Beaver 857

Beaver

Issue 857 | 18.10.16

the

Newspaper of the LSE Students’ Union

Students Present United Front with Marginalised LSE Workers

‘Justice for LSE Cleaners’ campaign enters new phase, with students joining employees and trade unionists on a public march and demonstration on Friday 14 October, with leaders advising that further action remains possible.

Greg Sproston Managing Editor THERE WAS A MOOD OF defiance and cautious optimism outside the Saw Swee Hock centre on Friday afternoon as students and others stood in solidarity with cleaners in condemnation of the treatment of staff on outsourced contracts. The event, advertised on Facebook as ‘Reinstate Alba: Justice for LSE Cleaners’ attracted a crowd of approximately 200.

The organisers of the demo, the United Voices of the World (UVW) union, allege that their member Alba - who has worked at the LSE for 12 years - was made redundant with just two days notice by Noonan, an Irish firm who provide ‘strategic outsourcing solutions’ to the LSE. The redundancy was due to the removal of 5 supervisor positions, which UVW claim that the decision was made for unnecessary cost-cutting reasons.

The LSE are thought to dispute this version of events, but have declined to comment specifically on individual cases. More information on Alba’s situation can be found on The Beaver website or in the Tuesday 04 October 2016 edition.

In addition, the event also sought to challenge the general practice of outsourcing that takes place at LSE, with protesters drawing attention to what they felt were discriminatory outcomes.

Protesters began to gather outside the Saw Swee Hock building at around 12:30; the distribution of feather dusters, mops and placards were sufficient in drawing interest away from the Hare Krishna queue and even the PwC stall and at 13:00 the assembled crowd listened to the testimonies of cleaners who either had the day off, or were using their short breaks to attend the demo. Whilst the cleaners are angry at what they feel amounts to unfair treatment, those who

spoke also struck a conciliatory tone. Speaking to the crowd, one LSE cleaner Mildred said “All of us are like one family here, want it to stay that way”, before adding “stop exploiting us!”. Earney, a cleaner who was unfairly dismissed in the 2015/16 academic year but was later reinstated following outcry from the LSE community, echoed these words, stating “We are undermined...We are like one family but they want to separate and divide us.”

The mixture of students, staff and trade unionists were joined by a solidarity march by SOAS Justice for Cleaners - a group who have been fighting for better treatment for its University’s cleaners for a number of years and those assembled marched to the Kingsway office entrance of Allan Blair, the LSE’s Director of Facilities Management. Using a microphone, UVW General Secretary Petros Elia called on Allan Blair directly, claiming he was directly responsible for what he considered the ‘unacceptable terms and conditions’ of staff members on Noonan contracts. Using a microphone, Elia demanded Blair come down from his office to address the cleaners, asking ‘why don’t you come face to face with the people you so clearly hold in contempt?’

Unsurprisingly, Mr. Blair did not show but the mood of the crowd was not dimmed. Speakers represented a wide, diverse network and used both humour and anger to deliver their messages to protesters. Messages of solidarity were delivered by, among others, Unison and a Union representing cleaners in New Zealand. To the delight of the crowd, a particularly impassioned protester called Vikesh declared “Cleaners of the world unite; you have nothing to lose but your brooms!”

Amidst the levity, trade unionists did deliver some serious warnings.

A Unison representative noted that, whilst he hoped industrial action would not be necessary, the LSE should be aware that when SOAS cleaners went on strike, they “shut down the Uni in two days”, such is the “fundamental” nature of the work that they do”. Additionally, a number of UVW representatives reiterated the successes they enjoyed against high street giants John Lewis and Top Shop.

A recurring theme of the protest was equality for cleaning staff at the LSE, which many feel is severely impacted upon by the University’s practice of outsourcing some of its operations. A third year economics student told The Beaver “It’s basically immoral.

When the Uni starts outsourcing, firms competing for the bid create a ‘race to the bottom’ atmosphere.

It’s inevitable that the costs are passed on to the most vulnerable people - the workers at the bottom.” This position was shared by a speaker who claimed that “institutional racism is fundamental to employment in this city”, articulating a viewpoint held by many attendees that the practice of outsourcing has a disproportionate impact on migrant and BME workers who make up the majority of cleaners at LSE and in wider society.

Though ostensibly a protest for reinstating a recently dismissed cleaner recurring chants throughout the day included ‘We are all Alba’ and ‘Reinstate Alba Now’ - the protest was truly a response to unions and workers feel are structural problems at the University. Those attending claimed that other staff members employed directly by the LSE are entitled to, among other benefits, sick pay for up to six months and pension entitlements worth up to sixteen times that of cleaners employed by Noonan. Those on Noonan contracts are entitled only to statutory sick pay.

However, the grievances of the cleaners are not solely financial.

Those brave enough to speak out plainly see the use of outsourcing as a way to divide staff, and one member of staff on a Noonan contract - speaking to The Beaver on the condition of anonymity, said they did not want to attend the march or speak up as they feared there may be consequences if they did so. The notion of a culturally hierarchal system of staff at the LSE was evoked most aggressively when UVW General Secretary

The Union The City

Tribute to Adhil Bakeer Markar Page 18

Theresa May’s Treasury?

Page 29

Petros Elia claimed that the Old Building’s 4th floor cafe was ‘out of bounds’ for cleaners, claiming that management had told them they were not permitted to take their breaks there. Considering the seriousness of such a claim, the school’s response has been quite straightforward, with Facilities Management Director Allan Blair merely stating, “Cleaning staff are free to use the fourth floor cafe, just as they are free to use other public restaurants and cafes on campus.”

Continued on Page 3..

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

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Managing Editor Greg Sproston

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From the Executive Editor

On the Death of a Friend Taryana Odayar Don’t let the title of this Editorial put you off. I am not usually one to express grief so openly, and being only 21 years old I can say that I haven’t experienced too many instances of heartbreak or angst. But last week caught me off guard completely, because last week Adhil Bakeer Markar, a friend of mine who had just started his Masters at LSE, passed away suddenly and unexpectedly.

There is nothing that can prepare you for the death of someone you care about, and there is very little people can say or do to console you once they’re gone. I would much rather have Adhil back, and I would much rather be writing another upbeat and newsrelated Editorial than the one you are currently reading. And

I would have given almost anything to not have to write the tribute I wrote in memory of Adhil this week (page 18-19).

It will sound extremely cliche to say this, but life really is fleeting and uncertain.

A mutual friend of Adhil’s recently sent me the following story, which I think reflects this statement well. So I shall leave you with this; ‘There was a merchant in Baghdad who sent his servant to market to buy provisions, and in a little while the servant came back, white and trembling, and said, “Master, just now when I was in the market-place, I was jostled by a woman in the crowd and when I turned I saw it was death that jostled me.

She looked at me and made a threatening gesture. Now, lend

me your horse Master, and I will ride away from this city and avoid my fate. I will go to Samarra and there death will not find me.”

The merchant lent him his horse, and the servant mounted it, dug his spurs in its flanks and as fast as the horse could gallop he went.

Then the merchant went down to the market-place and he saw me standing in the crowd and he came to me and said, “Why did you make a threatening gesture to my servant when you saw him this morning?”

“That was not a threatening gesture”, I said, “It was only a start of surprise. I was astonished to see him in Baghdad for I had an appointment with him tonight in Samarra.”’

From the Managing Editor Campaigning in the Bubble Greg Sproston We’re only in week 4 and LSE’s come under a lot of criticism from students. ‘LSE Resist’ was widely derided, students have been discussing the abysmal student satisfaction scores released over the summer, people are grumbling about the way the School approaches wellbeing and support for disabled students and, of course, hundreds gathered to protest the treatment of cleaners.

What brings these disparate complaints together, despite the cynicism and agitating nature of the body politic at LSE, is an undercurrent of hypocrisy. It is unfair for the LSE to produce lofty papers on the scandal of the youth mental health crisis whilst implementing policies which make students miserable; ridiculous to hold ‘guerilla style’ resistance events next to spiralling soup kitchen; unacceptable to rail against inequality whilst institutionally disadvantaging migrant workers and BME employees.

The danger here is that this line of argument is the implication

that these practices are ‘bad’ not because of their inherent qualities, but because of the way the Uni otherwise positions itself. In other words, the view lends itself to the idea that it’s the LSE’s hypocrisy, and not its practices, that are the biggest problem.

It might seem like a trivial distinction to make. It shouldn’t matter why issues are being tackled on campus so long as they are being tackled - the ends justify the means. But when we attack problems at LSE not because they are intrinsically objectionable but because of a feeling that that UNiversity ‘could do better’, we risk ignoring structural problems in society.

The exploitation of Sports Direct staff, for example, is fundamental to their business model. They move stock at extremely high speed which requires intense manual input.

To treat their staff as though they were human would eat into their profit margins and offsetting costs onto their vulnerable workers is

therefore essential to their bottom line. (Of course, it’s worth noting that the negative publicity is starting to outweigh this, leading to an outcry from investors). Is the way that Mike Ashley treats workers in his personal fiefdom any more palatable because he heads a firm which does not seek to address inequality through research? No, of course not. By the same token, a financial institution which invests in exploitative industries should not be given a free pass merely because they have not released academic papers which urge divestment.

It’s easy to get caught up in a bubble at LSE. The student body has a proud history of campaigning, and a traditionally socially and politically aware community generally means that there’s always something going on. But as far as I’m concerned, students and academics also have an obligation to look beyond WC2A and challenge injustices in wider society just as aggressively as we would when they happen here on campus.

TWEETS WEEK

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LSE Students’ Union @LSESU “We are one family, here.

That’s the way I look at LSE. We are one family.

Both the staff and students.

We are one family” Mildred Simpson [LSE Cleaner] Peter Lyon @PeterELyon Throwback to two years ago when Props was the place to be seen for LSE people UVW Union @UVWUnion Great demo @LSEnews @LSEpublicevents @lseideas demanding Justice for LSE Cleaners and the reinstatment of Alba.

LSESU PalSoc @LSESU PalSoc All #BlackHistoryMonth we’ll be focusing on the poor treatment of African refugees in Israel - we stand united with them against racism Busayo Twins @Busayo_Twins Gym can’t fix your character you know.

You’re LITERALLY just a bigger nuisance.

LSE Library @LSELibrary According to Bob Dylan we live in a “Political World”.

Find out more using #lselibrary resources online Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump The election is absolutely being rigged by the dishonest and distorted media pushing Crooked Hillary - but also at many polling places - SAD LSE 100 @TheLSECourse Great opportunity for LSE100 students: The Role of the Gulf in a Changing World #powershifts #collectivesecurity

News | 3 ...Continued from Front Page The meeting on Friday came less than 24 hours after the Students Union held an Urgent General Meeting on Thursday evening, after student campaigners were able to secure 250 signatures at extremely short notice in order to hold a debate. The text of the motion read “Should the LSESU condemn the school and Noonan’s decision to dismiss a member of cleaning staff and campaign for her re-instatement?” and passed with 90% in favour and 8% against, obligating the Union to campaign for Alba’s reinstatement and for a ‘better culture of respect for all cleaning staff’. At Friday’s demo, when voting was still open, a SOAS attendee urged students to fight whilst warning

that the road to success was a long one. “Take things out of the classroom, make the connections between what you learn about exploitation and inequality and the exploitation and inequality that goes on at your University”, before adding “But take it into the classroom too. Raise awareness, talk to your classmates, teachers and lecturers”.

The LSE’s comment to The Beaver states that “A top priority for the School is to get formalised meetings in place with Noonan and Unison - as the officially recognised union - to address the cleaners’ concerns”. However, there will be raised eyebrows at the suggestion that the School has truly softened its position since the dismissal and reinstatement of the ‘LSE 3’ in February of this year.

At that time, 3 cleaners with a combined 10 years of service were instantly dismissed by Noonan for finishing an hour early, despite the fact they had no outstanding work and had followed correct protocol. Initially, the School implied it had no control as the decision to dismiss was taken by Noonan. This was rubbished by campaigners and students who argued that, due to the value of LSE’s contract with Noonan, the school wielded significant influence. The three cleaners were subsequently reinstated by Noonan, a tacit acknowledgement that the dismissals had been unfair.

Solidarity and organised opposition in February were instrumental in Noonan’s reversal and the importance of a broad

coalition was well acknowledged at the march. Protesters repeatedly chanted “students and workers; unite and fight!” and LSESU Anti-Racism Officer Sarah Foss told The Beaver that they were “excited that there’s mobilisation of students and passion”, but added that they were “disgusted at how the LSE treats its cleaners” A strong turnout of both students and trade unionists, coupled with the passing of the motion which mandates LSESU to campaign on behalf of students, it is highly unlikely that this will be the end of the issue, and strike action remains a distinct possibility. It is thought that the next step for cleaners and the unions will be to mobilise support amongst other academic and non-academic LSE staff.

Section Editor: Joseph Briers Deputy Editor: Bhadra Sreejith

Government Promises Student Loans for EU Citizens Despite Brexit Joseph Briers News Editor

the effects of Brexit on their field.

University and College Union general secretary, Sally Hunt, warned that the announcement was not enough to undo the damage already done by the government’s most recent flurry of international student policies.

“We are pleased the government has now clarified the situation for EU students who want to apply to English universities for next year and hope the devolved nations will soon follow suit. We don’t believe this measure can undo the damage that various proposals floated at the Conservative party conference last week may have done via headlines around the world. The news that the government was also seeking to ban leading foreign academics from advising the UK government over Brexit because they are not British nationals will

have also done little to help our international standing.”

Universities UK president, Dame Julia Goodfellow, struck a similarly cautious tone, stating: “Every effort must now be made to ensure that this announcement is communicated effectively to prospective students across Europe”.

“European and international students are a valuable part of cultural and academic life on British university campuses and play an important role in UK towns and cities, creating jobs and supporting local businesses. Looking ahead, as the government develops plans [for] post-Brexit Britain, a commitment is needed to ensure that students, from Europe and beyond, are able to continue to come to the UK to study without unnecessary bureaucratic burdens.”

News

THE GOVERNMENT THIS week confirmed that student funding, in the form of loans, grants, and bursaries, would continue to be made available to students from the European Union for the 2017-18 academic year, regardless of whether the nation has yet Brexited. The move is an attempt to provide some level of confidence for European students considering applying to universities in the UK and address fears that uncertainty following June’s referendum is leading to a fall in the number of EU applicants to the detriment of British academia.

Universities Minister Jo Johnson said: “We know that the result of the referendum brought with it some uncertainties for

our higher education sector.

International students make an important contribution to our world class universities, and we want that to continue. This latest assurance that students applying to study next year will not only be eligible to apply for student funding under current terms, but will have their eligibility maintained throughout the duration of their course, will provide important stability for both universities and students.”

Under EU law, citizens of member states must be charged the same rate as home students, and are to be offered similar funding opportunities.

This latest government announcement ensures that this will continue at least for the next few years.

Senior figures in higher education welcomed the move but appear to remain anxious as to

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| Tuesday 18 October, 2016

King Bhumibol Adulyadej of Thailand, World’s Longest-Reigning Monarch, Dies Aged 88 Jeremy Wong-Kah-Chun Undergraduate Student KING BHUMIBOL ADULYADEJ of Thailand has died at the ripe old age of 88 at Siriraj Hospital in Bangkok. On Thursday evening, the royal palace announced the news to the public. The Thai King was the longest-reigning monarch in the world; serving for more than 70 years and was highly revered by the Thai people to the point of his elevation to an almost divine status. He was well known for his involvement in stabilising the country during times of political turmoil.

Flags at all government buildings and schools in the country will be flown at halfmast for 30 days and Thai government officials will observe a one year mourning period.

Prime Minister Theresa May said in a statement on the King’s passing: “I would like to express my sincere personal condolences to the Royal Family and the people of Thailand on the death of His Majesty King Bhumibol Adulyadej. His Majesty guided the Kingdom of Thailand with dignity, dedication and vision throughout his life. He will be

greatly missed. Our thoughts are with the people of Thailand at this difficult time”.

For the past decade, King Bhumibol had been suffering from declining health and was rarely seen in public. Bhumibol had missed nationwide celebrations on his birthdays in the past and he is reported to have had low blood pressure, increased acidity in his blood, and abnormal functioning of the liver in the days leading up to his death.

In a statement, President Barack Obama said: “His Majesty the King was a close friend of the United States and a valued partner of many U.S. Presidents. I had the honor of calling on His Majesty the King during my visit to Thailand in 2012, and recall his grace and warmth, as well as his deep affection and compassion for the Thai people. As the revered leader and only monarch that most Thais have ever known, His Majesty was a tireless champion of his country’s development and demonstrated unflagging devotion to improving the standard of living of the Thai people. With a creative spirit and a drive for innovation, he pioneered new technologies that have

rightfully received worldwide acclaim. His Majesty leaves a legacy of care for the Thai people that will be cherished by future generations.

The American people and I stand with the people of Thailand as we mourn His Majesty the King’s passing, and today we hold the Thai people in our thoughts and prayers.”

Born on the 5th of December 1927 in Cambridge, Massachusetts in the United States, King Bhumibol Adulyadej was the youngest son of Prince Mahidol of Songkhla, who was studying medicine at Harvard at the time. Bhumibol ascended the throne in June 1946 after the unexpected and mysterious death of his older brother, Ananda Mahidol.

Bhumibol was 19 at the time, but his official coronation did not actually take place until May of 1950.

The King’s revered status among the Thai people is wellpublicised. Despite being the head of state, he was said to have been very down-to-earth in his interactions with his subjects, trekking into rural and remote villages in order to learn more about the plight of the people and the state of the country. Being a constitutional

monarch, he had little political power, but his influence was nonetheless substantial. In May 1992, Thailand teetered on the brink of civil war after bloody confrontations between pro-democracy protesters and the military erupted in Bangkok. King Bhumibol called on the two leaders from both sides and requested a peaceful solution to the conflict.

The two were shown lying prostrate before Bhumibol on national television in the royal palace and the political crisis was brought to a swift end.

King Bhumibol is survived by his wife, Queen Sirikit, three daughters, and his only son, Crown Prince Maha Vajiralongkorn, who, as heir to the throne, is also likely to succeed his father. However, the Crown Prince does not have the widespread respect and admiration that his late father enjoyed and is rather unpopular with the people of Thailand.

Vajiralongkorn is known as being slightly eccentric in royal decision making. Most recently he made his pet poodle an Air Chief Marshal in the Thai Air Force. However, the

nation’s strict lèse-majesté laws forbid people from criticising the royal family which has inevitably helped the royal to curb gossip. Only time will tell if the Crown Prince can live up to the expectations of his subjects when he does become the next King.

Students and City Celebrate Black History Month Bhadra Sreejith Deputy News Editor THE STUDENT UNION and University are preparing to hold a number of events in celebration of Black History.

Black History month in the UK is celebrated in October.

The aim of designating one month to focus specifically on Black History is to recognise the achievements and cultural heritage of the African-Caribbean community in the UK, as well as the contributions that this community has had on British society as a whole.

In London, Black History Month is celebrated with the most fanfare in boroughs with large populations of people with African-Caribbean descent, such as Southwark, Lambeth, and Hackney.

However, all boroughs have a wide variety of events relating to Black history and culture.

A selection of events being held include the Black History

Month Oral History Archive in Tower Hamlets, a play put on entitled ‘The Slave’ in the Tristan Bates Theatre in Camden, and a Caribbean Family History surgery in Lambeth.

The new initiatives extend to City Hall. In a press release, Sadiq Khan said “In London, we do not just tolerate each other’s differences, we respect and celebrate them and for me, that’s what Black History Month is all about.” City Hall is hosting a photographic exhibition with English Heritage, as well as a production of King Lear and a perfor mance from the Black Heroes Foundation.

And what is the LSE Community doing to celebrate? Plenty, in fact. The LSESU states that “Black History Month is a fantastic chance to celebrate, recognise, and reward the myriad of contributions Black people have made to our country and to our world, and offers

a host of events to educate, entertain, and involve everyone in challenging damaging biases against the Black community. We will be celebrating the black historians of the past, whilst taking part in discussions about contemporary, current situations that affect the lives of black individuals in today’s society.”

A particularly exciting event previously held by the LSESU was the Black HerStory exhibition, which featured Black women from all walks of life who inspired LSE students.

Upcoming events include a poetry slam followed by a discussion entitled “Blackness in the LGBT community” on the 18th of October, from 6pm to 8pm, and a film screening of A Place of Rage on the 21st of October from 6pm to 8pm, a documentary which celebrates the achievements of African American women and looks at Civil Rights, Black Power,

feminism and homophobia.

Celebrating Black History Month at the LSE seems particularly relevant, considering how the LSE currently only has one Black

professor employed, despite five percent of its students being Black. The LSESU will be holding events for Black History month until the end of October.

“He’s a F*****g Psycho, that Ape!”, Secrecy Shrouds Gorilla-Gate as Rumours Swirl Joseph Briers News Editor DAYS AFTER KUMBUKA, the 29-stone Western Lowland Gorilla, escaped from his enclosure at London Zoo, it remains unclear exactly how the primate pulled off his daring bid for freedom. Initial reports claimed that Kumbuka had broken free by means of smashing through the glass viewing panel at his £5 million enclosure. However, keepers were quick to quash any rumours of pane-shattering, insisting no glass had been smashed during the incident.

The Regent’s Park Zoo was sent into lockdown on Thursday evening when an alar m was raised in ‘Gorilla Kingdom’ at around 5pm.

Zoo guests were forced to seek shelter in the aquarium, reptile house, and cafes around the park as ar med police swar med the area. Assisted by a police helicopter with a heat-seeking camera, the Met were soon able to track down Kumbuka to his holding pen where he was then tranquilized and transferred back into his enclosure.

Curator of Animals at London Zoo, Malcolm Fitzpatrick, said: “At no time

were any of our visitors in any danger. The gorilla did not get out of the safe space, there were only about 100 visitors, it was the end of the day and I would like to thank all of those visitors for co-operating and moving into buildings”.

Yet, Fitzpatrick has remained

side, describing the heaving primate as a “gentle giant”.

“Gorillas are highly intelligent and what I can confir m also about Kumbuka is that he’s got a lovely character” said the ZSL official.

However, the Guardian has claimed that Kumbuka arrived at ZSL with something of a reputation for raucous behaviour. According to the reports, the glass at Gorilla Kingdom has repeatedly been subject to Kumbuka’s wrath, having to be repaired twice in the last year. This will

“At no time were any of our visitors in any danger...

What I can confirm also about Kumbuka is that “We were warned by his keepers he’s got a lovely from his previcharacter...” ous zoo that he tight-lipped as to Kumbuka’s does have a bit of method of escape, thus far refusing to disclose any further a thing for ripping details of ‘gorilla-gate’. A full enclosures apart... investigation is underway.

It has been alleged that He’s been ripping Kumbuka in fact got out after the trees down, a door off of his enclosure was left open by zoo staff, throwing them at allowing the gorilla to charge the glass...” through into a secure holding pen, though the Zoo has yet to confir m this.

Fitzpatrick was clearly eager to push Kumbuka’s caring

come as no surprise to his for mer keepers at Paignton Zoo in Devon who apparently

cast the ape in a somewhat less flattering light than Mr Fitzpatrick. “We were warned by his keepers from his previous zoo that he does have a bit of a thing for ripping enclosures apart . And he’s been doing a bit of that. He’s been ripping the trees down, throwing them at the glass.” said Dan Simmonds, referring to warnings from colleagues at Paignton. Buzzfeed has also quoted one keeper as saying: “He’s a f*****g psycho, that ape. He’s smacked the enclosure glass a couple of times”.

Gorilla enthusiasts will no doubt wince at the thought of another zoo-based incident following the controversial shooting of American silverback Harambe over the summer. The Cincinnati gorilla was unceremoniously shot dead after a small child managed to clamber into his exhibit and, once grabbed by the zoo’s star resident, failed to wriggle free from Harambe’s loving embrace/vice-like death grip. Harambe’s vast ar my of online mourners will be thankful that, despite facing off against the full might of the Met, Kumbuka did not suffer the same fate as his American counterpart.

News | 5

News In Brief Student Visa Breaches ‘Exaggerated’ The Home Office has discovered that the number of foreign students that breach the terms of their UK visas by ‘vanishing’, have been massively overestimated, according to a report in the Times. New research from Amber Rudd’s department (which remains unpublished) is said to have found that previous attempts to figure out just how many students ‘disappear’ are off by up to tens of thousands. The analysis of figures reportedly found the number of non-EU students breaching their visa requirements each year was around 1,500 - far less than previously thought. A Home Office spokesperson told the Telegraph: “we do not recognise the 1 percent figure.”

Broadway Hit ‘Hamilton’ to Hold Open Auditions The London producers of smash hit Broadway musical Hamilton are holding open auditions, much to the excitement of the capital’s population. The musical tells the story of American president Alexander Hamilton and been drowned in critical acclaim since its opening last year, scooping an impressive 11 Tony Awards in the process. The producers are searching for “singers who rap and hip-hop dancers, who should be in their 20s and 30s and of any ethnicity”. Given the immense popularity of Lin Manuel Miranda’s show, it may well prove easier to perform in than get tickets for.

Students Protest Uni Link with Trump Students at the traditionally conservative Liberty University have moved to rebuke their College leadership for their association with, and support of, Republican Presidential nominee Donald Trump. The school has long had links to the GOP - earlier this year Ted Cruz announced his candidacy on campus. The student group protesting their school’s connection with Trump said: “Because our president has led the world to believe that Liberty University supports Donald Trump, we students must take it upon ourselves to make clear that Donald Trump is absolutely opposed to what we believe, and does not have our support,”.

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| Tuesday 18 October, 2016

News Analysis: Unmaking Everyday Sexism Sara Sindija Postgraduate Student I live in a bubble. For the last six years I was based in one of the most liberal cities in the world. I’ve been surrounded by academics, activists, journalists, and artists. My opinions and criticisms were often validated by my peers, and I seldom came into intimate contact with those who did not share my world view.

More recently, however, one such person has come blundering into my consciousness and he is running for President of the United States of America.

From startling admissions of sexual assault by a US presidential hopeful to disturbingly numerous instances of sexual assault and rape on college campuses, the ‘everydayness’ of sexism is unfortunately, nowhere near an issue of the past. In fact, in 2014 the UN’s special rapporteur on human rights, Rashida Manjoo, made headlines for commenting on the UK’s “sexist culture”, a culture “which impacts all women and girls”. This culture that has normalized sexism, according to author, feminist and founder of The Everyday Sexism Project Laura Bates, is exactly what needs to change.

Last week, Bates came to the LSE to share her work and discuss issues specifically surrounding sexism in the workplace and on college campuses. Her idea for the project began several years ago, on an ordinary day, after one particularly bad week. Bates walked us through experiences of sexual assault on a packed public bus, and days later, of catcalling on the street.

What struck her was not how violating and uncomfortable these situations were, but that had they not happened in succession, they would have seemed completely normal. She began speaking to other women about their experiences and found that not only did every woman have their own story, but they all had multiple stories.

Just this past week, author and screenwriter, Kelly Oxford, made the cover of The New York Times for her hashtag, #notokay, when she asked, “Women: tweet me your first assaults”. Stories came pouring in, and Oxford began receiving as many as 50 responses per minute.

So what does it mean to give someone on the bus a free pass on their assault? What are the repercussions for remaining silent when you don’t call out

a stranger or a friend on their behaviour? These things happen every day so why should we care?

The problem, says Bates, is that these acts and words become normalized to the extent that many don’t recognize that “we don’t live our lives in neat pockets of separate issues…one kind of abuse quickly turns into another”. At UK universities, 60% of students have been victims of sexual assault and, in this country alone, a rape occurs every seven minutes.

The circumstances aren’t any better for women in the workforce, one of the hardest places to convince many people that sexism exists. What many don’t realize is that workplace sexism has a massive impact not just on morale, but on workplace productivity. Tackling problems of workplace sexism has proven good for business too.

In her lecture, Bates made a brilliant comparison between sexism and climate change.

There will always be those who denounce it and on the other spectrum the small percentage of those who, say, recycle. It’s everyone in between that needs to take action, those who know that there is a problem but passively throw their plastic in the green bin.

When the news broke of more allegations of Donald Trump’s sexual misconduct no one should have been shocked, he had proven his character long before, but we were. As long as we continue to be shocked, disgusted, offended, as long as these stories make headlines that name and shame, as long as we continue to recognize

that “locker room talk” can, and does, lead to violence, we are actively changing norms. As students on a university campus we should hold every stranger, colleague, peer, and presidential nominee to basic standards of human decency.

To learn more, everydaysexism.com

visit

Garden Bridge May Cost £22m Even if it’s Never Built Polly Bass Postgraduate Student THE GARDEN BRIDGE MAY cost the taxpayer over £22m even if it fails to go ahead, according to a recent National Audit Office report.

Major concerns surrounding the future viability of the project have been raised by senior civil servants, with one suggesting that the true total cost to the public purse could be as high as £50m.

The report is a further blow to the Garden Bridge Trust, the charity overseeing the project, which would be just a five minute walk from the LSE. The government’s spending watchdog, the NAO, has moved to launch an investigation after it transpired in March that £60m of public funding had been committed to the project by the Department for Transport and Transport for London. The report’s remit concerned the £30m allocated by the DfT. The Garden Bridge Trust has already spent £37.7m of public money on pre-planning, preconstruction activities and professional services. The total cost

is likely to surpass £185m, more than ten times the total cost of the nearby Millennium Bridge which runs between Bankside and the City.

The Bridge was supposed to be funded entirely by private contributions, however a number of setbacks have led to what the NAO describes as a ‘pattern of behaviour’ in which the Trust has repeatedly relied upon the government for extra funding to make up for shortfalls in private contributions.

The Trust claims that “It has always [been] part of the plan that money received from the Department for Transport and Transport for London would be used for detailed pre-construction work and to help kick-start the private funding drive.”

However, the NAO report is clear that the DfT displayed a preference that the use of public funding should be minimal during the risky pre-construction phase based on concerns surrounding the viability of the Trust’s business

case.

The DfT awarded the £30m to TfL as a capital grant in spite of its concerns that there was a risk of poor value for money. The Department imposed a cap on the amount of its funding that could be used for risky pre-construction in an attempt to protect taxpayers’ money. However this cap was subsequently replaced on three occasions despite uncertainty as to whether the Bridge would be built.

In November 2014 it was capped at £8.2m yet by August 2016 the

DfT’s total exposure had reached £22.5m.

With the landing site on the Southbank not yet secured, and planning dependent on the GLA underwriting its maintenance costs at a time when Sadiq Kahn has halted further public contributions, it remains to be seen whether the project will go ahead. The upcoming inquiry by LSE Alumna Dame Margaret Hodge into the public sector value for money may be decisive in this matter.

News | 7

The Annihilation of Space byTime - New LSE University Round-Up Study Says Travel “on Brink of Revolution” Scott Carpenter Postgraduate Student ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE and big data are making their way into the travel industry, and the changes could be transformative.

That’s the conclusion of a new independent study by a team of LSE researchers, who predict that new mobile phone technologies are set to “revolutionise” the way people shop, socialize and make everyday transactions while traveling. As these new technologies fuel consumer expectations about streamlined and interactive travel, travel providers - from airlines to car rental agencies - face a threat: dive headfirst into a future filled with interactive technology, or be swept away by the changes.

“The world of the consumer is on the cusp of momentous change,” says the report, ‘Travel distribution: the end of the world as we know it?’, released this month. “Retail will permeate people’s lives as mobile virtual assistants point out nearby restaurants and shops, and guide people’s purchasing choices based on their personal preferences.”

If mobile phones helped to vanquish yesterday’s paperback

travel guides, then new consumer expectations for an easy-tonavigate and “responsive” travel process are quickly putting an end to the “proactive searching” or Googling that travelers have traditionally used, according to the study.

Instead, visitors to an unfamiliar city will soon no longer need to Google for nearby restaurants: their phones will do it automatically. Nor will they have to, say, guess about how a new piece of furniture might look in their living rooms: new technology on their phones will show them; in fact, a simplistic version of this is already being trialled by IKEA. “Consumers are starting to demand more in terms of being inspired, the booking process being smooth, a responsive customer service during the travel itself, and the opportunity to reflect and share the experience afterwards with friends, family and through public reviews,” the reports notes.

“To a large degree, these expectations come from consumer experiences in other sectors,” it continues. But make no mistake: they are rapidly “spilling over” into travel.

Released this month, the 55-

page study was commissioned

by Amadeus, a provider of advanced technology for global travel, and undertaken by five LSE academics. As part of their research did a literature review of more than 1,400 items and interviewed 37 experts from across the travel industry, including officials from Google, Facebook and such figures as Kenny Jacobs,

“If mobiles helped vanquish yesterday’s paperback travel guides, then new consumer expectations are quickly putting an end to Googling flights ..” the Chief Marketing Officer of Ryanair.

For Amadeus, and others in the travel sector, the future is not exactly clear.

Every travel industry - hotels and cars, for instance, or travel retails - faces more than one possible future “pathway.” The

airline distribution industry, for example, faces two potential futures (or both at once): either full service carriers, including larger airlines with strong brand name recognition, will see their direct sales grow, or an increasingly complex industry will require more aggregation and indirect sales through intermediaries.

In total the authors identify four areas “where the greatest changes are likely.” Those include air travel distribution and “the rise of gatekeepers such as Google and Facebook in traffic acquisition.”

“The travel distribution industry is entering a period of unprecedented change - with rapidly changing consumer expectations, advances in data analysis technology and a blurring of the traditional lines between the various players,” said Dr. Graham Floater, the Director of the Economics of Green Cities Programme at LSE and one of the report’s authors.

The report, in its final words, puts the conclusion more starkly: “Whether the imminent consumer revolution is perceived as a threat or an opportunity by the industry may well determine the winners and losers of the future.”

Bristol Forced to Cancel ‘Chav Night’ The Cheerleading Society of the University of Bristol has been forced to cancel their ‘chav night’ following concerns that the event contributed to the ‘oppression of the working class’. The Bristol Student Union said: “[the event] perpetuates oppression towards students from working class backgrounds”.

The Cheerleading Soc attempted to placate the SU by renaming the event ‘comfortable tracksuit bottoms and jumper night’. However, this went down no better than the previous title and the cheerleaders were forced to rename the evening ‘social’ - beautiful in its simplicity.

Newcastle Uni Searches for Life on Mars With the help of their new £7 million microscope, scientists at the University of Newcastle hope to be able to confirm that there is life on Mars.

The new technology picked up microbes on a 400-million-year-old rock found on the ocean floor, a rock very similar to those on the red planet.

Head of the laboratory, Professor Peter Cumpson, told the BBC: “What we have detected is the trace left behind by living systems: the biological fingerprint which even after 200 million years is still visible, albeit only with a very, very good microscope. If we can find those in this [Mars] rock and we can compare with the earth samples then I think we have made a big step - a very convincing step forward which shows that at one time life - a simple life - was present.”

Maryland Students Charged for Sexual Assualt Scheme Students at the University of Maryland have been told they will be charged a fee in order to fund the college’s sexual assault office. Pupils of the school will be forced to fork out $34 each to enjoy the privilege of an administrative body to deal with allegations of rape; needless to say they are not best pleased.

Yet, according to director Catherine Carroll, the office that fulfils the university’s Title IX obligations is chronically underfunded and its staff ‘burned out’. Student Government Vice President AJ Pruitt agreed: “The university has failed in their responsibility...It’s not something I’m excited about, but it gets us to fully funding the office.”

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Tuesday 18 October, 2016

Tory Rift Widens Under May

The PM is trying to broaden Conservative support. It may backfire.

Edward Hockin Undergraduate Student

Section Editors: Hakan Ustabas Deputy Editors: Vacant

THERESA MAY IS undoubtedly continuing to enjoy a political honeymoon, with over 40% of popular support according to polls, whilst the Labour Party languishes well behind. The ability for the Tory party not only to survive a political earthquake on the scale of Brexit, but also to come out of it better off, is remarkable (particularly given that they are party with the greatest divisions over Europe).

The polls suggest that on top of Leave voters abandoning UKIP and Labour for the Tories, Remain voters are also switching their support the same way. Somehow the Tories are becoming the party both of the Brexiteer and the Bremainer.

The Tory conference this year highlighted the broadening base of support that May’s Conservatives enjoy; with immigration policies to tempt UKIP supporters, and a fiscal strategy (complete with industrial strategy) to win over disaffected Labourites.

The problem with this

Comment

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strategy, however, is that there are vast ideological chasms between many of these groups of supporters: chasms that are impossible to bridge. The cracks are already showing; many economically liberal Conservatives will be feeling queasy at the idea of a new industrial strategy, with widespread government intervention.

But this isn’t the only divide.

Home Secretary Amber

“There are vast ideological chasms between many of these groups of supporters: chasms that are impossible to bridge.”

Rudd’s speech drew widespread criticism. A blatantly nationalist proposal to force companies to disclose how many foreign workers they employ, as if to say

that employing skilled foreign workers is something to be ashamed of. This was met with contempt from the business community in particular. It appears that the Government is trying to backtrack on this idea, but the mere suggestion of it leaves a rather bitter taste in the mouth. And her speech came against a backdrop of an increasing chance that Britain is heading for a ‘hard’ Brexit, which will alienate Remain voters. Those same Remain voters will also be unlikely to appreciate Theresa May’s jibe that “if you believe you’re a citizen of the world, you’re a citizen of nowhere”.

Conservative supporters now make up an extremely uneasy coalition, comprised of many groups with different expectations of Theresa May’s premiership. Some of these groups will inevitably be left disappointed. And a problem with trying to extend your base too far is also the risk of irritating long term core supporters.

People tended to know where David Cameron’s Conservative Party stood; it was largely economically and socially liberal.

Theresa May’s Conservative Party is harder to define but is

“Conservative supporters now make up an extremely uneasy coalition, comprised of many groups with different expectations of Theresa May’s premiership.” looking decidedly less liberal.

The Tory conference showed the breadth of their support right now, but it also drew attention to the conflicts within that support base. With time, as Brexit negotiations unfold, and May implements her domestic agenda, the awkward coalition will begin to deteriorate.

Help Fight For Assisted Dying

The failure of the Assisted Dying Bill is not the end of the campaign.

Hakan Ustabas Comment Editor

IT IS A FACT OF LIFE THAT AT some point, we will die.

I imagine that most of us hope for a comfortable death, free of disease and pain. However a few incredibly unfortunate people have their lives plagued by illness and torment. We must stop at nothing to ensure that such people get the greatest comfort in both life and death, that other people take for granted.

The Assisted Dying Bill sought to allow terminally ill patients (defined as those with less than six months left to live) to receive lawful assistance in ending their own life. The Bill, created in the House of Lords, received wide public support, and had the backing of the charity Dignity in Dying. Its aim was clear: to reduce the suffering of those who suffer the most.

Despite the noble and wellrespected intention of the Bill, the House of Commons defeated it at a later stage in the legislative process. It must be admitted that the arguments against Lord Falconer’s law were persuasive.

Alan Mak, MP for Havant, said that “I was concerned that there were not enough safeguards in place to protect the most vulnerable. I could not vote

for something that could foster an atmosphere where people, especially older people, felt a ‘burden’ to their families.”

When the purpose of legislation is to decrease suffering, opinions such as this are sensible in that they seek to ensure that a change in the law does not do

“The Assisted Dying Bill failed, but this does not mean that we should not continue to demand reform to solve such glaring injustices.” greater harm than good. The lack of detailed protection for vulnerable people was therefore a clear downside of the Bill.

Another problem with the Assisted Dying Bill was that it would only apply to those who are already terminally ill.

This law would have offered no help to the widely respected campaigner Tony Nicklinson,

who was forced to starve himself to death to escape the misery of his illness. Before his death, he experienced seven years of locked-in syndrome, and wrote that “I cannot speak and I am also paralysed below the neck, which means I need someone to do everything for me.” People like this need a change in legislation so that their suffering can be ended. The Assisted Dying Bill failed, but this does not mean that we should not continue to demand reform to solve such glaring injustices.

Currently, a person who assists another person in taking their own life can receive up to 14 years in prison — the same tariff which is placed upon murderers.

It is strange that, while it is not illegal to commit suicide, it is illegal to help someone do something which is legal in this particular case. Families of those suffering from horrific illnesses are faced with the terrible choice of allowing their loved one to die in agony, or to break the law and risk serious criminal liability.

Criminalisation of assisted dying is essentially discriminatory. An able-bodied person is perfectly entitled to commit suicide, and neither they nor their family face prosecution for it. However, a person who is physically unable to commit

suicide precisely because of the disease which they are trying to escape from faces a deprivation of liberty by the state. It cannot be fair to add to the misery of these people by using the prosecution services to restrict them from fulfilling their wishes.

The law is still in need of reform. If we as a nation hold dear the principles of freedom and autonomy, then we must enact legislation which gives effect to the wishes of rational individuals, disabled or not.

The specifics of the Assisted Dying Bill should be extended to include anyone who suffers from a serious disease or illness, regardless of whether it will kill them any time soon. In addition, it must be effective in protecting the elderly, mentally ill, and those who are vulnerable to social pressures from taking their lives. This will meet the reasonable standard which the House of Commons have set, and ensure that euthanasia is only used where it really needs to be.

We must all play a part in continuing to advocate reform.

While the Bill may no longer be on Parliament’s agenda, the horrors faced by the acutely and chronically ill continue every day.

With continued effort and support, the question will not be if assisted dying

Comment | 9

The British Museum and Neocolonialism

How the renowned institution reinforces the imperial attitudes of Britain.

Mona Elkateb Postgraduate Student “WELCOME TO THE BRITISH Museum — a Museum of the world, for the world”, declares the first page of the Museum’s ‘map’ leaflet, available for visitors in virtually every corner of the Museum. One may wonder why, if the British Museum is in fact “of and for the world”, it has such a nationalistic name. Little is ‘British’ about the British Museum. In fact, if we perceive it through a postcolonial lens, we just might realise that in its infancy, the Museum was a symbol of colonialism and that it presently embodies neocolonialism, offering visitors the narrative of “Great Britain is still great”, as phrased by Christine Sylvester in 2009.

Opening in 1759, the British Museum grew over the following two centuries alongside the expansion of the British

“Little is ‘British’ about the British Museum.” empire. The British Museum was adapted and rebuilt by Sir Robert Smirke, an architect who designed 44 columns based on the temple of Athena Polias at Priene, and built it in the Greek Revival style — even the structure of the museum lacks

historically British characteristics. The architecture of the museum mirrors the greatness of Britain’s overseas empire — upon approaching the intimidating building it is difficult not to feel small. With an astonishing collection, the museum is home to millions of priceless historical objects from around the world. The argument of returning certain artefacts has been discussed endlessly, notably those regarding the return of the Parthenon marbles to Greece. The interior of the

“The British Museum expanded over the following two centuries alongside the expansion of the British empire.” museum holds the second largest collection of ancient Egyptian artefacts after the Egyptian Museum. This article, however, attempts to discuss the significance of one symbolic Egyptian treasure: the Rosetta Stone.

Found by French soldiers of Napoleon Bonaparte in 1799, the Rosetta Stone is an item integral to the field of Egyptology as it was used to decipher an-

cient hieroglyphics. Following the defeat of the French forces at the Battle of the Nile in 1801, it was confiscated along with many other Egyptian artefacts. Colonial power structures denied the Egyptian state the right to take part in such negotiations, denying the Egyptian state and people any consultation in this process. The Stone is allegedly the most visited object at the British Museum.

Although it is commonly acknowledged that people are most likely to value objects in their places origin, Egypt was never granted the opportunity to display or thoroughly examine the Rosetta Stone, which upon its discovery was circulated mostly among European museums and scholars. Numer-

“Colonial power structures denied the Egyptian state the right to take part in such negotiations, denying the Egyptian state and people any consultation in this process.” ous attempts have been made

in the past to raise the issue of returning the Stone. “If the British want to be remembered, if they want to restore their reputation, they should volunteer to return the Rosetta Stone because it is the icon of our

“Some artefacts are symbolic, their attainment representative of certain points in history... Keeping them might be perceived as a symbol of colonial legacy.”

Egyptian identity”, urged Zahi Hawass, the chief of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities in 2003. At the time of an economic downturn in 2009, Hawass proposed to drop his request for the permanent return of the Rosetta Stone if the British Museum lent the stone to Egypt for only three months to be displayed at the opening of the Grand Egyptian Museum in Cairo in 2013 (it has yet to be opened following the country’s instability). This too was rejected.

Indeed, it may be true that the Rosetta Stone as an ancient

historical milestone is more easily accessible to many who visit London, one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the world, and some visitors may derive from the Museum’s collection inspiration to someday travel as tourists to Egypt. And yes, most of the artefacts were acquired through some sort of political diplomacy: “welcome to international relations and the theory of realism”, you might say.

These arguments seem to miss the point. Some artefacts are symbolic, their attainment representative of certain points in history. Withholding a symbol of Ancient Egyptian heritage is a reminded of the atrocities of the British Empire, of suffering, humiliation, and a struggle for independence — it might even be perceived as a symbol of colonial legacy.

A massive number of ancient objects that spent thousands of years on Egyptian soil are dispersed around the world.

Is it so ridiculous to ask that this symbol be returned to where it was found and taken without consent? We must reconsider, more deeply, the implications of power structures that are residue of Great Britain’s imperial past. The British Museum Act of 1963 legally prevents any object from leaving its collection once it has entered it, but are we not at a point in time when we can question and challenge our laws?

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| Tuesday 18 October, 2016

Rudd’s Race Row Promotes Division

The Home Secretary’s rhetoric undermines May’s drive for a “great meritocracy” in Britain.

Rajan Soni Undergraduate Student FIRM, HARDLINE POLITICS carries with it a seductive appeal.

It demonstrates a show of power and stability, and with the Labour Party in frantic disarray, this approach holds more sway than ever in capturing the minds and votes of the electorate.

Earlier this week, Home Secretary Amber Rudd called on a mass reduction in the numbers of overseas students entering the UK, in addition to tighter visa restrictions for those coming to work. The problem here is not the principle behind the policy, or indeed, the policy itself. Every nation is within its right to control its own borders, and although the measures proposed are, in my eyes, not a last resort, I will put it down to mere difference in political values and priorities.

“Rather than try to alleviate the volatile atmosphere following Brexit, the Government instead sees fit to hijack it to its own political advantage”.”

What appals me, however, is the manner in which these policies were justified at the Conservative Party conference on Tuesday. The Home Secretary’s desire to cut numbers of migrant workers so that they do not “take jobs that British people should do” not only suggests that British workers have some token right to remain immune to competition for jobs on merit, it also appeals to the kind of language used for decades by xenophobic branches of the right, in such a blatant way that it is almost cartoonish. Rather than try to alleviate the volatile atmosphere following Brexit, the Government instead sees fit to hijack it to its own political advantage in order to try to play the sycophant to those who voted against staying in the EU on the grounds of immigration with unnecessarily provocative rhetoric.

It is a dangerous cycle. The Government responds to what starts off as a sensible concern at rising levels of immigration with an enthusiastic nod of approval in order to appear to relate the opinions of the electorate. But it is done with such a trumped-up (no pun intended) level of enthusiasm that it feeds back into the electorate and encourages an

greater disdain towards immigration than was delivered, which reverberates throughout the minds of the public and increases the level of fear and stigma attached to incoming migrants. The exaggerated nature of politics, illustrated by the comments made by our Home Secretary, seemingly makes this phenomenon inevitable.

“Words are powerful. And perhaps the most striking thing about the comments made by Mrs Rudd this week is that it utterly inconsistent with Theresa May’s goal of turning Britain into a “great meritocracy”.”

Words are powerful. And perhaps the most striking thing about the comments made by Mrs Rudd this week is that it utterly inconsistent with Theresa May’s alleged goal

“The problem here is not the principle behind the polic, or indeed the policy itself”.” of turning Britain into a “great meritocracy”.

This is further illustrated by the MP for Hastings and Rye’s comments on the situation of international students coming to study in the UK, in which she demonstrated a commendable lack of understanding as to the processes which her own office uses to admit students to study degree programs here in Britain. According to Mrs Rudd, international students, who contribute 30% of the income for universities across the UK, need not “even have to be proficient in speaking English” to be admitted to study a degree course. As the international students on a Tier 4 Student Visa amongst you will be aware, this is nonsense. In order to qualify for a CAS (Confirmation of Acceptance for Studies), their Tier 4 sponsor, e.g. a university, must, as dictated in the official Home Office guide to the application for a student visa, assess an applicant’s English language ability. I know academically excellent students who have met all the financial and security condi-

tions to study in the UK, only to be turned down because of trivial mistakes in formalities. The last thing the process needs is additional bureaucracy.

“`The Home Secretary claims to want to attract the “brightest and best” students fom abroad. But what she does not understand is the impact of her statements and the Government’s policies represents far more than the sum of its parts.”

The Home Secretary claims to want to attract “the brightest and best” students from abroad.

But what she does not understand is that the impact of her statements and the Government’s policies represents far more than the sum of its parts. Restrictions like this do not only turn away those

that they are targeted to repel.

Regardless of whether a potential applicant from abroad is academically astute, or capable of meeting the visa requirements, the kind of poisonous rhetoric that has been spouted relentlessly across the Conservative Party conference over the last week will naturally act as a factor in diminishing a student’s desire to apply to the UK. As a result, Britain is failing to give the so called “brightest and best” the chance to thrive in the environment they deserve.

So even on its own terms, the Government will inevitably fail to enforce its vision of Britain as a “great meritocracy”, as well as financially damaging higher education institutions already at risk of having funding cut following the decision to exit the EU. To hear this kind of lazy, irresponsible bombast out of the mouth of our Home Secretary, frankly, makes me ashamed to be British. Whatever your values and politics, there is no denying that this represents a huge step backwards for cosmopolitanism and, considering Liam Fox’s comments on EU nationals at the conference and the Foreign Office’s decree on foreign researchers here at the LSE on Friday 7th October, a step towards an ugly xenophobic outlook on the world. But most baffling of all, it is totally at odds with this so-called “great meritocracy”, that Theresa May professes to want to achieve.

12|Tuesday 18 October 2016

Separatist Sentiment in Hong Kong Rises

China’s hardline approach to pro-democratic movements in Hong Kong is backfiring Philip Apfel Undergraduate student

“local citizens’ calls for a proper democracy are growing louder by the day” of the Umbrella movement demonstrations, along with some other student activists, for his involvement in the 2014 protests. The Hong Kong Eastern Court which gave the ruling reasoned that Wong’s conduct “damage[d] social peace”. Mr Wong took the conviction and the attendant punishment of community service, in his stride stating that he has “no regrets”, and that his plans to continue fighting for Hong Kong citizens’ right to self-determination are unwavering.

It is clear from these examples that the Communist Party and the Hong Kong government have opted for a punitive, uncompromisingly ‘sticks-not-carrots’ approach, rather than making the effort to hear out and address some of the legitimate concerns by people that were promised some level of democracy under

the fading ‘one country two systems’ paradigm. Broadly speaking, this is the idea that Beijing is responsible for the city’s defence and foreign affairs, whilst Hong Kong broadly enjoys self governance in other areas. Evidently, the hallmarks of self governance - freedom of association and the press, an independent judiciary etc. - are not always visible in Hong Kong The result? Alienated and frustrated members of the population, especially the young, are finding other ways to make their voices heard and are making demands that are actually more exacting than in 2014. While the 2014 protests focused on forcing Hong Kong’s unpopular proBeijing leader CY Leung from office and achieving genuine universal suffrage (the current voting system for Hong Kong’s Legislative Council skews outcomes in favour of proestablishment politicians, and the chief executive is chosen by a broadly proBeijing nominating committee) demands for outright independence are now entering mainstream politics.

In September of this year, in a move that must have irked the Chinese government beyond measure, six separatist activists, promising to fight against what has come to be known as ‘Mainlandisation’, were voted into the Legislative Council. That makes 15% of the 40 directly elected seats whilst another 30 are chosen by

broadly pro-Beijing, ‘functional constituencies’. Though 6-outof-70 does not sound like much, the symbolic value of this result is hard to overstate.

“Alienated, frustrated members of the population, especially the young, [...] are making demands that are actually more exacting than in 2014.”

It is proof of the deepening political divide in Hong Kong, with the unrelenting force of ‘Mainlandisation’ pitted against an equally persevering demand for democracy and selfdetermination. In the coming weeks and months, the new Legislative Council is likely to pull the idea of independence right into the centre of public discourse. As such, especially if the government continues its hardline approach (and there is no reason to believe that it won’t), the number of Hong Kong citizens who support independence is likely to rise.

That is good news for those who believe in democracy, the rule of law, and the right to self-determination. But the road ahead is likely to be rocky and full of further obstacles.

Photo Credit The Guardian

Features

Section Editors: Daniel Shears Stefanos Argyros

WALK AROUND THE EVER bustling streets of Hong Kong these days, and pedestrians are likely to be furnishing umbrellas only when it is actually raining. Apart from the occasional lonely protester holding up a sign on a busy street corner, things seem “normal”, if not calm. One could almost be forgiven for assuming that the Umbrella movement, a series of protests that saw thousands of frustrated local citizens take to the streets two years ago, has all but puffed out.

However, appearances can be deceiving. Though their umbrellas have left the streets, local citizens’ calls for a proper democracy are growing louder by the day. Concerted efforts by the Hong Kong government (at the behest of China) to stifle and suppress a groundswell of support, especially among young people, for democratic ideals have largely backfired.

The disappearance of five booksellers in 2015, spirited into the delicate care of China’s state security apparatus in blatant violation of their human rights for publishing or distributing mainland-criticising books, is just one illustrative example of how China is attempting to tighten its control over Hong Kong.

According to Steve Vickers, a former head of the colonial police’s criminal intelligence bureau, “there is a growing

feeling in Hong Kong of greater mainland pressure on universities and civil society”.

In August of this year a Hong Kong court convicted nineteenyear-old Joshua Wong, the face

Features | 13

Germany Divided After Failed Terrorist Plot

A foiled terrorist plot re-ignites debates about refugees in Germany Paula Grabosch Undergraduate student THESE ARE TURBULENT times in Germany.

Last Saturday the news that the police had closed off an entire neighbourhood in Chemnitz, the third largest city in Saxony, in the search of suspected terrorists planning an attack caused a big stir across the country.

Residents were advised to stay inside their homes as the police raided an apartment in the area.

As is now known, the decisive tip on the planned attack came from the US intelligence services. The Americans had monitored phone calls between the lead suspect, Dschaber alBakr, and the IS in Syria. AlBakr is said to have reported on the phone that “two kilos are done” (presumably referring to explosives) and a “big Berlin airport” would be a good location. Following this, police set up around the house al-Bakr was believed to live in. The 22 year-old suspect came to Germany as a Syrian refugee in 2015.

Since the police feared explosives to be inside alBakr’s flat, the building was evacuated before the raid.

Once inside, the police found over a kilo of highly dangerous explosives, as well as metal pipes, igniters and other things required to construct a bomb.

However, the main suspect was not present. A spokeswoman of the police later said that al-Bakr was seen at the door of the building on Saturday morning, during the evacuation of other residents. Alerted by the massive presence of police, he fled.

What followed, was a movie-like manhunt.

The police did not exclude the possibility that the suspect had more explosives either on him or elsewhere. All surrounding borders and airports were

closely monitored, cars, trains and busses checked.

On Sunday afternoon then, a different apartment was searched. The police arrested an acquaintance of al-Bakr, but still could not locate the lead suspect himself.

Whilst all German news outlets were flooded with updates on the search, it took almost thirty-six hours for the Saxonian police to translate the search warning into Arabic.

Only on late Sunday evening, a translated version explaining the situation was published online. At this time, three other Syrians in Leipzig, just an hour away from where al-Bakr fled, heard of the news. Earlier on in the day, these three men had been approached by alBakr at the main train station of Leipzig. Al-Bakr explained that he was a refugee and had no place to stay, urging his fellow countrymen to help him. Unaware of who he was, the men took him back to their apartment. Only after seeing the translated news and police statement in the evening, the three men realised who they had taken in. One of them ran to the nearest police station with a photo of their house guest. Meanwhile, the other two tied the lead suspect down with a rope and waited for the police to come. After midnight, al-Bakr was arrested, thanks to the help of the three Syrian men. The worst of the drama seemed to be over.

Then, on Wednesday evening the shocking news: alBakr was found dead in his cell in Leipzig, hung by his own t-shirt. The autopsy confirms that it was indeed a suicide.

Having been on a hunger strike as well as being diagnosed as suicidal, it is unclear how and why the lead planner of a terror attackwas left unmonitored for long enough to commit suicide. The 22 year-old’s public defender speaks of a

legal scandal, the police and department of justice face enormous criticism.

What remains are the questions: Was he working alone or might a terror cell be involved? Did someone instruct him or was he instructing others? Are there unknown others who might continue his plan?

What has now surfaced, is that al-Bakr presumably radicalised himself in Germany, not in Syria. His brother claims that before his arrival in Germany, al-Bakr was completely “unpolitical”.

According to the brother, who remained in Syria, al-Bakr was watching “horror videos” of his home country once in Germany and was “brainwashed” by an Imam from Berlin. The Imam allegedly urged al-Bakr to return to Syria to fight.

In September 2015 then, alBakr appears to have left Germany to travel to Rakka, an IS-controlled city in Syria.

Calling his family from there, he informed them of now being an IS-fighter- since then they were no longer in contact.

It also appears that al-Bakr travelled to Turkey after his arrival in Germany, where he stayed for several months.

What he was doing there and why his leaving and reentering Germany from Syria and Turkey was not further investigated earlier, remains unclear.

What is clear however, is that these dramatic events have re-ignited the refugee debate in Germany. Only in July of this year, the country experienced its first suicide bomber attack, also carried out by a Syrian refugee in Ansbach, Bavaria.

Even though no one was killed or severely injured in this attack, the shock was felt intensely amongst the German people. Both the attacker in Ansbach, Mohammed Daleel, and the suspected terrorist alBakr came to Germany before

the mass influx of refugees into the country in September 2015.

This was following Merkel’s controversial decision to allow the thousands of refugees at Hungary’s and Austria’s borders to come to Germany.

Prior to this, a welcoming attitude towards refugees was dominant in the population.

Notwithstanding that the attack in Ansbach as well as the planned attack from Chemnitz were not direct consequences of Merkel’s much criticised decision to welcome refugees, her opponents insist on using the events in their favour.

Only recently at the beginning of September, the extreme right-wing populist party “Alternative für Deutschland” (AfD) gained 20% of the votes in a regional election in the North-East, clearly showing that the rightwing sentiment is growing within the population. During the celebrations for the 26th annual day of German Unity in Dresden on October 3rd, Chancellor Merkel as well as the Federal President Gauck were welcomed by over five hundred protesters booing and shouting words and phrases such as “Traitors”, “Merkel dictatorship” and “Merkel has to go”. Particularly in contrast to the initial day of German Unity, shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the incredibly celebrated and admired Chancellor Helmut Kohl, the divide between the public and the current regime seems striking.

With over a million refugees already having arrived in Germany over the past one and a half years, and many more on their way, the country has in a sense divided. A lot has changed since those pictures of Germans welcoming and applauding refugees at the train station in Munich, but one can only hope that ultimately humanity, not hate, will prevail.

The Pocket Philosopher Musings on the use of probabilities to improve one’s beliefs Edmund Smith Undergraduate Student YOU MIGHT ALREADY know that there are certain habits of mind which can improve your ability to make good judgements.

One of these is to think of your beliefs are probabilistic, not binary. Putting a percentage on your confidence in a given belief very probably makes your views much more accurate- even if the number you present to yourself feels more-or-less arbitrary.

If you already follow this advice, then there’s some other advice that’s often said to be worth following- for any given field that you’re not an expert in, you should modify the views you have within the field by the base failure-rate in that field. For example, if half of all research programs in a given field turn out to be disastrously misconceived, then when considering how confident you are in a particular view in that field, you should halve your confidences.

So far, these are just good strategies for thinking. But they run up against problems when we find domains of inquiry that just don’t seem to be striving for accurate beliefs in the normal sense. There are plenty of fields like this. Some subfields of anthropology, some areas of literary theory, and large swathes of continental or Hegel-informed philosophy seem to be like this. The difference is that these fields don’t just seek to be successful, they also seek to set their own criteria as to what success means. If you are simply trying to find out the literacy level in a given country, then you are successful just if you find out how many literate people there are as against illiterate. The standard for success is not up for debate.

We need to draw a distinctionand quite a bold one. On the one hand we have normal inquiry, and on the other we have radical inquiry. The former understands itself as having its standards for success external, unchanging, and detached from the inquiry itself. The latter understands itself as participating in the creation of its own standards. My initial suggestions about improving one’s beliefs runs into problems when faced with radical inquiry- because it is not at all clear what it would take for a radical inquiry to fail.

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| Tuesday 18 October, 2016

Fees Must Fall: The Life and Death of a Noble Protest Students in South Africa are fighting for a noble cause, but they need to be willing to compromise Matthew De Klerk Postgraduate student GIVEN THE DEARTH OF coverage on the university protests sparking across South Africa, you would be forgiven for not noticing that SA tertiary education has come under fire.

While international reportage on the events has been scarce at best, even local newpapers and online ‘news’ outlets have given altogether polarised accounts of what’s happening on the ground, leading to an ‘Us-Them’ narrative that marks students as reactionary firebrand idiots, police as brutal instruments of an uncaring state, and lecturers, Vice-chancellors and academic staff as apathetic or outright anti-progressive villains.

If only it were so straightforward.

The history of FeesMustFall (hashtagged into common vocabulary as all modern protests movements are) has its roots in very noble causes. In South Africa, the majority of the country earns an income that falls into the lowest income brackets defined by the South African Revenue service. This poor majority subsists on free housing allowances from the government, social welfare and government grants, and free primary and secondary education to make ends meet.

However, the definition of free education (a vague electoral promise stretching back to the advent of democracy in 1994, repeated again in 2007 and 2009, and promised to be drafted into legislation in 2013) has never extended to tertiary education – an avenue viewed by the local populace as an immediate and effective escape from the institutional poverty that persists in a Post-Apartheid era.

And yet for many a university

education remains far, far out of reach and affordability. Year after year, thanks to declining government subsidies (that still demand universities stick to strict transformational quotas, development of infrastructure, and increased enrolment) , universities have raised the price of a year’s tuition, up to 10% per annum in some cases. If this were not bad enough, complex problems around the state education loans service mean that students are often covered for just tuition, and are left out of pocket for sundry necessities like books, food, transport, and accommodation. Worse still, in some cases academic excellence that earns a student a partial bursary or scholarship may, in fact, compromise this NSFAS funding. Statistics show that the through-put for black or poor graduates in the country are truly shocking: in some cases rising to a 60%+ dropout rate.

This is mostly because of the decline in stateprovided basic and secondary education. Today, the value of the national secondary qualification, a Matric, is very low. Thanks to political pandering, mismanagement, and a dropping pass rate, the market is flooded with expectant young adults from underfunded and underequipped schools (to obtain a basic Matric you need only obtain 40% for 3 subjects, and at least 30% for 3 other subjects; to be eligible for university entrance, this rises to a mere 50% for 4 subjects and a minimum of 30% for 3 other subjects). Despite the obvious incompetence of Minister Angie Motshekga of the Department of Basic Education, under whose regime the country has suffered an obliteration of basic education, and Minster Blade

Nzimande, who shows little consideration or even empathy for the plights of students, these two have held the helm of education on a disastrous course for 8 years now.

And so the rise of the FMF protests was warranted as they spoke of the deep suffering of an entirely disenfranchised majority of students who could not afford to make a better life for themselves.

So - as you trawl the news, inundated by images of burning buses, blazing buildings, torched libraries, petrol-bombed offices, incinerated theatres and computer labs, looting, riots and vandalism – you have to ask yourself what went wrong? This can be answered quite simply: structures, goals and attitude.

FeesMustFall – just like the multitudinous bodies around it: the RhodesMustFall movement, the Decolonisation movement, the “Shackville” protest for accommodation – follows an essentially open structure. It has no clear or democratically elected leaders, and what leaders the group has had has never been constant. There is no core mandate or well-defined, agreed-upon goals (goals which are hijacked by opportunist who go so far as to demand free food, or the expulsion of ‘problematic’ statues or Western science and academia). There is no constitution, no policy around organisational structure, no membership listing or criteria.

It’s ‘of the people, for the people, by the people’. And this would be noble and commendable if not for one sad fact. It doesn’t work.

Time and time again, bodies of protests have brought the gears of the academic program me to a grinding halt. Lectures are disrupted; halls, venues, offices and even administrative

buildings are ‘occupied’; roads are blocked and the teaching process entirely arrested.

University staff and VCs convene with these students, and are often delivered demands that are offered with zero compromise, under fundamentalist criteria that they be accepted even before they have been read. Even the involvement of mediators and unions does not further the process, as a reneging on even a single demand is perceived as a counter-revolutionary crime perpetuated by a body that aims to protect capitalist/ white interests (a perception that is enabled by cult-like, ultra-paranoid social media pages and Facebook groups that obsess with social justice and do not consider financial considerations.

Extremist sects – unhappy with this lack progress – commit violent acts, harass students, and use race baiting in their rhetoric.

Given FMF’s open, unofficial structure, condemnations of this are not believed.

Worse still, their attitude refuses to grapple with a central flaw in their thesis: that it’s financially impossible.

Currently, the majority of the national budget is spent on education, but little effect is felt in tertiary institutes because of institutional debts and operating costs (after all, lecturers must be paid, and the lights and water kept running!) Student ‘leaders’ have suggested all manner of options: from raising corporate and personal taxes (which have both already received increments for the 2017/18 period) and increasing the GDP and budget spent on university funding, to drastically reducing staff salaries and even forcing landlords to rent out accommodation at controlled prices. However,

these would only lead to increased prices of basic goods (as companies seek to recover costs) and reduced spending on social services and welfare (which would spark its own set of riots across the country.

Despite all these progressive suggestions, the expected deficit and shortfalls would be far, far greater than any costs recovered. Currently – even in a better economy than South Africa’s – the concept of free tertiary education is impossible, and (if enacted) would be singularly ruinous.

This is not a consideration for the movement as a whole, however. The noble struggle must go on, despite the naysaying of experts and critics.

Right now fears remain that the 2016 academic year might have to be ‘reset’: an event that would leave thousands of graduates and school leavers in the lurch, and deprive the country of thousands of doctors, engineers, social workers and psychologists.

What defines the student protests currently is fundamentalism. The inability to listen to opposing views and reach a consensus, a compromise for some progress, coupled with the movement’s too-loose structure has left it vulnerable to shifting goalpost and opportunistic hijacking by common criminals and looters.

As support for the movement dwindles, but the firebrand vehemence, vandalism and violence remains, South African education is reaching a tipping point, a critical impasse. Right now, the question is not whether there will be free education in our time, but whether there will be any education at all in the coming years.

Photo Credit: IB Times

Features | 15

Saudi Air Strikes in Yemen: Where is the outrage?

The killings of Yemeni civilians by Saudi air strikes should be condemned as a war crimes Elizabete Aunina Postgraduate student AFTER THE SAUDI ARABIA led coalition’s attack on a funeral in Sana’a, the capital of Yemen, that killed 140 and injured 525 people, Human Rights Watch called for an international investigation to determine whether war crimes had been committed. The incident took place within the broader context of a severe humanitarian crisis crippling the country: famine is spreading rapidly and medical equipment and care are scarce. According to the United Nations, the conflict in Yemen has claimed the lives of almost 11,000 people since March 2015, including those of approximately 4,000 civilians.

The urgency to learn from past mistakes and ensure that all relevant actors are held accountable has never been stronger. And yet, following the tragic incident in Sana’a, the United States decided to launch their own air strikes, consolidating the support they were already providing to the coalition. While the US National Security Council issued a statement noting that it was “deeply distressed” by the civilian casualties in the Sana’a attack, it has now become clear that the US does not intend to seriously reconsider its strategy in Yemen. This is particularly alarming given that

the conflict does not lend itself to neat dichotomies between “good” and “evil” actors. A brief overview of the country’s troubled history provides a more nuanced understanding.

Yemen is a historically tribal country that was formed in 1990 after the unification of the US and Saudi backed Yemeni Arab Republic in the North, with the USSR backed Democratic Republic of Yemen in the South. Following unification, Ali Abdullah Saleh, an ex-military officer, assumed the leadership of the country and established an autocratic and corrupt regime. Despite establishing a central government, President Saleh was not able to control territories beyond the capital Sana’a, which remained at the hands of the Houthis (estimated to be supported by 34-40% of Yemenis) as well as other groups.

The Houthis (also called Ansar Allah), who are believed to be largely funded by Iran, are followers of the Zaydi Shia movement and have been fighting an armed conflict against the central government since 2004.

President Saleh was forced into exile after the Revolution of 2011, in which the Houthis played a crucial role. The Saudi backed Abed Rabbo Mansour al- Hadi, at the time the Vice President to Saleh, became the Active President and was voted into the office unopposed on February 2012. Al-Hadi was

then ousted from the office following a coup d’état that brought Houthi control to the capital and forced Hadi into exile in Saudi Arabia in March 2015.

Houthi control over Sana’a angered Saudi Arabia, which saw Yemen as a hostile actor along its southern border, escalating the sectarian divide in the Middle

“The protracted and multifaceted conflict in Yemen keeps claiming thousands of innocent lives, often forgotten or glossed over under the convenient label of ‘’collateral damage” East between Houthis backed

by Iran and the Saudi backed Al-Hadi government. Following All-Hadi’s arrival in Riyadh, the Saudi Arabia led coalition consisting of nine Sunni majoritarian Arab states started its military campaign in Yemen.

To make matters worse, following the complete collapse of the state after the 2011 Revolution, al-

Qaeda’s affiliate group in Yemen, the Ansar al-Sharia (AQAP) as well as the Islamic State made large territorial advances in the outlying regions, while carrying out terrorist attacks targeting Houthi held territories.

Despite the coalition’s proclaimed aim of fighting terrorism, their focus on combatting the Houthis has created a safe space for terrorist organisations to recruit sympathisers while benefiting from the oil and port trade along the coastal territories they control.

International organizations have repeatedly pleaded for an increased attention to the plight of civilians who are targeted by all involved groups. Alarmingly, the United Nations estimates that coalition led airstrikes are responsible for 60% of civilian deaths. This raises the unavoidable question of Western involvement in the alleged war crimes, as the Saudi led coalition receives large support from the United States, the United Kingdom, France and Canada.

The United States in particular provides not only weapons through multi-billion dollar arm sales, but also intelligence and fuel to the coalition’s jets using the US controlled airbase in Southern Saudi Arabia. The airbase is crucial for the coalition partners like Morocco and the UAE as it allows them to carry out much longer and larger attacks on

Yemen without having to return to their home bases to refuel.

US personnel in Saudi Arabia also provides the coalition with ammunition, bombs, airto-ground missiles and tanks.

The protracted and multifaceted conflict in Yemen

“The conflict does not lend itself to neat dichotomies between “good” and “evil” actors” keeps claiming thousands of innocent lives, often forgotten or glossed over under the convenient label of ‘’collateral damage”, whilst the rise of alQaeda and ISIS shows no signs of regressing. To add to the already hopeless situation - Saudi Arabia is running for re-election to the Human Rights Council at the United Nations, after their current term expires this year, a position that the country has numerously used as a tool to obstruct any international inquiries on unlawful attacks against civilians in Yemen. With various media outlets calling Yemen ‘’the next Syria’’ the question remains – where is our outrage in Yemen, and why are we so willing to close our eyes to the war crimes committed?

Brexit and the Environment: A Bleak Future Awaits A “Hard Brexit” would have an adverse impact on the UK’s environmental policies Yllka Krasniqi Undergraduate student THERE HAS BEEN ENDLESS commentary on the effects of ‘Hard Brexit’ on the economy, immigration and on relations between the EU and the UK, but little has been mentioned on the impact of Brexit on the environment.

If pursued by Theresa May, a “Hard Brexit” would entail the withdrawal of the UK from the single market.

This, in turn, would signify that the UK will no longer be required by law to adhere to EU regulations. Regulation, or “red tape” was imbued with negative connotations in the Brexit campaign.

Regulations were criticised for stymying growth by placing undue burdens on businesses.

Nonetheless, a closer look at EU regulations indicates that their role is much more positive and valuable than whar the bleak picture painted by the Brexit campaign would suggest.

Environmental regulations

in particular are of crucial importance. They are comprised of a set of environmental directives and laws whose aim is to ensure the protection of, inter alia, the air, water,

“About 70% of our environmental legislation comes from the EU and is now at risk. ” habitat, natural ecosystems, natural spaces and renewable energy. The long term aims that underscore EU regulation are firstly to ensure the protection of the environment, and secondly, to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

However, with Britain voting to leave the European Union, EU environmental regulations will cease to apply once the UK formally

withdraws from the EU. This is one of the main ways in which “Hard Brexit” will affect the environment. Former EU legislation and directives will no longer be legally binding and the UK will also not be accountable for following the environmental policy goals set out by the EU. About 70% of our environmental legislation is currently comes from the EU and is now at risk. The UK Parliament will have the power to overturn environmental legislation that does not suit their agenda or interests.

But, it may be too harsh to argue that “Hard Brexit” would in fact damage the environment. Controlling our own environmental policy doesn’t necessarily mean that new environmental policies will be inadequate. The government will surely insist on the protection of the environment with innovative environmental policies. Yet this optimistic vIew is hardly warranted by the current political climate in the UK. The UK government has

a track record of not pursuing ambitious and substantive environmental policies.

Some environmentalists argued that the 2010-2015

“ The UK

government has a track record of not pursuing ambitious and substantive environmental policies. ” Coalition government led by the Conservative Party was responsible for the “worst period of UK environmental policy in 30 years” on the account that support for onshore wind was scrapped, solar subsidies were removed and the selling off of the green investment bank. Alarmingly, it does not look like environmental policy

will fare better under Theresa May’s current government.

To make matters worse, air pollution in Britain, more specifically in London, is terrible. For instance, London breached annual air pollution limits in the first week of the new year. Implemented by the EU, air pollution targets were intended to clean Britain’s air. Although with “Hard Brexit” on the table, Britain may be looking to return to its former reputation in the 1970s as “the Dirty Man of Europe”, if continued inaction from the government on air pollution persists.

Organisations such as Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace have argued that there will most likely be the “weakening of environmental directives from the EU” as well as describing the UK government as “one of the most obstructive and regressive in Europe on environmental issues”.

The environment will likely suffer if “Hard Brexit” prevails.

16 | Tuesday 18 October, 2016

Professor Barry Eichengreen on Brexit,

Interviews

Leighton Hughes Postgraduate Student BARRY EICHENGREEN IS the George C. Pardee and Helen N. Pardee Professor of Economics and Political Science at University of California, Berkeley.

He has written highly-regarded and prominent works, most notably ‘Golden Fetters: The Gold Standard and the Great Depression, 1919-1939’ and most recently ‘Hall of Mirrors: The Great Depression, The Great Recession, and the Usesand Misuses-of History’. He was a senior policy advisor to the International Monetary Fund in 1997 and 1998, and he served as President of the Economic History Association from 2010 to 2011.

On 25th September, I spoke with him about his standpoint on the ensuing Brexit and its consequences for Britain and the European Union, and the potential for - and consequences of - wider deglobalisation in the world’s politics and economics.

(Q) What do you consider the causes of Brexit to be?

How could it have been avoided?

There are now as many

“What might have made a difference? Above all, not making the mistake of calling the referendum. Some questions are too complicated to be put to the public...

Blame David Cameron, in other words.” explanations for the 52%-48% victory of “Leave” as there are commentators. This reminds me of the debate over the causes of World War I: one event, many theories, and hence an inability to convincingly distinguish between them.

For my part, I continue to subscribe to the conventional view: the victory of Leave reflects the disaffection and anger of individuals left behind by technological progress and globalisation.

The villain of the piece was the British government, which failed to help the losers from globalisation with more education, training, housing and income assistance. So supporters of the Leave campaign blamed establishment politicians, rightly, and immigrants, China and the EU, more dubiously.

What might have made a difference? Above all, not making the mistake of calling the referendum. Some questions are too complicated to be put to the public in a direct referendum and instead should be delegated to elected representatives for informed discussion and decision.

Blame David Cameron, in other words. We similarly have a lot of experience with a nonproductive referendum process in California.

(Q) In an article for Livemint.com you wrote in April, you said that, “the real problem is not the EU—it is the failure of the British political class to provide meaningful help to the casualties of globalisation.” What policies would provide help to significantly address such disadvantage?

As I said above: education,

training, housing support, and income support. But the education and training needed for British workers to compete in a globalised economy take time to impart and more time to produce results, so their effects don’t show up overnight. But neither did the growing income gap in the UK, which was the source of anger on the Leave side, develop overnight. So it’s unavoidable that the problem could take years, even decades, to correct.

Improving the availability of public housing in workingclass areas where there has been competition from immigrants can be done more quickly, by comparison. So can reforms to the tax system, including raising taxes on the top one per cent so as to help fund social programs for the disadvantaged. More generally, my Berkeley economics colleague Emmanuel Saez has shown that tax policy can be a major factor in exacerbating or ameliorating inequality. All this suggests that the economic fixes are well known. The politics, on the other hand, are fraught. But as you know, we have exactly the same debate about policy toward inequality in the United States and exactly the same political obstacles.

Credits: Rutgers Business School

Interviews | 17

the European Union and de-Globalisation (Q) Do you think that the worst is yet to come, or that the economists were wrong? Are there any economic benefits to Britain leaving the European Union (EU)?

I still believe that the worst is yet to come, macroeconomically, for the British economy. Uncertainty about future institutional arrangements (Will the UK be in or out of the single market?

Will there be a customs union with the EU? Will there be trade agreements with other economies? How long will it take?) will persist for an extended period – certainly for more than two years, the period of Article 50 negotiations.

Investors hate uncertainty, so it would appear that the UK is in for an extended slowdown.

How deep and severe will depend on policy. So far, it looks like the Bank of England the Government are prepared to mount a forceful monetary and fiscal response. That, at least, is a source of modest reassurance.

Benefits from Brexit, you ask? In principle, the UK has more freedom to put in place good economic policies, regulatory policies for example.

In practice, of course, that also means that it has more room to put in place bad ones.

“I still believe that the worst is yet to come, macroeconomically, for the British economy.”

(Q) Are there any benefits of Brexit from a European perspective?

From a European perspective, it should now be easier to develop a consensus for moving forward with deeper integration: complementing the single market and monetary integration with fiscal and political integration. Britain has always been opposed to fast movement in that direction, and now Britain’s opposition matters less. But there are also other obstacles, as we know. I’m under no illusions that progress in deepening the European Union will be fast.

“There will be no Eurozone breakup. At the same time, there will be no fast march to banking union, fiscal union and political union, which is what is needed to complete Europe’s common monetary house.”

(Q) Near the end of your impressive book ‘Hall of Mirrors’, you discuss the need for deep reform for the Euro to survive. How far has the EU gone in addressing these concerns?

If these reforms are not taken, should the Euro be voluntarily dismantled to prevent further crises?

The best forecast for the future of the euro, at least in the short run, is more of the same. (This is the “random walk approach” to euro forecasting.) There will be no Eurozone break-up. At the same time, there will be no fast march to banking union, fiscal union and political union, which is what is needed to complete Europe’s common monetary house. There will be no forced march toward deeper integration for the simple reason that the appetite is not there. So Europe’s common monetary house will remain half-built, and as a consequence the Euro Area will continue to underperform in terms of growth. It will continue to stumble along, much as it has. In the long run of course, anything is possible, including political union. But remember what Keynes said about the long run.

(Q) With potentially more protectionist approaches in Britain and the United States under a government committed to Brexit and a Trump Presidency, how much are you concerned that there could be wider de-globalisation? And what could this spell for the world?

The answer depends on what you mean by globalisation.

If you mean international transactions growing even faster than global GDP, then that phase of globalisation is already over. You can see it ending in the data, what with the global trade/GDP ratio having stagnated recently, and cross border capital flows relative to global GDP having fallen somewhat. These trends reflect the end of super-growth in China, a phenomenon that had been driving the rapid growth of international trade and investment, and limits on the further expansion of global supply chains, which had been behind a further rise in the trade/GDP ratio.

On the other hand, if by globalisation you instead mean maintaining the current level of cross-border transactions relative to GDP, more or less, then I think this so is possible.

Globalisation is sustainable in this sense, but only if we better manage its impact and do more to compensate the losers. If you permit me a plug, read my article on this subject in the November issue of Prospect Magazine.

18 | Tuesday 18 October, 2016

Gone Too Soon: In Memory

Adhil was studying at LSE when he passed away suddenly last week.

Taryana Odayar Executive Editor

The Union

T H E M O S T PA I N F U L goodbyes are the ones that are never said and never explained. Adhil Bakeer Markar started his MSc in Comparative Politics at the LSE only a few weeks ago, having been awarded the prestigious Chevening Scholarship. He had a promising career ahead of him, having already qualified as an Attorney-atLaw in Sri Lanka and holding the post of Director of the Sri Lankan National Youth Services Council under the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Policy Planning. As Youth Services Council Director, he was able to reform and revive the structural proceedings of the Council, such as formalizing the ‘foreign pool’ (a pool of young people from the youth club system who have been chosen to represent Sri Lanka in international forums), and ensuring that they had the necessary skills and capacity to be effective youth leaders.

He also represented Sri Lanka as the official Sri Lankan Youth Delegate at the United Nations’ 68th General Assembly.

In his role as UN Youth Delegate, he travelled around the country speaking to young Sri Lankans in order to include their input in the national statement on youth which he delivered at the UN on behalf of the youth in the island. During this time, he was also made a member of the International Youth Task Force which helped organize the World Conference on Youth 2013.

He was also the former President of the Rotaract Club of Colombo North, and the Founder Secretary-General of the Youth Model United Nations in Sri Lanka.

But most importantly, he was my friend.

Whilst I have written my fair share of articles as Editor, this is by far the hardest one I have ever had to write, and I hope and pray I will not have to write another one like this for a very, very, very long time.

The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer said that,

“The deep pain that is felt at the death of every friendly soul arises from the feeling that there is in every individual something which is inexpressible, peculiar to him alone, and is, therefore, absolutely and irretrievably lost.” I could not agree more, and am not ashamed to admit that I had to stop writing this several times because I could not make out the words on my laptop screen through the tears rolling down my cheeks There is a saying that people may forget your achievements once you’re gone, but that they will always remember the way you made them feel. As I have discovered by writing this, words are a blunt and poorly welded instrument for expressing the way a person made you feel. Using mere words to capture the essence of a person’s spirit, is like using a huge, rusty axe to carve out a delicate ice sculpture, or a machete to pick roses.

Adhil, you are my first eulogy, and although I know that words cannot possibly do you justice, or capture your kindness, humility, intelligence, generosity and warm, loving nature, I will do my best.

Whilst the rest of us grow old and grey, and our bodies become bent and wizened with age, you will always be remembered just as you were; young and radiant, and exuding the vigour and inexorable optimism of youth.

The first time I met you, I recognised you immediately because you looked so similar to your brother Fadhil. We went to a coffee shop near campus and had a long conversation about home, LSE and our plans for the future. But we mostly just talked about being homesick; you wanted advice on staving off loneliness after moving to a completely different country, and I told you to join all the clubs and societies you were interested in, to go to all the Postgraduate welcome week events and receptions, and to keep yourself as busy as you could to keep the loneliness at bay. I told you to message me if you ever needed somebody to talk to, as I remembered only too clearly how lonely I had initially felt after moving here from Colombo two years ago, and the helpless feeling of not knowing anyone and being a complete stranger in the busy concrete jungle that is London.

When I mentioned that I was thinking of doing a Masters in the US, you immediately mentioned a friend of yours already studying there and promised to put us in touch so that I could ask him for advice.

Although I only knew you for a short while, even

during this brief time you sought to help me and make my life better in any way you could. So I can only imagine the impact you would have made on your family and friends who knew you longer than I had.

Little did I know that only a few days later, this same friend of yours who was studying in the US would be the one to tell me that you were no more. How cruelly ironic life can be.

“Whilst the rest of us grow old and grey, and our bodies become bent and wizened with age, you will always be remembered just as you were; young and radiant, and exuding the vigour and inexorable optimisim of youth.”

But what struck me the most perhaps was your humility. You mentioned in passing an experience you had in New York “while on a trip there”, without mentioning that the trip had in fact been to deliver an address at the UN as the Sri Lankan Youth Delegate; shyly admitting to this only when I asked you about it directly. However, when I asked you about your plans for the future, you confidently and decidedly said that you wanted to return to Sri Lanka and continue your work as a Lawyer. I remember thinking to myself, God knows we need more people like Adhil in the Sri Lankan judiciary and politics.

I shall always remember the bustle of that coffee shop; full of people ordering their drinks and chatting mindlessly about mundane things. The student seated at the table next to us occasionally looked up from his book and watched us curiously as we we talked, loud and carefree as ever, laughing and cracking jokes as we compared Colombo and London, throwing in a few lively Ceylonisms such as “Aiyo!” and “yes, men” for good measure. I don’t think he got much work done with us there.

When I asked if you would ever work for the UN like your brother Fadhil you scrunched up your face in mock horror, and said “Never!

No way!” We both had a good chuckle after you said that.

Since I knew your brother fairly well, I felt somewhat responsible for you and making sure you were alright. I questioned you rigorously and in true Sri Lankan fashion on your accommodation, meals, and general well-being, even chastising

The Union | 19

of LSE’s Adhil Bakeer Markar This article seeks to honour and pay tribute to his memory.

you for not wearing a jacket.

As we stood up to leave, I gave you a hug, reminded you for the umpteenth time to wear a jacket, jokingly saying, “this isn’t Sri Lanka you know”, and promised to meet you soon for another coffee.

And we did meet again, very briefly bumping into each other on the way to classes a few days later. In that fleeting moment you said that your accommodation had finally been sorted out and you’d be moving into Sidney Webb House. I said that’s great, and told you that we should grab that much talked about coffee once you had settled in to your new place. Never in my wildest dreams did I conceive that that would be the last time I saw you.

For while I was rushing for class, you were rushing to meet death.

I desperately wish I could somehow have known and warned you in advance. I wish that I could have grabbed your arm before we parted ways, told you of your impending fate, and done everything in my power to prevent it. I wish that death had not marked you before your time, not watched over you so jealously and snatched you away in one fell swoop.

The last time I heard from you was the day you moved into your new accommodation at Sidney Webb. Because on Wednesday October 13th, after I had messaged you about something

and gone out for the day, I came back home in the evening to the news that you had already moved on. Once the shock had passed, I racked my brains thinking of ways that I could somehow have helped prevent your passing.

Maybe if I had messaged you on Monday instead of on Wednesday, maybe if I had absolutely insisted on meeting for coffee earlier in the week rather than later, I wondered if that would have made any difference, whether it would have disrupted the sequence of events unfolding unbeknown to us.

But how was I to know you’d be gone so soon? I thought that we had the entire academic year stretched out before us, and that we’d be graduating together at the end of the year, with the rest of our lives after that to forge our friendship. So there was no sense of immediacy, no hurry to meet.

Looking back, I really do think we would have been good friends.

But perhaps in another life.

Nothing is permanent, and nothing is ever certain. If there is anything I have learnt from your passing, it is the impermanence of life and the permanence of death. I have now lost my sense of youthful immortality, as the thought that death could easily have picked me instead of you is never far from my mind. And the sad truth is, that in all likelihood, you will not be the only one to die suddenly, or to die young, or

tragically.

There is an old Irish saying, one version of which goes, “May you never steal, lie or cheat. But if you must steal, may you steal away from bad company, If you lie, may you lie in the arms of the one you love, and if you must cheat, may you cheat death.”

On reflection, I don’t think it is possible to ever cheat death.

Sure, you can trick it, delay it, or sidestep it a few times if you’re lucky, but death cannot be cheated because there is no way to cheat the inevitable. Some of us will meet our maker sooner than others, and that’s all there is to it.

When writing this, I came across a verse by Emily Dickinson which resonated deeply, “If I can stop one heart from breaking, I shall not live in vain; If I can ease one life the aching, Or cool one pain, Or help one fainting robin Unto his nest again, I shall not live in vain.”

Adhil, you certainly did not live in vain. The people whose lives you have touched, no matter whether you were a part of their lives for as long as they could remember or whether you had only recently entered their lives, stands testament to that fact.

And it was not just my life that

“Adhil, while it is a tragedy to have lost you, I am grateful to have known you. It is a misfortune to not have spent as much time with you as I would have liked, but I shall cherish the time we did have together. It is a huge blow to the spirit to have a friend taken away, but what cannot be taken away is the joy of being able to call you my friend.” you touched while you were here.

The LSE Cricket Club recently said that, “The entire club (is) devastated to hear about Adhil: we only knew him for a short while, and yet he was already a popular member of the club. It was immediately obvious that he was passionate about cricket, and determined to make the most out of his time at LSE, as well as life in general. The cricket club

will definitely be a poorer place without him…he flung himself into cricket and university with a visible and contagious enthusiasm, and was already a popular member of our club…

We will be having a minute’s silence at the start of all our events over the next week (now this week) in Adhil’s memory, and will be looking to do whatever we can in honour of a member of our cricketing community, and our friend.”

LSE’s Islamic Society also had a message for you Adhil, “We are deeply saddened to hear that our Brother, Adhil Bakeer Markar has passed away. As a society, we all mourn his loss; he was a breath of fresh air and a very kind hearted man. It is a shock to us that our time with him has been cut short. We send our deepest sympathy to his family and friends.”

Adhil, while it is a tragedy to have lost you, I am grateful to have known you. It is a misfortune to not have spent as much time with you as I would have liked, but I shall cherish the time we did have together. It is a huge blow to the spirit to have a friend taken away, but what cannot be taken away is the joy of being able to call you my friend. I knew you only for what felt like a moment, but I promise I shall remember you for a lifetime. We all miss you, and will miss you, much more than you’ll ever know.

20 | Tuesday 18 October 2016

FILM

14

Review: Legend Tom Sayner

THE KRAY TWINS. London legends. Two East End boys who grew a crime empire that stretched from working class Bethnal Green to the glitzy West End. Somehow these brutal brothers have attained a place in the national consciousness and an almost fond reputation.

Yet this 2015 film fails to do these characters’ justice or to distinguish itself from the two traditions it attempts to emulate; the gritty British crime drama and the American gangster biopic.

Positives first. Tom Hardy was a wise casting decision bringing the muscular intensity that has won him something of a cult following. He reflects the charming yet callous nature of Reggie with his trademark full throttle aggression. His portrayal of mentally ill Ronnie is more problematic. Played with bulging eyes and a weird lisp Ronnie verges on caricature, a pantomime cockney villain. The action scenes, which is what I expect many of the film’s viewers came for, are well choreographed, intense but with touches of black humour.

Yet in all other areas of the film director Brian Hegeland struggles to articulate a vision for the film. The dialogue is clichéd and the film under utilises cinematic silences. Indeed, the film’s predilection to describing is one of its weakest points. The narration by Reggie’s wife (Emily Blunt) is forced and filled with banal statements.

Other small aspects of the movie point to a lack of subtlety in the filmmaking. One scene in the Kray’s nightclub uses a song which had not even been written when the scene supposedly occurred. The period detail is oddly inauthentic while the cinematography is uninventive. The lighting of the film is bright lending scenes a specious quality and fails to reflect the dark, brooding nature of gangsterism.

At points the film seems to be aiming at a British crime thriller in the vein of Guy Ritchie’s Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. It has eccentric characters, dark humour and cartoonish, brutal violence. Yet the tone will abruptly change and solemn narration heralds a change into standard Hollywood fare with a love interest becoming the plot focus. At points Hegeland is quite clearly trying to emulate the work of Scorcese, the master of the gangster flick. In one scene the film attempts to replicate the famous Copacabana tracking shot of Goodfellas. Yet all the frantic energy, precision and character development that the famous shot incorporated is absent in the Legend interpretation. Instead stale dialogue and rather obvious camerawork create a deficient replica.

In its desire to be many things at once Legend fails to distinguish itself. It has its moments but ultimately it fails to do justice to a fascinating period and a potentially thrilling story. Perhaps with a stronger directorial vision, more ambitious screenwriting and cinematography the story of the Kray’s will receive the portrayal it deserves.

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21

FOOD

Treat Yourself at German Gymnasium Caroline Schuman Grenier There is something so exciting about going out for dinner on a weekday. It just feels that much more special when it’s not on the weekend. Don’t buy coffee for a week, pack your lunch and you save 20 pounds. Why on earth would you do that?

Because once in a while, you need a break from life. Goodbye journals articles and problem sets. So long sleepless nights trying to get that reading done for your 9 am class. Tonight, you’re treating yourself.

German Gymnasium is a weird name, but the places with weird names tend to be the best places to eat (am I right or am I right?). Sadly, it has a terrible location.

Granted, it’s central being only steps away from King’s Cross. It’s easy for everyone to get to but you don’t walk out with that whole “London is so beautiful” vibe.

Do not let that affect your decision to try it out. The moment you walk inside you realize that picking a mediocre location has no effect on the interior aesthetics of the place. This restaurant is gorgeous. It buzzes with eager foodies and has friendly staff ready to enhance the culinary experience of the evening. Although there are a few vegetarian options, it may not be the ideal choice for your vegan friend. This place does German food properly. Sausages, schnitzels, strudels and sauerkraut….German Gymnasium has it all. It’s the kind of place where the menu is so big that you want to come back to try it all. I don’t know if I like that, to be honest. Overwhelmingly massive menus may indicate that the restaurant doesn’t actually value quality because there is too much choice. Here, such is not the case. They don’t use overly fancy words either. Some words are in German, which is normal, but I personally hate it when I feel like I need a dictionary to order my meal.

From the schnitzel to the tartar, the savory dishes all burst with flavor and look quite appealing. The portions are big thankfully; when you pay for soup and it comes in a teacup, I am anything but impressed. Second shout out to the steak tartar: whatever they put in there, it was the ideal combination of spices without being too overpowering. The sea bass was delicious although it’s not their specialty. Served with aubergine caviar, it makes you feel like royalty because there is “caviar” on your plate.

As fantastic as the meals are, the desserts lack wow factor taste wise. Don’t get me wrong, they LOOK incredible and taste good, but they’re not amazing. This is by no means a reason to skip out on dinner here, just means you can save yourself a couple of pounds after dinner.

German Gymnasium is slightly too pricey to go on the regular but even students deserve a treat once in a while!

Find them here: King's Blvd, London N1C 4BU

Drive is a fantastically versatile

2214| Tuesday 18 October 2016

Urban Albums Drive is a fantastically versatile film, bridging many apparently contradictory genres and allowing viewinmoods. Nicolas Winding Refn’s 2011 film contains elements of a neo-noir crime thriller, an Benjamin Thomas IN THE PAST FEW YEARS, there have been a series of hip-hop - and related - albums about life in the Los Angeles area. In various works such as YG’s My Krazy Life, Miguel’s Wildheart, Vince Staples’s Summertime ‘06, musicians have been talking about the areas they grew up in and the impact on them as artists and people, how they were shaped by their community socially and physically. The most critically acclaimed of these works is good kid, m.A.A.d. city by Kendrick Lamar. The album was hailed for its composition of hard beats and lyrical content as well as the narrative it told of a young man trying to find success amid gangs, crime, and violence. During Black History Month, it is valuable to listen to these albums and the songs within them as powerful voices from young black men in inner-city America, reflecting at once the crime and struggle in their lives as well as trying to understand these experiences from the perspective of success.

Accompanying Kendrick Lamar’s album, filmmaker Khalil Joseph created the short film m.A.A.d. which is now being exhibited at The Infinite Mix exhibition on Aldwych. The film, which stitches together contemporary footage of Compton, California with old home videos from Kendrick’s life set to the backing of snippets from the album, fleshes out the songs by giving visual aid to the viewer on the backgrounds to songs. From Centennial High School, to Rosencrans Ave, to Kendrick’s uncle, these images and settings help contextualise the songs and help the viewer better understand the life that Kendrick and many other lived and do live. Streets are shot as from a news helicopter following a police chase, parties are broken up by gun fire, men wield firearms proudly before children, youths try to find ways to cope through music, substances, and space. The images match the songs they influence, or reference songs they do not make the final cut of the video.

Watching the dual-screen installation in a dark room is enrapturing, forcing the viewer to actively switch between screens and watch the interplay of the varying images. Joseph seems to linger on people and ask the viewer to understand their perspective and their Compton just as they understand Kendrick’s. There is a powerful shot of a woman looking forward as Lamar raps about life as a prostitute with the bars “what point are you trying to gain / If you can’t fit the pumps I walk in?”. The album and the installation are at once deeply personal stories of particular peoples but also generalizable experiences for a community. The video is not a music video or a fluff piece on Kendrick it is able to exist at once as a self-contained piece of art but also as accompaniment to another. Compton in m.A.A.d. is just as vibrant and lively as it is violent and dangerous, and the film allows those who watch to better understand life in south-central L.A. even if they are a student in London.

T he Infinite Mix: Contemporary Sound and Image exhibition is on until December 4th at T he Store, 180 T he Strand, entrance is free.

art house production, an 80’s romance and a gory B

MUSIC

NIGHTLIFE

23

London’s Wankiest Night Out Ellie Peake It’s pretty hard to cock up a cocktail, I mean for fuck sake Bloody Marys are a thing.

But alas, gentrification hasn't just killed London’s soul, it’s also killed it’s upmarket nightlife. They’ve aristocrized our cocktail, those bastards.

Indeed, who ‘they’ is we may never know. In some ways, it may even be us. But on this specific occasion, it was in a coffee shop in Angel where I was truly able to look into the all seeing eye of the establishment.

It was a night that began like any other in North London.

A group of students entered a bar and were greeted by bartenders with welcoming smiles and witty rapport. We were informed that we would be receiving a few rounds of cocktails personalised to fit their perceptions of us.

Looking back, this was surely the first warning sign of things to come but undeterred we welcomed their advances and found ourselves faced with a lemocello and spicy chorizo sausage drink. What truly gave it that edge was that it came with those Chemistry pipettes from school so we could drip in our own sausage oil.

The drink itself was nice enough. But what was more pressing was what the drink was trying to tell us about ourselves. Looking into the drink I was able to see a side of myself that I had not previously seen. The european flavours sorely reminded me of those post-Brexit moments where all had been lost but so much nearly won. This bitter reminder of loss was countered balanced cleverly with the use of the pipettes. The imagery of the school utensils harked back to better days of innocence when the European Union wasn't just a reality, it was a friend.

Then, like a dream that only ends when you die at the end, they brought out the final cocktail. It was a tray full of dead leaves and sticks with a small cup that had a big fucking stone in the middle. A few questions immediately sprung to mind. Where did they get these leaves from? Did they buy them? If so how much do dead leaves cost? Who collects these dead leaves? Are they imported? Is there a worker somewhere in Columbia being underpaid to collect dead leaves for this very specific flavour of wanky bullshit? When asking the bartender these invasive questions he replied hahahaha we sourced them from the ground obviously! Well hahahahaha mr cocktail man! hahaha!

Then, the finale. Like some sort of 3-part greek tragedy, he set fire to all the dead leaves on the tray to complete ‘the experience for all the senses’. As the aroma of over-priced, over-thought London wankiness filled the air, the question of whether this can really be justified also lingered.

Wanky cocktails aren’t just wanky, they are symbolic of a wider epidemic to sour London’s nightlife. Me and my friends chose to spend £10 on a cocktail so that we could have a great Gram and feel that bit better about our cosmopolitan selves. In reality, it’s exclusionary and shallow and results in the hubs of London night life being replaced by skeleton-culture.

While the overpriced night probably has its place in London somewhere, the moment when it becomes the go-to Friday night for students is when we will have all truly fucked over London.

Thus in essence; Cocktails 6/10, Good for the country 2/10.

24 | Tuesday 18 October 2016 14

ORIGINAL

Shh Suppression at Work Vandita Dhariyal Some questions don’t have answers Maybe it’s because they were asked by the wrong mouth Or maybe because they were asked in the first place If silence was so appreciated, why then must one Open their minds, endeavour to decipher variables Inculcate sensitivity, and indulge in liberal thoughts If radical mind set is what is sought after Then what is the difference between me And that frog who believes that the well is the world Truth exists behind the veils of ignorance And subjectivity, it lies in the boundaries of others Where one must tread like an abandoned thief.

FOOD

14

25

Drive is a fantastically versatile film, bridging many apparently contradictory genres and allowing viewinmoods. Nicolas Winding Refn’s 2011 film contains elements of a neonoir crime thriller, an art house production, an 80’s romance and a gory B Some questions don’t have answers Maybe it’s because they were asked by Fiona Koch the wrong mouth Or maybe because Kicking off Michaelmas term with a classic, this grilled cheese recipe ticks all the boxes: it’s easy, cheap and they were asked in comforting. The side salad adds freshness and colour, while balancing out your meal with a zingy dose of healthy the first place

The Starving Student Next-Level Grilled Cheese Sandwich & Watercress Salad with Radish

greens.

If

The magic ingredient here is butter, which gives the bread its golden crust. I like to use sourdough bread, as it' takes on a nice crunch when grilled, but supermarket toast bread works well too.

INGREDIENTS : Grilled Cheese: Two slices of bread (sourdough or regular toast bread) Enough slivers of cheddar cheese to cover one slice of bread About half a matchbox-sized chunk of salted butter

If af-

Watercress & Radish Salad: Bag of watercress (spinach or rocket will do) Four small radishes Extra virgin olive oil White wine vinegar Mustard Salt & pepper of

METHOD : Cover the slices of bread in a thin coat of butter on both sides Slice the cheddar cheese into thin slivers, and sandwich them between both slices of bread Put a skillet on medium heat and add a small pat of butter Once the butter has melted, but before it starts bubbling, turn the heat to high and lay the sandwich in the pan Cook the sandwich for 5min on one side before flipping onto the other side Flip as many times as necessary until the crust is golden-brown and the cheese is gooey Mix olive oil, vinegar, mustard, salt and pepper in a small bowl Toss salad and chopped radishes in a bowl with the mixture.

silence preciated, must one Open their endeavour variables Inculcate ity, and liberal

was so apwhy then

radical what is ter Then what difference me And that believes well is the

mind set is sought

Truth exthe veils of And sublies in the others Where one like an thief

ists behind ignorance jectivity, it boundaries

minds, to decipher sensitivindulge in thoughts

is the between frog who that the world

must tread abandoned

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Following our appointment of Angelina Jolie as Visiting Professor, we are pleased to announce that the following Celebrities Academics have also joined our prestigious institution!!!

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AND MUCH MORE

288 | Tuesday 18 October, 2016

An Uber Strategy Uber have recently pulled out of China after spending billions on subsidies for their drivers - but this is no defeat for the firm Ramone Bedi

The City

Section Editor: Deputy City Editor Alex Gray Deputy Editor: COMPANIES THAT PIONEER Ramone Bedi revolutionary technological eras

have not always managed to stay on top: Nokia and BlackBerry fall into the mobile smartphone category, Kodak is the digital camera epitome and MySpace is the perfect social media paradigm. All these companies fell behind when it came to innovation: Uber must not do the same!

The world’s most valuable startup has always taken the Amazon-like approach of focussing on growth over profits.

It has spent billions of dollars attempting to enter new markets, mostly by offering subsidies to drivers and riders. This has been necessary to overcome the only real barrier to entry in the ride-hailing service industry: the need for a significant market share. Both drivers and riders want regular rides, hence a significant market share is required to ensure that demand is satisfied. The approach has been extremely successful. Since the founding of Uber in March 2009, the company have risen to a valuation of $70 billion.

However, contrary to its usual spend-like-money-grows-

Credit: Wikipedia Commons

on-a-tree approach, Uber has recently decided to cut its spending in China, abandoning its Chinese project. Uber was late to join the Chinese market, and, as a result, has had to compete with Didi Chuxing, China’s local ride-hailing service. Competing was never easy: Uber only had around 8% of the market share (compared to Didi’s 85%) and, in order to achieve these poor results, Uber had to spend $2 billion a year. Giving out sub-

“The world’s most valuable startup has taken the Amazonlike approach of focusing on growth over profits” sidies to drivers and free rides to passengers simply was not working; of course, because Didi was doing the same. Something had to change!

Merging with Didi was the best policy option available to Uber. On the face of it, it simply appears that Uber surrendered in battle, in order to save the

scarce resources that they had left. However, the deal is not that simple. Wounding Didi for over two years ensured that Uber had a very strong negotiating position, which they used to receive a 17.7% stake in, and a $1 billion investment from, Didi. All that money spent over the years in China did not go to waste.

Perhaps more importantly, the merger placed Uber and Didi on the same team. This looked extremely unlikely earlier this year when Didi chose to work with, and invest $100 million in, Uber’s US competitors, Lyft.

This partnership meant that when Didi’s Chinese customers were travelling in the US, they could summon a car through Lyft’s app, and vice-versa for Lyft’s customers in China. Lyft have not decided how to proceed following the merger between Uber and Didi. The Lyft spokeswoman Alexandra LaManna has simply said, “Over the next few weeks, we will evaluate our partnership with them [Didi]”.

Having said that, while it is not known how the Didi-Lyft relationship will progress from here, it is unlikely to be positive. After all, the Uber-Didi deal dwarfs the Didi-Lyft deal.

Moreover, Uber can now

focus elsewhere. In addition to having to pay legal fees for its regulatory issues in a plethora of jurisdictions, Uber is still financing its India ambition. Competition for the market with the local incumbent Ola is fierce but Uber believes it can do what it failed to do in China, and become the largest company in the market. The potential gains in India are colossal, as car ownership is very low.

Having said that, control over the global market alone will not

“control over the global market along will not be enough for Uber to survive in the long term” be enough for Uber to survive in the long term. The real opportunity for Uber, which will determine whether Uber becomes a company larger than Google or the next Myspace, is dominating the ride-hailing market after the emergence of driverless cars. Uber’s ultimate aim is to be the company dominating the global personnel mobility market, which will entail people hailing rides from driverless cars multiple times a day. This task is a cosmic one: many stars, including Apple and Google, have recognised the potential of this market and have begun innovating. With greater resources, these companies may have an edge in the market. Uber, however, will be hoping that the fact that it is established in the ridehailing market is enough to keep its customers. Achieving this aim may require capital - and thus force Uber to go public – but it is certainly worth it. Adam Jones, from Morgan Stanley, has valued the global personal mobility market at $10 trillion.

Uber is currently the company to beat in the race to transform the future of transport.

Unlike Apple or Google, it is focused on transport and does not have to finance a plethora of other projects. Its decision to make peace with Didi has removed a major problem and enabled it to devote its armoury to developing new technology.

Its success in this war will determine its future: it could reach a promised land that others firms can only dream of. On the other hand, it could end up like Hoover, lending its name to a revolutionary product without actually dominating the market.

The City |29

Theresea May’s Treasury?

There has been a historic change at the heart of government - Theresea May seems to have ended a decades old entente between Numbers 10 and 11 on Downing Street Alex Gray City Editor THE IMPACTS OF BREXIT on the economy have not begun to be properly felt - we haven’t even left the EU yet, but something has become clear; there is a changing dynamic inside the Government. Not since preThatcher days have we had such a disconnect between the Treasury and Number 10. In the shifting context of Brexit, this will surely come to blight the economy for years to come.

However, we must recognise that those who call the Chancellor to arms risk a return to the old unaccountable days of UK government.

The vote to leave the EU has dominated the headlines in the UK, and around the world. It exposed interesting chasms that divide groups across the country. Chief among these are the divides between the old and young, the rich and the poor, between London and the rest of the England, and between England and Scotland. It seems sensible to group these in two broad camps - between those who have been “left behind” who have little hope in the existing institutional structures of the UK, and those who have broadly done well from the existing struc-

Flickr, Ed Evertt

tures. When viewed through this prism, we can explain much of the hermeneutics offered of the Brexit vote. It also helps to explain why there exist so many other predictors of which way one would vote - belief in the death penalty (Leaver), reading the Guardian/FT (Remainer), having degree level education (Remainer) etc..

“not since the days of Thatcher have we had such a disconnect between the Treasury and Number 10” Whilst we have not yet left, this nonetheless been a tumultuous time in the UK’s economy and on the political scene, but all we are seeing now is the impact of the uncertainty as a result of the vote. There is little doubt among academic economists, and business leaders that the impact of Brexit on the UK economy will not be a positive one. It is worth noting that these are also many of the same figures who campaigned for a Remain vote, but it is also worth noting that many of these academics are among the best in

their respective fields (including several LSE economists).

One area where just the vote has had already had a real impact is in Westminster and Whitehall. The British Civil Service has had to cope with some serious changes: there are two new departments - one for exiting the EU (DExEU) and one for International Trade (DTI) plus some chopping and splicing up of other departments - namely the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (DBIS) and the Department for Energy and Climate Change (DECC). Whilst the implications of this are more likely to concern civil servants and the people of the United Kingdom, these changes do have far more wider reaching implications for the Government.

The so called “three Brexiteers - the heads of DExEU, DTI (both newly created) and the Foreign Commonwealth Office (FCO) appear to be the prime movers of the Government’s policy. These newly created ministries are there to help us navigate the process of Brexit, the question seems to be where this leaves the role of HM Treasury, a department that predates the magna carta by at least 150 years. It represents a historic shift in power across Whitehall, but appears

largely to have gone unnoticed.

The Treasury has historically been intertwined with the Cabinet Office, and the workings of Government in Whitehall. Blair and Brown were a famous two man team at the head of government, often bypassing the other departments and even Cabinet itself. This trend was

“the question seems to be where this leaves the role of HM Treasury, a department that predates the magna carta by at least 150 years ” continued with the Cameron/ Osborne relationship, where the Chancellor was widely seen as Cameron’s chief strategist at the heart Downing Street. Over the past two decades, this has led to a low regulation, financial services focused and flexible economy, whilst also leading to some incredible oversights. This was one of the major findings of the Chilcot Inquiry, released over the summer.

This was all interesting, but not desperately relevant, stuff

until the Conservative party’s recent conference. This was when we realised just how far to the right May’s Government is on Brexit. The worry about the influence of Number 11 grows as the rhetoric on Brexit becomes crystallizes. Although the Government has since climbed down somewhat from some of the positions laid out at Conference, there are some truly worrying signs on the economy, as reflected by the further crash in sterling. Positions on international students, concerns about foreign workers, and on the single market have contributed to this perception of a severe hardening in the Government’s position.

Increasingly it looks as though the aforementioned sworn Brexiteers are taking over the exit process. In lieu of any parliamentary process for holding the Government to account, as debated last week, this makes the role of the Chancellor of the Exchequer even more important. As he remarked at Conference, ‘nobody voted for Brexit to make the UK poorer’. He appears to be the lone voice inside Government taking up the mantle of Brexit for UK businesses. Whatever your stance on the way the economy has changed over the past 20 years, this change of power dynamics within the Downing Street is sure to reduce the influence of Britain’s businesses.

The question Remains [sic.] to be seen if this power shift will have broader implications, beyond a Brexit era. It has often been remarked recently that having a bipartite system, albeit informally, between numbers 10 and 11 on Downing Street gave previous governments a good direction, and a sense of leadership. It seems difficult, however, to not view this as simply a complaint about the direction of Brexit. As reasonable as this criticism is, for all the economic impacts set out above, it is surely not valid because the is a centre of power has broadened. I want the Chancellor to take a larger role in the Cabinet, but that is not because this is a better form of Government.

Businesses will always want a more liberal framework, and to that end will always want a stronger Chancellor. This would work well in softening the deleterious effects of Brexit, but in the long run will mean that we relapse into the unaccountable days where Cabinet, and therefore the British people, are overlooked and overruled.

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|Tuesday 18 October, 2016

‘Fancy Bear’ Hack Sparks Debate about TUEs Benjamin Thomas Undergraduate Student IN SEPTEMBER, HACKERS associated with the Russian government who have identified themselves as the ‘Fancy Bear’ hacking group, leaked files from top athletes relating to their Therapeutic Use Exemptions (TUEs). These forms allow an athlete to take a drug that would otherwise be banned, often as performance-enhancing, to deal with a medical issue. Although there have been reports that some of the leaked documents may be doctored, the accuracy of many has been confirmed.

It is important to note why these documents have been leaked and whether they do in fact challenge our perceptions of fair sport. The running narrative in the media has presented the leak as revenge for the banning of certain Russian athletes and teams from competing in the Olympics after evidence emerged of widespread statesponsored doping and evasion of testing. In revenge, the TUE leak is considered a means to embarrass the UK and USA as well as other western countries that pushed for the bans.

Regardless of the origin of the documents, their veracity does in fact point to a concerning use of the TUE system by certain countries and athletes that borders on abuse of the system. Many top athletes, from

Serena Williams to Simone Biles to Sir Bradley Wiggins to Rafael Nadal to Mo Farah all have received these exemptions and as such taken otherwise banned substances. While TUEs have a valid use in the system, for emergency treatment of athletes or those dealing with long term medical problems, the use by elite athletes only once they have already reached that level seems concerning. Many of the athletes named use steroids for the treatment of asthma. While one would not wish to prevent someone struggling with asthma

“Many top athletes, from Serena Williams to Simone Biles to Sir Bradley Wiggins to Rafael Nadal to Mo Farah all have received these exemptions and as such taken otherwise banned substances.”

from using an inhaler, one may yet find it problematic. Some of these prescriptions are given only briefly in a career in peak season, when the side-effects of ‘treatment’ namely performance enhancement would be most beneficial. Furthermore the incidence levels of these TUEs seem problematic as one wonders why such high percentages of athletes can reach the elite level if they struggle with asthma but also why some rarely need any treatment.

These TUE issues are not the only dodgy approaches used by elite athletes to comply with the letter of the rules but potentially not their spirit. Supplement use and high-technology training systems closely mirror the effects of banned substances but are not banned

by WADA. One can question what important distinction is used in determining a banned substance from a performance enhancing legal substance. One can artificially enhance the oxygen content in their blood

through a hyperbaric chamber, take substances that promote muscle growth and recovery, and use custom equipment that gives one athlete/team and edge and yet still be considered safe sport. On the other hand, an American sprinter was banned despite the court finding he was simply using a male enhancer for private use. What demarcates one from the other? The big Russia scandal included abuse of the then-legal drug meldonium, which was legal despite evidence of performance enhancement.

At a certain point this discussion reverts to two classic questions about sport and enhancement and sport and athletes. Firstly, what comprises a fair competition? Sport is meant to be contested among athletes with similar aids and based on their use of cunning and physical capability. At what point do the aids of training, equipment, and ‘nutrition’ become sufficiently unequal that the game is unfair. Some athletes have naturally more

efficient capacities, should less gifted athletes be allowed to pursue physical parity?

Continuing from this point, which athletes should be capable of participating in elite sport? As an elite competition, only the best athletes in the world are expected to take part in the Olympics. Is it fair to consider these TUEs and conclude that athletes who cannot train or compete without the aid of performance enhance drugs not be able to compete at that level? Should those with asthma, ADHD, etc. be turned away or allowed to compete with those who do not take their drugs? These questions are fundamental to sport, just as much as amateurism and payment. We should continue to consider them seriously and whether our answers require reform of the current system.

Drug cheats ruin sport, whether Russian, British, or American, finding a way to protect the virtues we value is needed.

Beaver Domination : LSE Women’s Football Club Laura Chitty Women’s Football Club Captain WOMEN’S FOOTBALL CLUB (WFC) have had pretty much the strongest start to the season possible. From an 8-1 victory against Royal Holloway, to 3-0 against Canterbury Christ Church, a strong social game off the pitch and a turnout of 54 girls for the first training session on a 5 a-side pitch (no typo, the pitch is that small). The ‘friendly’ against Royal Holloway wasn’t so friendly for our coach Alex, an ex Holloway Employee, and the nerves were clear as we made our way there. We had heard rumours of new players from Queens Park Rangers Ladies and a stronger team than last season. But the team started off strong, and were 3-0 up within 10 minutes. New general course student Karly Grof put in some blistering runs and left defenders standing confused.

Kelly Dougherty dominated the wings, and further terrified defenders with the strength of her corners.

In the midfield, Alessia Giombini moved the ball around effortlessly, and connected well to Karly,

even scoring herself just for fun.

By the final whistle, LSE were on 8, and Royal Holloway trailing with 1. To celebrate this success, WFC further impressed at the welcome social by sporting an inventive pineapple outfit (pineapple under the sea…get it?).

The club popularity continues to grow, and training turnout is high, leading to us securing our sponsor, Coram’s Fields, a local community youth group and unique seven acre playground for children living in central London. Our first league game also ended in celebration after a trek to Kent to play Canterbury Christ Church University - the team were possibly motivated by the promise of chicken nuggets for the bus home.

Eponine, the Belgian Beast, continued to amaze defenders and netted the ball 3 times in the first half. Debbie Cohen worked tirelessly in the middle alongside Leigh Rowland to control their stronger players, making life easy for our defenders to keep a clean sheet for the first league match.

We hope this success will continue as we take on Buckingham University on Wednesday!

Sport | 31

Half Marathon Success for Running Team

George Bettsworth LSE Running Team Captain AT THE END OF WEEK 0, the LSE Running team embarked on early season glory. Six athletes travelled up to Milton Keynes to take on the challenge of running the NSPCC Charity Half Marathon. The racing conditions were almost perfect and the anticipation of success loomed. Indeed, the team, particularly Joe Meegan, were after the coveted Community Challenge Prize. With this prize in mind, Joe, along with Antonin Boissin and PierreLouis Lostis, went off fast at the start of the race. They zipped out of the Stantonbury Campus, where the race began, into the

many parks and underpasses which seem to make up Milton Keynes. The route was made of a two laps, the first slightly shorter (around 10K) than the second (around 11K), with one major hill (the ‘Beacon’ as it’s known locally) on each lap.

And so, the race continued and at the half way mark the six LSE athletes remained strong and confident as they glided through Linford Wood to begin their second lap. The first three remained Pierre-Louis, Antonin and Joe. Not far behind them was Rob Funnell, who was attempting to add another halfmarathon to his already quite full distance-running resume.

However, he was soldiering through some knee pain.

Following him were Andy Cowan, an LSE lawyer and Saucy-enthusiast, and Lio Ando, a second year undergraduate who was attempting the half marathon for the first time.

It was not long before the fastest runners began to finish.

The winner ran a blistering 74:10 and was out of sight.

However, Pierre-Louis did his best to stay in touch, running 83:08 for the half marathon and finishing in 7th place overall.

In the typical style of LSE team performances at distance competitions, Antonin came in shortly behind Pierre-Louis in 87:57 in 19th place. Joe missed out narrowly on a sub 90-minute half on this occasion, running 90:02 but, along with

DAWN RISES over Leicester Square but a shadow that has descended upon a decadent Zoo bar endures. The Zoosfolk of the LSE AU wander aimlessly and aghast in the desolate wasteland, crippled by a Wednesday night so rife with treachery that it would have brought even Brutus himself to wince. In their hour of darkness, the people need to be shown the light; the perpetrators of such scandalous decadence need to be exposed.

And so the Zoosfolk throw their voices to the heavens and

cry: “O Beverage Reporter, Great Disseminator of Secrets, please lendeth a proverbial machete to this faithless thicket of backstabbing and betrayal!” And now I say unto you, fear not, men and women of the AU, for the Beverage Reporter has answered your call.

We begin in men’s rugby, infamous for it’s moral decrepitude, where a prominent clubman found himself caught at the centre of a love triangle following his foray after a woman only recentLee single. However, her subsequent actions in Deeceinvitin him from her house party seems to Sueggest that she’s still missing McCann (no, not THAT missing McCann).

It was a Schtef in the right direction at Leest for one wholesome fresher, who

managed to bury his Knuts without stepping on any toes, but another clubman was faced with a real Connorndrum and had to Tinker-bout whether or not to revisit a former flame; eventually he Tild-her that he’d be capering elsewhere that night.

Such deviancy was mirrored in the FC, where one gentleman Coombedn’t believe his luck when he was picked up by a flashy Benz, but once he was inside he found the Zechnology was dated. He’ll also be hoping the Gallagher sisters Don’t Look Back in Anger or his Masterplan will soon start to unravel, Little by Little.

Back at Zoo, the hostility soon spilled out on the streets, when a Dear young fellow turned blind with Donaghatred and raged at the scenes around

“They zipped out of the Stantonbury Campus, where the race began, into the many parks and underpasses which seem to make up Milton Keynes.”

him. Next door, a veterinarian complained of being subject to a Tarrant of verbal abuse and although the cul-pet managed to dog-dge a catastrophe by fleeing the scene, authorities are still on the lookout for anyone who seems a little horse.

And now, as the light finally begins to creep into the cracks in our broken society, and as Mother Zoo sits back, rubs her hands together and admires her deplorable work in orchestrating our plummet from grace into wasteful decrepitude, one shattered man rises from the ruination, blinks in the daylight, and embarks on his lonely Cezst to spread word of our atrocities in the reddoor districts of London.

quick times from Rob, Andy and Lio, the Community Challenge Prize was secured. Thus, the LSE team were victorious and Pierre-Louis, the nominated team leader for the day, summed up the race as “very nice” in his usual relaxed, care-free, attitude. With all six back in under two hours and everyone fed and watered, the trip to the “New City”, as it was once known, was over. Now, the team looks onwards to a very packed season full of cross country, road and indoor-track competitions.

This all starts with the London Colleges League meet on October 19th at Parliament Hill where the team hopes to beat the likes of King’s, UCL and Imperial, among others.

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32

Mud, Sweat and Fells....

Bobby Gard-Storry Undergraduate Student

Sport

Section Editor: Vacant MEDITATION

IS NOT A sport - on that I think we can all agree. But sport can be a meditation.

The right kind of ‘sport’, anyway.

I’m not a member of the LSE Running Club (exemplary outfit though I’m sure they are). In fact, despite running for an hour or more most days when I’m at home in the north, I don’t run at all in London. Not that I haven’t tried. I brought my shoes eagerly with me in first year, keen to keep in shape, but the activity I endured for a few confused days in the mean streets of the big smoke was unrecognisable from the one I do - and love - in Cumbria. I rapidly put the shoes back in the cupboard, where they sat miserably for a year before being taken home. They’ve remained in their natural habitat ever since; muddy and smelly through constant non term-time use, never to see another city pavement.

Over the last few decades, going for a run has become a hugely popular thing to do.

The fact that such a simple and accessible way of keeping fit should become ‘the done thing’ is no bad development, to be sure. But in amongst the clamorous shoe marketing and 10km road-race ads, my kind of running is usually lost.

I don’t run on roads, or circular

tracks. Back where I’m from, ‘Fell’ running is the tradition (and a long-standing one at that, with organised races dating back to the 1800’s). A few hundred runners (or a few dozen, for the smaller events) gather in a soggy field on an often equally soggy day, and shiver uncomplainingly in their vests until somebody fires the starter and they leg it up the fell (Cumbrian for ‘mountain’). The races are usually short in horizontal distance, but exceptionally gruelling in vertical terms. Not ‘up and down’ vertical in the ‘rolling green fields’ sense of home counties cross-country, you understand, but in the ‘1000m of ascent and the same straight back down’ sense. It’s burning on the climb, and knee-shattering on the way down, but wildly fun.

When I race, that’s how I like to race. But I don’t enter many, or very often. The competitive side of me enjoys the dash, but there’s no confusion in my mind that the organised events are merely a sideshow to my main pursuit, which is simply running a long way in the forests or on the fells, alone. Not just alone meaning without a running partner, but alone meaning that all other humans are out of sight, and out of mind. That’s something almost completely impossible in London.

I head out the door with nothing but my clothes and my wits, and I keep moving for a while. Often

quite a long while. The woods around my home offer narrow trails and forest tracks to explore, the fells offer mossy slopes and craggy peaks, and the lakes and tarns a place to go for a freezing cold swim on those rare hot summer days.

I let my mind wonder as I run, until the cacophony of busy everyday thoughts drains away, to be left with nothing but the sound of my breathing, my feet falling on the ground, birds, streams, the rain, the wind…

Running needn’t be a chore; something to be tolerated for the aim of cutting weight or increasing stamina. It needn’t be a competition; something to be

done for the T-shirt and the medal.

Those things are extras, not the main feature. To run alone, away from people, and away from the urban environment that people create, is to have a simple, clear experience of the world. Often, you find yourself appreciating - without having to really put your mind to it - a renewed perspective on the transience of your everyday worries, and how the wider world is unfazed by them.

So, if you run, the next time you go, go without your iPod. Go to the remotest place you can. Spend time just listening as you move, not worrying, not even thinking - simply being in the present: meditating.