Beaver 856

Beaver

Issue 856 | 11.10.16

the

Newspaper of the LSE Students’ Union

LSE Student Seeks Financial Compensation Over Botched Exams LSE Undergraduate submits complaint to independent arbitrator; claiming that the school’s failure to recognise his medically required examination arrangement needs led to deterioration in mental health and a wasted year.

Frank Morley Undergraduate Student THE LSE’S APPALLING record on student satisfaction, as highlighted in this year’s National Student Survey, is well known. What is less well known - or perhaps overlooked - is the role disability can play at a University where being happy is already difficult.

There are frustrations that seem quintessentially LSE late timetables, substandard feedback, half of campus being boarded off for three years, an inflexible bureaucracy. These issues, and many others besides, are magnified by disability. For Muhummed Cassidy, a second year Law student and the LSESU’s Disabled Students’ Officer, that disability is hyper-sensitivity to noise and his experiences at LSE have driven him to submit a formal complaint to the Office of the independent Adjudicator for Higher Education (OIA).

The LSE are fully aware of Muhummed’s disability based on medical evidence that has been submitted and subsequently accepted by the school. Speaking to the Beaver, Muhummed told of a diagnostic assessment - facilitated and funded by the LSE - which culminated in a report that made explicit reference to his hyper-sensitivity to noise.

Muhummed’s sensitivity to noise is such that the diagnostic report acknowledged that conditions for the medical assessment were ‘ideal…with no interruptions’, but noted that sound of rainfall outside was noticed by Muhummed. That this fact, which may seem incidental, was included in a medical diagnosis would appear to highlight the author’s acknowledgement of the severity of Muhummed’s

condition. An addendum to this report dated 19th March, 2015 stated that Muhummed was ‘very sensitive to noise which he finds very disturbing’. Muhummed’s needs-assessment report; a separate document held by the LSE, additionally stated that ‘…Muhummed reports that he is easily distracted by noise and other events happening around him; he prefers to read in a quiet space’, further stating that he ‘…has difficulty remaining focused in public study areas, he needs to work in a quiet environment.’

According to its website, the LSE undertakes needsassessments ‘…to identify what equipment, software or study

instances where disabled students would otherwise be disadvantaged. Despite the information the school held on Muhummed, this did not appear to be the case for him.

In the main exam period of the 2014/15 academic year, when Muhummed initially sat his first year exams, he was placed

support will enable you (students) to fulfill your (their) potential on your (their) course of study’. The Equality Act of 2010 articulates disability as a physical or mental impairment that has a ‘substantial’ and ‘long-term’ effect on the ability to carry out normal activities. It also places a duty of care on universities to anticipate and make reasonable adjustments in

in a room in which several other candidates were typing their examination scripts. This provision was both irrelevant and sorely inadequate to Muhummed’s needs, particularly given as keyboards are - generally speaking - louder than pens on paper. After sitting LL108 and LL109, Muhummed did not feel able or comfortable sitting his remaining exams unless he could do so in conditions which mitigated for his hyper-sensitivity to noise, and as a result was graded absent for his three remaining compulsory module exams for Summer 2015.

The LLB programme regulations state that in order to progress, ‘all 5 examinations’ must be passed.

On this basis, t the school dictated that Muhummed must re-take all 5 examinations, including the 2 for which he subsequently received a passing grade, during the September resit period.

Muhummed requested that the provisions be relaxed under the exceptional circumstances provisions of the LLB programme regulations.

As part of this process, he presented further medical evidence which advised that, ‘we have noticed how extremely sensitive Muhummed is to noise distractions…he would find any examination setting very stressful, emotions which would be heightened if there were any interference in the expected smooth running of an examination situation.’ The evidence further stated that, ‘it would be appropriate to take Photo Credit: www.primermagazine.com

The NAB

Snapchats of the Week!

Page 26

Comment

LSE: Resisting Self Awareness?

Page 11

into account the difficulties, both of the noise disturbance and of the uncertainties of the adjustments which were appropriate in his taking of examinations’. His appeal was rejected.

For his September resits, the school granted Muhummed use of an individual room as part of his examination adjustments - an implicit acknowledgement that the adjustments provided in the main Summer period, which directly led to the necessity of resits, were inadequate. As a result of what he felt was unfair behaviour from the LSE - both in regards to the initial examination arrangements and the rejection of his appeal to only sit the three remaining exams he had missed - Muhummed became depressed over the Summer. He sought assistance from the LSE’s counselling service and sent letters to senior figures, including then Director Craig Calhoun, but said that such efforts were ‘to no avail’.

By the time of his September resits, Muhummed felt, ‘extremely stressed and anxious’, and after finishing 3 exams, fainted and was taken to hospital in an ambulance in his 4th exam, and subsequently missed his 5th exam. These two exams were LL108 and LL109 respectively, which Muhummed previously sat and received passing marks for in Summer 2015. At this point, Muhummed had now attempted and passed each element of his first year examinations. However, the LSE decided that as these attempts had not all taken place during the same examination period, he would retake all of them again at the next available opportunity - Summer 2016. ..Continued on Page 3

Room 2.02, Saw Swee Hock Student Centre, LSE Students’ Union London WC2A 2AE Executive Editor Taryana Odayar

editor@thebeaveronline.co.uk

Managing Editor Greg Sproston

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From the Executive Editor

This Week in News Taryana Odayar ITS ALREADY WEEK 3!

Since last Tuesday, there have been some pretty interesting developments both at home and abroad, so I thought I’d do a round up of the more riveting ones thus far.

On Wednesday the 5th, Britain’s eurosceptic UKIP was plunged into chaos over party leader Diane James quitting, citing “personal and professional reasons”, only 18 days after being elected to the role. But in her defence, she almost certainly lasted longer than those Vote Leave promises.

On Thurday, former Portuguese Prime Minister and Head of the UN Refugee Agency Antonio Guterres stood poised to become the next UN Secretary General. He is set to replace Ban-ki Moon at the beginning of next year, but the question of whether he can do a better job than his predecessor remains to be seen. Concerns have arisen over his escapades

as UN High Commissioner for Refugees, during which time he was cautioned by UN auditors over his lackadaisical handling of funds for refugees, and his office’s failure to properly oversee the handout of almost a billion dollars to other relief organisations. Dodgy dealings.

On Friday, Obama made an unannounced visit to his hometown Chicago to cast an early ballot for the November 8th general election, smirking knowingly when some bright spark asked who he had voted for. Definitely going to miss those Obama off-hands.

Saturday was not a good day for Germany, as they had to ground half of their Tornado fighter jets, including six currently deployed to Turkey to fight ISIS, upon discovering that there was cockpit equipment with loose screws. Cue jokes about Germans being ‘one screw loose.’

Not to be left out, Donald

Trump was shaking things up in St. Louis on Sunday, busily gathering ammunition before his debate with Hillary Clinton by convening a meeting of women who had accused her husband of sexual misconduct. This, of course, was an attempt on Trump’s part to rise like the proverbial phoenix from the ashes of his verbal gaucheries, following the release of indefensible video footage from 2005, (spoiler : it wasn’t a trailer for The Apprentice).

A rather unpropitious endeavour if ever there was one.

And as I write this, Putin has announced that he still intends to visit France later this month, despite French President Francois Hollande vacillating over whether or not he actually wants to receive him. Hollande recently chastised Putin for his “unacceptable” comments supporting Syrian air strikes during a TV interview. Trust Putin to insist on going where he isn’t wanted.

From the Managing Editor Good Times, Bad Times Greg Sproston IT’S ACTUALLY QUITE frightening how quickly time passes by. Week 3 marks the first time I’ve started wearing a coat; something I should’ve committed to a while ago really, but i wasn’t quite ready to admit the summer was over. Week 3 also makes the third of ten editorials I’ll write this term, which is pretty terrifying. I feel as though - and the timetabling fiasco may have something to do with this - term has only just begun. I’ve yet to complete a problem set, or attend a class for which any arduous preparation was required and yet here we are; halfway to reading week.

The horrible sensation of time slipping away feels like a feature of my degree. It only seems like last week that I had my first ever lecture at LSE. For what it’s worth, the subject was ‘democracy and dictatorship’ and it was held in a lecture theatre named after a man who permitted a private press in his country, but only if they didn’t

criticise him or his family. Top marks.

The funny thing about the passing of time is how things we take as ‘normal’ now would have been absolutely unthinkable a few months ago. For example, at the height of Calhoun’s reign of terror and incompetence during Calhoun’s time at the LSE appointing its first female BME Director seemed like a million miles away. Of course, seemingly progressive change might not be all that (see Philip Apfel’s excellent article on corporate activism, page 14, for a fine example).

The UK has another female Prime Minister - something which seemed all but impossible during those post-Brexit heady days when Boris was anointed a national saviour. Some of the policies and rhetoric coming from Tory party conference are genuinely insane, but imagine how much more insane they’d have been in a pre-Brexit world! Databases of foreign workers, exempting the

armed forces from the European Convention on Human Rights, and the exclusion of word leading advice based on the nationality of those who give it.

This time last year, the primaries for the US Presidential nominations hadn’t even begun.

Pollsters and political junkies make predictions with varying successes, but no one could’ve guessed how many times ‘nominee’ and ‘sexual predator’ would be used in the same sentence during this cycle.

It’s a harrowing indictment of democratic discourse when a news anchor has to ask a presidential candidate ‘You bragged that you have sexually assaulted women.

Do you understand that?’

I wonder what events will unfold in the future that seem impossible today. Will LSE climb up the rankings of the National Student Survey? Will Spain get government? Can Stephen Woolfe ever truly replace Tyson Fury as a legitimate contender to the title?

Only time will tell!

TWEETS OF THE WEEK Quentin Letts @thequentinletts Row over LSE academics barred from being Govt advisers. Hang on. How were profs from so skewed a Lefty temple were hired in first place?

Ellie Knott @ellie_knott Why do you think @wikileaks is leaking stuff about Clinton not Trump? #LSEBrexit LSESU Japan Society @LSESU_JapanSoc Guys the committee are running late lol we will see you in 10!!!

Simon Hix @SimonJHix Theresa May: economically centrist/left plus populist right on immigration and social policies => closer to Marine Le Pen than Angela Merkel Jasmina Bide @Jasmina Bide What is the point of having fancy institutes when we don’t address these issues on our campus? @LSEInequalities Busayo Twins @Busayo_Twins Never forget that Mariah Carey actually has some bangeeeeerzzzzz LSE Library @LSELibrary We may not have a slide like Hoseo University in Korea, but we do have an impressive staircase George Harrison @George_Haz Heaven is the most Kafkaesque club in London I swear. Like a vast gay labyrinth LSE Careers @LSECareers Do I have to do a spring week? When are deadlines?

How many orgs should I apply to? Some Michaelmas FAQs+answers!

News | 3 ...Continued Page

from

Front

As a result of what he believes is the school’s refusal to show flexibility in the face of mitigating circumstances caused by disability, Muhummed has submitted a for mal complaint to the Office of the independent Adjudicator for Higher Education (OIA). The OIA provides an independent, transparent scheme to review students’ complaints against higher education providers.

He feels that the school failed him on two counts. Firstly, the lack of exam adjustments at the first opportunity in May

2015 which meant that he could not sit all of his exams.

Secondly, after providing him with an individual room for his resit exams, the school should not have made him retake the two exams that he had sat and passed in May 2015. He should only have had to retake the exams which he was unable to sit at the time.

He has based his complaint on the latter, and is seeking financial compensation from the school as a remedy for the distress and inconvenience that the school’s actions have caused him over the past 12 months.

Muhummed expects the OIA to issue a complaint

outcome in the next few weeks.

Whilst Muhummed’s experience and the outcome of the OIA is deeply personal to him, it is reflective of a broader patter n of the rigid bureaucracy which disadvantages those with disabilities. In April 2016, the school made national headlines when a student suffering from acute mental illness was evicted from LSE Halls of Residence, on the decision of the LSE Residential services and the Disability and Wellbeing Service, despite two NHS professionals having separately made official recommendations against

this course of action. More broadly, for mer Director Craig Calhoun last year tried to justify the school’s decision to pay tens of thousands of pounds on business class flights for senior management in the same Town Hall meeting as the failure to hire an additional counsellor was defended.

For all the talk of an £11m investment on teaching and lear ning, the reality is that the happiness and satisfaction at the LSE will not improve unless the school tackles structural problems which make the university experience for many students a miserable one.

Section Editor: Joseph Briers Deputy Editor: Bhadra Sreejith

Home Secretary Promises ‘Crack-down’ on International Students Joseph Briers News Editor

that stick to the rules – to attract the best talent … while looking at tougher rules for students on lower quality courses” said Rudd.

Mrs Rudd’s plans have not been well received by senior figures in higher education.

General Secretary of the University and College Union (UCU), Sally Hunt, told the Guardian: “International students make an enormous contribution to UK higher education, both educationally and economically. As highly skilled people, they make an invaluable contribution to our economy”.

“This proposal to limit overseas students to particular universities and courses equates to pulling up the drawbridge and sending a message that the UK is closed for business.

Ministers need to take a very different approach and support

universities by removing international students from the net migration target altogether.”

The Home Secretary’s brother is similarly concerned about the tone being set.

Speaking to Radio 4’s The World at One, he said that he was “desperately worried” by the current tone on immigration.

“We don’t want a society where we only talk about what’s right for British workers as if people who have come from Europe who now live and work here are not part of society” he said.

The LSE has the highest proportion of international students in the UK, with 70% of the student population coming to study from overseas, the majority from the EU. Last year, a Treasury report estimated that the increasing number of foreign students entering the UK would boost the economy by £1 billion.

News

HOME SECRETARY AMBER Rudd has used her speech at the Conservative Party Conference to announce sweeping changes to regulations regarding international students. The new policies proposed by Mrs Rudd include two-tier visa rules affecting low-quality universities, a £140 million “controlling migration fund”, and stricter limits on work visas.

The announcement is just the latest attempt by the Theresa May’s government to talk tough on immigration and convince voters that they are serious about cutting numbers.

In her speech to conference, Rudd restated her commitment to “preventing migrants taking jobs that British workers can do”. Rudd had spoken of requiring employers to disclose

the numbers of foreign workers they employed, however, she was subsequently forced into a U-turn on this particular policy following a huge public backlash.

The Home Secretary concentrated her aim on international students, who currently make up 167,000 of 600,000 migrants yearly. Freshly announced government policy will look to severely limit the rights of foreign students to seek work in the United Kingdom following graduation.

“I’m passionately committed to making sure our worldleading institutions can attract the brightest and the best. But a student immigration system that treats every student and university as equal only punishes those we should want to help. So our consultation will ask what more can we do to support our best universities – and those

4

| Tuesday 11 October, 2016

Colombian President and LSE Alumnus Awarded Nobel Peace Prize for Work on Peace Deal

Philip Apfel Undergraduate Student IN AN UNEXPECTED tur n of events, Juan Manuel Santos, president of Colombia and for mer LSE student, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his sustained efforts to negotiate a deal between the gover nment and the Colombian FARC guerrilla group last Friday. The award, the first of its kind to be awarded to a Colombian national (and the second Nobel prize), represents a welcome boost to a peace process that took a considerable hit just days before, when the people of Colombia narrowly rejected a peace deal (50.2% to 49.8%) that was six years in the making.

In his acceptance speech, the president made sure to keep the focus away from himself and on the peace process. “I accept this award not on my behalf, but on behalf of all Colombians, especially the millions of victims of this conflict which have suffered for more than 50 years.”

The Norwegian Nobel committee mirrored this sentiment, stating that besides being a testament to Santos’ personal efforts, “the award should also be seen as a tribute to the Colombian people who, despite great hardships and abuses, have not given up hope of a just peace, and to all the parties who have contributed to the peace process”.

“The award should also be seen as a tribute to the Colombian people who, despite great hardships and abuses, have not given up hope of a just peace... ” According to official estimates, counting up until the day the peace deal was signed on September 26th,

the 52-year-conflict (the longest-running remaining major ar med conflict in the Americas) had cost the lives of more than 220000 people, and had displaced more than 6 million people.

Both Santos, who vowed after the referendum that he would “not give up”, and the FARC’s top commander, Rodrigo Londoño, who stated that peace was “here to stay”, continue to show the political desire to reach a peace deal. Given the referendum result, and given the political pressure exerted by for mer president Álvaro Uribe, who had led the campaign for ‘No’, a second peace deal (or an amendment to the existing one) will now require a difficult renegotiation of some core ter ms of the previous accord.

What changes can feasibly be made is not clear yet, partly because ‘No’ voters rejected the deal for a multiplicity of different reasons, including dislike of Santos, the fact that the accord addressed the recognition of gay rights, and, most importantly, because conditions for FARC members

re-entering society were perceived as too soft given the atrocities committed. The accord envisioned a kind of ‘transitional justice system’ that would have allowed cooperative rebel fighters to avoid jail time, and which made political concessions to the FARC group in the for m of an allotment of ten seats in congress starting in 2018.

Both of these two provisions remain highly controversial.

“I invite everyone to join our strength, our minds, and our hearts in this great national endeavour so that we can win the most important prize of all: peacein Colombia”

As tends to happen in the after math of referendums, the coming weeks and months will be marred by political uncertainty in Colombia.

There is a lot at stake.

On October 4th, Santos announced that the ceasefire will expire at the end of the month. Three days later, a statement was issued by the negotiating parties to the effect that they intended to extend the ceasefire. So, in spite of the currently peaceful rhetoric on both sides, the risk that civil war will flare up again remains present.

In his first public address since the prize was announced, Santos said: “I invite everyone to join our strength, our minds and our hearts in this great national endeavor so that we can win the most important prize of all: peace in Colombia,”.

Past Nobel Peace Prizes have been awarded both on the basis of previous achievements, as well as to encourage ongoing efforts.

Colombian leaders are going to need all the encouragement they can get.

Farewell to First-time Buyers? LSE Report Charts Rise of the ‘Accidental Landlord’ Polly Bass Post Graduate Student A SIGNIFICANT RISE IN ‘accidental landlords’ has added yet another barrier to home ownership for first-time buyers, according to recent LSE research. The report Farewell to First-time Buyers cited a growing trend in wealthier households choosing to let out their starter home whilst they move up the housing ladder, leading to a further lack of supply at the entry end of the market. This has contributed to many young households being priced out due to scarce financial resources, rising prices, and credit constraints Based on UK Land Registry Data from over 12.5 million transactions stretching from 1995 – 2013, LSE’s Dr Felipe Carozzi has found that a fall in transactions for lower quality and lower value homes has been matched by an increase in overall levels of renting. Using census data Dr Carozzi measured this trend against the average age in the area, finding that a fall in the number of transactions was concentrated within younger areas.

This suggests that affordable firsttime homes have been given over to the rental market once the original

“There is a growing trend of wealthier households choosing to let out their starter home whilst they move up the housing ladder...” owner has traded up.

With Londoner’s now spending almost two-thirds of their income on rent many are familiar with the difficulties faced in saving for a significant down-payment. This year’s Halifax First Time Buyers survey estimated the average deposit in London to be £95,693.

Nationally, the 10 least affordable districts for first-time buyers are all on the fringes of the London Circular.

The report’s author, Dr Carozzi, said: “Until now not much has been known about how and why the composition of transactions actually changes during boom and bust periods. My research indicates that while the composition of transactions had been stable between 2000 and 2007, there was a strong and persistent change after 2008. This coincided with the sharp reduction in the availability of high loan-to-value mortgages to first-time buyers but also fewer entry-level houses coming onto the market.”

Traditionally affordable areas such as Lambeth, Newham,

Haringey and Hammersmith are among the least affordable, topped

by Brent where the average houseprice is 12.5 times average earnings in the borough. These outer regions of London have traditionally been the preserve of young families, yet many are now finding it increasingly hard to find a secure tenancy. This has wide-ranging effects, with a recent DLCG report finding that almost a third of families accepted by local authorities as homeless had become so due to a rental contract ending.

With the private rental sector surpassing socially rented housing as the dominant tenure in 2013 and with a quarter of private renters reliant on housing benefit to meet their payments, it is unsurprising that renters’ expectations to buy in the future fell by almost 5% in the year to 2015. In fact, the situation in London raises questions about whether the preferred tenure of owner-occupation must be rethought, or interventions such as a Land Tax considered.

Dr Carozzi’s findings come as the Chancellor Philip Hammond announced that he would not be renewing the Cameron government’s flagship Help to Buy scheme beyond the end of the year. As an extension of an earlier FirstBuy scheme, the policy announced in 2013 was designed to increase the availability of mortgages to young households who were able to afford the monthly repayments but were unable to save the large deposits required by lenders since the financial crisis.

Help to Buy enabled first-time buyers to purchase a home with a government backed loan of up to 95% of the value of the property.

Hammond’s decision to end the scheme cited the wide availability of similar mortgages by commercial lenders independently of the government’s scheme. However, many of these mortgages suffer from significantly higher interest rates and are increasingly taken out over longer terms than before.

In light of unpredictability in the market following the vote for Brexit, borrowers might be unwise to take out such high loan-tovalue mortgages. Nonetheless, the availability of high loan to value mortgages has now surpassed twothirds of pre-crisis levels, after it fell to just a tenth in 2009, and continues to rise.

In what could be seen as a change of direction for the government, the Treasury has promised to borrow £2bn for an accelerated construction scheme as well as channelling £3bn into a fund for smaller construction firms, many of which were wiped out as a result of the financial crisis. Despite criticism of the effectiveness of the schemes in practice, it is indicative of a change in policy away from ownership and towards solving the endemic lack of supply of housing.

News | 5

News In Brief Drake Visits Drake University Following an extensive online campaign, Canadian rapper Drake made a visit to Drake University of Des Moines, Iowa after finishing a show nearby. Students of the school were obviously thrilled. Although, hysteria was tempered somewhat by the fact that many students were still asleep. Drake arrived on campus at around 2.30 am and reportedly knocked on student’s doors.

In a video posted to Instagram, the rapper said: “Kappa Kappa Gamma I’m outside your sorority house right now and you’re all asleep,”.

First year Ben Scott, of Theta Chi Fraternity told local news station KTLA, “I think I was the only one that actually saw him and spoke to him which was phenomenal. I can’t believe it happened,”.

New Study Finds Link Between Pollution and Traffic Incidents A new study by the Grantham Institute at the LSE has uncovered a troubling link between levels of pollution and road accidents. The research shows that a rise in the average concentration of nitrogen dioxide of just 1 microgramme per cubic metre is sufficient to increase the average number of accidents each day by 2 per cent. Professor Sager of the LSE said: “Although it has already been shown that air pollution adversely affects human health and the ability to carry out mental tasks, this is the first published study that assesses the impact on road safety.

London Fifth Most Expensive City for Students The fact that London is a cripplingly expensive place to live will not be news to the students of LSE. However, they can at least now find some comfort in the knowledge that their counterparts in Boston and New York have it slightly worse. A Survey by Savills has found London to be the fifth most expensive city in the world for students. Students in London spend $4,672 each month according to Savills, they can also enjoy devastating their funds through expenditure on the most expensive purpose-built student accommodation on the earth, followed by New York.

6

| Tuesday 11 October, 2016

Caleb Femi Made First Ever Young People’s Laureate for London Bhadra Sjreeith Deputy News Editor THE YOUTH OF LONDON have been appointed their first ever Poet Laureate. The capital’s latest wordsmith, Caleb Femi, is a schoolteacher from Peckham who became interested in poetry

through grime.

He is a poet, filmmaker and photographer, in addition to being a secondary school English teacher. As a poet, his works are often described as vivid and honest, and are set to music which is reminiscent of grime.

Caleb Femi moved to London from Nigeria when he was seven years old, from a rural background to a grey, urban setting where he shared a one-bedroom flat with his parents and four siblings, one of whom is a recent graduate from the LSE. He lived on

the notorious North Peckham estate where Damilola Taylor was stabbed to death in 2000.

He too experienced a stabbing and shooting whilst growing up.

As a teenager, he was heavily involved in grime, and said in an interview with Emma Finamore, that “the more you look at it and the more you refine it, and take out the grime element, it ends up being poetry”.

His poetry is greatly influenced by his experiences as a member of the Nigerian diaspora. “Children of the Narm”, a dissection of his childhood in Peckham, is sometimes angry, sometimes sad, but always moving. In an interview with Alyssa Klein of Okayafrica, he described writing this poem as a “form of self-healing and growth… it brought me to a point where I had to examine and confront my childhood experiences by looking at the things that I long convinced myself was ‘normal’ or ‘not a big deal’; things to do with culture, belonging, crime, standard of living”.

The Young People’s Laureate position is an extension of the Young Poet Laureate for

London scheme, a role currently held by Selina Nwulu. Spread the Word, a writer development agency, aims to promote poetry through both these schemes.

16 to 25-year-old Londoners in paid employment or training were 66 percent more likely to have been to the theatre in the past year compared to 44 percent of those not in employment or training. Caleb Femi hopes to re-engage young people through poetry and through holding events. “The more events, the better”, he says, to the London Magazine, “but the events have to be on the terms of the young people, with what they feel comfortable with.

So we need to look at building closer relationships between the more established platforms and the underground, grass-roots happenings.”

While it is unclear just exactly how the positions of the Young People’s Laureate and the Young Poet Laureate for London are different, it is evident that there is real interest in promoting poetry amongst London youngsters who might not be otherwise interested, and that is commendable.

LSE Favourite Shami Chakrabarti is New Shadow Attorney General Josph Briers News Editor SHAMI CHAKRABARTI HAS been appointed Shadow Attorney General in Jeremy Corbyn’s latest cabinet reshuffle.

Chakrabarti, who studied law at LSE and has subsequently served on the court of governors and as a visiting professor at the school of law described her appointment as ‘an enormous privilege’.

The former director of Liberty was recently made a peer and authored a controversial report on anti-semitism within the Labour party which some have called ‘a whitewash’. The Board of Deputies of British Jews has been particularly critical of Chakrabarti’s appointment. Vice President, Maria Van Zyl, said: “We are disappointed, but sadly unsurprised, that once again Shami Chakrabarti and Jeremy Corbyn have spectacularly undermined her so-called ‘independent’ report. We hoped

her report would be a potent weapon in the fight against antisemitism. It now looks increasingly like the whitewash was a job application. She has sold out the Jewish community”.

Chakrabarti has strongly rejected any claims of tit for tat. During her appearance on the Andrew Marr Show, she insisted: “There was nothing

“These appointments mean, for the first time ever, two out of the three great offices of state will be shadowed by women...” remotely transactional about this”. Jeremy Corbyn is not a corrupt man and I am not a corrupt woman”.

Corbyn, naturally, is thrilled

with his latest shuffling. The freshly re-elected Labour leader said in a statement: “I am delighted to confirm the appointments of four extremely talented women to our shadow cabinet. “These appointments mean, for the first time ever, two out of the three traditional great offices of state’ will be shadowed by women.”

Chakrabarti is joined on the front benches by Sir Keir Starmer, who makes a return to frontline politics following his participation in the mass resignation from Corbyn’s ministerial gaggle in June of this year. Starmer makes his comeback opposite David Davis MP in his new role as Shadow Secretary of State for Brexit and has already expressed views on migration contrary to those of his party leader. Starmer has declared that immigration needs to be cut whilst Mr Corbyn has previously stated that he is “not interested in numbers”.

News | 7

University Round-Up: The Latest from Accross the UK 1/4 of York Students Boycott Sexual Consent Workshops

Bristol’s Production of ‘Aida’ Scrapped Amid Race Row

St Andrews Conservative Soc Disaffiliates from SU

God Save King’s: College Considers Ban on National Anthem

University Challenge in Shocking QuasiScandal

Students at the University of York have boycotted sexual consent seminars in significant numbers to mark their objection to what some on campus have described as a “patronising exercise”. Women’s Officers at the Uni had been due to speak to thousands of freshers in order to better inform them on this hugely important issue yet were left disappointed by the diminished turnout. Third-year student Ben Froughi reportedly handed out flyers urging his fellow students not to attend. Speaking to Nouse, he argued: “Consent talks are patronising, If students really need lessons in how to say yes or no then they should not be at university. There is no correct way to negotiate getting someone into bed with you...Consent talks propagate the backward message that all women are potential victims and all men potential rapists.”

Students at Bristol University have successfully campaigned for the cancellation of the uni’s production of ‘Aida’ due to concerns surrounding the potential for cultural appropriation. To add insult to injury, students were not planning to perform Verdi’s operatic masterpiece in it’s original form but rather a ‘musical theatre’ version penned by Elton John and Tim Rice. Bristol Student, Millie Evans, voiced her concerns on social media - “it’s quite simply [sic] really: if you are going to put on a production set in a particular place with a particular cultural context, then you need to reflect that with the ethnicity of actors… if this show is put on and white washed – ‘oh let’s just add a bit of eyeliner’ – then I think that’s disrespectful, dumb and embarrassing….look at Liz Taylor in Cleopatra!!!”.

The Conservative Society of St Andrews has moved to disaffiliate from their student association after a clash over the granting of membership. In a statement released last week, the Conservative society argued that they “must be free to withhold membership from persons who by their conduct fail to respect the values of our Party.” However, the Student Association fired back, pointing to the rules stating the requirement of any affiliated society to “permit any student matriculated at the University of St Andrews to become an ordinary member of the society and to exercise the full rights of membership.” The Tory Soc then disaffiliated. Speaking to The Saint, they said, “Though this is a difficult decision, it is the only one we can make... Anyone who openly voices opinions in contradiction to this jeopardises the aims of our Association.”

Kings’ College London has said that it will discuss plans to scrap the national anthem at g raduation after the Student Union’s Vice President for Welfare and Community called it “outdated” and “not ref lective of global values”.

Mahamed Abdullahi claimed that it was no longer relevant because of “increasing farRight nationalism”. A petition has since been launched urging the school to retain it.

The university says that it is “always open to feedback”, and is “currently in discussion with KCLSU student officer s about various elements of the ceremonies, including the use of the national anthem”. It is currently unclear whether Mr Abdullahi was joking. At time of publication, the Daily Mail is already outraged.

Jeremy Paxman has let slip that the BBC shockingly edits out sections of University Challenge where contestants repeatedly answer starter questions incorrectly. Speaking at Henley Literary Festival, the veteran newscaster and host of the show said: “If we get a run of questions, it doesn’t happen very often... you might get a run of unanswered starter questions.

They all get edited out”. The BBC was quick to refute any suggestions that they had mislead the good viewing public.

A spokesperson for the corporation said: “If minor edits are made they always accurately and fairly represent each team’s perfor mance”. It is not known whether the LSE team is one of those guilty of serial incorrectness. However, given recent perfor mances it does not seem unlikely.

Students Crave Microwave: Outrage as Much-loved Machine Goes AWOL Bhadra Sjreeith Deputy News Editor

THE LSE STUDENT Salon, which previously had two microwaves, currently has only one.

This may not seem like a particularly important development. But given that the Student Union tweeted, blogged, and posted about the two new microwaves when they were installed in January 2015, it seems that the good people at the SU view the microwave situation as something of a legacy project.

It is therefore rather strange that the student body has been given no information as to why the microwave was removed, and when (if ever!) we are getting it back.

Perhaps it has been removed for repair? Perhaps someone has stolen it? Perhaps the powers that be decided over the summer that one microwave is quite enough for the LSE student body. Perhaps it is a ploy to get us to buy food at the LSE outlets instead of us bringing our own?

All I know for sure is that

the queue for reheating food is now twice as long. When you have an hour for lunch, waiting for twenty minutes in the queue at the Student Salon, considering murdering everyone who decides to put their food in the microwave again because it clearly didn’t come out “piping hot” enough the first time, isn’t fun. And it could so easily be solved!

“Perhaps it has been removed for repair? Perhaps someone has stolen it? Perhaps it is all part of an elaborate rouse to boost sales at the Garrick?...”

Dear LSE, there is one very simple way to ensure that we are maybe tenth from last in student satisfaction next year instead of dead last. Give us our microwave back!

|

Tuesday 11 October, 2016

The LSE100 Needs To Be Optional

Students have had enough of the half-baked course.

Hakan Ustabas Comment Editor

Section Editors: Hakan Ustabas Deputy Editors: Vacant

AS I SAT WATCHING THE hands of the clock tick slowly around its face, I wondered how I could have better spent the time that I had been forced to commit to my LSE100 class. I had reading to do for my actual degree, articles to edit for The Beaver, and friends who I wanted to see. Three priorities for the day; none of which were being accomplished during my hour spent with an LSE100 teacher.

For those first years lucky enough not to know (you’ll find out soon enough), LSE100 is the “flagship” interdisciplinary

“The fact that this fruitless course takes up even more time from our already busy schedules is the greatest pain of all.”

Comment

8

course of the London School of Economics. Every undergraduate is forced to partake in the mundane pursuit of boosting the profile of the academics who organise the programme. Topics

tend to focus on problems facing the world in the present day, such as global poverty and inequality.

“That doesn’t sound too bad,” I hear you say. Anyone who has experienced the course knows the truth, however.

A weekly two-hour lecture is hosted in the stuffy Peacock Theatre. The material on display is usually the proud research of a ‘respected’ academic, keen to show off their work to a hall full of not-so-keen students. With this, the first problem of the LSE100 course is highlighted.

The material in the lectures is barely tangentially connected to the work we are supposed to do in class. The quality of the presentations are so poor that attendance each week is dismal.

What’s worse, however, are the compulsory readings.

Dry academic articles, often expressing a single world-view, are selected for students each week. Recognising that students don’t wish to spend too much time on the course, the reading list has been narrowed down over the years. In one sense this is good, but on the other hand it undermines the very purpose of the course — to provide a debate in contemporary social science.

With the limited information gleaned from independent study, it is no surprise that class discussions are kept to a minimum. Students’ eyes dart around the room, keen to avoid the stare of the teacher. Sighs

are emitted after every question asked. Only when an individual is picked on to give an answer do they reluctantly offer an opinion lacking any sort of conviction.

Occasionally, some students may express a more resounding view. However, as I learnt last

“A poll of LSE100 students has revealed that the majority want the course to be optional. Not only is it boring and time consuming, but ultimately provides no reward for those who undertake it.” year when questioning the logic of rent controls, unless that opinion was left wing, it was unlikely to be accepted as anything but nonsense. So much for intellectual debate and academic rigour.

The quality of the course isn’t even the main problem. Students at the LSE are busy. Our courses are hard. The fact that this

fruitless course takes up even more time from our already busy schedules is the greatest pain of all. Juggling degree reading with social events is already difficult enough without additional work to think about. Levels of stress and mental health problems at this university are far too high, and additional courses like this only place greater pressure on students.

A poll of LSE100 students has revealed that the majority want the course to be optional.

Not only is it boring and time consuming, but ultimately provides no reward for those who undertake it. It espouses skills such as ‘critical thinking’ and ‘time management’, but all I seem to do is critically think about how much I hate the course — and that takes up a lot of my time. The in-depth work that we undertake on our actual degrees is what will give us the skills needed to find work. The half-arsed content of the LSE100 won’t.

Students have selected their degrees so that they can follow the career path of their choice.

The lefty origins of the LSE seem to be out of touch with the modern undergraduate. Those who want to solve the world’s problems can go ahead. But for the others — the silent majority searching for that investment bank or law firm internship — the LSE should accept that they have no interest in this course.

As adults, it’s time that we were given a choice on the LSE100.

Photo Credit: Creative Commons 2016.

Comment | 9

The Last Laugh for First Past the Post?

The broken electoral system puts Westminster parties and supporters under strain Thomas Chambers Undergraduate Student THE DYING DAYS OF September seem to have developed a bit of an annual routine. Freshers enjoy the experience that is their first Saucy, our plans to be responsible with the student loan this term go out the window, and Jeremy Corbyn wins a Labour leadership contest. The first and the latter have left many with a headache or two.

“We need to recognise that First Past The Post doesn’t work.”

The unsurprising dispatching of leadership contender Owen Smith has left some of the Labour party with the issue of trying to continue in a world where Jeremy Corbyn has control over the party membership. There have been calls for a split, a breakaway renegade party of the anti-Corbyn brigade to form. However there is the haunting memory of the SDP whose split lead to consolidating Tory rule for another decade. The only solution to reconcile the impasse is a considerable rethink of the electoral system in the United Kingdom. We need to recognise that First Past The Post doesn’t work.

Under First Past The Post,

Blairites and Corbynistas are in the same party, UKIP and Green voters are underrepresented and Europhiles share party allegiance with Brexiters. First past the post forces political actors into marriages of convenience but as Labour is finding out having to continue in a loveless marriage is difficult. It is the thought of a messy divorce that leaves them locked out of power which means they have to endure this marital hostility. This is not the case in other countries, the Spanish have the radical left in Podemos and the soft left in PSOE. This is thanks to their system of proportional representation. This is the case in many of European nations who benefit from using PR based electoral systems.

Safe seats and the First Past The

“First Past The Post forces political actors into marriages of convenience but as Labour is finding out having to continue in a loveless marriage is difficult.”

Post system mean that voters go unheard. The Glaswegian Tory and the champagne socialist in Chelsea

“As long as this system remains in place the UK is going to continue having two dominant parties which suffer from greater and greater internal friction.”

fectively in Ireland, Malta, and the Australian senate. This is one form of PR which would allow the politics of the UK to advance past the outdated FPTP system.

All this is not to say that systems of PR are perfect. The continual existence of coalitions and minority governments can lead to instability, but the crisis that went on in Labour recently has left the UK with-

out effective opposition against a Tory government that is veering to the right. The broadchurch mantra is wearing thin and the lack of love in Labour demonstrates that given the opportunity, all parties should consider replacing the outdated FPTP system in the interest of democracy, fairness and even party management.

have no incentive to go to the ballot box. Even the Greens have made reference to the wasted vote idea that they have unsuccessfully tried to move away from. In the last general election there was widespread acknowledgement the Greens would struggle under the current electoral system. They sustained votes of 1,157,613, but were only able to win the one seat. In contrast, the SNP had 1,454,436 votes which is a difference of only 305,000 votes, but it translated into 56 seats.

This illustrates the unrepresentative nature of the electoral system in place. As long as this system remains in place the UK is going to continue having two dominant parties which suffer from greater and greater internal friction.

A PR system such as Single Transferable Vote gives voters more choice, gives the nation a more reflective Parliament, and encourages parties to focus on all areas not just the marginal seats. STV works ef-

Brexit, Lies, and University Challenge 2016 has gone from bad to worse...

Jack Boyd Undergraduate IT’S BEEN A TOUGH YEAR so far. Brexit, Bake Off and Bowie are just a few pleasingly alliterative examples of the absolute shitter than 2016 has been. But all were ultimately to be expected. A known porcine enthusiast was the figurehead trying to save us from Brexit, Paul Hollywood is basically the Judas of the kitsch competitive baking world, and Bowie was too pure for this cruel Earth.

What was not expected, however, was the revelation that University Challenge sits on a throne of lies. Specifically, Jeremy Paxman let slip that the programme is edited, if the contestants fail to answer several starter questions in a row. He followed up with this being because of the licence fee, but personally that sounds like the ravings of a Daily Mail reader rather than a veteran journal-

ist/interrogator of students. As a longtime fan of University Challenge, this has proved to be rather a blow to my worldview. What if the speccy kids who know every Beethoven composition under the sun are actually just like me?

Have they checked to see if the

“Brexit, Bake Off and Bowie are just a few pleasingly alliterative examples of the absolute shitter than 2016 has been.” hot water in their room sink is hot enough to make a Pot Noodle be-

cause they couldn’t face a walk to the kitchen?

At least we know that Jeremy Paxman is still a bit of a bastard, in that he was so disgusted by the editors letting people off his own blend of disappointment and disdain he doles out when they can’t say who was King of the Netherlands in 1582. God help us when it turns out that Paxman’s actually a big teddy bear, consoling Jonty after he fluffs a question and looks like a right dick in front of the nation, his mum, and all of his mum’s mates, who she told to watch so she could act all high and mighty about her clever boy when she saw them next at Waitrose. If there was ever a cause for UKIP to get behind now, it would be making sure we keep the Paxo-Brand emotional abuse that has made University Challenge, and Britain as a whole, great and strong.

Speaking of UKIP, this is perfect fodder for blokes in Wetherspoons to talk about how the

metropolitan elite are lying to us, making us thinking their fancy university education means they

“University Challenge sits on a throne of lies... now I can hold onto the fact I might not be as bad at University Challenge as I previously thought.”

know everything. But I think that the people who have really been

lied to are the slightly less clever uni students. Just think of all the ribbing from your dad when you watch, completely speechless at the science questions; “Oh I’m sure there’ll be easier questions for the arts students”; “That history degree doesn’t look as good as Natural Sciences when you can’t even tell me what an Ampere is, son”. Sodding Bartolomeo Cuthbert Joly de Lotbiniere could have been as thick as those watching, the only difference being is that Bart had the advantage of editing wizardry after he got five things wrong in a row, while we have to do it live, with far more abuse from family members.

By revealing this deceit, Paxman has returned to his journalistic roots of exposing how we’ve been lied to. I would argue that this is as important as the Panama Papers and Chilcot rolled into one, because now I can hold onto the fact I might not be as bad at University Challenge as I previously thought.

10

| Tuesday 11 October, 2016

Journalism By the People; For the People

Technological advancements will break the oligarchy of globally powerful media sources Stephan Michaeli Postgraduate Student AS HUMANITY TRAVELS deeper into the digital age, we remain plagued by many recurring issues. Income inequality, irresponsible businesses, political corruption — to name just a few. But with the powers of technology, one such problem is becoming unacceptable. The vital craft of journalism is still dominated by a few powerful media empires.

“The vital craft of journalism is still dominated by a few powerful media empires.”

Fortunately, technology has begun to break this monopoly.

News reports often use footage that is already circulating through social media. Smartphones and the internet mean anyone has the potential to become a journalist.

But these citizen and professional journalists alike are still neglected by the industry. They do not see a fair share of the revenue their vital work helps create. So how then can a more democratic system be created? Though several websites have tried this, one in particular seems to stand out.

In order to give everyone a fair platform, Crowdpondent, a new website, is trying to crowdsource

journalism. Rather than simply hiring a select group of individuals to write, this platform will give everyone a means to share their perspective — perspectives that are as essential as they are neglected. Anyone can sign up — from veteran journalists to freelance writers to bloggers — and depending on the performance of their articles, they will be remunerated.

This payment is not just based on views however, but by how readers rate the piece.

This way mindless clickbait would be outcast and high-quality original content encouraged.

These articles will also be limited to 300 words. Firstly, this means important content will be published quickly. Nothing beats speed in this digital age. But this will not compromise content, it will merely concentrate it into its most important and concise form. This will al-

help of our writing guide, as well as our dedicated team, writers will be learnt to make the most out of each word — a skill transferable to many other facets of life. Not least essay writing.

Indeed, students are ideal ‘crowdpondents’. They are digitally savvy, informed and tend to be very politically charged. As such, Crowdpondent will launch a competition between universities to encourage students to become crowdpondents. The winning team will get a generous cash prize on top of their general reimburse-

ments, but to earn it, they must not only get the most views on their articles, but the community must also rate their articles very highly.

This publication will also be one of the many new startups to embrace Bitcoin. This has several advantages. Firstly, for writers around the world, the extortionate fees of international bank transfers will be avoided. It will also ensure anonymity for those who truly need it. But it is also the sort of modern mechanism that is necessary for meaningful change in society.

The ideal outcome for this website, and something that journalism certainly could do with, would be a global collection of crowdpondents. Anyone who is able and willing to write about the important or interesting issues and does so. They are rewarded for their efforts, and as a result, more information can be gathered, more perspectives can be seen. This will allow us to understand our world better. The traditional channels of media no longer suffice. The crowd must be heard.

“Students are ideal ‘crowdpondents’. They are digitally savvy, informed and tend to be very politically charged. ” low readers to gain a great deal of incite while covering a wide array of topics. Despite shrinking attention spans, too much content contains needless waffling. With the

Top Marx For Capitalism Why Karl Marx was wrong, and how capitalism has saved the world Hakan Ustabas Comment Editor PICTURE THE SCENE: THE year is 2033, and our commune is holding a day of remembrance to mark the 150th anniversary of the death of our economic saviour.

We eat our bread, grown on collectively owned land, and farmed using collectively owned tractors, while being thankful for the peace and equality that surrounds us.

My comrade rises to give a speech in memory of what the glorious Karl Marx fought against.

“Imagine if Marx had not been born,” he shouted. “We would be mere wage slaves! We would continue to be oppressed by the ever smaller yet ever more powerful bourgeoisie!”. The others who sat in the collectively owned park let out a cry of support for the speaker. “The inevitable collapse of capitalism occurred, and

our lives are all the better for it!”

In reality, however, we continue to live in a capitalist system.

Why didn’t the economic base come crashing down? Why didn’t the class conscious proletariat rise up against their bourgeois oppressors? In short: Marx got it wrong

“In short: Marx got it wrong.”

It cannot be disputed that 19th Century Europeans were having a rough time. The masses lived in crippling poverty and children were forced to work in dangerous factory conditions while the owners of wealth got rich from their labour. One could almost (but not quite) forgive Marx for the condemnation of capitalism which he

concluded with.

One of the great mistakes Marx made was in viewing his ideology as a scientific theory. He felt it was provable through what he called ‘dialectical materialism’. For him, history was almost predetermined through collective actions, caused by changes in the economic base. Capitalism was inherently unstable as it was built on exploitation, hence why he felt revolution was inevitable.

With the benefit of hindsight, we can count each and every one of his failed predictions. Property did not fall into the hands of fewer and fewer ‘super-rich’ elites.

Of course, there are a few billionaires in the world, but the vast majority of business-owners are small scale investors, running local enterprises or creating innovations in technology. Contrary to Marx’s belief, wealth had spread into more hands.

Perhaps the most important

flaw in Marx’s argument was that capitalism had the power to generate income like no other economic system, and distribute it amongst the population. In real terms (i.e. wage growth adjusted for inflation), average yearly income in the UK has increased from £2,834 in 1850 to £21,857 in 2014. Living standards for every person in the country have rapidly increased in the last 150 years. The average British person today literally has a higher standard of living than King Louis XIV of France. That’s right: you’re living like royalty.

Marxism in the 21st Century has been almost entirely abandoned. With exception to the isolated pockets of academics, or underachieving teenagers sat in some dark corner of Tumblr, most people regard Marx’s teachings as a thing of the past.

That’s not to say that leftism is dead. By contrast, the increase in inequality in recent years has

caused a growth of hard-left voters, and a rise in the popularity of the Green Party, and politicians such as Jeremy Corbyn. However, the new-left politics which is emerging today cannot be further from Marxism. It focuses on using a system of progressive taxation to redistribute income, regardless of whether or not a worker is a ‘proletarian’ or an ‘exploitative capitalist’. A prime example of this is the rise of ‘banker bashing’ — the desire to tax city investors to within an inch of their lives, despite the fact that they have made their income without using the labour of others.

As for Marx, his work has been sidelined as a form of academic study, rather than a serious recipe for political organisation. His rhetoric may be repeated today in order to inspire or to inflame, but rarely does any meaningful action come from these words.

Comment | 11

LSE: Time to Practice What you Preach

All too often, the University is blind or complicit in allowing inequality on its own doorstep John Milnes-Smith Undergraduate Student LAST FRIDAY NIGHT, I WAS heading down to the Tuns with a friend. As we approached the university, we came across two events happening across the road from one another.

On one side of the road, outside the New Academic Building, the LSE Sociology Department were hosting the closing party for their “LSE Resist” festival. In the true spirit of resistance, students and academics enjoyed their Friday night soiree under LSE Marquees.

As promised by the event, ‘street food’ was being served, while a DJ blared out popular grime hits such as “Shut up” and “That’s Not Me” to an awkward crowd.

On the other side of the road, another event was in full swing. Queues of the homeless waited to be served at Lincoln’s Inn Field soup kitchen, as they do every night.

I walk past the soup kitchen practically every day on my way home and, over my three years at the university, the queues have grown longer. In the last five years, the number of homeless on London’s streets has doubled, with nearly 8,000 sleeping rough last year.

As the homeless waited for their food, the sounds and smells coming from LSE’s latest display of social upheaval carried over to them. Although sadly I missed it, the LSE Resist programme also later promised a “Project Resist Lighting Programme”, where they would project participant’s inspired ideas onto the façade of the New Academic Building “in a true resistance and guerrilla style” for all to see. I am sure the homeless would have appre-

ciated that as well.

And as I walked past the event, the only question I was left with was; “Resist what?”

Perhaps this is too harsh. I am sure that LSE Resist enabled the most cutting edge of academic debate over the course of the three day festival, achieving its aim to “turn the university inside out” in discussing the theme of resistance. I myself did not go to the festival, but there is a point to be made in that.

“When you take a step back from it all...do we come across as a University that is sincere in its proclaimed goals of tackling social issues?”

When you take a step back from it all, how do we come across as an institution? When you’re not engrossed in the heat of intellectual discussion of LSE Resist, do we come across as a university that is sincere in its proclaimed goals of tackling social issues? Curious for a third party perspective, I asked my friend, who does not go to university, what his impression was of the LSE Resist festival. The reply was blunt; “the only thing being resisted was self-awareness”.

To me, LSE Resist summed up a university that all too often fails to practice as an institution what it preaches as an academic

movement. The LSE was founded by four Fabians with the aim

“The only thing being resisted was self awareness.” of bettering society. With the aim “To Know the Causes of Things”, vast sums of articles and reports are published each year by the university to try and explain the various inequalities and challenges we face as a society. However, all too often the university lacks the self-awareness to realise that it is does not need to look beyond itself to find the causes of the very same inequalities that is trying to address in wider society.

The LSE Resist festival is not only the only example of where the LSE community has failed to live up the values it proudly boasts to wider society. The day before the festival’s closing event, a UGM was held by the Student Union on whether the LSE needed a new officer position to tackle issues of social mobility at the LSE. And at the very same time as this UGM, an open meeting was held to address the horrific treatment of the cleaners at the LSE, some of whom have described of being treated by the university “like the dirt they clean.”

It is the same university that has published papers for the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission that also faces serious complaints of being inaccessible to students from lower socio-economic backgrounds.

It is the same university that, as the Justice for LSE Cleaners

movement has pointed out, has an International Inequalities department yet also exploits its own staff - which aren’t technically its own staff; thanks to the divisive and unnecesssary practice of outsourcing.

When one looks beyond the last few weeks, the list of hypocrisies only continue to grow. Last February, LSE’s Personal Social Services Research Unit proudly published the first report of its kind that looked at the economic impact of youth mental health services in the UK. Its conclusion: that to “neglect mental illness in young people” is “morally unacceptable”.

I am sure the LSE felt far less proud of the reports that

“LSE has a moral responsibility to hold itself to the same values that it preaches in its academic work to tackle the inequalities right here on our doorstep.” were published just two months later by the Beaver that revealed that the university had evicted a student with mental health issues from halls residence, despite warnings that it would lead to the student becoming homeless.

LSE seems to too often fail to realise that the society their academic papers analyse is not some sort of distant construct.

Society is made up of the real people around us; the staff, the students, the cleaners, the homeless who queue at Lincoln’s Inn Field every night for their dinner.

LSE has a moral responsibility to hold itself to the same values that it preaches in its academic work to tackle the inequalities right here on our doorstep. If we do not, we are nothing but hypocrites, calling on other institutions to adopt practices that we fail to take up ourselves.

Furthermore, by failing to tackle the social issues in our immediate community, we also undermine the integrity of our academic work. How can a university that lacks such perspective and self-awareness, failing to address the blatant inequalities both on and immediately around campus, be taken seriously by the public when addressing wider social issues? If LSE is sincere in its proclaimed goals of bettering society, it needs to lead by example.

The task of balancing our university’s principles and practices as an institution is a challenge. The relationship between being one of the world’s top universities and trying to address social inequality is an uncomfortable one, and so it should be.

But it is only in constantly challenging and questioning our own practices that we can seriously address, and being taken seriously in, issues in wider society. What we preach to others and what we practice ourselves is part and parcel; they reflect one another.

If we do not do this, when we start eating street food and listening to grime while the homeless watch on, there is no question on which side of the social divide LSE stands on.

12|Tuesday 11 October 2016

Challenging the Progressive Orthodoxy International political anarchy and an increasingly liberalised global economy

t: Kenny Louie, F lickr

THE WORD GLOBALISATION

Features

Section Editors: Daniel Shears Stefanos Argyros

is often associated with other terms/buzzwords such as broad-minded, universalistic, tolerant, cosmopolitan and progressive. Those who reject globalisation are derided as small minded parochialists who fail to see the “bigger picture”.

In Britain, the Leave campaign was associated with an archaic conception of 20th century nationalism, and mocked for its apparent ignorance of global interdependence, while the Remain camp claimed the EU was a wonderful

people in the world receiving as much as the bottom 57%.

Firms no longer just have to compete within their own country; now the whole world is on their doorstep.

Free movement of human capital means foreign labour is suppressing wages in lowskilled, manual industries (whether this be Eastern Europeans in Britain or Mexicans along the American South). And when it’s not physical free movement of people, trade liberalisation and relatively free movement of capital has led to global competitiveness where goods and products are bought from the cheapest vendors, usually

in the much the same way as national economies; countries essentially act as specialised fir ms, trading across the globe with other countries which can produce more of a good/ service, at a higher quality

“Trump’s advocation of protectionism has tarred antiglobalist rhetoric and sent liberals running scared”

“However, it would seem that economic globalisation has created more inequality, not less, with the richest 1% of people in the world receiving as much as the bottom 57%. Firms no longer just have to compete with their own country; now the whole world is on their doorstep” symbol of globalisation and co-operation between once warring European states. The progressives flocked in their hoards to ballot boxes to choose to stay inside the EU, brandings themselves as liberal internationalists, with the majority of members of the Green Party, the SNP, Labour and the Lib Dems all decisively supporting Remain. Over in the USA, Trump’s advocation of protectionism has tarred anti-globalist rhetoric and sent liberals running scared.

Anyone who dares insult globalisation is seen as somehow “backwards”: the very opposite of progressive.

However, it seems that economic globalisation has created more inequality, not less, with the richest 1% of

raised living standards after the industrial revolution took hold of Western Europe in the 19th century (led by Great Britain), living standards have now peaked in the Western world (at least until the next paradigm shift in GPTs occurs).

U n f o r t u n a t e l y, specialisation on a national scale within a global context doesn’t yield the same results in terms of development or growth in comparatively poorer countries. Therefore, the focus now should be enabling more people to share in this wealth and prosperity, and attempting to close the gap in living standards between the rich and poor.

The comparison between internal national inequalities and international inequalities is rather striking; for example, while Britain’s Gini coefficient is 33, the global coefficient is a staggering 66. Even the most unequal societies which exist in African nations (such as Comoros or South Africa) fail to reach this figure.

As The Globalist reported back in 2012, the global 1% is composed of the “old rich”, i.e. Western Europe, North America and Japan, while the biggest losers of globalisation

“The focus now should be enabling more people to share in this wealth and prosperity”

nations where labour is cheap such as China or Bangladesh.

Efficiency is chased at the expense of human welfare.

The global financial economy has not opened up new opportunities for all, it has simply entrenched and enhanced the position of those who already have vast sums of capital and valuable assets.

Granted, we have witnessed a flourishing of new, prosperous middle classes in countries like China, India, Brazil and Indonesia, and absolute poverty levels have fallen across the globe. However, I can’t help feeling that this seems more like a fortuitous side effect than calculated and intended consequence.

The development of the global economy has occurred

and lower cost, with the same resources than they can.

For example, America’s top exports are machines, engines & pumps (13.7%) electronic equipment (11.3%) and aircraft & spacecraft (8.7%), while India specialises in gems & precious metals (14.7%), oil (11.7%) and vehicles (5.3%).

They both realise that it is more efficient to buy these goods off each other than try to reproduce the same goods using domestic supply chains, and, at face value, this seems like voluntary, mutually beneficial exchange rooted in the comparative economic advantages of each nation.

The problem is that, whereas specialisation and division of labour within factories increased productivity and

have been African and Latin American nations (as well as former Communist nations).

It is shocking that the poorest global 5% have failed to see their income rise in the past two decades of intensely rapid globalisation.

This brings me to a crucial point. Global living standards have not risen at an equal rate by what I call “global specialisation”. Why? Because within nations, we have governments to redistribute the economic gains of increased productivity and efficiency. On the other hand, the international political and economic system is characterised by anarchy; it lacks any authoritative, supranational body to regulate the economic activity of nation-states (in the same way governments ARE able to regulate the economic activity of firms and individuals).

Features | 13

and Reassessing Globalisation

are a potent mix, and should be seriosuly questioned by the centre left In fact, since the end of WW2 the consensus has been to further liberalise the global economy by reducing trade barriers and expediting the movement of goods, services and capital across the world. At the 1944 Bretton Woods conference, U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, stated that the establishment of the IMF and the IBRD marked the end of economic nationalism. The rise of offshore banking, for example, is emblematic of a global economic system where competition on a global scale reduces incentives to regulate large, multinational corporations, and which rewards countries which are most favourable to capital.

Therefore, in many ways, we can see the EU as a

“In many ways, we can see the EU as a completely rational reaction to the uncertainty an chaos of globalisation” completely rational reaction to the uncertainty and chaos of globalisation; “Fortress Europe”, used as a pejorative term by Brexiteers to decry the protectionism of the EU can be seen as a vital economic

f irewall between Europe and the rest of the world. Perhaps this is why young, progressive voters supported Remain during the EU referendum. It wasn’t necessarily an embrace of neoliberal globalisation but an acceptance that Europe can act to temper some of the more negative aspects of global competition. The EU gives them a sense of control and security. It prevents a race to the bottom by providing an equal playing f ield (in the form of the single-market) for all member states, contingent on pooled sovereignty to override credible commitment issues.

This has implications for worker’s rights as well. In a world where cutting costs increases your comparative trading advantage, those without minimum wages or worker protections in place have no incentive to change that (see China, Colombia, Guatemala, Pakistan).

Moreover, because of global specialisation, there is no incentive for Western governments to invest in the economic diversif ication of developing states such as Ethiopia, which do a great job at providing us with coffee, tea, spices and vegetables.

These developing nations, which never fully experienced industrialisation and the productivity gains associated with it, are now stuck in a global economic system which functions in the same way as modern capitalist nation-states but without the redistributive power mechanism of a common sovereign authority.

This

is why the rich are getting exponentially richer, while the poor lag behind.

Of course, we can’t blame everything on global structural problems. Many

“Globalisation has undoubtedly brought about profound change, and much of it is good. The free exchange and movement of information, culture and people has undeniably made us more enlightened, more diverse and more enriched as a human species.”

developing nations are held back by political corruption, weak institutions, predatory governments, bloated public sectors, the infamous “resource curse” and unaccountable politicians. This does indeed pose a problem for foreign aid

The Pocket Philosopher

spending by rich, developed nations (the only real attempt Musings on ethical at direct global distribution), duty, responsibility, most academic studies of which heavily suggest is ineffective and justification primarily because of the aforementioned corruption Edmund Smith and lack of transparency in Undergraduate Student autocracies. Nonetheless, this doesn’t mean a liberalised, FOR ALL OUR DISAGREEMENTS unregulated global economy is on ethics, there is at least one point making the situation any better. of startling convergence. It is not Globalisation has enough for us to do our duty. We undoubtedly brought about must also stand behind our duty. I profound change, and mean by this that it is not enough much of it is good. The free to do the mere bodily actions that exchange and movement of our duties require. It is not even information, culture and enough to have the right attitudes people has undeniably made or emotional inclinations towards us more enlightened, more our duties. We need to have some diverse and more enriched as means of justifying ourselves. We a human species. But being a have to be able to say why this is our progressive doesn’t necessarily duty, and not some other course of mean buying into Whig action. Moreover, because we have historiography, and accepting to provide and believe an account that as long as we are moving of why our duty is as it is, we have forwards, we are improving the to hold ourselves responsible for the actions we take as part of our human experience.

Being a progressive is about ethical duty. To be unable to do moving in the right direction, this is in some sense inadequate. If not moving at any cost and in this is, indeed, part of our common whatever direction the wind ethical framework, then we can all takes us. We must be careful fail in our ethical duties in three about accepting globalisation distinct ways. The first is the mistake in every form, and learn to be Hannah Arendt saw in Adolf more nuanced and rational Eichmann. Eichmann performed when forming our views and the actions that he perceived to be opinions. Above all, we must his duty, but refused to provide an strive to create a better world account under which his actions for all, even if this means could be justified. This refusal to challenging liberal orthodoxies stand behind his duty is generally from time to time. And perhaps taken as a failure to engage with the nation-state, often dismissed any form of properly conceived as irrelevant, even undesirable ethics, and its consequences are by radical cosmopolitans, abhorrent. The second is the should be valued a little more failure of someone which considers for the security it can provide their duty, but never goes through for its most vulnerable citizens. with it. Plausibly, someone who is convinced of the rightness of Singer’s drowning-child argument, but fails to follow through with its consequences for their life is in this position. Finally, of course, one could fail to be ethical by failing to either stand behind their duty, or to take the practical actions their duty consists in.

The point is simple: it is never enough to do one of these, no matter how well- one must do both.

Photo Credit: www.businessinsider.com

Interested in writing for Features?

Email us at: features@ thebeaveronline.co.uk

14 |

Tuesday October 11, 2016

Corporate Social Activism: All rainbows and smiles?

The new era of corporate social activism should be welcomed, but not without a second thought Philip Apfel Undergraduate student

Credit: steelerslounge.com

ASK ANYONE ON THE streets of Britain to describe the phenomenon of the modern day company in a few words, and you can be certain that phrases such as “human rights advocate” or “social justice warrior” are unlikely to cross many lips. These terms are much too political and loaded. Business, most would say, is concerned with nothing but the all-embracing, all-pervading imperative of profit-maximisation, scrupulously neutral when it comes to social issues. However, across the pond, the answer of a random pedestrian is likely to be quite different. That is because in the last few years, an incredibly forceful movement of corporate, socially progressive activism has swept the United States.

In March of this year, Indiana’s Republican-dominated legislature passed, and Governor Mike Pence signed, a “religious freedom” bill (Senate Bill 101) which allowed for-profit businesses to use religion as a justification to discriminate against customers.

Lauding the bill, right-wing group ‘Advance America’ stated that “Christian bakers, florists and photographers should not be punished for refusing to participate in a homosexual marriage!” Their alacrity was short-lived, however. The passing of the bill evoked a tidal wave of criticism and boycott

threats by dozens of companies. Angie’s List, a crowdsourcing website, and Salesforce, a cloud computing company, were among the first to announce that they would scale back their operations in Indiana. The result? Legislators were left scrambling to pass an amendment.

A month later, House Bill 757, a “religious liberty” bill that would have allowed employers in Georgia to reject LGBT job applicants on religious grounds, was vetoed

by Georgia Governor Nathan Deal after having already cleared the legislature. The reason? The NFL had previ-

“Marc Benioff,

CEO of Salesforce and pertinacious advocate for socially progressive policies [...] stated that there is “a third [political] party emerging in this country, which is the party of CEOs”” ously notified state officials that, should the its bid to host the highly lucrative 2019 Super Bowl goodbye. Furthermore, executives from dozens of big name companies including

Disney, Apple and Salesforce had pressured the governor to veto the bill.

North Carolina saw a bill pass into law at around the same time, which invalidated several existing anti-discrimination measures, and which forces transgender individuals to use the bathroom that corresponds with their birth certificate, and against their gender identity. Since the passage of what has come to be known as HB2, hundreds of corporations have come out to condemn the legislation. The economic impact on North Carolina’s economy has been considerable. PayPal went back on a planned $3.8million expansion of its operations in the state, Deutsche Bank pulled hundreds of jobs from its base in Cary, the NBA announced in July that it would move the planned 2017 All-Star game out of North Carolina, and, last month, the NCAA announced that it would move seven previously awarded championship events from the state. North Carolina’s legislators have yet to cave. But, given the considerable economic pressure, it may only be a matter of time.

So, what to make of this new era of corporate social activism? In general, progressives seem to have welcomed it with open arms. After all, traditionally, corporations have generally been assumed to be aligned with conservative political causes. But a word of caution is in order.

Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce and pertinacious advocate for socially progressive policies such as LGBT equality, recently stated that there is “a third [political] party emerging in this country, which is the party of CEOs”.

At this point, for a true progressive, the alarm bells should be going off. After all, don’t

“the left should not make the mistake of thinking that companies are supporting these social policies purely out of the kindness of their hearts. It is partly true, but there are elements of pure rational selfinterest involved as well.” progressives consistently rant about the travesty of big companies using their economic clout to strong-arm elected officials? So why is that now acceptable all of a sudden, just because corporate interests happen to align with a sociallyprogressive political agenda? Is

this not the height of hypocrisy? Legislators in Indiana, Georgia and North Carolina were all voted into office democratically, CEO’s were not.

So what of our commitment to democracy, then? Only 32 percent of Georgia voters support gay marriage. What of the other 68%?

Furthermore, the left should not make the mistake of thinking that companies are supporting these social policies purely out of the kindness of their hearts. It is partly true, but there are elements of pure rational self-interest involved as well. As a company in today’s day and age, in some countries, sanctioning discrimination of any kind will simply be bad for your bottom line.

But what if, at some point in the future, that stops being the case? Will companies remain on what progressives perceive as the right side of history?

While it is important to keep cognisant of these objections to corporate social activism, none are convincing enough to reject it. On balance, it is a good thing. Given what’s at stake, a small measure of ideological impurity is an acceptable price to pay.

Fundamental human rights issues should be allowed to transcend the fetters of democracy.

Furthermore, regardless of whether companies are acting out of self-interest rather than idealism, at the end of the day, they are still helping. And these minorities need all thrthe help they can get.

16 | Tuesday 11 October, 2016

Prashant Rao : from Beaver Editor to AFP’s Taryana Odayar Executive Editor PRASHANT RAO IS THE current Deputy Business Editor for Europe at The New York Times, and the former Baghdad Bureau Chief for Agence FrancePresse (AFP). He was assigned to the Baghdad Bureau by the AFP for five years from 2009 to 2014, where he was responsible for the coverage of Iraq in English, French and Arabic. He graduated from the LSE in 2005, and contributed to the Beaver as Executive Editor during his time as an undergraduate.

Interviews

(Q) How did you get involved with the Beaver?

A News Editor position opened up, and the first time I didn’t get it but the second time I did. And it was just really fun. The group of people who were in the Editorial roles were really nice and fun to be around, and we’re still really good friends. Several of them attended my wedding and vice versa. Then the Editor decided he wanted to leave early in our third year, and then I got the Editorship. We’d start on Sunday and just be super slow, work till 3 or 4 in the morning, I’d walk home to Carr-Saunders, then I’d walk back after two hours of sleep, edit the paper, make sure it was ok, and it inevitably would not be! But its all about the people you meet, like-minded people.

(Q) Did being involved with the Beaver help you on your career path?

Its definitely good to be involved with the Beaver, especially in an Editorial role because you really have to think about what kind of content you should be publishing and what kind of news matters.

These are questions that journalists ask themselves on a daily basis, so you get some real kind of experience in terms of what we put on the front, have we given everybody who is a party to this story adequate time to respond to any allegations made, have we done a decent enough job of checking whether this is legit or not. And inevitably we wouldn’t have, and that was part of the learning process because in the grand scheme of things its relatively low stakes, and so that was enormously helpful - to really think about how we prioritise news.

One of the big ones was, ‘should the LSE remain a member of the NUS?’, ‘Should LSE remain a member of ULU?’ And I wanted to hear what everyone on the Editorial board thought. It was a mostly leftwing Editorial board but a couple of the writers were Right-wing and it was really fun with everybody trying to get their two cents in.

Looking back, this was the kind of stuff that was really useful, having those kinds of discussions about what is the most important news of the day, and is it the most important news or the most urgent news. That’s really helped me along the way.

(Q) Do you have any advice for student writers who would like to become journalists?

The most important thing is to keep at it. Its like muscle memory, you just have to keep trying, you have to keep writing, you have to keep reading a lot. Its hard as a student journalist because a lot of

“In my last two months ISIS took Mosul, so I didn’t do a huge amount of journalism because I was going to bed every night and waking up every morning hoping that none of my staff had been kidnapped or killed.” the fundamentals of news writing you can learn, but there aren’t a lot of places that teach it. But I think its important to just keep writing, and especially if you want to be a journalist, there’s a real value to being humble and trying to get as much experience as possible because obviously LSE is one of the best universities in the world, but in the Times Higher Education Supplement that came out, the LSE was 25th. That means there’s at least two dozen other universities with smart kids, who also probably want to be journalists. There’s no shortage of people who want to be journalists, so you have to be humble, you have to work really hard, you have to be willing to make sacrifices.

(Q) What were some of the sacrifices you made working as a journalist?

I worked for two years on the night-shift at AFP, and then I worked at Bloomberg in financial journalism which at the time I definitely didn’t want to do because my over-riding ambition was to be a foreign correspondent. The thing about journalism is that its kind of a meandering path to your eventual goal. There is no direct line, there is no set way of doing things because it is a relatively small community of people in the grand scheme of things. There is no traditional way of doing things, you’ve just got to work at it, plug away and try your best and hope that you get lucky. I got lucky here and there and it worked out really well, but I would say the most important thing is to plug away and be humble, because

you will probably fail, and it sucks.

And even if you do succeed, you’ve probably failed several times before that. I got rejected from all kinds of jobs, constantly. I must have sent out dozens of job applications in my final year. I got one job offer, maybe two, I think. Most people fail but if you really want it you’ve just got to keep trying. Its brutal.

(Q) What was it like working in Iraq for five years and eventually becoming AFP’s Baghdad Bureau Chief ?

That was fantastic in terms of moulding me as a journalist because I went when I was 24, and I definitely wasn’t any good when I got there. And I don’t think I got good for several years after that, because you can learn the fundamentals of news writing, but when bombs are going off and you have to write clean, fast and concise, that takes time. And I would say for the first few months at least that was a real struggle for me because it was a lot of pressure, and I wasn’t sure if what I was doing was right.

My previous job was as a junior reporter in London, which was a big bureau so I didn’t have a lot of responsibility thrust upon me, and then all of a sudden I’m in this city where its incredibly violent, and there are moments where you’re as close to terrified as you can get if not actually terrified.

Our office was bombed a couple of times. But I think it really moulded me as a journalist because it teaches you so many things. It teaches you that there are human stories here and we have a duty as journalists to tell them as much as we possibly can, and there’s nuance and complexity which we never see from afar, and its also our duty to convey as much of that as possible. There’s a duty to free speech and humanity. It was a very difficult kind of experience in many ways, but I was really lucky because I worked for a news organisation that was very supportive of its journalists.

They paid a lot of money for security, our salaries, our insurance. And all Western news organisations were very responsible in Baghdad.

They took the necessary precautions and were smart and caring, to the greatest extent that they could be, I think.

But it was still difficult and its not for everyone. But it worked for me, and I found it be the kind of journalism that I wanted to do, and I still want to do. The kind of journalism that tells people things are happening that you need to be informed about. You see this kind of narrative all the time, where things are happening and people say the media isn’t covering it, yet people typically find out that its happening via the media - although they complain - and its usually the wires, like AFP, the Associated Press, Reuters. And news organisations like the BBC, Al Jazeera, The New York Times, they commit a lot of money and resources and attention to these stories. I really enjoy these kinds of stories that demand something of you and make you think, that make you care.

And personally it worked out really well, because I started out as a Baghdad correspondent, spent two years as Baghdad Deputy Bureau Chief, and then spent two years as the Bureau Chief. In my last two months ISIS took Mosul, so I didn’t do a huge amount of journalism because I was going to bed every night and waking up every morning hoping that none of my staff had been kidnapped or killed. We were still doing tremendously important journalism. I’d been there for five years, our Deputy Bureau Chief had been there for three years and our correspondent had been there for three years. So we all knew the country fairly well, we were all very young and we all worked really hard. It was exhausting, and

Photo credits: (above) twitter.com (right) Time Magazine

Interviews | 17

Baghdad Bureau Chief and The New York Times genuinely among the most stressful things I will ever experience in my entire life. There were points at which we were not sure whether Baghdad would fall or not. Myself and the Reuters Bureau Chief who lived down the road would have meetings every few days and say, alright, if they take Baghdad they’ll take it this way so these are the roads we’ll need to take if we need to get out. It was serious stuff, and it gives you some perspective.

(Q) Did you lose any members of your team while you were in Baghdad?

We were lucky that none of them were in direct danger. We had an Iraqi journalist in Kirkuk who was pretty close to a car bomb, and that happened at a time when I had just become Bureau Chief and I didn’t really know what to do as well. Luckily AFP was a great news organisation and they were really supportive of me, and my managers guided me through how I should be handling this. He suffered some hearing loss, he had to have some surgery, AFP was very good about it and paid for everything. But since I left, one of our photographers has died of illness, one of our part-time technicians also died of illness. Two have claimed asylum, one of them has left Iraq permanently of his own personal volition, and before I got there I think one of our technicians had been killed. We had some of our journalists who got into sketchy situations. We were not unusual in this; The New York Times lost people, Reuters lost people, the AP lost people, everyone did. It was a horrific conflict.

The couple of times that our office was bombed, there were enough safety precautions in place that there were only minor injuries.

There was a psychological effect as well which I don’t mean to downplay but no one was physically in direct harm. We were lucky and we were good, and you need that combination in places like that.

(Q) When you see your fellow journalists giving up their lives for the news stories they cover, does it seem worth it?

There’s a phrase that often gets said by Bureau Chiefs and journalists all the time, and its that no story is worth your life. Its a very trite phrase, but at the same time its obviously true. There is no story that would have been worth a journalist dying for. Its the kind of thing where you have to believe in it, you have to believe that this story has to be covered, otherwise there’s no point in being in a place like Baghdad. And you have to do it the right way. I think going to Baghdad on a shoestring, with no planning, would be a terrible idea.

AFP had been in Iraq since the 90s, and all the news organisations that were there employed security contractors. We had good relations with all the embassies, and whenever

anything happened the embassies would tell us in off the record conversations because everyone wanted to be safe. So looking back, its a difficult question to answer, because I would say telling the story of Iraq was absolutely the right thing to do. Its an important country, and again this will sound trite but its full of wonderful people who don’t deserve what’s happened to them. You can take whatever political stance you want, but nobody deserves that. And so its important for that story to be told as far and wide as possible. I think the way to do it is in a responsible way that doesn’t compromise yourself, your staff, the people around you. And you can see now there’s very little reporting that comes out of rebel-held Syria because its such a dangerous place. And that’s obviously a story that needs to be told, but if you can’t do it safely you shouldn’t do it because it creates all kinds of other compromises that make it very difficult.

A lot of the journalists who died in Syria died during the early stages when we didn’t know how difficult it had become. I think the Syrian conflict

at the time was bigger than most Bureaus anywhere in the world, from any news organisation. So in Syria, AFP had been rotating correspondents to cover the battle for Aleppo in the second half of 2012, and I was one of the latter ones who went in, and by that time we didn’t have a Baghdad level infrastructure,but we had people who we trusted at the time, we had procedures in place for how to use satellite phones, how to use telephones in general, which drivers we can trust, what parts of the country are safe to go to and not.

turned especially in mid to late 2012 for journalists in a very dark way. Iraq on the other hand still had some kind of functioning state apparatus, so in non-ISIS controlled areas you could move freely. Broadly, security forces didn’t want to kidnap or kill you, and the militias typically didn’t either, because if they wanted to they would have by now. I’m not aware of many journalists who went to ISIS controlled areas when ISIS was in control in Iraq, but in the rest of it you could kind of go close to the front lines, as there was more of a functioning reporting apparatus there.

Its hard, because so much of it is gut, but there’s also groups on Facebook where the community of journalists recommend people who can be trusted. In places like London where its very easy to be a reporter, people are competitive, but in places like Baghdad, people are very fraternal and communityoriented. I would go on reporting trips with Reuters even though AFP and Reuters are competitors, I would share information with the New York Times, the Washington Post, the AP. As with any form of journalism you talk to people, try to gather information and prepare yourself and thats how you find people you can trust.

(Q) How did you source your stories?

We had a staff of about 60 in the country; it was a really big news operation. Our Baghdad Bureau

You have to be respectful of the local population, you have to try and be inoffensive. Iraq is a country and a civilisation that goes back a long time, its something they’re extremely proud of, and you need to exhibit an understanding of that.

I remember we did one story about how Baghdad was celebrating its 1,450th anniversary of being founded as a city, and so you show an understanding that the city has been there for a long time. Its been there since before you were there and it will be there long after you are gone. Just understanding that there are so many different things that shape a story and shape a society is really helpful, and you try and be a sponge for knowledge.

(Q) What was an average day like for you in Baghdad?

This is going to be cliche but there was no average day. A quiet day in Baghdad was kind of fun - it sounds ridiculous to say fun but there was a wonderful literary market on Fridays, and I used to go to the literary market and we’d have tea and an Iraqi lunch and come back to the office. Those were days where I’d wake up at 8 or 9 (am). We lived

(Q) What were some of the challenges of covering Iraq and integrating?

There are several challenges.

in the office, and so if I woke up at 8, I’d be in the office by 8.30. You go to the gym, we had a cook. And then the other extreme was ISIS, where I woke up at 8, went to bed at midnight, we needed a fresh 800 words every two hours, and I was the Bureau Chief so I wrote those 800 words, or the correspondent would write it and I would newsedit it. In between that, I would have conference calls with Paris and our regional headquarters because we needed to update them on security and plan for all kinds of different eventualities. Its the kind of thing where I could tell you everything I did, but actually thinking back to the astonishing levels of stress, its really hard to describe. It also happened so fast that it threw me for a loop.

I was supposed to leave Iraq in June 2014, and then the agency

asked me to stay for an extra six weeks, because of ISIS. The whole narrative in my five years in Baghdad had been; this is a really problematic country, but somehow it survives as a unitary state and its kind of surprising that it does because its got all of these weird problems.

I was at a wedding here in London and then a correspondent calls me and says, Mosul just fell, and it just blew me. I wrote a piece where the analogy I made was that sports reporters write most of the story before the match is done, because usually after about 75 or 80 minutes you know what’s going to happen, you’ve written your bottom 600 words, and you just need a top and then you’re good. So my analogy was that I felt like I had the 600 words of my sports story and then everything just flipped.

I’d get into shouting matches with reporters because everyone was just constantly stressed. We we were all working insanely hard, they were obviously putting themselves at risk. Its extremely hard to explain.

A normal day there shouldn’t be a normal day anywhere in anyone’s life.

(Q) What was your transition to The New York Times like?

The New York Times has completely different challenges. At an agency you have a very strict word limit. When ISIS took Mosul, that was the number one story in the world for the next two or three months non-stop, but none of our stories were allowed to be longer than 800 words. So fitting in a country collapsing into 800 words is extremely difficult. At the Times, 800 is like an average length story, so writing a good, tight, 1,200 word tory is extremely hard. Its much harder than writing a good, clean, 400.

The other thing is when you’re in an agency, you have to cover everything - thats just the function of it - and you don’t know who your clients are, so you need to cover everything. So in the nonISIS period we were covering oil auctions, we were covering Iraqi football matches, we were covering cultural events, violence, politics, economics, we’d cover everything.

Whereas at the Times, we’re much more selective, and that creates its own kind of challenge, because if the bar is higher for what is news, then what crosses it is a constant conversation. I’m still getting a feel for what qualifies as news in a New York Times sense and how to report it in a New York Times way Obviously I could write a straight news story right away, but with The New York Times thats not always what we’re trying to write, we’re trying to be the best writers, we’re trying to be the smartest take, we’re trying to be the definitive article on a subject, and that means that its a higher bar and your writing needs to be excellent.

The Union

18 | Tuesday 11 October, 2016

Clockwise from Top Left: C&W Officer Riham wishes students a happy mid-autumn festival; SU offers free HIV check ups; Tranquil-Tea event on women’s equality (Surely that could’ve been equali-tea?!); New Rag committee (minus Valentin. Poor guy); SU launches sandwich bar (what a time to be alive!); Students celebrate Rosh Hashanah.

Part B

20 | Tuesday 11 October 2016

FILM

14

Review Drive

The Film Editon

Drive is a fantastically versatile film, bridging many apparently contradictory genres and allowing viewinmoods. Nicolas Winding Refn’s 2011 film contains eleTom Sayner DRIVE IS A FANTASTICALLY VERSATILE FILM, BRIDGING MANY apparently contradictory genres and allowing viewing in a variety of moods.

Nicolas Winding Refn’s 2011 film contains elements of a neo-noir crime thriller, an art house production, an 80’s romance and a gory B-movie.

Underlying this stylistic pastiche is exquisite cinematography and a slick electro-pop score.

What is so refreshing about Drive is its willingness to explore cinema’s ability to convey emotion and action without dialogue. Too often mainstream directors feel the need to explain every plot nuance with forced dialogue. Refn has experience in using only the camera to tell a story. His 2008 film Bronson harnessed deeply stylised images to depict some of the Tarantino-esque violence we see in Drive whilst also ensuring plot and character development.

Drive sees our protagonist, the brooding Driver (Ryan Gosling), navigate the Los Angeles underworld. Though a stunt car driver by day Gosling’s character acts as a getaway driver in the seedy night-time. The Driver quickly develops an intense relationship with his neighbour Irene (Carey Mulligan) and becomes a father figure to her son. When Irene’s husband (Oscar Isaac) returns from prison and is caught in the financial grip of local gangsters The Driver is forced to protect Irene and her child by robbery and violence.

The plot contains all the elements of a classic noir thriller. Indeed, The Driver bears the hallmarks of Clint Eastwood’s nameless vigilante in Sergio Leone’s Westerns. Refn also notes the influence of 80’s John Hughes romances on the interplay between Irene and The Driver. While such references may excite film critics Drive retains much emotional impact. The chemistry between male and female leads is palpable and the audience is undoubtedly invested in the relationship we see on screen. Similarly, the violence, peppered in with discretion, retains the power to shock and appal rather than leaving us numb. This stands in contrast to a later Refn-Gosling collaboration, Only God Forgives, which sacrificed emotion and plot for pretentious and unnecessary stylisation.

The basic elements of a good film are all present in Drive. Mulligan is excellent as the fragile Irene while Gosling’s darkly magnetic Driver is perhaps one of the 2000’s most memorable cinematic characters. The score, composed by former Chilli Peppers drummer, Cliff Martinez, is hazy and ethereal with tracks like ‘Nightcall’ by French electronic artist Kavinsky.

Yet it is in the technical aspects of the film that it truly excels. The car chase scenes emphasise the cunning of The Driver and utilise minimal CGI lending the action an earthy authenticity. Newton Thomas Sigel, the cinematographer, produces some stunning shots, beautifully composed and full of light and dark.

Indeed, one of the finest parts of the film is LA itself. The city seems to perfectly evoke the mixture of romance and violence, darkness and light that is at the films thematic heart. Refn uses a wide angle lens to give his shots depth and detail displaying the subtleties of acting and composition that the film relies on for emotion and story-telling.

Refn succeeds in blending the violent and the romantic, the technical with the visceral in a manner that suggests a truly talented director. Drive straddles the region between art house and Hollywood, taking the finest elements from both.

The cinematography is noirish and enveloping while The Driver is a character to rival many of 20th century cinema’s silent anti-heroes. This combination results in a film of true depth and power, destined for cult status.

part

B

editorial team PartB Editor

Flo Edwards

Fashion

Film

Jamie Lloyd Meaghan Clohessy Tom Sayner Maria Maleeva

Food & Lifestyle

Literature

Caroline Schurman-Grenier Camila Arias Sean Tan Buritica

Music

Technology

Theatre

Visual Arts

Rob Funnell Will Locke

Edward Tan

Noah D’Aeth

Hanna Lee

21

FOOD

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22

FILM

| Tuesday 11 October 2016

14

Review Blair Witch

Meaghan Clohessy THE EXCITEMENT SURROUNDING Adam Wingard’s Blair Witch is two-fold.

First, the film potentially rejuvenates a franchise that once revolutionised horror filmmaking and marketing. Second, the direction of Adam Wingard held promise, especially after the underground success of his films V/H/S and You’re Next. Upon viewing, Blair Witch offers a genuinely unsettling experience, but fails to build on the original mythology. New camera technology and CGI-enhanced scares drastically reduce the film’s organic quality and realistic approach.

It entertains without content, jeopardising its longevity within the franchise.

The third instalment follows James (James Allen McCune), the brother of

Heather Donahue, one of the filmmakers who disappeared in the original film.

After discovering a video appearing to show Heather at the Blair Witch’s house, he takes off toward the infamous woods. He is joined by his Lisa (Calle Hernandez), who films the journey for a class, and longtime friends Peter and Ashley (Brandon Scott and Corbin Reid). The journey takes a turn after adding Lane and Talia (Wes Robinson and Valerie Curry), internet vloggers who uploaded the video and want to document the trip for their own channel. Tension swiftly escalates as missteps and false alarms bring them deeper into the woods. As they struggle to escape, a mysterious entity begins to hunt them, unrelenting until they are ultimately lead to the house and—presumably—the Blair Witch.

Wingard explores numerous dimensions of creating fear to submerge audience in the horrific atmosphere permeated by the

woods. Multiple cameras types are used to manipulate the visual ability of the audience. They witness events largely through Bluetooth cameras worn by the characters, limiting our knowledge glances and hear snippets. Fans of the original film will also note the use of DV memory cameras, eliciting fear as prolonged damage ruins the quality of the cameras and what audiences can actually see. Once Wingard establishes this atmosphere, the woods transform into a landscape of horror. An essential element of the Blair Witch’s curse plunges the woods into an endless night, leaving the characters defenceless against the pursuing witch. Flashlights flicker and cameras freeze, leaving audiences with a horror in which the only escape is to keep moving. Fear derives from our inability to predict what lies beyond.

For all its investment with new technology, Blair Witch trades away realism and

mythology. Use of the Bluetooth cameras possesses the drawback of losing the stark realism that made The Blair Witch Project terrifying. Shots from this film feel more like a big budget production, unlikely for someone filming for a college class. Additionally, the film all but erases the Blair Witch mythology, disconnecting the story from the neighbouring town. As a result, the witch loses her omnipotent presence, appearing more as a supernatural stalker attacking the meddling kids who trespass on her property.

When audiences finally see the witch, the rushed CGI creation serves as an abysmal payoff from the tension of the previous ninety minutes.

Blair Witch will provide short-term entertainment with its non-stop scares.

However, once the scares become contrite from repeated viewings, it will no doubt fade into anonymity from its much subdued predecessor.

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FILM

2016 BFI Film Festival

By Alexander Raubo The Dreamed Ones Dir Ruth Beckermann. Scr Ina Hartwig, Ruth Beckermann. With Anja Plaschg, Laurence Rupp. Austria 2016.

89 min.

Paul Celan met Ingeborg Bachmann in 1948 when he was 27 and she was 21. After spending a few weeks together, he, already a poet of considerable esteem, and she, a philosophy student in Vienna, began a love affair that was kept alive through their correspondence until his suicide in 1970. In Die Geträumten (The Dreamed Ones), Ruth Beckermann, an Austrian filmmaker, takes their exchanges as the departing point for her own reflection on love finding itself between the private and the public—or in Celan’s terms—between the ‘I’ of the poem and the ‘you’ it addresses. The premise is simple: two actors, Plaschg and Rupp, read the letters aloud in a recording studio, in a way simply reporting their contents. However, their readings are interspersed with regular smoking breaks and conversations through which Beckermann is able to build a subtle conceit that takes us away from a historical retelling and towards a mediation of metaphysical distance. Only occasionally do we get any overt attempts at dramatisation: at one point we see Plaschg holding back tears, at another, Rupp surprises us with an unusually expressive reading of one of the more hostile letters. The smoking breaks afford the two a possibility of physical contact, but this too is largely withheld.

Through her formal approach, Beckermann disciplines her viewers but, through the film’s economy, each theme is afforded a development to a satisfying fullness so that, at the end, one is moved deeply, spiritually.

Mimosas Dir Oliver Laxe. Scr Oliver Laxe, Santiago Fillol. With Ahmed Hammoud, Shakib Ben Omar, Said Agali. Spain-Morocco-France 2016. 93 min.

When screening at this year’s Cannes festival, Oliver Laxe’s Mimosas was categorised as a ‘Sufi-Western’, which despite its jocularity is not an entirely wrong description of the film.

Consider for example the centrality of the vast, arid landscape, here a mountain range rather than a plain, through which the characters draw a path with their travel. The difference might be what is sought with the journey: the elements of Sufism in the film point toward achieving divine illumination through asceticism. There is a Sheik to be escorted, but who’s insistence on a path through, rather than around, the mountains becomes the expression of his nearing death. The body has to be carried to a dignifying burial place, but the expedition trails off, and the goal becomes increasingly indeterminate. In fact, the most compelling case for the ‘Sufi-Western’ designation is the very fact that crime and revenge interject unexpectedly and literally hijack the film from its initial premises. What this does is creating a kind of antagonism in between which the mysticism is able to achieve a kind of fullness, whether scaling the mountainsides or rolling next to speeding desert-taxis.

Christine Dir Antonion Campos. Scr Craig Shilowich. With Rebecca Hall, Michael C Hall, Tracy Letts.

USA 2016. 119 min.

There was an uncanny coincidence at this years Sundance film festival when two films about the local news reporter Christine Chubbuck, Kate Plays Christine by Robert Greene and Christine by Antonio Campos, premiered at the same time. This coincidence is now repeated at the BFI festival, but though the timing of their release might be ascribed to chance, the fact that more than one film has been made about the same person owes more to the sensationalist nature of the subject: Chubbuck became internationally known when she committed suicide on air in 1979, with the sought after footage of the incident remaining hidden till this day. In Campos’s film, Chubbuck (played by Rebecca Hall) is portrayed as an innocent and highprincipled reporter working at a local news station where journalistic standards are up for compromise in response to declining viewership. Her co-workers seem all to be insensible to her, in many cases, reasonable concerns, with many of them repeating banal, psychologistic advice. What results is a wholly sympathetic portrayal of Chubbuck punctuated by recurrent foreshadowings of her suicide in an attempt to build up suspense before a known resolution.

In the end, however, this empathetic modulation is not cashed out in any satisfactory way and we are left feeling disturbed after having seemingly watched the film only to fulfil our own insatiable curiosity for, as Chubbuck put it, ‘blood and guts’.

24 | Tuesday 11 October 2016

FILM

14

Moonlight Dir-Scr Barry Jenkins. With Mahershala Ali, Naomie Harris, Trevante Rhodes. USA 2016. 110 min.

Moonlight, a film by Barry Jenkins based on the play In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue by Tarell Alvin McCraney, is competing in this years Official Feature Competition. Set in Miami across three decades, it portrays the coming of age of Chiron. It succeeds through a deliberate invocation of familiar premises without drawing any familiar—or indeed—paraphrasable conclusions. The very form of the film, with its division into three sequences labeled with the different names given to Chiron, asks us to confront the banality of the idea of identity as something ultimately self-constituted. Chiron is in certain respects ‘at odds with’ his environment, but this friction does not merely take the form of blows and punches—implying that is, that one could overcome one’s adversities simply by punching back, harder. There is no fight to win: we inevitably have to live through, or in terms of, things done to us. Jenkins does not aspire to any obvious generalities nor any facile reduction to politics (though that doesn’t mean the film doesn’t raise political questions) and is thus able to give a thematically rich depiction of the complexities of desire and the tangible consequences (and inevitability) of ostensible definitions, of beingnamed.

Don’t Blink — Robert Frank Dir Laura Israel. Scr Laura Israel, Alex Bingham, Malinda Shopsin. USA 2015. 82 min.

Robert Frank’s The Americans undoubtedly counts as one of the great photographic portraits of the United States. The breadth of its subjects—from the lower classes in segregated Alabama to the wealthy old-dames of Los Angeles—become a thematic chart of the country through the democratic gaze of a Swiss émigré. Symbolic elements, through the very act of being pictured and arranged in a certain order, result in a development of unexpected syntheses: we see, for example, a stretch of road, then roadside crosses, then a bumper-sticker saying ‘Jesus loves you’. Laura Israel’s documentary Don’t Blink — Robert Frank charts another kind of development—that of Frank’s career—but instead of surprising us by finding a formal structure in the very material on which it is based, it simply becomes another instalment of what can be described as (borrowing slightly from Adorno) ‘documentary as preview’. We see quick snippets of Frank’s work in chronological order set to loud music—the ‘material’ becoming essentially an advertisement for the artist as a public persona. The film begins, for example, with an extract from an interview with Frank in the 80’s where he expresses his disapproval of the conventions of televised journalism laconically (as in four letter words) and never really goes beyond the kind of sound-bites that a mainstream audience would find entertaining solely because of their apparent irreverence.

Hermia and Helena Dir-Scr Matias Piñero. With Agustina Muñoz, María Villar, Mati Diop. Argentina-USA 2016. 87 min.

Matias Piñero’s previous three films have all incorporated texts from Shakespeare’s comedies in various ways. While films like Viola and The Princess of France both featured the theatre explicitly, with the characters involved in productions of Twelfth Night and Love’s Labour’s Lost respectively. Hermia & Helena, Piñero’s first film predominantly in English, is concerned with Camilla (Agustina Muñoz), who takes the place of her friend Carmen (María Villar) at a artist’s residency in New York. Camilla is working on a Spanish translation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, with the idea of translation as transposition (and vice versa) being played out through repeated jumps between New York and Buenos Aires. In fact, the film flashes back to the day of Camilla’s departure for New York, which was marked by her qualms regarding a relationship that was just getting serious. The play impinges on the film explicitly in several guises, for example, as sheets of paper in Camilla’s notebook or as vectorised overlay on the footage itself. Piñero himself has said to have intended to treat the source text as a fictive provocation rather than adaptation and the films most satisfying sequences are those when the characters are quite literally provoked to seamlessly reenact parts of the play. Other times the film strays off, becomes a fugitive of its own apparent structure. Such vagaries, whether of experience (as portrayed by the actors) or formal structure, take their most convincing shape in the mise en scène, which is mainly based on camerawork, mostly pans and tilts, adding texture (motion) to the blocking of the scenes with dialogue running in and out of frame.

FILM

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25

Une Vie (A Woman’s Life) Dir Stéphane Brizé. Scr Stéphane Brizé, Florence Vignon. With Judith Chemla, Jean-Pierre Darroussin, Yolande Moreau. France-Belgium 2016. 119 min.

Une Vie (A Woman’s Life) is based on Guy de Maupassant’s novel of the same title from 1883 and tells the story of Jeanne (Judith Chemla), a young convent-returnee who lives with her parents in rural Normandy. Early on, Jeanne marries Julien de Lamare, a member of the local nobility, with whom she eventually has a son. Both Julien and the son later become the sources of misfortune for Jeanne, who will remain in the countryside, often simply staring; either out the window or when sitting next to a brook. Stéphane Brizé, whose previous film La loi du marché (The Measure of Man) won the best actor award at Cannes last year, makes use of varying techniques to portray the passage of time and give expression to the rather broad temporal scope of the source material. The passage of the seasons provide a formal structure, which is cut across by flashbacks and the depictions of various mementos (photographs of the convent, drawing’s of Jeanne’s son), making the subjective mediation of reality by the main character—her habitual, sorrowful dwelling on the past—apparent and richly textured.

There’s a skilful restraint being exercised in the camerawork, which, though handheld, mostly involves simple pans and tilts if moving at all (that is, until a late scene in the film when we’re surprised by a dramatic zoom and shaky panning). Together with a recurrent passage from a Jacques Dulphy piece for piano forte, the camerawork both heightens and tempers the depiction of Jeanne’s anticipation. Chemla plays the part beautifully, with a face whose expression —often pensive, serious—brings forth the tension between the painful revelations brought upon her and her remarkable capacity for suffering.

Elle Dir Paul Verhoeven. Scr David Birke. With Isabelle Huppert, Laurent Lafitte, Anne Consigny.

France–Germany 2016. 130 min.

The Dutch director Paul Verhoeven, who in his Hollywood period made such films as Robocop and Basic Instinct, adapts the novel Oh… by Philipe Djian for his first film since 2006. Elle is a luxurious thriller (the mainstream genre classification says ‘psychological thriller’) that dazzles the audience with its sumptuous images of expensive Parisian settings and its suspenseful string score. The plot is deliberately, journalistically, provoking; involving—from the very first scene—violent scenes of rape. Michèle (Isabelle Huppert) is the head of a successful video game developer that gets sexually assaulted in her house: an incident that she shrugs off immediately after it occurs, going about her job and family problems as usual the next day. We soon find out that the reason for her stoicism, at least her reluctance to having the crime reported, lies partially in the fact that her father is a notorious serial killer. Consequently the rapist persists and his text messages become somewhat of an indulgence for Michèle, and the intrigue deepens. Verhoeven has a solid grasp of the zeitgeist and in this film he realises a vision that is wholly continuous with global luxury commerce and the constant discourse of transgression that accompanies it. We see various stylish people flout moral conventions mercilessly, to our and their satisfaction. The depiction of the video game industry serves as a doubling for the theme of play and magnifies the question Michèle ends up asking repeatedly: is this for real?

Late for my LSE lecture on the breakup of the year.

And by that I mean Brexit.

Foreign LSE Academics contributing to Brexit talks?

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288 | Tuesday 11 October, 2016

Goldman Suchs?

Recent employee deaths have put the limelight on the working culture at investment banks - but there’s much more to it than just long hours Ellen To

The City

Section Editor: LSE Undergraduate Alex Gray Deputy Editors: “WHAT’S THE CULTURE like?” It’s the question asked by alRamone Bedi most all fresh-faced aspiring investment bankers at networking events and careers fairs. And, despite half-heartedly expecting it, they are somewhat disappointed when the answer consists of the words “welcoming”, “supportive” and “inclusive”. One can hardly blame them when the mere thought of investment banking paints a picture of gruelling hours and a macho testosterone-fuelled world where analysts brag about going home only to take a shower. So is the ‘sink or swim’ culture a myth or reality?

The headlines do not help to dispel the horrors of the industry.

In 2013, 21-year-old investment banking intern Moritz Erhardt was found dead in the shower after working non-stop for 72 hours at Bank of America Merrill Lynch.

The news sent shockwaves through the world of global finance; a statement issued by the bank proposed actions for the future including creating a senior working group to examine the office culture and in particular, the hours worked by its junior staff. However, when the source of a problem seems to be rooted in the culture and the people, measures undoubtedly take a long time to create an impact.

Polly Courtney, an intern at Merrill Lynch in 2001, said “During my internship, all-nighters were like a rite of passage. They were discussed among us in the canteen each night with an outward sense of loathing, but tinged with pride… it wasn’t just a culture of long hours and hard work; it was more a culture of desperately trying to impress, with ‘face time’ – pretending to be hard at work even when you were done for the night”.

Credit: Wikipedia Commons

So you may be thinking that cases like Erhardt’s are extreme and rare; some may even question whether it is the culture of the bank that led to the tragedy or Erhardt’s personal determination and drive to succeed. If you do not want to work gruelling hours, surely you can just quit your job right? The answer is that it depends. The more recent case of 22-year-old Sav Gupta who died after struggling to quit his job in 2015 as an analyst on one of Goldman Sach’s most prestigious

“investment banking intern Moritz Erhardt was found dead in the shower after working non-stop for 72 hours at Bank of America Merrill Lynch” investment banking teams, sparked outrage and thrust the culture of the industry in the limelight again.

The difference between Gupta and Erhardt was that Gupta was aware of the physical and emotional toll of the culture. In a phone call to his dad, he says “It is too much. I have not slept for two days, have a client meeting tomorrow morning, have to complete a presentation, my VP is annoyed and I am working alone in my office”. The young banker died that day.

Firms including Goldman Sachs have pledged to improve the experience for their new recruits.

The shift, prompted by cases such as the death of Erhardt and Gupta, has been driven in part by a fear that the brightest graduates don’t view investment banking as a sustainable career. And indeed, dras-

tic measures are being introduced: Goldman Sachs hired larger classes of analysts and encouraged them to stay out of the office on Saturdays. The firm also started making analysts full-time employees from the start, instead of offering twoyear contracts. Many more global employee networks have been established at banks such as HSBC and Morgan Stanley, aimed to address issues like gender, age, ethnicity and sexual orientation. These groups also provide a forum for employees of differing levels of seniority to discuss working conditions and campaign for changes.

And banks know that it is important to debunk the myths and showcase the changing culture to students from a young age. For example, there has been an increase in insight programmes offered to A-Level students at major investment banks, consisting of panel sessions on work-life balance and one-to-one conversations with senior bankers. Students are actively encouraged to ask any question they wish. An increasing number of these programmes are targeted at female students or students from a disadvantaged socioeconomic background- a clear initiative to inspire the brightest students, regardless of who they are, to pursue a career in the industry. Competition for these insights are fierce; at the ‘Step In, Step Up’ three-day programme at Morgan Stanley for female A-Level students, over 500 applications were received for just around 56 places. But the insight is worth it: many students walk away feeling more confident about the industry after hearing about the vast range of roles on offer and the process of meeting the bankers themselves dismisses the image of the ruthless, calculating, goal-orientation individual.

However, it is also important to

avoid generalising the industry as a whole. Within investment banks there are many divisions, each which demand a different skill set.

For example, life as an analyst in investment management requires building long-term relationships with clients which may add up to long hours but the payoff is working with some of the world’s biggest investors. Global Banking is known for its high pressure and intensely demanding atmosphere from day one but some people thrive in this exact climate. A Deutsche Bank representative working in Global Markets, an area renowned for its intense pressure, tight deadlines and high-stake environment, revealed that “It’s not all about making immediate trading decisions at a fast pace- I’m on a flow desk and some of my trade ideas might be for six months or two years in debt markets”.

So some areas may have longer working hours but most are manageable. One could also argue that starting a career and making a good impression in any industry requires dedication and long hours to get ahead. And despite the focus on the lowlights of investment banking, for some people it can be a very rewarding experience both emotionally and financially. Speaking at the LSE last week was former Head of European Leveraged Finance of Barclays Capital PLC, John Kelting, who gave an honest insider’s view on investment banking. Although he revealed that “you can’t bubble along in the middle of the pack as you’ll be out” and he himself “rarely went a month without thinking [he] was going to be fired” due to the “nature of the industry”, he spoke with sincere enthusiasm about the “bright people, with a common goal” and how he “had some brilliant times” for which he “wouldn’t change for the world”.

Sometimes there are some words that make such an unlikely pairing that we find it hard to put them together. Italy and efficiency, for example. Or Bake Off and Channel 4. ‘Investment banking’ and ‘relaxed’ may be another one.

It’s true that the industry is difficult, hours can be gruelling and the culture stifling. But measures are in place to ensure that the industry is slowly evolving; after all, banks do not want to scare off the best talent.

Ultimately it depends on you as a person, the role that you are going for, and the individual culture of the bank itself.

As aptly put by John Kelting, “it can be a fantastic experience but it depends on whether you are the right person. And there’s a lot of luck involved; who you work with is key. But at its worst, investment banking can be very ugly indeed”.

Immigration Signals move from Amber to Rudd

The City |29

International students bear the brunt of new immigration reforms Zikai Chua LSE Undergraduate

DROPPING FROM SIX TO just two months, international students now have drastically shortened permission to stay in the UK after graduation. Following Brexit, the visa verification criteria are pushing up against the limit. Amber Rudd announced two-tier visa regulations, as well as a new £140m “controlling migration fund” to further decrease the size of overseas student body. The government will now put stricter regulations on student visa applicants from poor university, courses, and relative majors, and criteria on recruitment.

This might be seen as a fair policy at first place, for international students take about 28% percent of the overseas labour market. This is indeed a large group, and certainly, for a group that can be efficiently moderated to achieve sustainable net immigration, adjustments in visa requirements can have an immeasurable impact on them.

Credit: Wikipedia Commons

However, what extent should these regulations be stretched up to? Will the discouraging nature of the students’ visa policy contribute favorably in long term? For once, such hostile circumstance comes to education, the probability that overseas students are being pushed away is increasing.

“the majority of students go back to their home countries after they have finished their study” Undeniably, lots of factors are taken to consider when oversea students apply for schools. The quality of the local universities and students’ corresponding academic capability are essential, yet the tendency of Britain to discourage students from either entering or staying is critical.

Most students who come to Britain for study are non-EU

citizens—Chinese, Indian, Nigerian, Malaysian and United States students being the top five sending countries over the past five years. However, they face increasing pressure, rigid criteria and higher requirement of maintenance fees to either enter or stay. Tier 4 students are banned from extending their visas after their program finished, and were permitted to stay from originally half a year to now only two months. Tier 2 or Tier 5 work visa applicants were required to leave the country before application, rather than switch their visas within the UK. Moreover, Tier 4 students who want to further their education have reduced study time now—from 3 years to 2 years.

These factors in all discourage and obstruct potential prominent students from coming. As for EU students, the idea works in the same way—the policies to control oversea students number having already been implemented.

Yet what becomes tricky here is that this group of students is creating a great number

of jobs, and they are committed to the education sector via their knowledge contribution and economic consumption.

Recent London and Partners report published by the end of 2015 shows that international students contribute £3 billion to the UK economy and help support 37,000 jobs. Yet with the hostile conditions on studying abroad, international students face increasing incentives

“Jeremy Hunt said that the NHS can be ‘selfsufficient within 10 years’ and ‘not have to rely on foreign doctors’” to choose alternatives.

As a matter of fact, Nicola Dandridge of Universities UK pointed out that the majority of students go back to their home countries after they have finished their study. By limiting students from course options

and opportunities of recruitment, the British Government is taking affirmative action in obstructing the movement of immigrants, visitors, essential scholars and talents.

At the Conservative Party conference on Oct. 4th, Amber Rudd’s statement suggested not letting foreign labour ‘taking jobs British people could do’ further indicated changes of hiring ethics, in ‘forcing companies to reveal the number of recruited foreign workers’. Jeremy Hunt said that the NHS can be ‘self-sufficient within 10 years’ and ‘not have to rely on foreign doctors’. How would overseas students respond to such condition? Taken the uncertainty of Brexit negotiation, what their position or social role will be amidst British society in the future?

There are other sections of society that are under attack here, too. For instance, the City which brings in almost 10% of the UK’s tax revenue relies heavily on immigration, and international students. There is the real worry that in her quest for a “hard” Brexit, Amber Rudd and Theresea May will severely damage the prospects of those very people that voted to leave in the first place.

This would, on top of the harms of reduction in the talent pool from lower immigration, reduce the funding available for the vital public services on which so many rely.

There is the final point to be made that not only is the policy direction foolhardy, but it may not even be practical. For the NHS to train up a new cohort of doctors would take several years, assuming that all the doctors currently being trained here would stay. This would require massive spending on training, and on benefits. Money which, after Brexit, the UK Government does not have. Another example is the aforementioned policy from Amber Rudd, that would see the regulatory burden placed on the UK Government, and on UK businesses, severely increased at no real gain.

Whilst the will of the UK people cannot be ignored. The UK must think seriously before it enters into an environment that is hostile to foreign students, UK businesses, and to the UK’s standing in the world. At least, in the event of structural UK decline, Theresea May will be responsible, after having “taken back control”.

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Sport | 31

RunWithRAG:TheBarcelonaMarathon Harsha Vishnumolakala Undergraduate Student ON THE 12TH MARCH 2017 Barcelona will once ag ain be hosting one of its most prominent and cel eb r ated even ts, th e B a rc elona Marathon. T his event attra cts over 17,000 participants ever y year and ta k es th em o n a j o u r n ey exploring the iconic sights th at c a p tu re th e v i b r a n c y and culture that Spain of fer s. T he LSESU RAG have partnered up with Make-AWish UK to allow LSE stu dents to have an incredible experience in a city famous for its art, fine cuisine and now its marathon. T his op portunity of fer s the chance fo r s tu d en ts to ti c k s o m e th i n g o f f th ei r bu c k et l i s t a s

Under the sea.

Under the sea.

Everything’s better, down where it’s wetter.

Take it from me.

A timeless proverb immortalised in song by Sebastian the Crab in the 1989 Disney classic.

But here at the London School of Economics, where we endeavour to discover the causes of things, it would be folly to take such whimsical dictum as gospel without first testing the validity of such a claim.

Such was the thinking of the Athletics Union executive when

wel l p rove to th o s e n o n believer s out there that not only can they run 26.2 miles but also have an amazing time doing it.

T he one-hour infor ma ti o n s es s i o n reg a rd i n g th i s event will be held on Tues day 18th October at CLM 7.02 from 6:30pm onwards.

To kee p up to date and to register your interes t in th i s even t, p l ea s e v i s i t o u r event page by searching ‘LSE SU RAG Barcelona Maratahon’ on Facebook.

In addition to this sporty undertaking, RAG are also undertaking a Kilimanjaro trek fo r D i g D ee p, A M achu Picchu t rek for A c tion Ag ainst Hunger, and London to Pa r a i s / B u d a p es t to Z ag reb cycle for Breast Cancer Now. For infor mation on any

deciding on the theme for the 2016 AU Welcome Party. With each sports team granted artistic license to interpret “Under the Sea” as they saw most appropriate, the Tuns was transformed into a watery wanton wonderland, awash with lecherous lifeguards, perverted pirates and degenerate jellyfish. And were things indeed better? Here lies a detailed report of the Athletics Union’s findings, with absolutely no shameless ocean-themed puns whatsoever. You can be shore of that.

The FC, once again demonstrating their creative knack for interpreting any fancy dress theme in such a way that sees that make no greater commitment than swathing themselves in a bedsheet, declared that they were indeed the sea itself. Whilst some Were a little

of these events, check out LSE SU RAG on Facebook.

RAG has already made an incredible start to the academic year, having raised £29,000, making its fund raising week the most suc cessful ever at LSE. In the wo rd s o f R AG Pres i d en t David Zhao , ‘RAGulous’.

T he g reat start to the 2016/17 academic year comes after an incred ible 2015/16 which saw RAG raise a g rand total of £164,098.22 for over 60 char ities l oc al l y, nationally and across the world and subsequently saw LSE RAG scoop Best Fundrais ing Night/Event, Outstand ing Fundraising Project, and Medium RAG of the year at the RAG annual con ference in Hertfordshire.

uncomfortable at first in the Salty water, others weren’t prepared to let it dampen their spirits, with one pretty buoy putting the Carter before the proverbial seahorse by developing a Nisshe range of techniques in an attempt to cover 71% of the females at the LSE, some of which was caught on the Sea-CTV. Elsewhere, one swashbuckling renegade got more than he Copp-Bargained for when he was caught frolicking in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and came crashing down to earth when he was finally brought to Jesstice for his public misdemeanours. Meanwhile, when another woman found herself in troubled waters, it was fortunate that there was a Bridge to lay her down - though things would have gone smoother if he’d had Aishave beforehand.

Finally, continuing with the watery theme, and of particular interest to the potamologists amongst our readers, the River Tarrant was spotted diverting from it’s original course in Dorset and flowing unexpectedly into France, before finally depositing its sedimentary load in the v-shaped Beau-Valley.

And so, returning to our original hypothesis, can we truly declare that everything truly is better down where things are wetter?

The findings are inconclusive. But what we Cam say for sure is that over in cuddle Kingdom, where one man sought to Hogg the limelight and test the theory for himself with a lady of more resolute moral standing than he, they do not respond well to ‘take it from me’.

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32

English Footballing Woes

Sport

Section Editor: Vacant

Fraser Snow Undergraduate Student CHURCHILL ONCE SAID about the fighters of the Battle of Britain that “never have so many owed so much to so few.” I feel the opposite is becoming apparent within English football. So few definitely owe so much to so many – we are being continually disappointed time and time again, but why? No matter how much hype there is behind our new sparkling team, whether its Shearer and Linekar, Lampard and Gerrard or Kane and Vardy, they let us down consistently every year.

The news of Big Sam’s departure is symbolic of English football – come in, batter a mildly depressed footballing insignificance 3-0, and then get caught

up in a stor m of money and fame before crashing and burning into the irrelevance that is the last fifty years of English football.

Our one bright spark of our country as a footballing nation is the Premier League.

A league of countless stars, both managerial and on the ball. However, where this league provides our name in world football, and an endless source of footballing entertainment, it’s also the root of all our misfortune.

Yes, Sergio Aguero can bang in thirty goals a season, but what is he contributing to our English team? Nothing.

Maybe if Thatcher had gone the whole hog and taken Argentina with the Falkland Islands he might be of some use to us, but currently, he’s taking up the star striker’s

position in a top English team that could be filled by a young English talent ready to supply an extra player to the team on the international stage.

The English managerial position has become a poison chalice. The media pressure and press hounding of any person in that job has left the bookies’ best bets of next managers looking like a list of people who should be down the job centre, not taking up England’s top job. Steve Bruce? When was the last time he managed a team that did not get relegated? Arsene Wenger?

Despite supplying that most British of characteristics, consistent disappointment for all that support him, he is about 70 years old. He should retire having had a decent to mediocre career and never look back. We shouldn’t

be looking to employ him.

Gareth Southgate? He was a nobody when he played, and he’s a nobody now.

Destroying Lithuania’s under 21 side with the overfinanced England under 21 team is not an achievement.

So really, the issues are corporate money pouring into the English domestic league and the media hounding destroying our chances of gaining a reputable and effective leader. Where the parallels to British politics are not lost on me, this is at least an issue that we can potentially fix with some stronger English player quotas in the Premier League and some genuine support for our team, rather than chasing down stories of who slept with who’s wife before the big game.

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