governmental arrangement, as subsidiarity-based and participatory democracy took hold over the polity, wherein each delegate to the higher form of nested council was ‘bound by the mandat imperatif (formal instructions) of his constituents’ (14). Here, a Rousseauian idea of democracy, one driven by a popular general will, with a representative body connected by its very nature to the will of the people, is progressed; the same is inexorably true of a sortition legislature, despite the clear institutional differences between the two models.

There is, I think, a weightier similarity to be drawn between the two. Both are but preliminary institutional arrangements, to be constructed and built upon as a stopgap between the present, with our incredibly weak democratic spirit, and the future, when the post-revolutionary polity becomes something of ‘an association’ of political animals governed by a healthy mix of individual interest, altruism and public-mindedness, as well as scientific rationality, wherein ‘the state [is converted] from an organ superimposed upon society into one completely subordinate to it’ rather than a ‘public power’ with a ‘political character’ (15).

This segues neatly into the issue of feasibility. Marx stated that the future type of man, the man of a socialist society, will be a “fully developed individual, fit for a variety of labours, ready to face any change of production, and to whom the different social functions he performs are but so many modes of giving free scope to his own natural and acquired powers” (16). In order to create something like this, it will be necessary to drastically increase the level of democratic commitment and public mindedness in our society. Like Rousseau's citizens, communist men and women are the authors and directors of the institutions that affect their lives.

But genuinely communal and autonomous agents of this kind do not yet exist. If they are ever to exist, they must be created. Because social engineering is inadequate to this task, would-be communists must create themselves. Individuals and groups who would make the communist ideal real must, like Rousseauian citizens, transform themselves, through their praxis, to the point that they genuinely become the communist men and women communism requires (17). Whether this is possible is utterly crucial to the emancipatory mission of Marxism, and we simply cannot know without a genuine attempt at democratic empowerment.

Furthermore, at the heart of the feasibility of sortition is an underlying hypothesis about social psychology, that the representative citizen is at least potentially open-minded, able to listen to different points of view, persuadable by rational and empirically backed argument, able to consider that maybe the set of convictions they came in with are not completely correct in order to seek common ground and create as much consen-ensus as is available, which is a very optimistic assumption.

However, there is good research – particularly the work carried out by John Gaston in Portland, Oregon, and notably by Larry Fishkin around the world, to indicate that ordinary citizens, if the right institutional frame occurs, are capable of this, not that they will inevitably do. Moreover, for those hesitant to believe that such common ground does and cannot exist, the deliberative process which the assembly seeks to emulate is a process of discovery and creation which attempts to produce consensus through limited and fair compromise. It is simply true that theirs is not necessarily an a priori already existing common ground, but through dialogue people can redefine the nature of the problem in ways that generate common ground. Finally, to emphasise its feasibility, I consider first its desirability, second its viability, and thirdly whether it could be done. I believe the proposal is obviously desirable. If you consider the triplet of democracy: of the people by the people and for the people, parliament is certainly by the people - the people elected it - but it isn't of the people because the typical people that are elected are our elites.

Indeed, Burkean conservatives accepted limited elections as they were seen as a way of reinforcing aristocracy, not democracy, because of the inevitability that it would be elites who would be chosen, not the people.

The sortition legislature would be a random selection of ordinary people, that would be the chamber of the people, the elected legislature would be the chamber by the people, and together they would be constituted a legislature for the people.

I believe I have established that the proposal is viable: you could have such a thing; if you could snap your fingers and get it, it wouldn't self-destruct. It’ll have all sorts of consequences, and some may be negative, but they're not of the character that make it unviable, just that they would require additional institution building.

The question then is, is it achievable, how do you get from here to there? Well, one could imagine, in a place like Canada or Britain, with our unelected upper houses, a period of political crisis, of democratic shakiness, occurs – like the one we’re experiencing now - where the proposal is made to convert a chamber of notables into a chamber of citizens.

This approach, I think, is not far-fetched and therefore, reasonably, it is achievable, at least theoretically; while we don't have a strategy by which we can bring it about, we can imagine the circumstances in which it could be brought about, and then the task is to make a viable and clear enough proposal that so political forces can take it on. In the words of the late Erik Olin Wright, ‘our beliefs about what possibilities there might be affects what possibilities there are; our imagination sets actual limits’. I hope, through this article, that I have contributed to the imagination of the possibility of a more democratic world; that, through this, the limits of emancipatory political action may be progressed towards abolition ‘Utopian visions do not turn real in a day, but they guide us and strengthen us throughout the effort.’ (18) – Phillipe Van Parijs

Christopher O'Neil is a 3rd Year History & Politics Student at Brasenose College.

References: https://www.express.co.uk/news/politics/1517937/andrew-neil-news-house-oflords-sleaze-row-peerages-latest https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/ifbritain-is-truly-a-democracy-the-house-oflords-has-no-place-in-it-2t0pv6lcw https://www.ft.com/content/269eb4f51277-4984-8064-00bec1f48b99 https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/nov/15/house-of-lords-scandal-abolish-parliament-upper-house https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/ uk-politics/2021/11/if-you-want-to-cleanup-this-sleazy-parliament-start-by-listeningto-billy-bragg King Jr., Martin Luther. (June 11, 1967). Interview with NBC News. First Accessed at https://joshdance.medium.com/source-ofmlk-cruel-jest-to-say-to-a-bootless-man-interview-quote-4b71105dee35 Marx, K., 1844. On The Jewish Question, p.51. https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/ tv-radio/2020/08/peers-reviewed-analysisfailings-house-lords Westbrook, Robert B. (1992). "John Dewey and American Democracy". The American Historical Review. 97 (3): 919–20. Speech given in September at the 2017 New York Times Athens Democracy Forum. Gastil, J. and Wright, E. O., 2018. Legislature by Lot: Envisioning Sortition within a Bicameral System. Politics & Society, 46(3), pp.303-330. ibid. ibid. Marx, K., 1871. The Civil War in France. London. Engels, F., 1892. Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. London. James, C.L.R., 1956. Every Cook Can Govern: A Study of Democracy in Ancient Greece - Its Meaning for Today. Correspondence, Vol. 2, No. 12. Levine, A., 2002. Engaging Political Philosophy: From Hobbes to Rawls. Oxford. Van Parijs, P. and Vanderborght, Y., 2017. Basic income. A radical proposal for a free society and a sane economy. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

IT’S TIME TO UNIONISE OXFORD OXFORD WORKER JUSTICE

Let's face it: in many ways, Oxford is backward and slow to change. From disability access to fossil fuel divestment, this is not a university that necessarily likes to move with the times. The unions are no exception to this rule. If you haven't heard of the University and Colleges Union (UCU) voting for industrial action, it may be because at Oxford the union is only recognised at departmental level. In other words, if academics had chosen to strike, they would only have been allowed to strike against the department. So there would have been no classes or labs, but tutorials would have gone ahead unhindered. Given the demographics of OULC subjects, we can assume that most people reading this article would therefore hardly have noticed such a strike! These conditions are hardly conducive to workers' power, and yet in Oxford it is the best possible scenario for anyone hoping to advance workers' rights.

We do not want to minimise the difficulty that academics have had in organising, especially in the context of the restrictive trade union laws that govern this country. We also note that many UCU members are zero-hour tutorial staff, in which case they would not be able to strike. However, there is a much larger group of Oxford staff, in worse conditions, with even less opportunity to organise. These are the people you see every day, day in and day out: the scouts, the kitchen staff, the service staff, and those behind the scenes supporting the students in every Oxford college. From time to time you may see an article online about an Oxford college offering a position, but not offering the Oxford Living Wage. Perhaps the institution has even claimed to be a 'living wage employer', although this accreditation is hardly

https://www.oxfordworkerjustice.co.uk/

worth the paper it is written on. What you may not have realised is that this is more or less the norm when it comes to working in low-paying jobs in Oxford. Few colleges pay all their staff above the Oxford Living Wage: since this year's increase, only Merton is a Living Wage employer. Many staff are employed on agency contracts and so may receive even less than the already low advertised rate. For those of us on the left, the current situation should be considered completely unacceptable.

However, at present there is little that workers can do to improve their lot. Only a few colleges recognise a union for domestic workers, and those that do have few members. These workers alone have too little power to challenge the governing bodies and bursars who set their pay rates. With high turnover, which is of course a function of these conditions, workers have even less opportunity to challenge their bosses. The only way to improve things is to do the hard work of organising. This is not about getting people to join a general union or vote in an industrial ballot: it is a mission to help our workers create a branch here in Oxford to fight specifically for domestic workers. Oxford Worker Justice is the (mainly) student group that was originally set up to fight for the living wage. However, this is no longer enough. To establish sustainable workers' power in Oxford, we need to get unions recognised in colleges and create the structures that will allow workers to fight for themselves and each other. We are currently talking to workers and offering what low-level support we can. It is through this that we hope to build links with workers in Oxford and eventually facilitate the formation of a union for them. For students who who consider themselves socialists or trade unionists, as we all should, supporting the OWJ is the best way to put your beliefs into practice directly.

Given that we need workers to organise themselves for the union to be effective, one wonders what the point of student support for the OWJ is. At Oxford, students are privileged by the very nature of the place. Not only because we are effectively looked after by a small army of staff, but also because, frankly, it is harder to discipline students than staff and we have less to lose. When staff are caught organising, their bosses often illegally threaten them with dismissal or isolation from

their colleagues. This is particularly threatening for the large number of migrant workers found in Oxford colleges, who may even lose their visas if they lose their jobs. These are threats that simply do not apply to us. I'm not saying that joining the OWJ is a recipe for trouble with your bursar. However, we can have conversations that workers may not dare to start. We have a space (our Saturday morning cafes) where workers can talk without anyone hearing them. And we can change students' minds until colleges are forced to agree to workers' demands. So if you're a trade unionist, a socialist, a supporter of justice for all, join the OWJ by sending a message to one of our social media pages, support workers' organising and help us organise Oxford.

This article was written by Oxford Worker Justice (OWJ). OWJ is a group of students campaigning for justice for workers at the university and its constituent colleges.

FIGHTING THE FOSSIL ECONOMY C H A R L I E TAY L O R

On 16 November 2021, two Australian activists from Blockade Australia climbed on top of one of the stacker-reclaimer machines at Port Newcastle, the largest coal port in the world, and brought the entire plant to a halt. A video claimed that the action was directed against the extent of global fossil capital, which is "ceaselessly causing a climate crisis" and "pushing us ever closer to the point of social collapse".(1)

Port Newcastle has become a telling case study in the rhetoric and lack of concrete change in climate policy by Australian politicians. As recently as 2017, the Port's Chairman had told the media that the "long-term outlook for coal is a threat to the Port" as people around the world increasingly move away from coal-fired power generation. This reaction was in direct contrast to the fact that the government at the time was subsidising the development of an entire new coal mining area in Queensland by the Adani Group, which led to a massive increase in port traffic (2).

Now, in 2021, the response to the protest was not much different. Matt Kean, Treasurer and Energy Minister for New South Wales, a critic of the Australian government's energy policy, made it clear: "There are hundreds of ways to make our views known and advocate for change, but risking the lives of rail workers is definitely not one of them" (3) . As a result, the government looked for legal loopholes to punish activists harshly instead of working on solutions. At what point does continued inaction lead to ever more daring protests and shutdowns? As James Butler writes, "Where are all the eco-terrorists?"(4).

Exaggerations followed by blatant inaction have become such a cyclical process in the climate movement since the 1990s that one could despair of it. Much of the current disquiet can be summed up by Greta Thunberg's call for politicians to "blah blah blah". But while many politicians across the political spectrum are calling for pathways to "carbon freedom", "climate equality" and "climate justice", concrete infrastructure overhauls and a radical dismantling of the fossil fuel economy seem so far off the radar as to be almost outdated statements.

If anything, the fossil economy has been moving at an unprecedented pace since the international climate summits began. Barrack Obama's appearance at COP26 seemed more than a farce, as his presidency oversaw the most extensive expansion of gas fracking in the United States and unprecedented fossil fuel extraction, empathetically warning leaders that "time is really running out" (5). The scale and nature of the increased expansion of the fossil fuel economy is all too clear. In 2018 alone, more than two-thirds of all capital invested in energy projects went into oil, gas and coal, in addition to investments in extraction, fuel combustion and power generation facilities. In the process, big energy companies are increasingly using their power within states to stop opposition to their expansion.

Steven Donziger, an environmental lawyer, is just one of the prominent victims. In 2011, he sued Chevron in the Ecuadorian courts and obtained the repayment of $9.5 billion in damages because Chevron had dumped 16 billion gallons of oil into indigenous peoples' land in the Ecuadorian Amazon (6). Chevron has fallen far short of paying, which would

set a dangerous precedent for corporate accountability. Instead, Chevron hired private lawyers to fight Donziger in court on largely false premises. As a result, he lost his law licence and was condemned to house arrest for more than 600 days (7). But states themselves are also beginning to crack down on even small and moderate environmental movements. Extinction Rebellion's "civil disobedience" model has received a lot of attention in the recently passed amendments to the Crime and Police Sentencing Bill. The arrest of nine protesters from the Insulate Britain initiative, following the Home Secretary's anger and the outrage of the right-wing tabloid press, appears to be another move by the British government not only to crack down on peaceful protest, but also to try to silence a burgeoning environmental movement (8).

For Andreas Malm, it is this vacillation between state reactionism towards moderate environmental tactics and the immensity of fossil capital structures within which the left must act. In his recent book, How to Blow up a Pipeline (Verso 2020), he points to the urgency of direct action to combat climate change. Previous attempts have been lacklustre, and while important for messaging and urgency, they have not been enough to bring about major change from the state side. Consequently, the framework is one that is inherently linked to the unequal impact of warming on social classes.

The ruling class is not "bothered by the smell of burning trees" and they are not fleeing floods, forest fires or inhospitable cities. Instead, "the commitment to the endless accumulation of capital wins every time" at present (9). The urgency could not be clearer, change must come or we ruin the world. Increasingly, the question is: "Is there another phase, beyond peaceful protest?"(9). A large section seeks to criticise the methods and aims of existing climate groups. From Malm's point of view, XR's commitment to non-violence is an unfortunate misstatement of historical principles.

Roger Hallam, one of the founders of the movement, sets out their aims in the "XR Handbook", based on the simple fact that "progressive outcomes" are only possible through strategic non-violence. In doing so, they point to the abolition of slavery, the suffragettes, the civil rights movement and Gandhi's struggle for Indian independence (9).

The problem is that these historical examples did not achieve change through simple acquiescence and loud noise. Ignorance of the violence of the Haitian Revolution emboldened and frightened white metropolises in England and France to push for the abolition of slavery. Emmeline Pankhurst set fire to letterboxes and smashed London jewellery shops in the name of women's suffrage. Riots following the assassination of Martin Luther King and the presence of a radical wing of the civil rights movement forced change. Gandhi's non-violence belies his willingness to engage in violence with the British, who sent thousands of Indians to an early grave by recruiting them en masse for the Great War. This is nothing new for the left in terms of the strategy of effective praxis. Movements that cut profits, scare off investors and get the state to act have always been more successful than large-scale media campaigns. But in the absence of larger-scale unionisation or even widespread industrialisation, direct action that harms fossil capital becomes one of the only ways out of the climate catastrophe for Malm. When push comes to shove, he advocates pulling up the ropes at Port Newcastle and shutting down the coal plant. Beyond direct action, structural changes in lifestyles and consumption patterns must also be considered. Consumption patterns that are largely shaped by the tastes of the rich and super-rich bring further complications for the planet.

Not only does the fossil fuel economy need

to be dismantled, but for Malm, tackling inequality is also a secondary campaign that environmentalists must champion. So there needs to be a rethink, because while the richest 0.54% emit more than a third of the poorest half of the entire planet, luxury consumption is also harming the planet (9). The proliferation of luxury SUVs is just one of many examples. The IEA reports that in 2018, all SUV drivers, if they were a nation, would cause the seventh most pollution on Earth (9). To save the planet, direct action must do two things to counter the fossil fuel economy. It must not only harm the investments, places of extraction, distribution and validity of fossil fuels for the energy supply of nation states. It must put forward a programme of reform that attacks the global inequalities that are driving the climate crisis even further. Not only the coal-fired power plant must go, but also the exegesis of luxury consumption, yachts, private jets and luxury SUVs.

So is capitalism at a tipping point? Wh ile ecological destruction will only progress on the generally very weak surface of the economic structures of neoliberal capitalism, the expansion of capital will always be held back by the increasing scarcity of resources and the increase in pure destruction.

Malm's critique of environmental activism is based on the inability of the practice to take a form that might be more than a little inconvenient to the status quo of the contemporary neoliberal market economy. Change can only be achieved by critiquing the market forces that are creating more and more scarcity and changing the planet for the worse. The entirety of our modern economy, the hinge of capitalism's relentless consumerism, and the alternative of complete ecological collapse must be fought.

if action is taken. While the fossil fuel economy seems to be a monolith, anything "built up over time can potentially be demolished (or escape)", our need to phase out seems more urgent than ever.

Charlie Taylor is dergraduate at

a 2nd Christ

year UnChurch.

References: https://www.washingtonpost.com/ world/2021/11/17/coal-protesters-shutdown-australia-port-abseil https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/dec/18/newcastle-worlds-biggest-coal-export-port-announces-shift-awayfrom-coal https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/nov/17/blockade-australiaanti-coal-activists-vow-more-disruption-despite-warnings-of-25-year-jail-sentences https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/ n22/james-butler/a-coal-mine-for-everywildfire 11:10-11:30 https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=69EMd4csZRY https://www.democracynow. org/2021/10/27/steven_donziger_judicial_ harassment_from_chevron#:~:text=Donziger%20has%20already%20spent%20 over,land%20in%20the%20Ecuadorian%20 Amazon https://www.theguardian.com/usnews/2021/mar/28/chevron-lawyer-steven-donziger-ecuador-house-arrest https://www.independent.co.uk/climate-change/news/insulate-britain-protestjail-high-court-b1959232.html Malm, How to Blow up a Pipeline

From the smokestacks in Manchester in 1842 to the towering coal columns in Hunter Australia, the environmental movement must act, and act fast. There is hope, but only

MIDDLE CLASS MINDFULNESS AND CLASS CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE MODERN WORLD J O S H TAY L O R

It seems as though we live in a time where one cannot escape mindfulness. Meditation apps and yoga YouTube channels follow us round every corner, and Matthew McConaughey’s voice gently seduces us off to sleep. And rightly so. With social media, the constant news cycle, Oxford deadlines, the climate crisis, FOMO, and everything else on the list, mindfulness is an incredibly useful tool for helping our mental health and easing the stresses of life. As with all medicine, though, there is such a thing as too much of a good thing. Buzzwords and phrases like ‘toxic positivity’ have started to emerge to describe the occasionally overwhelming pressure one can feel to be mindful, but another equally toxic aspect of mindfulness has come to the surface recently, which I shall call middle-class mindfulness.

Middle-class mindfulness is characterised by an approach to mental health and wellbeing that focuses too heavily on cognitive behaviours (being present, noticing negative thoughts, and so on) and not enough on the various factors external to one’s mind that carry an effect too. Material conditions have just as tangible an impact on physical and mental health as the more ethereal and illusive culprits like social media do, but middle-class mindfulness is the type of mindfulness that, deliberately or not, ignores this fact.

In and of itself and with the right audience, this is not an issue. Everyone is entitled to their wellbeing and, generally, this brand of mindfulness is directly marketed to those for whom material conditions aren’t a problem. And good for them. Who doesn’t love a good stretch and being pampered on a regular basis? People with no material concerns are allowed to do mindfulness just as much as the rest of us.

The reason this brand of the movement threatens to become a problem is when the idea emerges that the only thing we can improve in this world is our mental behaviours. While it is no doubt the case for a great many people that their mental behaviours are the main cause of their mental health issues, it is equally certain that for a great many people material conditions are just as, if not even more, contributory to their difficulties.

Deep-breathing for ten minutes every morning is far more effective for someone who doesn’t also have to worry about where their next meal is going to come from, or how they are going to heat the house this winter. Slogans like ‘romanticise your life’ and ‘everyday magic’ are great if they help you find happiness, but they are not onesize-fits-all solutions to the multi-faceted reasons for people’s mental health issues.

The narrative of perception perpetuated by this type of mindfulness is also dangerous insofar as it implicitly alienates and marks as inferior those for whom material conditions are such that middle-class mindfulness is of little use. Like a cloud of fog, the narrative descends between people’s perceptions and their compassion; concepts like inner peace or oneness can unintentionally create an us vs. them conflict between the ‘enlightened’ and those still struggling with their mental health, because under narratives of perception, the only reason one might be mentally ill is because they aren’t seeing the world in the right way. What is arguably even worse, however, is the knock-on effect that these narratives of perception can have on wider political concepts like class-consciousness. Middle-class mindfulness is excruciatingly individualistic, placing a burden on individuals to change cog

nitive behaviours as a solution to their mental health problems, rather than acknowledging problems that might be present in the system.

Issues like wage slavery, long working hours, and a lack of workers’ rights will cease to be challenged effectively if narratives of perception become the norm because ‘change starts from within.’ A good example of this is one of Jordan Peterson’s rules for life: set your house in perfect order before you criticise the world. Setting your house in perfect order is hardly attainable or something worth attaining when the entire street is on fire. To give another example, a famous study tuber turned mindfulness vlogger said in a recent video that they wished they could take the CEO of an oil company on a yoga retreat to teach him about mindfulness and why climate change is important. Is this not just the most patently delusional and absurd thing you’ve ever heard? It is a perfect illustration of how, under middle-class mindfulness and narratives of perception, issues in our societies will cease to be diagnosed as systemic problems and instead will be treated as facts of life that our mentalities ought adapt to, as if it is better to trick ourselves into thinking we enjoy our lives than to change the world such that we can actually, all of us, genuinely enjoy it. In this way, middle-class mindfulness acts like the lie of meritocracy: it perpetuates the false idea that people have mental health problems because they aren’t mindful enough just as meritocracy perpetuates the false idea that people are poor because they don’t work hard enough. Instead of tackling some of the root, systemic causes of mental health and poverty, these narratives procure the lie that the fault is with the individual rather than the system.

Though this kind of mindfulness is hardly prevalent and hardly representative of the movement as a whole today, platitudes and phrases from this type are becoming more and more common. Should that trend continue, it seems probable that class conscious ness in Britain, a country that clings on to class-segregation like few others in the West,

will only diminish even further as those with comfortable enough lives place the blame on workers for not being mindful enough rather than on the capitalist class for having made a system that is uncomfortable for so many.

Mindfulness is a great tool for tackling the widespread issues of mental health that exist in Britain today and I do not wish to diminish its potency or achievement. There are innumerable people for whom it has been truly life-changing, but it should always be considered as one tool in people’s arsenal. If there are people whose living or working conditions mean mindfulness alone is not enough, our response should never be to condemn them, but rather to condemn the society that allowed those conditions in the first place.

Josh Taylor is a student at Brasenose College.

https://www.mindful.org/what-is-mindfulness/

THOUGHTS ON THE FUTURE DIRECTION OF EUROPEAN SOCIAL DEMOCRATIC MOVEMENTS

JOHANNES HÆKERRUP

European social democrats have had a difficult century so far. Since the 2008 financial crisis, European social democratic parties have faced chronic decline and some have virtually ceased to exist, such as in France, where the PS (Socialist Party) candidate Benoît Hamon only received just over 6% of the vote in the 2017 presidential election. However, Europe's political landscape is changing. Olaf Scholz's SPD victory in October in Germany, both the largest economy and most influential country in the European Union, represents the latest and perhaps greatest achievement of the European social democratic revival. Germany, Spain, Portugal, Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden are now governed by social democratic parties. According to the latest polls, Europe's S&D party will become the largest in the next European Parliament elections, the first time this has happened since 1994.

With their growing influence across the continent comes a rare and unique opportunity to promote wide-ranging and much-needed European reforms and policies. Social democrats should seize this opportunity and use their new influence to implement the changes that their supporters voted for. They must coordinate and cooperate with each other, as there are already opposition factions against them. Only if they unite around a common European agenda will they be able to create the change that Europe so desperately needs. Although the aims of each social democratic party may differ in some detail, there is a shared ideological commitment to building a society of equal opportunity, welfare, decency and democracy. This really unites rather than divides. The parties should

come together on the European economy, the protection of the rule of law and Europe's international role in the world, particularly on climate change. If they seize this opportunity now, they can have a lasting impact on Europe and the world.

A Fairer and More Flexible Economic Framework

It is time to reassess the economic structure of the Eurozone and the European Union, following the COVID-19 pandemic. Austerity policies following the 2008 financial crisis led to a devastating and ineffective economic recovery, with spending cuts stalling Europe's recovery. After the pandemic, most European countries adopted major economic spending plans, backed by an EU stimulus package of €806.9 billion. Countries have introduced furlough schemes, grants and loans for businesses and other demand-side measures. Now social democrats are calling for reforms to ensure that similar measures can be adopted in the future. The main point of contention is the European Stability and Growth Pact, which limits the state budget deficit to 3% of GDP and requires annual reductions in national debt if it exceeds 60% of GDP. However, these rules have been suspended since the start of the pandemic, but are due to come into force again in early 2023. These rules prevent countries with debt from introducing social democratic reconstruction plans involving long-term investment and demand-side interventions, as they are forbidden to undertake deficit spending. Instead, they must cut services and reduce

services and reduce spending. The debt threshold of 60% is an unrealistic target: thirteen of the twenty-seven member states have already exceeded it, and spending during the pandemic is only pushing countries to exceed it still further.

The need for a common social democratic agenda on this issue is made clear by the consequences when splits and divisions within them are brought to the fore. Three European social democracies, Denmark, Sweden and Finland, signed a letter to Austria, strongly opposing the reform of the Stability and Growth Pact, led by Spain and France, in September in anticipation of the Commission's recently launched review of the eurozone's rules. Two months later, in November, the European Parliament's Employment and Social Affairs Committee voted in favour of a draft resolution, including supportive votes from Spain, Portugal and Germany. This resolution entailed a directive on a common European minimum wage, despite huge protests from social democrats in Denmark and Sweden.

No pan-European agenda can circumvent the question of the rule of law, which cuts to the heart of the European project and the struggle for democracy. At the heart of social democracy is an unwavering commitment to democracy as opposed to ideologies which place any other objective above the preservation of democracy.

Compromises may be reached with regard to the European economic structure. One of the proposed reforms, led by EU Economic Affairs Commissioner Paolo Gentiloni, is to include a so-called "golden rule" for green investments that would allow those investments to be disregarded in the

According to polls, support for the European Union is 80% in Poland and over 90% in Hungary. European social democrats must make it clear: undermining the rule of law in any form is not compatible with EU membership. The Social Democrats must remai-

Manoeuvring against each other will get the Social Democrats in Europe nowhere. Coordination on both issues, the possibility of reforming the Stability and Growth Pact in return for a minimum wage model that better protects the Nordic labour model, could lead to a more social democratic outcome and facilitate future cooperation. By rejecting the southern social democrats' desire for reform, the northern social democrats have lost faith in the minimum wage debate. By pushing through a deeply repugnant project, the southern social democrats have fundamentally alienated northern social democrats and strengthened their opposition to economic reform.

deficit. The proposal is linked to the central social democratic priority of tackling climate change by moving towards a green economy. The European Commission estimates that meeting Europe's current climate targets would require an additional investment of €650 billion per year. Securing this investment has been a long-standing priority for social democrats in the North of Europe, and green investment reform would support this while providing economic flexibility for more indebted EU members to implement social democratic recovery plans and domestic policies.

Defending the Rule of Law

Poland's and Hungary's rejection of the rule of law is an existential threat to the European Union and needs to be responded accordingly. When Poland's Constitutional Court rejects the supremacy of EU law and elevates Polish law, it rejects the very mechanism that gives the EU any substantive power. An attack on EU law is an attack on European democracy because it rejects the principles agreed by all EU members. The Copenhagen criteria, the criteria for accession to the European Union, explicitly demand "stability of institutions guaranteeing democracy and the rule of law". The double attack on local and European democracy cannot go unanswered by the social democracies of Europe.

n adamant about the economic sanctions imposed on Poland and Hungary. Some members of the European Commission have begun to soften on the issue, offering to potentially unfreeze €35.97 billion and €7.2 billion in EU reconstruction funds for Poland and Hungary respectively, in return for concessions on rule of law issues. European Social Democrats should reject these proposals because they open the door to a democratic backlash in Europe.

European social democrats must adopt absolutist positions because anything less than a functioning democracy will lead to profound incompatibilities. Absolute positions often lead to missed opportunities for compromise but in the battle against existential stakes, the answer must be existential. European membership and free democracy or no European membership and its benefits at all. The only way to remain true to social democratic values in a crisis of democracy is to be unambiguous and to do so requires a united front against the destruction of the rule of law. European Global Leadership and Climate Change

Europe has not played a strong global role in recent decades, but this will need to change if the hopes and ambitions of social democrats are to be met. A strong European Union in global politics could provide two key advantages for social democrats: leadership on climate change and leadership on security. Social democratic parties must unite around measures to strengthen these two qualities. European social democrats have already had a major impact on the direction of European Union climate policy: the previous S&D candidate for president of the European Commission, Franz Timmermans, was head of the European Green New Deal and the European Climate Act. This link reflects the Social Democrats' strong desire to tackle and mitigate climate change by mobilising all the resources necessary to do so.

The EU has been criticised for its lack of leadership on the COP26 negotiations, due to internal disagreements on key climate change issues. For example, more than 70% of all energy production in Poland comes from coal. Only the promise of the necessary transition funds and reductions in some key legislation have made it possible to reach agreement on a Green New Deal. Structural differences prevent the European Union from providing much-needed strong leadership at the international level, especially in the face of joint opposition from China and India to extensive international climate agreements.

Europe must recognise that it must take responsibility and cannot rely solely on international summits and agreements to achieve the necessary CO2 reductions. In September this year, the EU launched its Global Gateway Initiative, which aims to provide infrastructure investments, to connect African countries to Europe and promote economic development. It is these initiatives that can do the hard work of reducing CO2 emissions. European social democrats should push for these investments to be green investments to help Africa transition to a green economy. The proposed carbon border adjustment mechanism (CBAM) of the European Green New Deal - a mechanism that would ensure that non-EU producers pay the same price for carbon production as EU producers (who must pay EU CO2 emissions allowances) represents both an opportunity and a risk for European global leadership. While this mechanism is certainly a step in the right direction to prevent carbon leakage (when manufacturers move their production abroad to avoid carbon costs), it risks undermining developing countries’. Most industries already struggle to compete with advanced European industry, and facing the additional cost of carbon may weaken them so much that they cannot afford to modernise production by moving away from carbon-intensive technologies. Europe can demonstrate its genuine commitment to

climate change mitigation internationally, not just domestically, by providing resources to CBAM-affected industries to invest in carbon-neutral technologies. European social democrats should adopt these reforms not only to provide concrete economic assistance to tackle climate change, but also to demonstrate their leadership. This process will of course cost European resources, but if the commitment to reducing climate change is genuine, all social democrats should rally behind it. Regarding security, European strategic autonomy, the ability for Europe to conduct its own operations, will enable Europe to assume greater responsibility and leadership in neighbouring regions, especially the Middle East, Africa and Eastern Europe. The withdrawal from Afghanistan, as well as a deeply felt interest in giving Europe a greater say in its commitments, has led most European social democrats to push for such autonomy. This will require three changes: more investment in joint European military capabilities, deeper integration of the European armed forces, and continued consultation with the US and other allies to ensure consistency within NATO. Social democrats can directly promote the first two areas by supporting initiatives such as the European Defence Fund (EDF), established to support joint research and development for the European defence industry, and the Permanent Structured Cooperation (PESCO) initiative, aimed at developing cooperation between member states' armed forces. Another contribution that the Social Democrats can make is to present a unified bloc ready to assume responsibility. One of the main reasons for the United States' concerns about strategic autonomy is that Europe is not ready for it, but social democrats, with a strong and sincere commitment, can provide these necessary guarantees.

Conclusion

The opportunity for European social democrats lies not only in the fact that the balance is shifting in their favour, but also in the fact that specific social democratic strategies are on the table. The worst outcome would be if division and disagreement led to this moment being missed, leaving it as little more than a hypothetical "what-if?" The individual social democratic parties must move beyond their internal power struggles and join together in a joint European vision. What is needed is a deep and serious conversation between the social democratic heads of state, within the S&D group in the European Parliament and between the domestic political parties of all EU member states, whether in power or in opposition. The policies and positions proposed here are just some of the possible outcomes, and a fully comprehensive agenda must address all relevant current issues. By coming together, social democrats can bring meaningful change to Europe.

Johannes Hækerrup is a 2nd year PPEist at Queen's College. He an international student from Copenhagen, Denmark

A NORTHERN IRISH LABOUR? M A I A H A M I LT O N

While we look forward to the results of the next general election and hope for success across the country, there is one region of the UK in which we know that Labour will not gain any advantage.

statement). Of all the regions of the UK, Northern Ireland is the least acceptable to parties that appeal to the whole of the UK.

The Labour Party did not allow people in Northern Ireland to join until 2003. Instead, the number of seats held by the right-wing Conservatives and the socially-conservative DUP more than tripled in that period.

It is the sea and its physical separation that is one of the factors driving the countries apart. Northern Ireland's land border is not with England but with Ireland, and until 1921 there was no division between north and south. It would be too simplistic to write off the differences between Scotland and Wales as a distance between countries. Plenty of island states exist without such clear divisions into groups of political parties.

In 1997 Labour won 43.2% of the vote and had a majority in the next two elections. On the face of it, it would seem that Britain was united in its desire for a left-wing government. However, in Belfast the Northern Ireland Labour Party had not existed for ten years.

Even in recent years the situation has not changed. No one would deny that Scottish Labour could have done better, but the fact that they became the third most popular party in the Scottish Parliament in 2021 puts them among the biggest players in Scottish politics.

Meanwhile in Wales, a Labour-led government won half the seats, matching the best result in the Senedd. In Northern Ireland, the idea of a Labour government is ludicrous: the highest number of seats it has ever won is one.

It would be unfair to think that only Labour faces this problem. The Northern Ireland Conservatives won just 0.3% of the vote in the 2017 Northern Ireland Assembly elections, and similar results can be seen for the Greens. The absence of Labour cannot be explained by the fact that people in Northern Ireland are too far-right to join Labour (although there is some truth in this

So why is this the case? It seems obvious that Northern Ireland feels more disconnected from the politics of the rest of the UK, and this has been a constant feature throughout its history. This year is the 100th anniversary of the formation of Northern Ireland, and although the vote share in elections changes, it never includes a party from across the sea.

The elephant in the room is Northern Ireland's murky past. Current politicians, more than 20 years after the Good Friday Agreement, are still accused of illegal paramilitary involvement. Many of those who are not have been seen making sectarian remarks.

Northern Ireland is a country consumed by its past. In 2017, 93% of children attended segregated schools, a figure that has risen from 90% in 2006. Belfast still has peace walls erected as barriers between warring neighbourhoods in an attempt to curb violence, and there are still the physical scars of 'turmoil'. In cities such as Belfast and Derry, houses are decorated with murals depicting rifles and men in balaclavas. This culture is unique and difficult for the rest of the UK to understand.

Even parties such as the Alliance, which claim to be neutral to the Union, are defined by this deliberate neutrality in Northern Irish politics. There are differences of opinion within the Unionist and Nationalist parties, but their main issue is primarily orange or green. Residents of Northern Ireland are also concerned about other issues, it is easy to find murals on housing and social justice in the city, and many are unhappy with the current leadership. However, the Loyalist debate will always come first for the Northern Irish people. It is not just politics, but also history, culture, religion, your school, your friends and family, the holidays you celebrate, the pubs you go to, the essence of your identity. English parties don't address this because they don't understand it, so their inability to connect with the Northern Irish people is not surprising. The more pressing issue for parties such as Labour and the Conservatives is Brexit. Northern Ireland generally voted to remain in the EU, despite the DUP backing the campaign for exit. And after 5 years we can see why: Northern Ireland is in a state of transition even after the UK has officially left the EU.

The trade border has nowhere to be set. It cannot pass between Northern Ireland and Ireland without violating the terms of the Good Friday Agreement, and unionists in Stormont and Westminster would not want it in the Irish Sea, which would further separate Northern Ireland from the rest of the UK. Yet a parliamentary majority has agreed to this deal with the EU, which leaves one of its countries in dangerous uncertainty. For Westminster politicians, placing the border in the Irish Sea was a rushed solution to a problem that prevents voters on the mainland wanting to see the Brexit they voted for. For the people of Northern Ire land, it means risking a return to the violence that was thought to be behind us. This year in April and May there have been days of unrest in many towns in Northern Ireland, largely as a response to the Irish Sea border issue. Many people in Northern Ireland feel that their country is being thrown around in a way that is convenient for English politicians to score points with their voters.

If Labour, or any other British political party, wants to make serious inroads in Northern Ireland, they should seek to make Northern Ireland a priority, not a stumbling block to their own plans. One has to wonder, however, whether it is too late. If there is a sea border between Ireland and Britain, will Northern Ireland really ever become British again?

Maia Hamilton is a 2nd year Chemist at New College. This term, she is the OULC Membership Secretary. https://www.irishnews.com/news/northernirelandnews/2021/03/12/news/sinister-irish-sea-border-posters-condemned-2252441/

There is no Irish question in the manifestos of Labour and the Conservative Party. The Irish question does not need to be asked in the Sinn Fein and DUP manifestos. All the main parties in Northern Ireland are defined by their desire, or lack thereof, to reunite with the south of Ireland.

OSTROM SHOWS US HOW TO SAVE THE COMMONS RACHEL HART

The climate crisis is upon us. We are becoming accustomed to reports of rising sea levels, wildfires across the globe and the impact of extreme weather events on our lives. Looking forward to the future, it seems bleak for the environment. This sentiment has been compounded by the relative lack of promised action at COP26 in Glasgow this month.

How have we got here? There are many explanations. The most compelling argument is that the current institutional interaction of the market and state has compelled the individual to consume until said consumption has dire effects, and incentivised the firm to produce irrespective as to its climate impact. The use of fossil fuels and the fossil fuel market exemplifies this. That is to say: unchecked capitalism and the way it is embedded into power structures has created this climate crisis. Solving the climate crisis cannot be done within the same system that created this existential threat. I first address why capitalism cannot solve this problem, and then move to show how Ostrom’s framework of the Commons provides an eco-socialist alternative to our current institutional set up.

Firstly, it is important to establish that capitalism is not exclusively a malign force. Markets bring about socially optimal coordination between individuals on the basis of price signals and private property. The monumental rise in living standards since the 19th century, the economic liberation of women and the internet age are largely all of its creation. (Caveats apply, of course). We can be grateful and in awe of these outcomes while also critical of its weaknesses. As we enter the 21st century, it is extremely clear that a major weakness of this

economic system is that capitalism has never centred the environment. How could it? Profit maximisation allows no space for long-termism. Especially with the rise of Friedman's approach to shareholder value - such that the ‘best’ way to run a firm is to always maximise shareholder value - a long term approach to anything external to the market is a profound challenge.

In order to attempt to respond to this challenge, traditional economic modelling refers to things that cannot be captured by a price as ‘externalities’. However as externalities cannot be modelled in terms of price, they are rarely (if ever) centred in modelling. Considering the environment as an ‘externality’ necessarily makes it of second consideration to profit maximisation. Hence we return to our familiar conclusion that within capitalist states there is far greater incentive to destroy the environment than there is to protect it. Taking lead from Elinor Ostrom and her work on the Commons in this matter helps us to make a start recentring the balance of power between capitalism and the world in which we live.

In 2009, Elinor Ostrom became the first woman to win a Nobel Prize in economics. This award was given to her on the basis of her work on the Commons. Her work was in response to the theory of the ‘Tragedy of the Commons’ proposed by ecologist Garrett Hardin. Hardin’s proposition was that the market (in theory) brings about socially optimal coordination between individuals on the basis of price signals and private property. However, these kinds of mechanisms don’t typically work in the global commons and common pool resources in general, because people don’t own these resources.

No-one owns fisheries, forests or oceans. Hence, the Tragedy of the Commons occurs where people thinking only of their own self-interest, deplete a shared resource. Hardin concluded that only total private or public ownership could solve these issues. Ostrom’s work challenged Hardin’s approach to the “Tragedy of the Commons”. She argued that individuals and communities could manage their own collective resources. When awarded the Nobel prize, The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences cited Ostrom ‘for her analysis of economic governance’, saying her work had successfully demonstrated how common property could be successfully managed by groups using it. Her research in Maine, Indonesia, Nepal and Kenya led to the development of a set of design principles which have supported effective mobilization for local management of Common Pool Resources (CPR) in a variety of areas.

One example of where this applies is in Nepal, where communities of farmers set aside their individual interests to manage their single most precious resource without any outside management. Ostrom found and documented that farmers mobilised, organised and distributed without the rule of the state or the pressure of markets. The lucky farmers nearest to the water sources resisted the urge to take advantage of their privileged position in order to sustain the agriculture of potential competitors. In return, all the farmers contributed to maintenance. In doing so, they contradicted how most economists and politicians tell us people will behave, providing an insight into how our own society might be reimagined. Ostrom’s thorough research shows that we can refute the ‘common sense’ belief that human nature is selfish. Human motivations are complex; conditions can be established and institutions designed that promote alternatives to enclosure, privatisation and statism.

However, we can draw on common themes to identify how the Commons can be protected elsewhere. In all examples in her work,

the Commons has survived (and thrived) where six conditions hold. First, clear boundaries exist; the ‘community’ doing the managing is well-defined. Second, there is clear monitoring of the shared resource. Third, there is a reasonable balance of costs and benefits for participants such that there is motivation to participate in the protection of the common space. Fourth, there is a predictable process for the fast and fair resolution of conflicts. Fifth, there is an escalating series of punishments for cheaters. Finally there are good relationships between the community and other layers of authority, from household heads to international institutions.

Much like the ‘Divine Right of Kings’, capitalism is fallible and challengeable in meaningful ways. Ostrom’s design rules for a successful and sustainable Commons strengthen socialist arguments for decentralised, cooperative and public models with democratic control. This is a real and viable alternative to capitalist democracy, a model which has led us to the point of disaster. The climate crisis is the challenge of our generation. Ostrom offers us insights about how to help the planet before it is too late.

Rachel PPEist

Hart at

is a 3rd year Wadham College.

THE PROSPECTS FOR FUTURE DEMOCRATISATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST: A VISION FOR SUCCESSFUL DEMOCRATIC CONSOLIDATION OTTO BARROW

Ten years after the commencement of the Arab Spring, the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region appears torn between two visions of progress: a democratic vision replacing the leaders who currently dominate the region, and a modernising one that wishes to replace the people who inhabit it (8). Though the latter project is currently on the ascent, it is likely to founder on its own internal contradictions. While Arab publics across the region may be ambivalent about democracy, the region retains considerable democratic potential. Firstly, the last ten years of the Arab Spring have demonstrated that the region has the potential for democratic change, in stark contrast to its frequent characterisation as destined for despotism. Secondly, different countries’ experiments in democratisation across the region have contributed to the democratic learning curves across the region, especially within the arenas of political life and civil society, as can be demonstrated by comparing the Arab spring in Egypt and the protests in Sudan. Thirdly, the uprisings have resulted in the emergence of some relatively successful cases, whose transition exerts regional repercussions that are symbolic but influential, and lead to changes in approach from even the more authoritarian regimes. Thus, future democratisation and democratic consolidation remains highly possible, and even inevitable as Middle Eastern economies become less resource dependent. Democratisation is the transition to a more democratic political regime, which amounts to substantive political changes moving in a

democratic direction. Democratisation is an overarching phenomenon, which exhibits multiple determinants, from economic development to educational attainment to the spread of mass media (11).

One good example of democratisation can be seen through Europe’s history (1). The development of democracy across Western Europe took place in a range of local contexts and different manners.

As Sheri Berman argues, democracy did not come in an easy or peaceful way, and certainly did not follow a straightforward or stage-like progression. Democratisation is an extended process, and different countries’ attempts at democratisation are replete with varied experiences that are hard to characterise as following one single path (3), but can be generally seen as following two processes. Firstly, there is the “initial transition” from authoritarian rule, installing a democratically elected government paves the way for a ‘second transition’ that is usually more complex and longer than the first (3).

Perhaps the most important consequence of the Arab uprisings is that they ended the age of authoritarian stability which was once strongly associated with the region. To be sure, mass protests occasionally took place across the region even before the ‘Arab Spring’. In Egypt, the Kefaya Movement, which opposed Hosni Mubarak’s fifth presidential term in 2005, and labour strikes that later resulted in the April 6 Youth Movement in 2008, as well as Yemen’s Southern Movement anti-government protests in 2008 and 2009 are all vivid examples of popular mobilisations in the 2000s (3).

But the Arab spring led to the first process of democratization that triggers a universalistic set of events, processes and symbols, and empowers citizens to acquire human rights and civic freedoms they did not have before (10). Moreover, the success of the ‘first transition’ contributes to long-run democratic development in the MENA region, as people are less likely to remain passive to the same degree that they have in the past’ (3) due to the collective memory of the mobilisations.

This observation is quite useful in demonstrating the ability of the uprisings to tear down ‘the wall of fear’ and to alter people’s propensity to mobilise their private oppositional preferences into public dissidence. On the other hand, following subsequent failed attempts at the second stage of democratisation in Egypt, Yemen and Libya, many questioned the ability of the region to realise its potential for democratic change, arguing that the impacts of the uprisings were ephemeral rather than long-lasting.

Yet, as some scholars note, ‘getting rid of an authoritarian regime is one thing; creating a stable democratic one is something else altogether’ (1). By placing an emphasis on the combination of uncertainty and agency that defines the transition process and its ‘abnormal’ politics, “transitologists” treated these previously alleged pre-requisites as mere facilitating or debilitating factors that could be overcome by what Machiavelli called “virtù” – the capacity of an individual political actor to assess the rapidly changing situation, see the opportunities for creative responses, and to come up with a set of rules and practices that accommodated to the specifics of a given polity – while respecting the three generic principles of democracy, namely, political equality or citizenship, participation in collective action and accountability of rulers (10). Thus, while the Arab spring hasn’t led to successful democratic consolidation, it fulfilled an important first stage needed to start the democratisation process in action. 44

Secondly, the Arab spring also offered a unique window of learning when it came to democratic development, as they contributed to the region’s ‘historical experience with political pluralism’ (3). Scholars usually point to the positive impact of historical experience with political pluralism, as countries having a meagre record in this area typically face more difficulties democratising than those with more experience (2). In democratic transitions, another important issue is whether or not political proliferation accompanies expansions in civil society (3) In particular, the transitions in Tunisia, Libya and Egypt provided new spaces for the formation and development of political parties. Unlike Egypt and Tunisia, Libya’s political party landscape was created from scratch following the uprisings. During the Qaddafi era, political parties were outlawed, and the regime strictly monitored all political activities (4) Considering these examples, the uprisings constituted a historical moment in the sense that the social and political dynamics of these countries were unleashed, especially within the first few years (3). To be sure, these political and socio-economic encounters resulting from the sudden expansion of civil society and the proliferation of political actors led to a challenging situation that we call ‘democratic instability’ (13). But it is clear that these experiences led to an improvement in tactics.

This can be seen in the case of Sudan since December 2018. In Sudan, protests against inflation in a small, industrial town in the northeast of the country in December 2018 spread quickly to the capital, metamorphosing into a full-scale insurrection and compelling a cabal of generals—in a near-reenactment of the 2011 Egyptian uprising—to finally lower the curtain on Omar al-Bashir’s thirty-year reign in April 2019 (5). When the junta, again replaying the Egyptian script, announced a “Transitional Milita-

ry Council” to manage things until elections could be held, the Sudanese people proved wilier than their Egyptian neighbours, redoubling protests until the military agreed to share power immediately (8). Since then, Sudan was administered by a half-military, half-civilian “Sovereignty Council”, with scheduled elections.

Although the odds of a successful transition remain long, given recent events, there is similarly no denying that the Sudanese are freer today than at any point in recent memory (8). The Arab Spring also lives on as well in Algeria (8). In February 2019, shortly after learning that their octogenarian president, Abdelaziz Bouteflika, was looking to add another six years to the twenty he had already spent in power, Algerians commenced a great hirak, or movement, that first forced Bouteflika to withdraw his candidacy, then secured his resignation a few weeks later (cit red). Although these movements have yielded little beyond the rearrangement of ministerial deck chairs, they are also not likely to go away, and these mechanisms are likely to be used to achieve further democratisation.

One way of looking at what successful democratic consolidation might look like is by analysing one of the few Arab countries to have undergone the second stage of democratic transition, Tunisia. The presence of an ongoing ‘second transition’ in Tunisia, again, despite issues on this front, offers counter-evidence to this argument and works against these old stereotypes, especially in the aftermath of the transitional breakdowns in Egypt, Yemen and Libya (3). In Tunisia’s ‘second transition’, there has thus far been notable progress in institutionalising democracy, although fragility persists. Having both democratic and authoritarian traits at once, transition countries usually face particular challenges ranging from the ‘elimination of authoritarian enclaves’ to the ‘neutralization of anti system actors’ and from ‘party-building’ to the ‘stabilization of electoral rules’ (9). Although some scholars

argue that the success of democratic transition in Tunisia owes much to the country’s idiosyncratic conditions (e.g. its anomalous history with French colonialism, and its smaller geographic area), and that is why it is hard to expect a similar successful democratic transition to occur somewhere else in the Arab world and the MENA region in general (7), this situation isn’t necessarily the case. Thus, democratisation would likely follow similar lines, along with similarly high levels of instability.

Against this ongoing movement for democratic government is an alternative vision of Arab progress: Enlightened absolutism (8). As the murdered Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi wrote in 2018, “the idea of the benevolent autocrat, the just dictator, is being revived in the Arab world.” Such leaders promise to reinvent the Arabs—transforming them from a people overfed, indolent, and easily duped by peddlers of religious nostrums into lean, industrious folk who will single mindedly pursue officially sanctioned programs for national greatness (8). The first of these twin obsessions—what Calvert Jones describes as the desire to produce “a new kind of citizen” who is “modern,” “globalization-ready,” and “better prepared for a post-petroleum era”—is on display in many of the various “national vision” documents that Arab governments have put forth in recent years (6). The need is particularly acute in the oil-dependent countries, whose expedient of mass bribery through public employment and generous social benefits cannot survive tumbling oil prices (8). This need to turn dependents into taxpayers is behind one of the most seductive features of the new authoritarian project—its apparent dedication to the emancipation of women. Saudi Arabia’s widely touted reforms include not only the push to permit women to drive, but also a law against sexual harassment, a ban on firing pregnant employees, equalisation of the male and female retirement ages, and the end of regulations that

required Saudi women to ask the permission of a male “guardian” before traveling (12). Rather, it is about making the Arab world safe for, if not democracy, then some measure of personal (but not political) freedom. Thus, even where the people are not rising up directly, leaders feel the pressure to liberalise and appear more like Western democracies.

To conclude, future democratisation and democratic consolidation remains highly possible, and inevitable as Middle Eastern economies become less resource dependent. The uprisings should not be written off as a simple failure of democratisation, as they resulted in multiple, complex and uncertain consequences (3), setting the initial stage of democratisation into action.

Some of the earlier mistakes of the first wave of the Arab spring have been learnt from, and are likely to become more frequent as time goes on. The second stage of democratisation would likely follow similar lines to that experienced by Tunisia, accompanied by similar levels of instability. Even when authoritarian regimes are not liberalising democratically, the increased pressures resulting from a depletion of resources lead such regimes to liberalise, further precipitating democratisation.

Otto Barrow is a 3rd year PPEist at Magdalen College. As OULC Publications Officer, he is the Editor of this term’s Look Left.

Bibliography:

Berman, S., 2007. How democracies emerge: Lessons from Europe. Journal of Democracy, 18(1), pp.28-41. Carothers, T., 2007. How democracies emerge: The" sequencing" fallacy. Journal of democracy, 18(1), pp.12-27. Dinçer, O.B. and Hecan, M., 2020. Democratisation in ambiguous environments: positive prospects for democracy in the MENA region after the Arab Spring. Third World Quarterly, 41(12), pp.2087-2108. House, F., 2015. Freedom in the World. Hassan, M. and Kodouda, A., 2019. Sudan's uprising: The fall of a dictator. Journal of Democracy, 30(4), pp.89-103. Jones, C.W., 2017. Bedouins into bourgeois: Remaking citizens for globalization. Cambridge University Press. Lepro, E., 2018. Tunisia: An Arab Anomaly?. Review of Tunisia: An Arab Anomaly. Masoud, T., 2021. The Arab Spring at 10: Kings or People?. Journal of Democracy, 32(1), pp.139-154. Schedler, A., 1998. What is democratic consolidation?. Journal of democracy, 9(2), pp.91-107. Schmitter, P.C. and Sika, N., 2017. Democratization in the Middle East and North Africa: A more ambidextrous process?. Mediterranean Politics, 22(4), pp.443-463. Teorell, J., 2010. Determinants of democratization: Explaining regime change in the world, 1972–2006. Cambridge University Press. Topal, A., 2019, September. Economic reforms and women's empowerment in Saudi Arabia. In Women's Studies International Forum (Vol. 76, p. 102253). Pergamon. Welzel, Christian, and Ronald Inglehart. “The Role of Ordinary People in Democratization.” Journal of Democracy 19, no. 1 (2008): 126–140. doi:10.1353/ jod.2008.0009.

COMMITTEE LIST MICHALEMAS 2021

Co-chairs: Anjali Kawa, University College & Olly Boyland, University College Secretary: Hari Bravery, University College

Treasurer: Danial Hussain, Lady Margaret Hall

Communications Officer: Maddie Cooke, Keble College Membership Secretary: Maia Hamilton, New College Social Secretary: Hayden Barnes, Keble College Campaigns Officer: Alex Fish, Hertford College

Disabled Members’ Officer: Theo Sergiou, Keble College Women’s Officer: Laura Ennis, University College

BAME Officer: Ahmad Nawaz, Lady Margaret Hall

LGBTQIA+ Officer: Marcin Pisanski, St. Anne’s College Publications Officer: Otto Barrow, Magdalen College

Co-Chairs Elect: Amy Field, Balliol College and Danny Leach, Pembroke College

Look Left MT21

Articles inside

Otto Barrow The Prospects for Future Democratisation in the Middle East

Rachel Hart Ostrom Shows Us How to Save the Commons

Maia Hamilton A Northern Irish Labour?

Johannes Hækerrup Thoughts on the Future Direction of European Social Democratic Movements

Josh Taylor Middle Class Mindfulness and Class Consciousness in the Modern World

Charlie Taylor Fighting the Fossil Economy

Oxford Worker Justice It's Time to Unionise Oxford

Christoper O'Neill Tory Sleaze Manifests Our Democratic Dearth: Let's Legislate By Lot

Isabel Creed Why Labour Needs More Scientists in Politics - Learning From Scientists for Labour

Charlie West A Century of PPE: A Modern Great?

Ella Staddon The Feminism of Barbara Castle

Daniel Leach Labour Governments and Socialist Hegemony

Dan Harrison What Anthony Crosland Can Teach Labour

Matthew Holland James Callaghan and Me

Co-Chairs' Report

Note from the Editor