The Oxford Student - Week 3 Hilary 2023

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O XFORD S TUDENT The

The University of Oxford’s Student Newspaper, Est. 1991

Influential positions across Oxford University’s student life are still held disproportionately by students educated at private schools, OxStu can reveal

According to the most recent data made available by Oxford, 70% of all offers made to students studying in the UK went to state school applicants. Yet, a disproportionately high percentage of elected roles within student politics were held by students educated in the private sector.

The disparity is most obvious at the Oxford Union, where 77% of elected officials on the governing body – specifically the President, officers, officers-elect and elected members of Standing Committee – were privately educated. Of these 13 senior roles just two are held by former state comprehensive pupils.

Exclusive Investigation: how the private school elite still dominate Oxford’s student life

Anvee Bhutani

Student party politics, by contrast, has a massive difference depending on the party and reflects wider societal conceptions about party membership.

For the most senior positions of the Oxford University Conservative Association, 69% of the committee members attended private fee paying schools. The data for the Oxford University Liberal Democrats was largely inconclusive as a result of most committee positions being vacant.

An Oxford student has been jailed for four and a half years after stealing over £2 million in a cryptocurrency scam.

Wybo Wiersma, a PhD student from Goredijk in the Netherlands, was studying at the Internet Institute of St Cross College when he set up a website, iotaseed.io, under a false name. The website generated

Read more on page 3

Within college politics the private school students make up less than half of positions but still a disproportionate amount, 40% of JCR Presidents attended a fee paying school. Similarly, there is a 2/3:1/3 split between state and private across the senior editorial teams of Cherwell, The Oxford

Oxford student jailed over cryptocurrency scam

Gabrielle Thompson News Editor

‘seeds’, passwords made of what users believed to be entirely randomised strings of 81 characters. The seeds are necessary to use Iota, a type of cryptocurrency, and Julian Christopher KC told the court “Anyone who knows the seed can access, and so can transfer and trade the Iota crypto”.

Read more on page 4

Oxford University Labour Club’s elected executive positions by contrast are dominated by state comprehensive and grammar school educated students. Just one of 12 of the top club-wide elected positions is held by someone from a private school, putting the state school proportion at 92% which is in line with the 93% national average of state school students nationally.

Oxford’s chapter of the national 93% Club which is the UK’s largest network for state school students told OxStu, “The reason there seems to be Read more on page 4

“

“Why did you commit these offences? Greed and dishonesty are the two words that readily come to mind.

- Judge Michael Gledhill KC

Hilary Term, Week 3 | Friday 3 February 2023

Student and The Oxford Blue.

Read more about the UCU strikes on p6

Susie Barrows recommends the best places to eat on Valentines day

HILARY TERM 2023 EDITORIAL TEAM

EDITORS IN CHIEF

Anna Davidson and Milo Dennison

ASSOCIATE EDITOR

Ayomilekan Adegunwa and Susie Barrows

CREATIVE DIRECTORS

Yii-Jen Deng and Blane Aitchison

STRATEGY

Dominic Enright (Director), Anmol Kejriwal, Jason Chau, Andrew Wang

DEPUTY EDITORS

Rose Henderson, Matt Holland, Dani Kovacs, Emily Hudson, Florence Allen, Martin Alfonsin Larsen

NEWS

Rose Henderson, Ayomilekan Adegunwa, Samuel Kenny, Anna Lee, Gabrielle Thompson, Ali Khosravi, Rosalie Chapman

COMMENT

Matt Holland, Ali Khosravi, Tara Earley

PROFILE

Matt Holland, Ryan Teo Chee Shan, Samuel King

FEATURES

Anvee Bhutani, Haochen Wang, Tara Earley, Rosalie Chapman

IDENTITY

Florence Allen, Vivian Gu

PINK

Blane Aitchison

ENTERTAINMENT

Martin Alfonsín Larsen, Natascha Norton, Cosimo Schlagintweit

FOOD & DRINK

Susie Barrows, Asmaani Shukla

GREEN

Emily Hudson, Jasmine Wilkinson, Anna Bartlett

SCITECH

Emily Hudson, Nicole Hasler, Archuna Mohan

SPORT

Dani Kovacs, Joe Sharp, Bradley Beck

OXYOU

Susie Barrows, Jack Meredith, Jack Jacobs

COLUMNISTS

Elena Buccisano, Matthew Taylor, Liberty Osborne, Blane Aitchison, Jonah Poulard, Amanda Li, Efan Owen

If the highest award in journalism is being shot by the CIA, the second highest is being shot by Milo Dennison of the OxStu for procrastinating your editorial on a Wednesday evening. The past week or so has been full of journalistic excitement: I have learned the value of networking (got a free bottle of wine); of hard work (this editorial has now taken more than 5 minutes); and of paper integrity (I am weighing up whether or not to get a ‘The Oxford Student’ bucket hat).

Many people to thank, as always, for this week’s edition. My co-EiC - if his editorial is mispelled do forgive him, he’s concussed. Ayomi, who has

spent a considerable amount of time on the ‘Inspirational Quotes’ section of Goodreads for his. Susie, who wrote her one a while ago. Thanks to Rose, Blane, Anvee, Yii-Jen, Matt, Emily, Dani, Martin. Everyone who writes, edits, commissions. They are all hardworking, very talented, and basically ready for week 5 and 7 already(!)

This week’s edition is full of great pieces. The investigation into the state-educated composition of student societies is particularly interesting; I certainly remember, coming from a state comprehensive, feeling totally intimidated by student journalism. I hope that bringing more awareness to the hurdles preventing state students feeling that they belong will encourage societies to think critically about their networks and accessibility. The OxStu also has progress to make, but I hope we can break down the intimidating image, one hat at a time.

ple of weeks have been full of unexpected events, and it’s to our news team’s credit that they’ve kept you updated on all of them. Ably headed up by Rose, they’ve all been relentless in their pursuit of stories.

I’m currently sitting in the SU contemplating whether I should call 111; in one of those fun twists of fate, I had a rather nasty bicycle crash this morning and it’s currently quite painful to walk. The reactions of my fellow editors were telling: Susie gave me a “Oh sh*t”, Ayomi gave me an “Is it true?” and Anna just laughed hysterically.

I should probably use this as a slightly trite metaphor about how in journalism you should always expect the unexpected, but unfortunately I think I have slightly too much self-respect for that. The point stands though: these past cou -

Anna has again been an absolute star: I don’t have a clue what I’d do without her. Steering the paper through all its crises, both large and small, she’s not just a wonderful journalist but a great leader (even if I do get bullied in her editorials).

Finally, our whole team has once again been stars again. Ayomi and Susie for providing me with reactions for this editorial, Matt for consistently laying in a million pages and Blane for leading the reestablishment of Pink. I can’t wait for the next couple of weeks.

From the Editors Milo

Isit here, in the idyllic SU offices, reflecting on yet another print edition of the Oxford Student. The Q-Step deadline is quickly approaching, my code is unwritten and I don’t really understand what the questions mean. Nevertheless, like a lighthouse on the shore, the Oxford Student shines out to me and keeps me safe against the waves of stress induced by the rhythms of Oxford life.

This week I have been pondering the issues of perception. How do I know to trust what I think I see in the world? How can we differentiate between illusion, hallucination and veridical perception? I wish I could tell you. What I can tell you is that this edition of the Oxford Student is a great one – enjoy!

Ayear ago, I was nervously writing my first journalistic endeavour, the impactful and thought-provoking article titled ‘What your chosen work location says about you’. A year on, I’m writing an editorial for the very same paper. I suppose I should impart some sage wisdom here – but I think the main takeaway is simply that the OxStu is so fun. As I scour the internet for post-graduation journalist jobs, it’s funny to think about how different my life would be if I’d never found the joy of writing silly little articles and meeting great people. I’m only hoping the big world of journalism outside of Oxford is even slightly as fun as this – and that the other editors don’t take the mick out of how soppy this editorial is.

Susie Barrows, Merton College

Ayomilekan Adegunwa, Worcester College

15 minute city zones that have been proposed by Oxford City Council as part of the Local Plan 2040 have garnered significant controversy. The plan, which will see traffic filters installed on six roads as part of a £6.5m trial, is set to commence in 2024. Under these new filters, residents will be able to drive freely around their own neighbourhoods but will be fined up to £70 for driving into other neighbourhoods through the filters. The plan’s aim is to create neighbourhoods in Oxford where ‘essential’ facilities are accessible by a walking distance of up to 15 minutes. These facilities were determined by a 2022 civilian consultation of over 5,000 stakeholders.

Such facilities in a prospective 15 minute city include shops selling food and other essentials, parks and green spaces, postal services, health services including a GP and pharmacy, social and hospitality outlets like coffee shops, and banking services. The Local Plan 2040 also

15 minute city plans cause controversy

Martin Alfonsin Larsen

aims to address issues relating to disparities in service provision, with the council stating that they want to ensure that ‘areas of the city such as Barton, Blackbird Leys and Rose Hill have all the essential services that areas such as East Oxford and Jericho already have’.

The City Council has asserted that the plan’s intent is not to coerce residents into staying in one neighbourhood, but to address ‘awful’ congestion in the city centre which it argues is making public transport in Oxford ‘unviable’. The traffic filters will not take the form of physical barricades; instead, new traffic cameras which can read number plates will be installed. These were first introduced in 2015 as part of the Oxford Transport Strategy, with Magdalen Street being covered by one. Filters will operate on St Cross Road, Thames Street, Hythe Bridge Street and St Clements from 7am to 7pm, with more on Marston Ferry Road and Hollow Way

operating from Monday to Saturday.

These assurances have not stopped the plan from being criticised by a plethora of stakeholders and political commentators. Online media personality Jordan Peterson has criticised ‘idiot tyrannical bureaucrats’ who ‘decide by fiat where you’re “allowed” to drive’ and labelled the filters ‘part of a well-documented plan’, while far-right commentator Katie Hopkins labelled the plans ‘coercive’, drawing parallels with tyranny that she perceived in COVID lockdown laws.

Peterson’s labelling of the 15-minute city zones as part of a ‘well-documented plan’ has been linked to debunked conspiracy theories regarding a ‘great reset’, which claim that elites and groups like the World Economic Forum, which convened in Davos, Switzerland from January the 16th to the 20th, aim to take away basic rights from citizens

in the new post-COVID world. Some residents have also critiqued the plan, with 3,400 signing a petition against new filters for Marston Ferry Road and Hollow Way. Another 1,700 people have signed a petition asking the Council to reconsider, over fears Botley Road in the west of Oxford will be inundated with traffic. A protest was also organised by Not Our Future, a right-wing populist pressure group, which has labelled leading politicians as part of a ‘Blob’ that has conspired to deprive political power from ‘the people’. Over 250 volunteers were confirmed.

However, it is important to note that travel to other areas of Oxford will be permitted by alternative routes, such as the ring road surrounding the city, at any time. Residents will also be able to apply for permits to drive through filters and into other neighbourhoods for up to 100 days a year, while Oxfordshire residents will be able to

secure permits for up to 25 days a year. Free travel through filters will be allowed by bus, bike, taxi, scooter, and walking. Exemptions will also be provided for carers, blue badge holders, business, and emergency services. This element of the plan is indicative of its aims to incentivise sustainable private and public transport, with Oxfordshire County Council wanting to make such modes of transport ‘the natural first choice’.

The City Council has received death threats and online abuse as a result of the inaccurate claims regarding the proposal. Duncan Enright, Oxfordshire County Councillor and cabinet member for travel and development strategy, told the BBC he felt ‘bruised’ and ‘cautious’ due to the threats he had received.

St Hugh’s Cancel Ball

Blane Aitchison

Inan Instagram post published on the 24th of January, the St Hugh’s College Ball Committee announced that they are having to cancel the college’s 2023 ball due to a lack of tickets being sold.

The ball, which was due to be held on Saturday the 29th of April, was to have a ‘Swan Lake’ theme, referring to both the famous ballet by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky and the swan as an icon and companion of St Hugh of Lincoln, the namesake of the college.

This comes just 12 days after the tickets, costing £125 for St Hugh’s students and £135 for students of other colleges, were made available to purchase on Fixr. The Instagram post states that anyone who had bought a ticket will be refunded, although ‘this won’t be immediate’, and the remaining tickets are now no longer available to purchase on Fixr.

Alongside the lack of tickets being bought, the committee’s Instagram post also blames ‘the cost of living and rising prices’ as other factors that have made it impossible to go ahead with the plans to transform ‘the length of our [St Hugh’s] grounds’ into ‘an enchanted woodland’.

The Swan Lake themed ball would have been the first ball held at St Hugh’s in 3 years due to Covid.

One disgruntled student took to Oxfess to say they would rather the committee had put on a ‘scaled-down event than no ball at all’.

Exclusive Investigation: how the private school elite still dominate Oxford’s student life

Anvee Bhutani

Cont. from page 1

a disproportionate amount of privately educated students in a lot of the big societies is these societies also tend to be the oldest and in the past the proportion of private schoolers in Oxford was a lot more skewed than it is today. As a result, a lot of state schoolers may feel unwelcomed into these societies. The 93% Club Oxford aims to build a supportive community of state schoolers that feel they have been given a platform where they can

get involved and have their voice heard.”

Of the 89 significant figures selected, OxStu was able to gather data on the school attended by 86. In virtually all cases, claims made on Facebook and LinkedIn, or statements made by the school, were used to identify where they had previously studied.

The data is not much different from five years ago when the last investigation into Oxford’s privately educat-

ed elite was conducted. Whilst the proportion of privately educated Union officials was lower, that of JCR Presidents was higher. Oxford also only admitted 59% of state school students at the time.

This counteracts the more recent narrative that Britain’s private schools have lost their grip on Oxbridge and shows that a disparity still exists. However, it is the case that four out of five of the top 5 schools for Oxbridge offers are now state schools which shows the needle is moving forward on bridging the stateprivate divide.

Class Act, an Oxford SU campaign set up to represent the interests of students of work-

ing class, low income, first generation, and state comprehensive backgrounds at Oxford, said, “We know the UK’s top jobs are dominated by the privately educated and this investigation highlights how this is apparent even at university. Having influential positions in Oxford can lead to having influential positions in life after university. If we do not make active efforts to make influential student positions accessible, it will not only stop state school students from getting involved in Oxford but also places them at a disadvantage for later life.”

A Spokesperson from the Union, where life memberships currently cost £299.95, told OxStu, “As a studentled debating society, our membership is primarily drawn from The University of Oxford. As such, our active student membership body changes each year and the composition of the Society’s committee

changes after every termly election. A recent Equality Monitoring Analysis report found that 60% of Union members were educated in a statefunded or predominantly state funded institution, with 34% in a predominantly privately funded school or college. 2% were none of the above and 4% preferred not to say. The vast majority of our governing body are directly elected by our membership.

We support the many outreach initiatives run by the University of Oxford. For over a decade, we have also continued to progress our own outreach activities. This term, for example, the president and development officer championed the re-launch of a schools’ outreach programme which can viewed on our website.”

Additional reporting by Milo Dennison

Oxford student jailed over cryptocurrency scam

Cont. from page 1

Wiersma’s website led users to believe the seeds it generated were entirely random. However, they were in fact predetermined, owing to the malicious code that was written into the site. Wiersma was therefore able to access each one. Since those who have the seed have the power to transfer Iota, Wiersma was then able to steal funds by transferring them into his own accounts. He subsequently converted them into Bitcoin and another cryptocurrency known as Monero using the cryptocurrency exchange website Bitfinex on January 19, 2018.

Bitfinex quickly became suspicious of the activity on the accounts and froze them, requesting identification. Wiersma provided them with photographs of two obviously fake passports. One passport, supposedly from Belgium, had an

incorrect outline of the country evident in the document. The other photograph was of a man allegedly called ‘Jason’ holding an Australian passport, which was also proven to be fake.

The accounts on Bitfinex remained frozen, so Wiersma pivoted to another crypto exchange called Binance and opened five more accounts. These were also quickly frozen, and he provided another photograph for identification of a man holding a fake British passport.

By 2018, a number of victims of the iotaseed.io site had reported their stolen funds to German police, who traced the crime to the UK and passed the case to the South East Regional Organised Crime Unit’s cyber crime unit. They managed to trace the crime to Wiersma “when it became apparent that he and he alone had used the same virtual private

network to access his own Bitfinex account”, leading authorities to the four other accounts which had received stolen funds.

British police then raided his home in Oxford in January 2019, by which time he had dropped out of his PhD studies at St Cross. Finding his desktop computer opened, they were able to track his activities. In interviews, Wiersma claimed his computer had been hacked. When questioned about the malicious iotaseed.io website, he answered “no comment”, and was eventually released without charge, returning to the Netherlands.

However, detectives continued their investigation, and found that the pseudonym Norbert van den Berg (used to set up the original malicious website) had also appeared in Wiersma’s university coursework. They were also able to connect his virtual

private network to a payment made in Bitcoin that was used to set up the seed-generating website. Although unable to access another laptop, six hard drives, two USB sticks, and a memory card seized in the raid, prosecutors were still able to charge Wiesma and he was arrested on Christmas Eve 2020 in the Netherlands.

Sentencing Wiesma to four and a half years in prison after he pled guilty in Oxford Crown Court on Friday afternoon (27th January), Judge Michael Gledhill KC said: “You are an expert in IT and computer sciences… The fact of the matter is that you decided to abuse your skills in order to steal. This is dishonesty at the highest level.”

“Why did you commit these offences? Greed and dishonesty are the two words that readily come to mind”.

‘Killer Robot’ projects found in Oxford

Martin Alfonsin Larsen Senior Editor

ASeptember 2022 report investigating the role of UK universities in the development of autonomous weapon systems (AWS) found that the University of Oxford has been involved in at least six projects that have been deemed moderate risk or higher in helping to produce such systems.

The report was carried out by the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots, a group of more than 180 NGOs across 60 countries. It examined 13 UK higher education institutions with significant funding from groups such as the UK Ministry of Defence, the US Department of Defence or private arms manufacturers and dealers. 65 separate projects across these institutions were identified as potentially contributing to AWS programmes.

Publication of the report coincides with recent strides in AI development, as well as rising concurrent concern amongst political analysts, AI experts and scholars of the dangers that new technologies potentially bear. Geopolitical risk consultancy Eurasia Group has identified new AI technologies as third on their ten defining political risks of 2023. AWS development, however, has not received as much attention.

AWS can be understood as the range of weapon systems that detect and apply force to a target based on sensor inputs without human input, or ‘killer robots’. The first recorded usage of LAWS (lethal autonomous weapons systems) was observed in March 2020 in Libya. A UN report was filed in 2021, classifying a skirmish involving a Kargu-2 drone as autonomous, but it is unclear that the drone caused any casualties. The Turkish arms manufacturer STM that manufactured the Kargu-2 drone denies its autonomous capabilities.

A recent UN summit in December 2021 discussed

LAWS within the framework of the UN Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW), a platform used to restrict dangerous or indiscriminate weapons. However, the positions of major world powers, including the US, UK, Russia, and China, meant that no significant progress was made, as consensus is required before action can be taken within the CCW framework. The US specifically has claimed that current frameworks are enough to control the usage of LAWS, and the UK government has stated that it has no LAWS and has no intention of developing them. Despite this, the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots report found that the Ministry of Defence has spent heavily on research and development in technologies that constitute LAWS.

The report created four tiers of potential contribution to AWS in research projects. These four are higher, medium, lower, and insufficient information to decide. Higher risk means that a research project directly contributes to development of AWS and is funded by military or arms groups. Medium risk identifies research with what is termed ‘dual use potential’, potentially legitimising AWS in future or perhaps being used for development of AWS in absence of proper controls. Lower risk identifies no immediate dual use potential or AWS potential

The report identifies 6 projects affiliated with the University, 5 of which are categorised as medium risk and one of which is categorised as high risk. It also states that Oxford is one of the universities with the highest levels of military funding in the UK, alongside the University of Cambridge, Cranfield University, Imperial College London, and the University of Sheffield.

Moreover, seven of the military contractors sponsoring research at Oxford have been

targeted by Amnesty International for ‘alarming indifference to the human cost’ of their business. Oxford was also in receipt of £6m from Rolls-Royce, whose engines are frequently used in aerospace engineering, from 2017-2019. During this period, Rolls-Royce paid £671m in penalties after anti-corruption investigators found they had bribed countries internationally to secure government contracts. £700,000 was also received in the same period from Atomic Weapons Establishment, the company responsible for the production of the UK’s nuclear warheads.

Another issue that the report identifies across the University and all 12 other institutions is a lack of transparency. For many projects, there is a scarcity of information available online; the report claims that the University, for example, does not make the details of research grants it receives public. The report also alleges that the activities of the Committee to Review Donations and Research Funding at University of Oxford are not publicly available. The body’s responsibilities include deciding whether specific donations may go against the university’s internal frameworks for the acceptability of decisions. Moreover, no university which the report examined mentioned AWS or LAWS within ethical frameworks related to research.

Following the publication of the report, students at universities in Lancaster, Warwick, Nottingham, Bristol, and Sheffield engaged in ‘demilitarisation’ protests whose primary aim was to remove the influence of the military and arms traders from UK universities. However, some would argue that those goals are misplaced, given the current underfunding of UK universities and the wider issue of academic funding. River Butterworth, education officer at the Uni-

versity of Nottingham’s student union, stated that “I asked at the beginning of the [academic] year about demilitarising, and the university was basically like — OK, work out how we’re going to finance the whole of the engineering department then.”

Six College JCRs (Junior Common Rooms), Oxford University Amnesty International Society and more than 70 individual students have signed an open letter addressed to the University stating a ‘deep concern’ in its potential role in the development of AWS and LAWS. The letter asks the university to establish a policy forbidding the development and production of LAWS and sign the Future of Life Pledge.

The report also highlights the attitudes of researchers working within the universities. One researcher at the University of Cambridge, who was sympathetic towards the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots’ views regarding AWS technologies, stated that he would have taken money from groups furthering AWS if it ensured funding for his research. Researchers were also largely unaware of the potential issues attached to ‘dual use’ frameworks, despite many academics within the institutions having signed the Future of Life Pledge, a call to international leaders to regulate AWS technologies. These comments reflect a precarious position that academics at the University and at other institutions may find themselves in. Despite potential ethical qualms with the sources of funding for their research, some may feel that they are left with no choice due to the lack of funding available elsewhere.

The report encourages all UK universities to sign the Future of Life Pledge calling for international regulations and laws against LAWS, as well as pledging to establish mecha-

nisms to minimise the risks that dual-use research could pose. It also encourages specific ethical frameworks for LAWS and other AI technology, as well as other measures to increase transparency.

Groups operating within the University could help to devise these specific ethical frameworks. The Institute for Ethics in AI at the University was founded in February 2021 following £175m in donations by Blackstone financier Stephen Schwarzman. It is chaired by John Tasioulas, a Greek-Australian philosopher, who has argued that, despite the currently embattled state of the humanities, they will be essential to discussions surrounding regulation and usage of AI and technologies like AWS in the 21st century.

The group’s dedicated philosopher for examining the ethics of killer robots on the battlefield, Dr Linda Eggert, has publicly probed the issue of AWS. In 2023, she questioned “Do we have a right for decisions, even the decision to kill us, to be made by people not machines?”

The university said “The University of Oxford, working with collaborators, funders and other organisations around the world, pursues world-leading research that advances knowledge and discovery. Our research has wide-ranging applications across many domains from the development of new technologies to addressing key societal challenges such as climate change and pandemic preparedness. We maximise dissemination through open publication and sharing of our research outputs, whilst ensuring we maintain strict compliance with relevant legislative and regulatory frameworks such as export control requirements governing the transfer of sensitive technologies outside of the UK.”

Oxford United in discussions for new stadium site

Rose Henderson Head of News

Oxford United has been given approval to start negotiations over the lease of land for the building of a new football stadium. The club plan to build a new stadium with a capacity of 18,000 on ‘The Triangle’. ‘The Triangle’ is a site on greenbelt land, south of Kidlington Roundabout. Council officers will now be able to begin talks on “outline commercial and legal terms.”

Oxford United currently play at Kassam Stadium, in the south of Oxford, and have played there since 2001. However, the licence agreement the club has with the stadium expires in 2026. According to Oxford United, there is no opportunity to extend the lease. Kassam Stadium has a capacity of 12,500.

Plans for a new stadium include building four sides (the Kassam Stadium only has three) which will reduce noise leakage and improve the fan experience. Parking will also be directed to Oxford Parkway, ensuring that minimal noise is generated on site.

Environmental concerns are also at the forefront of designs, with the club keen to imple-

ment state-of-the-art methods to reduce the impact of the development and make the ground itself carbon neutral. Potential features include an energy capture centre, like at the Emirates (Arsenal’s stadium), and rooftop and vertical gardens like at Wimbledon.

The final proposal will be subject to a detailed feasibility study, but the club hopes to have a fan zone, boutique business hotel, and community sports facilities. Oxford United have said that public consultation and stakeholder engagement will help to inform the final design, with priority also placed upon creating a family friendly environment. Furthermore, a new community stadium would allow the club to potentially host community events, like disability sports and Christmas markets, unlike at Kassam Stadium, where Oxford United has no control.

The club previously wanted to build their new stadium on 18 hectares of council greenbelt land at Stratfield Brake, near Kidlington, with the plans described above based on this location. However, the council proposed the 4.9 hectare ‘triangle’ as an alternative. The council have said that any agreement they come to with Oxford United

on the new stadium must ensure that a green barrier remains between Oxford and Kidlington.

“We are running out of time to save this football club.” – Niall McWilliams, Oxford United’s chief strategy officer.

While a public consultation earlier this year indicated 80% public support for the Stratfield Brake site, the Friends of Stratfield Brake group described the consultation as ‘farcical’ and aimed at football fans rather than local residents.

At the Oxfordshire County Council cabinet meeting where approval to begin talks was given, a variety of opinions were on display. Ian Middleton, a Green Party councillor, called for increased local consultation. How-

ever, Riva Casley, from Oxford United Women, said that the new stadium “will allow the women’s and girls’ games to grow even further” as a licence agreement means the women’s team cannot play at the Kassam. Conservative councillor Liam Walker called for “no more dither and delay.”

Harry Millar, cabinet member for finance, said that the council will “seek the views of a wide range of stakeholders before reaching any final decision.”

Oxford United is the only professional sports club in Oxfordshire, and has over 250,000 registered fans. The club estimates that a new stadium would add around 800 jobs to the local economy, in addition to the £10m it already contributes through its economic and social impact. The

men’s first team currently plays in League One (the third tier of English football) and were founded in 1893 as Headington United. The club previously played at Manor Ground for over 75 years, before it moved to the Kassam in order to play in an allseater stadium. Manor Ground has since been demolished and made into a private hospital.

Oxford United said that they will “continue to explore all options available” and that “given the dwindling timeframe available to us […] it is imperative that a decision about a preferred site is resolved as soon as possible.” Planning permission is still required from Cherwell District Council.

UCU strike dates announced

also details the ongoing ‘action short of a strike’ that UCU will be taking, describing it as “staff working to contract, not covering for absent colleagues, and not undertaking any voluntary activities”.

Gabrielle Thompson News Editor

ings, & vice chancellors take home ~£315k each year”, but arguing “it’s not being invested in students and staff”.

The Universities and College Union (UCU) have announced the dates of new strike action, taking place at 150 universities including Oxford across February and March. The announcement comes as tensions escalate between the UCU and the university employer representative the Universities and Colleges Employers Association (UCEA).

The dates are:

Wednesday 1 February

Thursday 9 and Friday 10 Febru-

ary

Tuesday 14, Wednesday 15 and

Thursday 16 February

vvvTuesday 21, Wednesday 22

and Thursday 23 February

Monday 27 and Tuesday 28

February and Wednesday 1 and

Thursday 2 March

Thursday 16 and Friday 17 March

Monday 20, Tuesday 21 and Wednesday 22 March

There will be no strike action in the week commencing Monday 6 March.

The university’s web page dedicated to industrial action insists “the majority of teaching will go ahead as planned” including all scheduled examinations, and asks that students contact their Head of Department to discuss any concerns further. The page

Oxford UCU’s Vice-President, David Chivall, commented “Not one of our members wants to take industrial action but until employers engage constructively, we have no other choice.” The UCEA have offered a pay rise of 4-5%, but the UCU calls for them to “substantially improve” this to allow its members to cope with the cost-of-living crisis. The UCU is also demanding “an end to the use of insecure contracts”, and a reversal of the pension cuts that the union argues “will see the average member lose 35% from their guaranteed future retirement income.”

According to the UCU’s Twitter account, “The university sector is generating record income. It holds over £40bn in reserves. It is spending £4.6bn on new build-

UCU general secretary Jo Grady said: “There is a clear route out of these disputes, but at present vice-chancellors lack the political will to take it. They are failing staff who want to get back to work, and students who want to get on with their studies”.

The strike action comes as two creative writing lecturers bring a case against Oxford disputing their classification as gig economy workers. Alice Jolly and Rebecca Abrams claim their ‘personal services’ contracts have prevented them from accessing fundamental workplace rights like holiday pay, in what Abrams deemed the “Uberisation” of teaching.

The university said it would not comment on an individual case while it is pending.

Oxford-Cambridge corridor receives funding

Milo Dennison Editor-in-Chief

The Pan-Regional Partnership (PRP) between Oxford and Cambridge received a significant funding increase this week. Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Michael Gove, endorsed the proposal, allowing more than £2.5 million to be directed toward the area.

Pan-regional partnerships are designed to strengthen cooperation between local authorities and government on infrastructure and economic strategy. The Oxford to Cambridge PRP covers an area that contains more than 3.5 million people, including Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire and Northamptonshire.

The endorsement follows a proposal submitted to government by leaders from local councils, local enterprise partnerships, the Arc Universities Group and the area’s transport body, England’s Economic Heartland.

An earlier proposal to develop the Oxford Cambridge Corridor into an economic zone, known as the Oxford to Cambridge Arc, was scrapped after it was accused of being too government led, rather than relying on local authorities working together.

Councillor Susan Brown, Leader of Oxford City Council, said: “Working in partnership is one of the most important things we do as a council. The area that the Pan Regional Partnership covers is already known world-wide for our innovation and research and we want to work together to make sure that our local residents benefit in an inclusive way from the strengths of our local economies.”

However, the campaign group Stop The Arc (STARC) have expressed their disapproval with the scheme. Charles Pither, the Chair of STARC, said “The Pan-Regional Partnership doesn’t represent the views of the five counties it proposes to build over. It speaks for the developers, the landowners – in particular the universities – and potential foreign investors.”

Many are also unhappy that the East-West Rail proposal to link Oxford and Cambridge is still in the works. Stage One of the line will connect Oxford with Milton Keynes and work has already started. Stages Two and Three will connect Oxford to Bedford and then Cambridge.

Yet last July, the Infrastructure and Projects Authority reported that, “The project may need re-scoping and/or its overall viability reassessed,” after they acknowledged “major issues”. STARC has said “the rail link still has no business case”.

Jericho murder: Police issue witness

Rose Henderson Head of News

Thames Valley Police have released CCTV of two potential witnesses to the fatal stabbing of a man in Jericho in November.

Alex Innes, 25, was murdered at around 00:50 on the 13th November 2022.

Detectives want to speak to two men who were seen to “walk up Walton Crescent, onto Walton Street, and then remain in the vicinity of the Love Jericho bar.”

Police believe they may have important information that could assist their investigation.

Four men, aged 18 to 19, have already been charged with murder and are due to stand trial in May.

Police have previously said

that a post-mortem examination revealed that Innes died at the scene from a single stab wound.

If this is you, or you know these men, you are encouraged to contact Thames Valley Police, citing reference number 43220511338.

The murder defendants (McGregory Muinami, 18,

of Cranham Street, Michael Oluyitan, 19, of Waynflete Road, Bradley Morton, 18, of Cumberlege Close, and Keyarno Allen, 18, of Furlong Close) have also been charged with possession of a bladed article.

At the time of the murder, the Walton Street area was shut down with residents, including students at nearby

Worcester College, being unable to access their homes without a police escort.

The incident took place between the intersections of Great Clarendon Street and Little Clarendon Street, near the Freud nightclub and the Blavatnik School of Government.

Cornmarket Burger King permanently closed

Rose Henderson Head of News

The Burger King on Cornmarket Street has permanently closed, shortly after being awarded a one-star food hygiene rating.

Fittings have been removed from the restaurant, and a contractor told the Oxford Mail that it would not reopen.

In an assessment by the Food Standards Agency in December, the Burger King branch was awarded a one out of five food hygiene rating.

In comparison, Cornmarket’s McDonalds received a rating of five stars when

it was inspected in March 2018.

According to the Food Standards Agency’s website, a one-star rating means that “major improvement is necessary”.

The agency inspects how hygienically the food is handled, the physical condition of the business, and how the business manages ways of keeping food safe.

On Tripadvisor, the restaurant has an average of one star, with customers commenting that the burger emporium had “the rudest staff

ever” and that “bins were full, the tables and floors dirty and the toilets appalling.”

Burger King has faced stiff competition from nearby fast food restaurants like McDonalds, Wendy’s, KFC, and Five Guys.

It had previously closed in August 2020, when it said it could no longer afford the rent on the property, before reopening again in October 2021.

At the time, a spokesman for Burger King’s commercial property agent said that the

chain was focusing on out of town restaurants.

In April last year they announced plans to open 200 more restaurants in the UK by 2026.

Jesus College is thought to be Burger King’s landlord, with the closure of the branch meaning it has another retail lot to fill, alongside the new property opportunities in the ground floor of their Cheng Yu Tung building on Cornmarket Street.

Editors: Matthew Holland, Ali Khosravi(Deputy), Tara Earley (Deputy) comment@oxfordstudent.com

On the 14th of January 2023, a British citizen who had been imprisoned on trumped-up spying charges in Iran since 2019 was executed by the country’s dictatorship. Alireza Akbari was an Iranian reformist politician and one-time deputy defence minister who had retired from politics, moved to and lived in Britain for a decade and naturalised as a British citizen. After returning to Iran in 2019, he was arrested and imprisoned and reportedly endured thousands of hours of torture and interrogation. The British Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak condemned his execution on Twitter as “a cowardly act” by “a barbaric regime”. The Foreign Secretary, James Cleverly, also tweeted that “this [barbaric act] will not stand unchallenged”. Apart from the sense of shock that this news story may inspire for the reader (or worse, imagine being British Iranian these days) you may also be left wondering ‘is that it?’ or asking ‘Is tweeting condemnation all the British government can do after it has failed to save or protect one of its citizens?’. After all, on the inside cover of British passports there is an inscription which reads “Her Britannic Majesty’s [should be changed to ‘His’] Secretary of State…requires… all those whom it may concern…to afford the bearer such assistance and protection as may be necessary”. Akbari’s execution could be viewed as a sobering wake-up call that no dual national can be completely safe (in Iran at least). Whether they came to Britain as refugees or not (not being able to return in the case of the former) in Iran they can be arrested, and convicted of trumped-up spying charges and there seems to be nothing the British government can do to save them. This is a sobering exposure to the limitations of Britain’s reach and influence, to even protect its own citizens.

However, it may be slightly unfair to measure Britain’s influence around the world, perhaps in the one rogue state which conforms to no international norm or diplomatic protocol. The Iranian dictatorship is in some ways arguably even more isolationist than North Korea, refusing to negotiate directly with the United States for example (at least Kim Jong-un met and shook hands with then President

Trump). However, even taking into account the exception of Iran, Britain’s influence on the world stage has taken a serious hit in recent years.

The humiliation of the Suez Crisis in 1956, was perhaps the first time (since the first wave of decolonisation) the British establishment realised that the country was no longer a first-rate power. After having been reprimanded and economically threatened by US President Eisenhower, Britain and its rulers concluded that they would no longer be able to militarily intervene in another country (as they had done before) without American permission even if in the 1950s it had a much larger ‘warfare state’ than today, in comparative terms. Ever since the loss of the British empire (for good, needless to say) and the painfully tangible realisation of it by the British elites, they have pondered about Britain’s new place in the world.

Becoming Prime Minister just after the Suez debacle, Harold Macmillan sensed a need to think deeply about Britain’s new position in the new post- ‘Pax Britannica’ age. So in June 1959, he commissioned a panel of senior civil servants and military commanders to ‘forecast what the state of the world would be in 1970, and what role the United Kingdom would be able to play in it.’ From this ‘Future Policy Study’, a few important conclusions were drawn that shaped Britain’s foreign policy for the following decades. The report emphasised the importance of the NATO alliance and cooperation with the US to Britain. Yet it warned that the ‘Anglo-American partnership is not a law of nature’. The report’s authors wrote that “One basic rule of British policy is clear: we must not find ourselves in a position of having to make a final choice between the United States and Europe. It would not be in our vital interests to reject either one or the other”.

Perhaps it was this clear-eyed assessment which prompted Macmillan to launch Britain’s first bid to join the new European Economic Community (EEC) in July 1961. Though the application was vetoed twice by the French president, Charles de Gaulle, who viewed the British as ‘too Atlanticist’ to ever be able to become good Europeans. Nonetheless, Britain final-

ly joined the EEC by the early 70s. In the following decades, Britain tried to play the role of a bridge between the United States and Europe, perhaps most effectively under Tony Blair. Yet more than six decades after the Future Policy Study, Britain is now distanced from its European neighbours after Brexit and neither particularly close to the United States, even under Liz Truss reportedly abandoning the traditional ‘special relationship’ label which has been used to describe the UK-US relationship since the days of Winston Churchill.

In 1962, the former US Secretary of State, Dean Acheson famously remarked that Britain had “lost an empire, and failed to find a role”. In the early 2020s, having left the European Union and finding itself distanced from Washington, Britain can be described as having lost a role and struggling to find another. This awkward positioning stands in clear contrast to the vision painted by the leading Brexiteers who promised a ‘global Britain’ which was supposedly ‘unshackled from Europe and only now able to engage with the rest of the world’. However, I think there are a number of ways the country has become less internationalist and outward-looking than it was before. For instance, in 2020, the UK government merged the Foreign Office with the Department for International Development (DfID) which had existed since 1997 and had gained a reputation as a world leader in aid and development policy. Since 2005 the government had pledged to spend 0.7% of the UK GDP on international development, which far from being an arbitrary figure was in fact a UN target. That pledge made by Tony Blair was only gradually realised in 2013 under David Cameron (for this both PMs deserve credit). Yet that policy was abandoned in late 2020 and spending was reduced to 0.5% of GDP. This was, in fact, a double cut in the aid budget since as UK’s GDP shrank during and after the pandemic, the aid budget would have shrunk with it either way without a cut in percentage.

S econdly, despite the country’s network of 274 embassies and consulates across 169 countries, British diplomatic and consular missions are often small operations with a handful

of professional diplomats and “no real capacity to lobby and persuade at the top level”. The number of career diplomats employed by the Foreign Office has fallen from 8,000 at the end of the cold war to a little more than half of that in 2015. The numbers only began to rise again in 2018 under Jeremy Hunt’s tenure with a target of 1,000 new staff in the next two years. All these have been pointed out by Peter Ricketts, a career diplomat whose recent book ‘Hard Choices’ is a must read for anyone who cares about the subject.

Thirdly, since 2016, Britain has had six foreign secretaries, each on average lasting a little over a year in the job. This level of turnover is not conducive to the country’s (supposedly) ‘chief diplomat’ learning enough about their department, their role or building the necessary (often personal) relationships with their counterparts around the world.

An American friend from Washington DC told me about his experiences of first arriving in Britain as a student which provides a good metaphor: “Dude, your country is falling apart!” he said. “Britain was once a first-class country that got a 2:1…now it feels like it’s becoming a 2:2 country”. This was a good university student analogy I thought, despite how depressingly downbeat he sounded about the place I other- wise love and call home.

But the recent and current trends should not be mistaken for destiny and fatalism. A clear-eyed and realistic assessment of Britain’s strengths and limitations has to be found between the rhetoric of boosterism on the one hand and pessimism and isolationism on the other. I personally think that Britain really could become a ‘soft power superpower’ if it wanted to, and if it once again seriously invested in what it really can be good at, namely aid, diplomacy and intelligence. The country must accept that it can never seriously compete with the military spending of the likes of the United States and China. Instead, it must focus on areas where it can have the highest marginal returns at a time when money for public services may be in short supply.

In some ways, Britain is singularly qualified for the role of a soft power superpower. It is a country that was

one of the architects of the post-war liberal world order and the structures that were supposed to uphold it, from the United Nations to NATO. Yet neither NATO nor the G7 is big or inclusive enough to act as a forum or a steering committee for the world’s democracies. An alternative must be found. Britain can shape itself into a new role as the convener and the de-facto secretariat of a new D-10 group of leading democracies, including important players like India, Australia, and South Korea which the G7 excludes. Britain must also repair its relations with both the United States and Europe and restore its traditional role as a bridge between the two.

Whether we accept Joe Biden’s dichotomy of ‘Democracies vs Autocracies’ or David Miliband’s ‘Accountability vs Impunity’ categorisation of the new shift in the global geometry of power, the country that arguably invented the rule of law (‘Magna Carta’ and ‘Habeas Corpus’) can still play an important role and make a valuable contribution if it genuinely engaged with global affairs. Boris Johnson was in fact uncharacteristically objective when he claimed in his farewell speech that UK’s “diplomats, security services and armed services” are still “globally admired”, even if its politicians have become laughing stocks in recent years to outside observers. Amidst the recent political turmoil, Britain’s career diplomats around the world have had to (in John Kampfner’s words) act as “reputational firefighters”.

Yet, even with all the recent developments and trends, hope is not all lost. The experience of Ukraine shows how Britain can still ‘win friends and influence people’ once it invests in others and actually stands up for the values it purports to uphold. Any British reporter who has travelled to Ukraine after the Russian invasion would talk about the warm reception they have received after mentioning they were British. Those smiles and cheers amidst the Ukrainian resistance prove that Global Britain as an ideal and a force for good may for now at least be found in the streets of Kyiv.

A Case for Abolishing the Union

Leon

Wheeler

In recent weeks the status of the Oxford Union as an entity attached to our university has once again become a point of focus in the wonderful arena of discussion and debate that is Oxfess. Given the very nature of the Union as an organisation steeped in a history of elitism and discrimination, this is to be expected. And yet again, just like every time the question of the Union gets raised, I am forced to conclude that it must be abolished. In this article I will set out some of the reasons (of many) for why the Oxford Union should be abolished. I’ll also tentatively suggest some ways in which this may be achieved.

One of the first problems about the Union that arises is that when a student first gets to Oxford, or even just first hears about Oxford University, they are confronted by the Union. In many cases this is a result of the numerous articles about the Union that are published in the national newspapers detailing the latest controversy to have rocked it. In others, it’s by being immediately ambushed by people hoping to convert you into hackers or extract the hefty membership fee from you. The issue with this is that because it’s so noticeable it creates a bad reputation for the university, which affects us all, regardless of whether we are members of the Union or not. When the headlines that come up if you search up Oxford University are all about rumours of nepotism, bullying, or discrimination that have taken place at the Union, everyone who goes to or has gone to Oxford has their reputation and university tarnished.

A large amount of these negative stories about the Union arise due to the fact that the termly election cycle of the Union means that no one can truly implement any lasting change – as all but the President are constantly getting ready to run in the next election whilst they hold committee positions. This results in a situation where those who rise to the top are the individuals who are prepared to descend into Machiavellian politics – backstabbing, rumour spreading, and intimidation. Meaning that many of those who then become President are the best at playing this game in pursuit of power and so have no will to reform the system they themselves have flourished in. And even when the President does have a will for reform this is often blocked by those who are

The Cases For and Against Abolishing the Oxford Union

still striving to climb up the ladder. We can therefore expect the negative rumours and tales to continue leaking from the Union into both the university psyche and the student and national newspapers, as no change is ever going to be effectively implemented.

Furthermore, the fact that it’s the Union that is notorious means that there is a high degree of confusion between the Oxford Union and the Oxford Student Union. When I first arrived at Oxford, innocent as Bambi and equally doe eyed, I had no clue what the Union was. When told about it my initial assumption was that it was Oxford’s SU, and that I was therefore being asked to pay over £200 just to be a member of the organisation meant to be representing me.

Although I soon corrected my mistaken assumption, there are still plenty of members of the university who don’t engage enough with either organisation in order to know the difference. So, when they hear that the Union has had a blind man escorted from its premises for merely sitting down they think that their SU is prejudiced, and when they hear that the SU has acted in relation to lecture recordings they assume the Union has just made recordings of their speakers more readily available. This is a state of confusion that benefits the Union by distracting people who might otherwise be opposed to it and harms the SU by tarring it with the brush of Union scandals whilst diminishing the achievements it makes for the student body. As such, the abolishment of the Union would be nothing but beneficial for the SU, and therefore for Oxford University students.

A further issue surrounding both the SU and the Union is what I like to label ‘the Union-SU Pipeline’. As I pointed out earlier, the type of people who rise to the top of the Union are those who are prepared to play the political game in the dirtiest fashion and who have no issue with engaging in nepotism and bullying. Often these individuals find themselves attempting to engage in the SU and bringing these Machiavellian traits with them. This can result in either Union style hacking and other election techniques being employed in the SU elections or in SU sabbatical officers who are heavily involved in the Union attempting to run for roles in the Union whilst in their sabbatical post. Despite the fact that this then becomes their

focus rather than the job they’re being paid to do on behalf of the university’s students – something that previous SU Presidents have done. Yet again we can see how the Union, and its intersection with the SU – is bad for the university as a whole.

A final reason I will address for why we should abolish the Oxford Union is that I believe the Union to be engaging in an almost financial scam situation with incoming freshers. When you arrive at this university the Union is often advertised as a grand institution that you absolutely need to be a member of. Reasons for the desirability of this membership are supposedly the extensive list of speaker events and debates that are run. This, combined with the fact that the Union offers a discount for freshers during the first few weeks of the academic year, often leads to new students splurging what is a significant amount of money for most on a membership. Unfortunately, many who do so live to regret this. Unless you actively engage in the political, election side of the Union most people do not see an effective return on their investment – as the high workload of an Oxford term means that many rarely go to any of the events that are being run. Furthermore, the negative reputation often dissuades those who do have the time from going anyway. Due to this many freshers are conned into shelling out a load of money for a society they will rarely interact with. For those who do get engaged with the politics of the union, they may see a return for their money, but too often this is accompanied with a shedload of mental health concerns, toxicity, and stress.

So, what can be done about this? Well one step in the right direction would be for colleges to deny the Union the ability and right to advertise in their college freshers fairs – this would not only prevent new students from being scammed but would also deny the Union the vital funds it needs to continue operating (new membership fees is one of the few ways in which the Union remains financially afloat). Another would be for colleges to ban the advertising of Union events and of hacking messages in college community Facebook groups and pages. Although even both of these if implemented across all Oxford colleges would most likely not achieve the death of the Union it would still be a start.

Free Speech and the Oxford Union Matthew Oulton

When it’s not preceded by the phrase ‘buy-oneget-one,’ the word ‘free’ should always be regarded with suspicion. From free lunches to free markets, branding something you agree with as ‘free’, and thus implicitly denigrating the alternative, is one sure-fire way to lend the appearance of strength to an otherwise weak argument. The problem with characterising something as ‘free’ is that it implies a value judgement – that the ‘free’ thing is good – without making that judgement explicit.

The term ‘free speech,’ then, is the pinnacle example. Nobody (or, at least, almost nobody) believes in unmitigated free speech, but all too often people will say that they do. In no country on earth, for example, can you stand up in a court of law, admit to committing a crime, and then claim that you cannot be convicted because you were merely exercising your freedom of speech. The label ‘free speech’ is generally a way to present something you want to say as being above reproach, even when it is not.

So rather than trying to label some speech as unimpeachably free and above debate, we should think of speech more similarly to how we might consider other potentially damaging behaviour. Your right to speech should be afforded the same protection as all your other rights. It should conform to the Mills’ ‘harm principle’ – you should be free to speak as you wish so long as you do not harm other people.

What kind of harm can speech do? Speech can obviously be incredibly harmful. It varies from the clichéd example of ‘yelling “fire” in a burning building’, to the less tangible harm done when someone insults you, criticises you, or, in the extreme, abuses or defrauds you. To offer protection to all of these, then, is clearly absurd – ‘free

speech’ should not mean the freedom to conduct a pyramid scheme. However, to regulate all of these is also fraught. You do harm if you lie to your partner, if you insult a stranger, or if, after a few too many drinks, you are too honest with your friends. The reason we do not, and must not, prevent this sort of behaviour is that censorship also imposes a deep moral harm: silence. To prevent someone from speaking their mind is a very powerful thing.

Your freedom to speak freely, then, should come as an extension of your right to think freely. As a result, where censorship would have the most utility – preventing people who believe harmful things from sharing them – can never be allowed. If someone is a racist, they must be allowed to share their racism. You can use your own speech to try to dissuade them, and indeed you have a moral responsibility to prevent them from spreading their vile ideas through their own speech, but you cannot prevent them from speaking.

Abuse is different, of course. The right to explain your views to people, no matter how reprehensible those views are, does not extend to the offering of abuse. The reason for this is simple – being able to attend a BNP meeting and express reprehensible views is necessary to preserve people’s intellectual and moral self-determination. Being able to yell slurs in the street is not.

It has become common to try to define freedom of speech merely as the freedom from state influence – a corrupting artefact of the protection offered by the First Amendment in the USA. But such protection is incomplete.

If you can’t be arrested for reporting sexual assault, for example, but your employer can and will blacklist you, you are not really free to express your view on it.

Likewise, if it is legal to be a

member of the Communist Party, the British National Party, or even the Labour Party, but to be registered with any renders you utterly unemployable, you might as well legally proscribe the organisations. Freedom of thought, then, requires both legal and social protection. This creates difficult-to-resolve ethical tensions. Where is the line between the requirement to allow people their right to their views and the tolerance of the intolerable?

Again, the line is blurred, but identifiable. You are entitled to your own views and, consequently, your own speech. You are not entitled to abuse or consequent discrimination. That will lead to tricky situations; it is morally justifiable to refuse to be friends with someone who has views you disagree with, but it is not justifiable to sack someone, or seek them to be dismissed from their job, merely for having (or tolerantly expressing) such views, no matter how bad. Of course, if you job relies on the views you hold or the things you express – being a Conservative MP, for example – then you certainly can and should be sacked for expressing views that liken vaccination to the Holocaust. But if a job lies outside the public sphere, we must resist the urge to enforce our own views on people by making their employers sack them.

The Oxford Union, supposed defender of ‘free speech’, then, should be regarded with intense scepticism. Free from what? Free Speech for who? You cannot answer these questions without making implicit assumptions about where your freedom to speak without consequence ends, and what valid consequences there are for crossing that line. These nuances, however, are lost all too often in the debate for and against the Oxford Union. The debate descends, too frequently, into a discussion of whether or not the Oxford Union is a good thing. Whether or not the institution is classist, unpleasant, or otherwise discriminatory. That is a complete side-show.

We cannot and must not ban organisations just because we disagree with them.

Equally, just because you are free to do something, doesn’t mean you are free from consequences. I’m sorry, but if you hold discriminatory views, I won’t be friends with you. You can’t defend yourself by appealing to ‘free speech’ or ‘freedom of expression’ – yes, you have the right to think what you like, but I also have the right to dislike you. Likely, I will think even worse of you because I have to defend your right to speak and think, whilst disagreeing and even disliking the entire time.

Censorious undertones are common at UK universities. And the Oxford Union, whatever you think of its members and leadership, is a voice fighting against those undertones. You do not have to agree with the Oxford Union, you do not have to join, but in a democracy, you have to tolerate its existence. In fact, you should be free to pretend the Oxford Union doesn’t exist – if you think it’s debates are a waste of time, being held in bad faith, or downright offensive, then you have the right to ignore its existence. Furthermore, complaints about speech are hijacked by those who find it politically expedient, of course, with many people arguing for protection they don’t deserve, or decrying political discrimination that isn’t real. But all too often we students reach for the ability to censor, de-platform, or silence people, when they are not actually doing any harm beyond expressing their thoughts. We must learn to resist that. Free speech may not be sacred, but the right to disagree is.

“Ordinary People” Holocaust Memorial Day 2023

By Matthew Holland

Holocaust History has been of the most important interests of my life. At A-Level I wrote my EPQ on the legacy of Holocaust History in Germany since the Second World War, which was both the most depressing and inspiring study I have ever done. It gave me stories of courage, bravery, humanity in spite of circumstances, optimism while also giving me stories of helplessness, despair, tragedy, and cowardice. My interest in this very specific section of History is in part due to the fact it is the perfect example of the importance of History generally; we must engage actively, learn the stories and keep in memory the brave and the weak. This year’s theme for Holocaust Memorial Day on the 27th January is “Ordinary People”, to remind us that while it is easy in History to focus exclusively on those who perpetrate and inspire the grand ideas which are played out, it is ordinary people who are the “perpetrators, bystanders, rescuers, witnesses – and ordinary people were victims.

…it is easy in History to focus on those who perpetrate and inspire the grand ideas which are played out

This book comes to the conclusion that rather than singling out individuals and applying blame to a certain group as cowards or heroes, we should rather understand that humans generally lack the capacity to rebel against figures of authority, and that instances of rebellion are therefore extraordinary. This does not take away at all from the horrifying things that were perpetrated, but helps to inform us that those who were perpetrators were simply ordinary people conforming to the expectation which psychology defines for their humanity.

My interest is also inspired by a fascination and interest in German History, of which the Holocaust influences so strongly. I have always tended therefore to view Holocaust History more objectively than most. My EPQ was indebted to Stanley Milgram’s seminal book ‘Obedience to Authority’, which sought a psychological understanding as to how those ordinary people were able to perpetrate and carry out the atrocities both of the Holocaust and the Second World War more generally.

…we should rather understand that humans generally lack the capacity to rebel against figures of authority, and that instances of rebellion are therefore extraordinary.

Rather than taking away from bravery, this view enhances it by suggesting that the brave are even more commendable for being able to battle against the psychological inhibitions that make most people obedient. Therefore, much of Holocaust teaching and remembrance should focus on these figures as important and extraordinary individuals to deify and memorialise in the hope that we may all learn from their bravery.

other “undesirables”, to make them seem almost mythical villains, at fault for all the world’s ailments. In order therefore to defy the Nazi Regime in the modern day we should place much value on remembering these individual victims as mother, daughters, father, sons, brothers and sisters, and lovers. One of the greatest services done to History is the importance we place on Anne Frank’s diary, which is one of the most read non-biblical texts in the world, and the stories of which we teach in schools and universities. Her book tells of a young girl experiencing everything which an ordinary young girl would experience but in the most extraordinary of circumstances. Much like I did, one should read this book as an adolescent themselves, in order that the full gravity of her humanity in spite of everything should be felt.

To me the names Hans and Sophie Scholl, Raoul Wallenberg, Martin Niemöller and Claus von Stauffenberg should be known by everyone…

To me the names Hans and Sophie Scholl, Raoul Wallenberg, Martin Niemöller and Claus von Stauffenberg should be known by everyone in as much as Anne Frank and Elie Wiesel.

We should also remember that the victims were also ordinary people. The Nazi aim was to depersonalise Jews and

One of the first articles I wrote for the Oxford Student was this time last year on the importance of Holocaust History and the preservation of the stories of victims. This year I wanted to follow along with the theme of the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust which necessarily meant discussing the “Ordinary People” who are so central to the importance of this study. The importance of this cannot be qualified given that the study of “Ordinary People” allows us to imagine ourselves in their unique situation. We question whether we would be brave or a coward. But what is most important is that we remember that it is a glitch in History that we weren’t born in that time, and that we never have to answer the question of whether or not we’d be brave, and also whether or not we’d be victims, bystanders or perpetrators.

of the week Profile

Matthew Holland talks with Dr Simon Clark

Dr Simon Clark is a YouTuber, science communicator and alumnus of St Peter’s College. His videos focus mainly on climate change and human impacts on the biodiversity and atmosphere of our planet. My interest in Simon’s videos began with his involvement with the YouTube collective, the Yogscast, and the channel Hat Films, who Simon began collaborating with around 4 years ago. From there I began to watch Simon’s videos regularly, in particular his videos documenting his time at Oxford and latterly his experience completing a PhD at the University of Exeter.

MH: Firstly, would you recommend Oxford to people you know, such as family members, and what advice would you give both to those applying and those already here to balance the workload and pressures?

SC: I definitely would recommend people to apply, because Oxford has an awful lot to offer people. I didn’t have the best personal experience, but I feel like if I could take my 18 year old self aside I would give the advice of ring-fence time off. My problem when I was at Oxford was I tried way too hard and I was constantly trying to work and I just burned out spectacularly, because in school my time was managed for me whereas at University its wide open and you’ve got to ring-fence time that’s just for you and to not feel guilty about not working during that time. It’s not about how long you work or how hard you work, but about how smart you work. I feel like with that knowledge and a bit better time-management, as well as the fact that Notion (an organisational app) exists now and it’s free for students, I would definitely recommend people, family members or otherwise, to apply to Oxford. I’d obviously give them the caveat that it’s not for everyone and there are plenty of people for whom it would be an absolute nightmare to go to. Just because it’s at the top of the league tables doesn’t mean you should necessarily be applying there,

because it’s a very specific type of University experience that is for some people but isn’t for others. I think it was for me, I just went about it the wrong way.

MH: I definitely feel the same, for me at school I wasn’t heavily involved in extracurricular stuff and as soon as I came to Oxford I found myself filling my timetable with so many other things that are so much more difficult to organise than simply classes or lectures. Onto the next question, was it a dream of yours that one day your book would be in the St Peter’s library, and is there any kind of designated alumni section in your library like we have at Exeter?

SC: I don’t think they do, or at least they didn’t when I was there. The college has only existed for about 60 years now, so I’m not sure if there would be enough alumni to merit an entire shelf, maybe in the future though. I never would have believed it if you had told me as an undergraduate that I would write a book and it would be in the library, and the librarian would seemingly be happy to have it. I never would have believed it. It wasn’t a dream because I never thought it was even vaguely possible. I’ve wanted to be an author since I was very young, probably since primary school, but I never thought it would really happen. I just assumed I would go down the Physics route and that wouldn’t leave time for any fun things like writing books. It’s very surreal knowing that it’s somewhere in St Peter’s library.

MH: As you said in the video about going back to Oxford, the idea that it might then inspire someone else to actually study Physics.

SC: I wrote Firmament (his book) basically as the book I wish I could’ve been given when I was in Sixth Form starting as an undergraduate, as like this whole area of Physics and Science that you don’t know exists and has got this really interesting history and there are really relevant bits of work

that you can do in it. Trying to capture the same moment I had in St Peter’s library when it came to falling in love with geophysical fluid dynamics, trying to bottle that I suppose and to give it to people to experience themselves and hopefully help them fall in love with the subject too.

MH: Given that your videos helped me personally to have the resources and knowledge to apply and get into Oxford, how does it feel to know you’re having a positive impact on admissions and the University?

SC: I just assume at this point that I’m so old and that those videos are so old that they’re not relevant anymore. It’s a bit surreal when I go to Oxford and Cambridge and I meet people who say I was the reason they applied. I always say sorry, I always feel like I have to apologise for inflicting an Oxbridge education on people, especially if you’re doing Physics at Oxford. To hear that you’ve profoundly shaped someone’s 3 or 4 years of their life and that you are potentially responsible for hopefully a really good experience but potentially a really bad one, I feel a huge sense of responsibility. It’s like finding out that you’re going to be a parent, I imagine. It’s like being ambushed by your as yet unknown 18 year old children, and being told you’re somehow responsible for them. It’s a lovely feeling but it does feel like a heavy responsibility.

MH: For most people who find your videos and then might go back in your channel and look into your Oxford videos its probably based on an interest in science, but for me I was introduced to you through the video you did of the Science Game Show with Hat Films, and I watched it I think when I was in Sixth Form and so I found your channel at a time when I was applying to Universities.

SC: I feel like that’s the really valuable kind of science communication. There’s a lot to be said about doing the kind of things I do most weeks where it’s a video just about science which you may find interesting, but there’s a huge amount to be said for doing collaborations with people like Hat Films and the Yogscast. There’s a great quote which I actually took from the first video I ever found on YouTube about Oxford which was from the Said Business School. There was an alumnus who was talking about “We are all prisoners of our previous reference points.” and you don’t know something is possible until you see someone has done it. I feel like when you do that kind of science communication and you reach that audience who won’t have seen a scientist in a very unguarded and casual sense. That’s when they see they are just like normal people, they’re just like me and they make stupid mistakes like me. That is a really valuable entry point for people into sci-

ence, in or outside of academia.

MH: What has been your favourite video to make, one from your channel and one from someone else’s?

SC: That’s a really hard question actually. Can I even put it down to one? Going down a mine in Yorkshire to examine dark matter and exo-planetary biology was really awesome. It’s such a diverse group of videos to pick from. Also ‘Which planets in Warhammer could really exist?’ has to be up there as well. Any video in which you get to really indulge in your nerdy side and get into the details and combine your passion with some kind of science is really interesting. In terms of someone else’s channel, it’s also Warhammer related but I did a battle report with Midwinter Minis where my Hawaiin Orcs faced off against his Orcs, and it was the first time I’d done a collaboration like that in that sphere and I loved it so much I felt like a kid in a candy shop for the entire time.

MH: If you were on Desert Island discs, what would you choose as your favourite song, book and luxury item?

SC: My favourite book would be My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrel, because it’s just endlessly re-readable and there’s just a simple joy to it. If you’re on a desert island on your own you’re gonna be very contemplative, so I’m gonna cheat a bit and say for my song The Path of Miracles,

Deputy Editor: Matthew Holland

Section Editors: Ryan Teo, Samuel King oxstu.profile@gmail.com

which is 4 movements and is by Joby Talbot. That’s my favourite piece of Choral Music and is very spiritual and I could just imagine myself on a desert island listening to it. My luxury item would probably be a book on how to rebuild society from scratch, although I don’t think I’m gonna have much luck repopulating the island on my own.

MH: Do you think it’s realistic to expect the changes to lifestyle, certainly in a western context, which are necessary to halt climate change?

SC: We can absolutely hold it to less than 2 degrees, and yet have largely similar lifestyles. When you’re talking about overhauling lifestyles, particularly western ones, you’re talking about really overhauling the top 10% or fewer of the population. So curbing the amount of flying taking place, or changing diets, changing transport patterns, and fundamentally where we get our energy from. Some of that stuff you can do in a way that doesn’t impact people, like you don’t know where your electricity comes from in your house, so you can absolutely reduce the emissions intensity when it comes to energy. From an individual perspective about 75% of all individual emissions come from electricity usage, and heating and cooling. So 75% of your life can be absolutely unaffected. The transport stuff will be the difficult thing, because transport is a really difficult thing to decarbonise. Decarbonising transport comes down to two things: decarbonising longdistance transport and urban transport. Urban transport is the thing that will affect people more and that absolutely is something that is possible and would probably actually improve people’s quality of life, once you divorce people from the idea of everybody needing to own a car. The longdistance transport is what is going to be really tough, because you’ve basically got to kill the demand for long-distance travel which the Pandemic has shown us you can with telecoms conferencing, there are far fewer flights now for business reasons.

Full interview available at oxfordstudent.com

General David H. Petraeus (US Army, Ret.) is a Partner in the global investment firm KKR and Chairman of the KKR Global Institute, which he established in mid-2013. Prior to joining KKR, General Petraeus served over 37 years in the US military, culminating his career with six consecutive commands as a general officer, five of which were in combat, including command of the Surge in Iraq, command of US Central Command, and command of Coalition Forces in Afghanistan. Following retirement from the military, and after confirmation by the Senate in a vote of 94-0, he served as the Director of the CIA during a period of significant achievements in the war on terror. General Petraeus graduated with distinction from the US Military Academy and later earned a Ph.D. from Princeton University. He has held academic appointments with the US Military Academy, the University of Southern California, Harvard, Georgetown, the City University of New York Honours College and he is currently a Senior Fellow and Lecturer at Yale and an Honorary Professor at the University of Birmingham (UK). General Petraeus has earned numerous awards and decorations, including four Defence Distinguished Service Medals, the Secretary of State’s Distinguished Service Award, the Bronze Star Medal for Valour, two NATO Meritorious Service Medals, the Combat Action Badge, Master Parachutist Wings and the Ranger Tab. He has also been decorated by 14 foreign countries and sanctioned by Russia. He is believed to be the only person who, while

in uniform, threw out the first pitch of a baseball World Series Game and did the coin toss at a Super Bowl.

DH: What do you believe is the primary reason for the Russian military’s failure to achieve their strategic objectives?

DP: There are numerous reasons for Russia’s failures – poor campaign design, shocking inadequacies in the conduct of basic tactical tasks, lack of a professional noncommissioned officer corps, overestimation of Russian capabilities, inability to achieve combined arms effects (i.e. integrating armour, infantry, engineers, indirect fires, close air support, air defence), very poor command, control, and communications, etc. But the primary reason has to be the extraordinary performance of the Ukrainian forces which are, of course, fighting their war of independence, doing so brilliantly, and continuing to increase in size and capability as a result of the total mobilisation in Ukraine and the enormous provision of arms, ammunition and other material by the US, NATO and other western countries.

DH: Thinking in terms of the concept of ‘strategic leadership’ which I know that you’ve done work on with the Belfer Centre for Science and International Affairs, why has the USA been able to demonstrate strategic leadership during the war?

DP: I think US and western policy makers collectively have performed the four tasks of strategic leadership very impressively – getting the big ideas right, communicating the big ideas effectively, overseeing the

implementation of the big ideas superbly and determining how to refine the big ideas to repeat the process.

DH: The USA (nearly $50 billion) and the UK (over $3 billion) are the two largest donors to Ukraine’s war efforts and so do you believe that they should have more influence over the timing and nature of potential negotiations than other western powers?

DP: I think that at this point, the approach by the US and most other western powers properly has been to adhere to the adage, “Nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine.” But, presently, the conditions established by Ukrainian President Zelensky are clearly well beyond anything that might be acceptable to Russian President Vladimir Putin and Putin does not appear willing to engage in serious negotiations in any case. My sense is that negotiations will not be viable until President Putin recognises that the war in Ukraine is not sustainable on the battlefield or on the home front (due to sanctions and casualties, that are already many times those that occurred during the USA’s time in Afghanistan). And we should do all that we can to hasten that recognition. At that point, certainly the US and UK will likely play particularly prominent roles in possible negotiations, especially given that they have led many of the initiatives to impose financial, economic and personal sanctions and export controls on Russia and Putin’s inner circle – from which Putin will want to see ended as part of any negotiated resolution.

DH: As President Putin de -

scribes Xi as ‘my friend’ and invites him for a state visit in 2023, what can the USA do to balance against this emerging alliance?

DP: I think the US and the West have been embarked for some time on efforts to respond comprehensively, pragmatically and effectively to the emergence of a renewed era of great power rivalries, especially given the relationship between the US and China that the US National Security Advisor has described as “severe competition.”

DH: Thinking back to your time in Iraq and Afghanistan, is there anything that the USA and the alliance could now be doing to enhance their support to Ukraine that they currently are not doing?

DP: I’m not sure you need to think back to Iraq and Afghanistan to answer this question frankly. The war in Ukraine presents a very different context, conflict and situation from either of those two conflicts. But to address the question, the biggest issues have to do with additional capabilities that could be provided to Ukraine – e.g. longer range rockets (extending the range from 80 to 150 km) for the U.S.-provided HIMARS (high mobility artillery rocket system), more capable drones, western tanks and additional air defence capabilities, as well as the very substantial resupplying of artillery, rockets and other munitions that have proven so important for Ukraine.

General Petraeus is a captivating character. He lives a relentless life, where his ferocious industry, dutiful public service and valour meet as well-known

“US and western policy makers collectively have performed the four tasks of strategic leadership very impressively”: Dan Harrison in conversation with David Petraeus

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ELECTIONS 2023 Voting opens February 6th

- 8am

It is nearly time to cast your votes in this year's Oxford SU Leadership Elections. Voting closes on February 9th at 6pm. This is your chance to have your say in how your Student Union is run so don't miss out!

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Jordan Carvalho is certainly a master at stage presence. You can tell when he’s performing by the echo of his tenor along the walls of Cornmarket, or the background vocals of the people singing along. When he comes out, the set feels like a mini-concert: people filming, songs being requested, duets with passers-by. So it came to no surprise that when I came to interview him, Jordan was surrounded by about thirty people, all belting out Sam Smith. He told me to come back at 5 when his set was over; the karaoke session ended at 7 only because his phone ran out of battery and the music stopped playing. We were both tired from the singing, probably me more than him, but he still was his chipper self when describing his set. Okay, readers, I have a secret to admit: Jordan and I have known each other for a good chunk of my short time at Oxford. I first met him on a sunny Thursday while I was feeling the fourth week blues (shh, they exist,) in the middle of his cover of Coldplay’s Yellow. We had a quick chat about my enjoyment of the song and his killer vocals, and I continued my walk to Pret fifteen minutes later, fully certain that I had made a friend. Every time I pass by, we say hello; he even comforted me about my breakup.

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So the question that was on my, and probably everyone’s minds: How does he do it? There seems to be at least one friend of his who passes by every set. Turns out, it’s just how he is. Jordan busks to make people happy and “open[s] [his] hands for everyone.” He loves hearing people’s stories and giving them a chance to sing and showcase their talents, even if they’re feeling shy about it at first. “Some people’s talents are hidden… when you empower them you make them feel confident and it makes them sing. When I help them do that, I come home and feel like I’ve done a good thing.”

Jordan certainly has empowered himself through this music: since his stage fright from his first busking session five years ago, he’s gotten more confident in his performances and has begun to thrive on the corner. Even when people do odd things, like when a drunken group listened to his performance and took off their clothes, Jordan never wants to stop busking.

The conversation turned to the connections Jordan made while busking, the most obvious example being our friendship that developed after one song. He noted, “Every time I’m in Oxford, there’s twenty people I have to say hi to – a lot of them like you, that I met when I busk.” I still say hello to him every time I

pass by, whether it’s a quick high five on my way to Sainsbury’s or a detour for a song or two. Besides the regular passersby, Jordan tries to connect with everyone, no matter their background or whether he knew them or not. When some tourists approached him, he asked where they were from and conversed with each of them in their native languages: English, Spanish, Portuguese, the list went on. How many languages does this man know? Turns out, he’s a polyglot: ten. And this translates to his music: Jordan listens to music of all types and sees what speaks to him most, whether it’s Enrique Iglesias or some of his personal inspirations, Cher and Shania Twain. He also subscribes to the Pete Lock school of singing a crowd pleaser, playing more modern songs for his younger audiences and older songs for the older people that pass by. So out of all of the songs he’s sung, which one is the most popular? “‘Perfect’ by Ed Sheeran. It is a song that everyone knows, and they always say “awwww!” when I sing.” He even learned the lyrics in Italian, which always shocked the Italian speakers that pass by..

I know almost all the songs that Jordan sings, probably because I’m part of the young audience he caters to when singing. Most of the songs he

does are pop songs, though they are diverse in nature with release date, acousticness, and popularity. I always wondered what his favorite song was. When I asked him that, he laughed and said, “Being a musician, every song is your favorite song. Once you know how to sing it, that’s it. You can make your own version of it and it will be all yours.” I was slightly shell-shocked: he was right, obviously, but I never thought about the slight varieties of each song that an artist puts out. I like the songs I like because of how they make me feel, and it’s lovely to hear how each person covers a certain song. We did talk about some songwriters we loved, though: Jordan is a James Blunt fan. We agreed that “You’re Beautiful” is up there in terms of both of our favorite songs – shameless plug to listen to it!

We talked about the freedom of singing in an open space where you could pick music rather than having a set list thrown upon you: Jordan much prefers busking to some of his hired events because he could pick what he wants to sing. I always loved that he took song requests and dedicated them to that person: having Jordan sing to them made people brighten up. Though he loves to busk, Jordan dreams about a bigger busking arena: the concert

venue. “If someone saw me singing here and came up to me and asked to sign me up, with a record deal? I would, in a heartbeat, say yes… it’s my dream.” For him, busking is a way to showcase and improve his talents, make people happy, and earn a bit more money to support himself.

So with all the covers he knows, I wondered if he ever sang any originals. Turns out he has! Jordan’s currently working on an album of originals to release, doing a test run of one of his songs during one of his busking sessions. He described the rush he felt after he finished singing: “It was a shock. People said that it was amazing. You work with your own abilities, make your own lyrics, create your own tune, sing it and people love it? That’s the most special thing you could have.”

Yet I felt that Jordan’s set was already pretty darn special. Despite doing no advertisement for his sessions (I had to go searching for him every day for a week until I ran into him for the interview), every time he came out, there’d be a crowd more enthusiastic than the last one. His talents are amazing and the song choices are good, but one thing’s for certain: it was his mastery of social aspect of live music that made Jordan’s set stand out.

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What to Wear Based on your Favourite Tesco Meal Deal Items

Have you ever wanted to try out a new style, or wear something different, but you don’t know what to try? Use this guide that’s based on your favourite meal deal items to decide your next outfit for that extra special occasion you have coming up soon!

Mains

Cheese Sandwich: a simple graphic T-shirt

Ham Sandwich: a striped polo shirt

Ham and Cheese Sandwich: a big fur coat

Bacon Sandwich: a vintage leather jacket

BLT Sandwich: a bright Hawaiian shirt

Sausage, Bacon and Egg Sandwich: a flannel/plaid shirt

Egg Mayonnaise Sandwich: a 1920s detective-style trench coat

Club Sandwich: a suit and tie

Tuna/Prawn Sandwich: a denim jacket

Wrap: A vintage neon windbreaker jacket

Pasta: A bomber jacket with patches

Salad: A comfortable jumper or cardigan

Snacks

Ready Salted Crisps: blue jeans

Salt and Vinegar Crisps: chunky jewellery

Cheese and Onion Crisps: overalls/ dungarees

Prawn Cocktail Crisps: a pirate hat

BBQ/Bacon/Steak/Meat Crisps: a viking helmet

Spicy Crisps: a big wool scarf

Drinks

Water: flip flops

Coke: trendy trainers

Energy Drink: combat boots

Coffee: brogues/high heels

Fruit Juice/Smoothie: Crocs

Columns

Columns

Eastern European Expeditions: Breaking into Russia

We’re back folks. Back when I was planning this column, I had intended to write the second piece about my time in Narva, but someone beat me to it. Gutting. To be fair, it was a great article, so read that after this one. Anyway, the consequence is that you get this cracking story even sooner. Enjoy.

After Tallinn, I did a bit more of Estonia: Narva and Tartu.

During my time in the latter I witnessed probably the most bizarre event of the entire trip. I’ll set the scene: me and the guys from Estonia’s number one eco-hostel were out tooling about town, imbibing the culture of the European Capital of Culture 2024. At the time the city was having some sort of launch party for the accolade. #tartu2024tilidie. We were drinking in a park near the centre with the rest of the city. It was a good vibe, then I began to hear some thumping hard-bass emanating from the depths of the park. It got progressively louder.

Before I knew it, seven men in different coloured morph suits sprinted out of the undergrowth. Thankfully, they already had their target. They approached a be-hoodied man asleep on a bench and linked arms around him.

Think Eric Andre’s “Nightmare! Nightmare!” story. The poor man was slowly resurrected, before stripping off to reveal his own morph suit underneath. You can imagine my enraptured surprise. Then they raced off elsewhere like a technicolour wolf pack. Fever dream.

Guess you had to be there. Moving on. After Tartu spent a solid three days in Riga before heading to Kaunas, Lithuania’s second largest

city and European Capital of Culture 2022 as it so happens. What are the chances?

From Kau- nas I took an

I headed over to the beach on the sea side of the spit (sorry), but didn’t spend a lot of time there as I wasn’t ready, mentally or physically, to deal with all the sand.

marina and a couple of family restaurants, the sands opened up before me to a chorus of children screaming about whose turn it was on the seesaw.

morning bus across the country to Nida on the Curonian Spit to get some beach time in before heading inland for a month. It’s a little resort town where well-to-do Lithuanians come every summer, nestled between the Baltic Sea on one side and a lagoon on the other, separated only by a sandbank about a kilometre wide. A couple of miles to the south lies the border with Russia’s Kaliningrad exclave. You can see where this is going.

Arriving in Nida at the peak of the afternoon’s sweltering humidity, I made straight for my guesthouse. On the way I saw the sights of the town itself: a (sizeable) supermarket, two museums about amber, signs to a lighthouse and a small marina. The star of the show was of course the pristine lagoon, with pedalos disguised as cars dotted across the azure. I sunk into an Adirondack style chair in the shade and admired the view. After the surprisingly bustling cities of the Baltic states, the break was welcome.

It was a nice beach, broad, sandy and well-equipped with volleyball nets and other facilities. I watched the action from a café on the dunes with an ice-cold pint of kvass. Then, in the words of Virginia Woolf, to the lighthouse! After trekking up a small hill in the verdant centre of the spit, I quickly found myself at the foot of the lighthouse. Satisfied that there was indeed a lighthouse there, albeit not the best I’ve seen, I left.

The morning after, it was time for my mission: to sneak into Russia. My plan was simple: walk along the lagoonside beach until I hit a fence, poke a couple of toes under it and snap a quick selfie. Run away under a tirade of gunfire. Job done. You probably think that this is a stupid idea. You’d probably be right. I commenced my grand expedition behind enemy lines, setting off southwards along Nida’s promenade. Past the

I hugged the water’s edge for about an hour, enjoying the liminal space between the glassy sheet of the lagoon and the steep dunes that the spit is famous for. I was completely alone, imprinting fresh tracks in the wet sand amongst the occasional dead fish and oasis-like thickets of pure green harbouring the dulcet drone of various insects. Although stopping and simply relishing this idyll was tempting, the mission came first. I ploughed on regardless, slightly offput by the activity of several boats roundabout where I judged the border to be.

Then, disaster struck. A fence, and not one into Russia. I had reached an absolute nature reserve, no humans allowed under any circumstances. I thought it was a terrific coincidence that the reserve’s boundaries started exactly 1200m from the border and stretched the entire width of the spit. Tempted though I was to venture over the fence,

the threat of a €2000 fine and being shot by the Russian border force kept that desire at bay. Mission failed. I turned around and set off back in a state of utter dejection. This dejection was not to last, as I finally sat down and appreciated the paradise with which I was confronted. I embraced the privilege of my solitude, settling down in a shady grove to wonder at the perfect stillness at my fingertips. The two cardinal vaults of sea and sky became one, the horizon vanished into a gentle gradient of wispy blue. I had never really been lost for words at a landscape (or rather lagoonscape) before, it’s a special feeling. Shortly afterwards I jotted the following down:

“The sun is low now, the water and sky distinct, but tomorrow in that same place, that same shady pocket, earth and heaven will melt imperceptibly into one again.” I hope you’ll excuse the romanticism. Even though I had not snuck into Russia as I had imagined, I was to experience a different dream. Until next time.

by Jonah Poulard

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Stinky Tofu: The Year of the Rabbit

This past week has been filled with Lunar New Year celebrations here in Taiwan, with the entire island on holiday to usher in the Year of the Rabbit in 112.

The year is 112 as Taiwan is one of the few places in the world which doesn’t use the Gregorian Calendar, the system which dictates this year to be 2023 of the common era. Instead, it uses its own Republic of China or 民 國 Minguo calendar, counting all years from 1912, when, in the wake of the fall of the Qing Dynasty, the Republic of China was founded in Nanjing. For centuries, years in China had been labelled according to the reigning Emperor - now, they were to be labelled according to the new government. When the KMT (國民黨 Guomindang) subsequently fled to Taiwan in 1949 and claimed it as the new heart of the Republic of China, this calendar system fled with them.

Beyond being an interesting political relic, the Minguo calendar also often leaves me feeling foolish as I struggle to calculate what 2003 would be in the Taiwanese system, whilst someone watches on bemused that I don’t know the year in which I was born. Being constantly reminded that time is a social construct is also liable to cause an existential crisis or two.

For most Taiwanese, however, Lunar New Year is not a week to ponder the meaning of time, but to celebrate with family, friends, and plenty of food. On New Year’s Eve, there is a mass exodus from Taipei as people travel back to their hometowns, ready for a week of feasting and prying questions from relatives. For several nights, everyone scurries around in new red clothes as dish upon dish of laboriously-crafted delicacy is piled on the table. Walls are bedecked with 春聯 chunlian, red scrolls bearing new year’s wishes, many of which will last through the seasons until the next year comes.

An aspect of the festivities which struck me and my friends the most was the sheer bluntness of discussion and celebration of wealth. One of the most common new year’s greetings is 恭喜發財 gongxi facai, which translates to something like ‘wish you prosperity and wealth’, whilst the most common gift is cash. In a culture

The Pretend Parisienne: Twins, Trouble and Techno

which traditionally emphasises family structure and filial piety, children and adults alike pay respects to their elder relatives, and in return receive 紅包, little red envelopes into which banknotes are slipped. Children run around clutching and waving their shiny prizes, adorned with beautifully scribed calligraphy or emblems of the coming year’s zodiac animal. (Don’t worry, though - nowadays, Mickey Mouse and Paw Patrol options are also available.)

Watching 紅包 hongbao traditions unfold felt a far cry from home, where many people see the very giving of money as rude, showing a lack of thought in picking a nice gift. Whenever someone does give you cash, it is usually hidden in a card, with most people thinking it polite to focus on reading the card whilst awkwardly ignoring the money. ‘Thank you SO much, Aunt Jill, for such a thoughtful message!’ you would say, emphatically referring to a hurried generic scrawl of ‘Merry Christmas’, but not mentioning the banknote slipped inside. Dealing out 紅包 hongbao in British culture would be seen as a crude display of wealth - in Taiwan, it is a display of familial love and tradition.

Yet, amongst all the fun, in some ways, celebrating Lunar New Year as a foreigner, (and writing this), felt strange, and a bit out of place, as if I were imposing on traditions that do not belong to me. I was lucky enough to have a lovely Taiwanese family invite me to join in with their celebrations, but it still felt odd that an event that held such cultural significance for them was an exciting novelty for us. This is a dilemma that runs at the core of studying Chinese, or any language, as a degree - what gives you the right to indulge in and reflect on someone else’s culture?

On that rather overdramatic, degreequestioning-inducing note, it is time to wish everyone 新年快樂 xinnian kuaile or ‘Happy New Year’! I hope the Year of the Rabbit brings you wonderful things.

by Liberty Osborne

I’ve now been back in Paris for three weeks and I’ve been trying to adapt to the world of work. Although the internship is going well (surprising, I know), I do miss the more lax lifestyle of studying. But that too had its own adjustment struggles. My friend recently started her semester at the same Parisian university I was at and when she asked for help with the enrolment process I was forced to relive some of the traumas of higher education in a new country. University in France is certainly different. Stepping into my seminar classroom on my first day genuinely felt like being transported back to secondary school - rows of more than thirty tired and disinterested students facing the whiteboard waiting for the teacher to show up. The campuses are actually set up to look like a secondary school, with a canteen, library and corridors of classrooms. During the World Cup season most of the students would watch entire football matches as they sat through the three hour seminars. Yep, that’s right. Three hours. Probably one of the more painful aspects of French university is that their standard ‘seminar’ is three hours with one or two (if you’re lucky) five minute breaks that often end at 8pm. I put ‘seminar’ in quotation marks because the French definitely have their own interpretation of it - it’s more like a monotonous three hour lecture in which the students (myself included) are genuinely asleep by the end.

So, when my friend asked me to tell her what it was like I felt like an experienced veteran of the French university process - one infamous amongst other foreign students in Paris, one designed to beat you down until you are literally begging anyone vaguely associated with the university to tell you what you’re supposed to be doing. The university I attended, one of the first established universities in Europe, was also unsurprising quite averse to technology or indeed any form of online enrolment which meant we had to trek back and forth across the city to the various university campuses to find the illusive secretariats, (magical offices which supposedly contain the right person who would finally be able to help you.) I am doubtful these places actually exist and are just designed to keep foreign students hoping that they will eventually sort

everything out. On reflection, the key problem with the university’s backwardness was that they assumed that the foreign students, people who had probably stepped on French soil for the first time a week before, would just know how it all worked. But despite all that, the semester was really good fun and its differences with Oxford were actually somewhat refreshing.

The internship I’m currently doing is also proving to have its own startling moments - I was in my local cafe (working from home) and staring at the stream of emails flooding in when I looked up and saw two twins with memorable blonde quiffs wearing matching bright blue berets and combat boots. It was none other than Jedward themselves. On a random Tuesday morning sitting in a coffee shop in Paris I was face to face with my childhood cultural icons. Needless to say I immediately told everyone I knew, with the most common reaction being: what the fuck? and sort of sat there in a surprised daze. Another moment to add to the fever dream this Year Abroad has been so far.

To finish off a long week at work, I was looking forward to going out on Friday night to a techno event with friends at a well-known Parisian club. I had done my prep for it during the day, secured my drinks for pres and consumed an increased amount of caffeine to help me make it through until roughly 6am when I would inevitably crash and drag myself home on the early morning metro, probably sat across from some wide-eyed corporate Joe, looking half-alive. Oxford nightlife certainly did not prepare me for what I was to face in Paris - a standard night out in Oxford has me walking back from Bridge with a kebab in hand at a healthy 3am. Parisians, on the other hand, go hard - they take their music seriously and commit fully to the night - there are even dedicated Afters clubs in Paris which stay open until 4pm (!). I haven’t made it to an Afters in Paris yet but I have made it my missionwhether I remember any of the night is another story.

by Elena Buccisano

Editors: Haochen Wang, Rosalie Chapman, Tara Earley

Deputy Editors: Anvee Bhutani features@oxfordstudent.com

Tara Earley, Features Editor

How the Co-Chairs of the Class Act Campaign, Danial Hussain and Jenni Lynam, are tackling class issues in Britain’s “poshest” university.

Breaking Down Class Barriers in Oxford

With the Sutton Trust’s most recent report revealing that almost 60% of students would describe their financial situations to be worse than in the previous academic year, it seems the cost of living crisis has had an impact across the board. But this issue disproportionately affects students from disadvantaged or working-class backgrounds.

Oxford has consistently striven in recent years to make itself more accessible to these students, but there are still ways to go before we reach a point of equal opportunity. I was fortunate enough to be able to sit down with Danial Hussain and Jenni Lynam, co-chairs of Oxford’s Class Act Campaign, and discuss their work, upcoming projects, and thoughts on college disparities and Oxford’s overall accessibility for Class Act students.

Q: What made you decide to initially get involved with the Class Act campaign?

D: So, I started on a foundation year at LMH, and the community was amazing – there was a real sense of solidarity, and it really made me feel welcome. But I saw across colleges that this wasn’t the case, and that depending on what college you went to, your experiences were just so different. I really became of the view that your background doesn’t change with an Oxford offer – therefore, your support shouldn’t either.

J: Well, I’d say initially, I myself was feeling a bit out of place, and I started to wonder if anyone else was feeling that way too. And then one of my friends, who was already on the committee, she suggested

not really understanding what it’s like to be from a workingclass background, not realising that sometimes, working-class people can’t afford to go out all the time – not because they don’t want to, but because they simply don’t have the choice. J: would say that I think freshers’ week can be particularly tough for students. It’s that initial kind of recognition and realisation, of, “Oh, I’m at this university, and there’s a lot of people around me who don’t seem very similar to me.” We tried to roll out the idea of class training in colleges, which was really successful for the colleges that participated in it, but I just think making people talk more about class issues straight away, to perhaps remove that barrier that comes along with talking about it, is really key for freshers’ week, to make people feel more comfortable from the beginning, because it’s really a hard transition!

Q: Could you tell us about some of the work you’re doing within the Class Act campaign, any upcoming projects, and how you think they might make an impact?

advice session, and a speaker event with Lee Elliot Major OBE who is the first professor of social mobility in the UK.

J: Yes! So, we’ve got two reports along the way. The first one we’ve got is our cost of colleges report, which obviously is going to be really key, for actually having evidence of the disparities across colleges, and just making things more accessible to students, even before they apply, on how colleges work, and which college might be best suited to them, so that’s really important. And also, that will help with lobbying other colleges as well. And then our estranged student report, which will be focusing specifically on what happens for estranged students, what sort of support is available for them, so that will be really key as well for, again, having the evidence to lobby for change. And then we’ve just got quite a lot of socials coming up soon too, we obviously just enjoy putting on things for people to come to and find that community.

Q: Is there anything you’re particularly proud of accomplishing within the Class Act movement?

that I think about joining, and I just thought, “Oh, that’d be so cool!” So, I just ran for an officer position first year, and that was the start of it all, really!

Q: Are there any personal experiences you can share, or student experiences you’ve seen, where you feel class was an overlooked issue and students could be better supported?

D: Honestly, I think we’ve mostly moved along from direct classism, but there is a really strong sense of indirect classism, and that’s really hard to stop. I definitely feel there is an increasing sense of ignorance between people from perhaps more privileged backgrounds

D: I think Jenni and I tried to split Class Act into two arms, and both of them are mutually reinforcing. So, you have the campaign side and you have the social side. Jenni and I, and Class Act, are quite pragmatic, and we believe we need to get people who aren’t already interested in class, who aren’t perhaps already thinking about how to change things, on board, so we have a bigger coalition for change. And that’s why we first focus on socials, primarily, and then we focus on campaigning. So, the first thing we did was hold welcome drinks, and we had college bar crawls, where we would introduce people to lots of different colleges that they might not have initially been able to see. We organised a 93% Club bar crawl, prelims

maybe that wouldn’t have happened before, now they can ask us questions, and having that space is really important.

J: I would say our prelims advice session was definitely very successful, because even afterwards, the feedback from that was amazing, and we actually heard people say that it really improved their prelims. Students genuinely saw concrete change occur as a result of that, which was really good. But also it was kind of frustrating, because why isn’t the university already doing stuff like this? Why is our job to do this? But that was really successful. And in general, I’m proud that we are just trying to spread the word about the fact that you can come and talk about class issues, you can share your experiences, and Class Act will try and support and help you, we’re just making people know that we are here if they need to turn to somebody.

Q: If you could deliver a message to the student body, or indeed to our new Vice-Chancellor, is there anything you’d like to say?

D: I think there’s a lot, to be honest with you. I think the main thing for me is… well, for example, yesterday I was at the Crankstart Ball, and I saw people who met each other through Class Act socialising together, and for me, that was amazing, because I saw how happy they were, and how they found that friendship. Maybe that would’ve happened without Class Act, but it was really nice to know that Class Act helped create that link. And then also I think people coming to me and Jenni for access issues, whereas

There’s a structural problem with Oxford where most people, especially those from Class Act backgrounds, feel lucky to be at Oxford, or as if Oxford has done them a favour, and maybe as a result don’t push for change. But the truth is, there’s rights and responsibilities.

I don’t feel like there’s anyone at a universitywide level to turn to that is responsible for tackling these issues that people from Class Act backgrounds face.

Holocaust Memorial Day:

D: I think that class needs to be seen as an issue for Oxford as a whole. I’d probably say, I think there’s a structural problem with Oxford where most people, especially those from Class Act backgrounds, feel lucky to be at Oxford, or as if Oxford has done them a favour, and maybe as a result don’t push for change. But the truth is, there’s rights and responsibilities. The university has the responsibility to teach us, and we have the responsibility to behave in a mannerly fashion, and make sure we do our work, but equally, we have the right to a good university experience, and one that works for all students.

J: I think for me it would just be recognising that there are problems, and actually having a concrete response to that, rather than just passing the buck on to everyone else. It seems like there’s no one really responsible for these class issues, because whilst every college obviously has a body that governs it, I don’t feel like there’s anyone at a university-wide level to turn to that is responsible for tackling these issues that people from Class Act backgrounds face, so for me the important thing is recognition, and commitment to change.

Every year on Holocaust Memorial Day, I think one day a year could never be enough to say everything that is still left to be said about the Holocaust – and every year, as soon as I sit down to write anything, my mind goes blank, with only one word pulsing through it: HaShoah. Hebrew for ‘The Catastrophe’, it’s how a lot of Jews choose to refer to the Holocaust. I hope that this usage never becomes obsolete – that humanity will never see atrocities rivalling those that earned the Catastrophe its definite article – but the list of genocides we remember on HMD keeps growing, and as it grows, this hope sounds more and more like a pipe dream.

Today marks the 78th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz — an extermination camp that alone appended the Hebrew honorific HY’’D (short for HaShem yikkom damam –‘may G-d avenge their blood’)

reserved for victims of violent antisemitism to a million names, give or take. Revenge is a dish best served cold – and non-violently. By vehemently opposing everything the Nazis strived for: by remembering the names they tried to replace with prisoner numbers, by listening to the stories of people whose memory they sought to erase, by celebrating communities that they worked tirelessly to wipe off the face of the earth, by showing up for the oppressed and stand up to bigotry in any form, we avenge the blood of the six million Jews — as well as the millions of Slavs, Roma people, queer people, disabled people, communists murdered by the Nazis, and of the millions and millions of people who have died, and are still dying, in other genocides. Unfortunately, I don’t think we’ll see much of the latter today. Instead, the media will be flooded with the routine Lest we forget’s and Never again’s from people in positions of power that don’t seem to know what they’re trying not to forget or what they cannot allow to happen again. Frankly, I don’t care what the Prime Minister, whose Home Secretary earlier this month refused to apologise for her anti-refugee rhetoric when confronted about it by a Holocaust survivor, has to say about the Holocaust. I don’t want to hear the name of the Shoah come out of the mouths of people I wouldn’t trust not to be complicit in the next Shoah.

Someone might do well to remind Suella Braverman that the refugee ‘crisis’ was once Jewish in nature, and that back then the ‘invaders’ of Britain’s southern coast came on Kindertransports. I doubt that would make much of a difference to her, though; there was never a shortage of voices calling for even stricter immigration controls in the name of ‘British jobs’ and ‘the fabric of British society’. It is quite grotesque that in the eighty or so years that have passed since then, the priorities of British refugee politics have remained much the same — as if they had not been responsible for failing to avert many thousands of the six million deaths.

Someone might also do well to remind Suella Braverman that

the Nazis’ absurd pseudoscientific theories about race weren’t the sole, or even the main, vehicle of dissemination of the hatred that fuelled the crematoria of extermination camps. Jewish people were not simply ‘inferior’ from a ‘scientific’ perspective; they were painted as a threat that Germany and the Germans needed to be protected from. Dehumanising groups of people through reducing them to a ‘question’, a ‘problem’, a ‘debate’ is the first step on a well-trodden political path that leads to Auschwitz. The same language and the same principles are coming to dominate Britain’s government rhetoric and inform its policy towards migrants, trans and queer people and other minorities.

Not unlike Germany in the 1930s, today’s Britain is a society where the language of hatred and division is allowed to proliferate by those holding the highest offices and where marginalised groups are scapegoated for the country’s rapid downhill trajectory to lift the weight of accountability off the shoulders of those who have profited from it. Populist propaganda has been very successful in fostering a culture where the fight for social justice is derided as ‘wokeness’, social welfare is pushed to the sidelines of the political agenda, and bigotry is normalised and trivialised.

The theme of this year’s HMD, ‘ordinary people’, is very pertinent in this social climate. Today, we should all take some time to think about the ordinary Germans of the Third Reich — not just the criminals who faced trial at Nuremberg or the accomplices who escaped justice, but also the runof-the-mill citizens. Especially the run-of-the-mill citizens. The Holocaust wasn’t just the arms that wore the Hakenkreuz — the Holocaust was also the eyes that looked away and the mouths that stayed sealed. There’s no reason to believe this couldn’t one day be us.

The ordinary Germans weren’t all raging antisemites doing the sieg heil out of sheer zeal, though many were. Others did the sieg heil because they had things to lose; their job, their in-

come, their social standing. Not everyone who refused to help Jews asking them for help and protection did so out of malice or fear. Many simply had other things to worry about, other people to take care of, other places to be, important Nazis to shake hands with, important Nazis to impress. Maybe they went to bed after work every night too tired to wonder where the Jewish greengrocer from the little shop down the street had gone. The scariest thing is, you often think becoming an ordinary German is worse than death – until you become one, and life feels like it was never any different. I’ve learned a lot about this over the past eleven months.

As someone who was born and grew up in Russia, I feel like I’ve witnessed its transformation into a country of ordinary Germans since the start of its invasion of Ukraine in the name of its ‘denazification’. There’s hardly been a day that I didn’t hear about public figures and people I used to know denying Russian war crimes, justifying them as a ‘necessary evil’, claiming Russia had no choice in the face of an alleged genocidal threat to ethnic Russians but to commit genocide first. As outrageous and deeply disturbing as all of these things are, there’s one that’s the most soul-crushing of all; ‘I don’t really care about politics’ – in my experience, for some reason, indifference is a bigger killer of hope than hatred.

I’m in no position to judge ordinary Russians; I think I turned into one at some point, too, and I’m still trying to un-become one. It’s easier to become desensitised to genocide than you would think it should be, it turns out. It doesn’t begin to compare to the horrors of genocide itself, but it’s still horrifying in a different way. For the longest time you can’t sleep or think about anything else or stop talking about it, and then one day you find yourself opening the news to check how many deaths your family’s tax money paid for today, feeling numb when you see the figure, then closing the news and going back to your errands. You don’t notice the moment you cross this threshold; it just creeps up on you, and next thing you

know, it feels like some part of you has shut down, almost like you’re barely human anymore. Maybe it’s just me. Sadly, I don’t think it’s just me – if it was, we’d be remembering a lot fewer genocide victims today.

Yesterday in Gaza, the IDF killed nine Palestinians at Jenin refugee camp, including a civilian man and an elderly woman. About 30% of the population of Israel are of full or partial Ashkenazi Jewish descent; I am, too. We are all only three or four generations away from the barbed wire of Auschwitz, and we owe it to the memory of those who never lived to see the world past the fences made of it to refuse to watch these fences spring up again in silence. Words are rarely enough, but, as HMD reminds us every year, silence is worse. Silence is complicity.

In extraordinary times, the human psyche adapts to what under any other circumstances would sound unfathomable. Ordinary people inflicted, condoned, ignored barely conceivable suffering – but equally, ordinary people looked out for one another in ghettos and concentration camps, ordinary people hid Jews in their homes or helped them get to safety, ordinary people formed resistance groups in the face of the threat of execution. To make sure none of us will ever have to make choices as difficult as these on a daily basis for years, like the Germans and the people of other Nazi-occupied countries did, we need to consistently choose to condemn injustice when we see it instead of looking away, to speak out against bigotry whoever we hear it from, and to listen to marginalised people when they say they’re being oppressed.

what the lives of the ordinary people of Nazi Germany tell us about being an ordinary person today

Anna Ashkinazi

Image attribution: Frankie Fougathin via Wikimedia Commons

Schlagintweit

Beyoncé and Beckham:

Selling out for performative allyship?

Charlie Bowden

WhenBeyoncé takes the stage, the whole world seems to stop and look. Her recent performance in Dubai, her first full-length concert since 2018, was no different, with fans clamouring for any footage of the private event on social media. However, some fans feel betrayed that she would perform in a country where queer relationships are illegal, especially in light of the reverence her recent album Renaissance paid to the queer community.

Editors:

The private concert for 1,500 guests was held to mark the opening of the luxury hotel Atlantis The Royal. Beyoncé’s hour-long performance included such hits as “Drunk in Love”, “Halo”, and “Crazy in Love” as well as the live debut of several songs from her 2019 album The Lion King: The Gift. Blue Ivy, Beyoncé’s daughter, appeared on stage to perform their Grammy-winning collaboration “Brown Skin Girl” together for the first time. Many fans noted, however, the conspicuous absence of any music from her album Renaissance which was released last year.

Renaissance is a celebration of house music and the Black queer ballroom and club scene which brought it into existence. In crafting the album, Beyoncé included elements from club classics like “Show Me Love” by Robin S. and Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love”, as well as voice clips by New York nightlife icon Kevin Aviance and TV personality Ts Madison. Rapper Big Freedia, who helped popularise bounce music in New Orleans, is sampled on the chart-topping “Break My Soul”. On Instagram Beyoncé dedicated the record to “all of the pioneers who originate culture, to all of the fallen angels whose contributions have gone unrecognised for far too long” and to her late uncle Johnny, who died from complications related to HIV. In a 2019 speech at the GLAAD Awards she praised Johnny for having “lived his

truth” and being “brave and unapologetic at a time when this country wasn’t as accepting”.

Fans were eager to see Beyoncé perform songs from the record after the album received little promotion upon release. However, none of the tracks from Renaissance were in her Dubai setlist, and it’s easy to see why. Under United Arab Emirates law, itself in accordance with Sharia law, same-sex sexual activity is punishable by death. The influence of queer culture on the songs from Renaissance would not have been a good fit for performance in Dubai.

Why, then, did Beyoncé agree to perform in Dubai in the first place? It is reported that she earned $24 million for performing there, but some have argued that she didn’t need the money. If she did, she probably would’ve promoted Renaissance a lot more last year. Music journalist Abigail Firth told the BBC that it seemed like a “really misguided choice” for Beyoncé given that her recent work is “indebted to LGBT culture”.

Some have compared Beyoncé supposedly selling out for this grand hotel opening to David Beckham, noted for his gay activism in the past, being paid £10 million to be a brand ambassador for the Qatar 2022 World Cup. Qatar has also persecuted queer people, with male homosexual acts

being outlawed and Muslims who are convicted under Sharia law facing possible capital punishment. Drag queen and television personality Kitty Scott-Claus tweeted asking if it is “one rule for one and one for another” as some fans are hesitant to condemn Beyoncé’s performance.

It is important to recognise that these two situations are different. Beckham was paid by the Qatar government to be an ambassador for the World Cup, while Beyoncé was paid by a private company to perform at a private event. Performing in a country is not the same as espousing the policies of that country’s government. In 2008 George Michael performed in Qatar and it’s obvious he didn’t share their views.

That doesn’t mean there isn’t anything questionable about Beyoncé deciding to perform there. Atlantis Resorts, the company which owns the Atlantis The Royal, is a subsidiary of Kerzner International. South African business magnate Solomon Kerzner founded Kerzner International and was involved in numerous political and business controversies throughout his life. In 1984, he made a deal with the government of Bophuthatswana, a nominally independent republic from South Africa at the time, to advertise apartheid in return for tax breaks for his hotel company Sun

International. He was also named in Jeffrey Epstein’s ‘little black book’. While he died in 2020 and Kerzner obviously was not involved in arranging the performance, it seems odd that she would choose to work with a company founded by such a controversial figure for her return to performance. Beyoncé famously takes great care with her performance arrangements, so her team must have been aware of these details about the parent company of the hotel.

While you cannot truly compare Beckham’s ambassadorial role for the Qatari government with Beyoncé performing at a Dubai hotel, it is questionable why somebody of her stature would choose to give her first concert since 2018 in a country with such oppressive laws and at a hotel whose company’s founder had such immoral business dealings. Artists with Beyoncé’s platform and status should make choices that consciously support marginalised groups, and while some fans could argue that this performance is a step forward, she did not use the performance to speak up about attacks on the queer community. Instead, she just spent an hour performing her hits, like she has done at so many other private functions in the past. This time, though, it’s come back to bite her.

Image Credit: Wikimedia

Susie Barrows, Martin Alfonsin Larsen, Natasha Norton, Cosimo

Equal parts delightful and torturous: a review of Aftersun

Charlie Bowden

Charlotte

Wells’ directorial

debut Aftersun is an ode to unconditional familial love and all of the heartache it brings. Of all the praise that could be afforded to Wells, I am compelled to first commend her on the film’s title. Watching protagonist Sophie reassessing a childhood holiday with her troubled father feels akin to the sunburn revealed by aftersun after a carefree day at the beach. It is bittersweet, nostalgic, and painful all at the same time.

Aftersun is not a particularly plot-driven film, largely compiled of shots of the Turkish tourist-scape and the nostalgia of the all-inclusive. However, it is this emphasis on aesthetic and emotion, rather than narrative story-telling, that makes Aftersun such a triumph. Wells has revived the place of cinema as the ‘septième art’, using it as a ve-

hicle to explore the intimacies of a loving but complicated father-daughter relationship.

The competing perspectives of both younger and older Sophie create a compelling portrayal of childhood naivete, and the painful coming-ofage realisations that force us to see our parents’ flaws. The resulting narrative is reminiscent of Jeanette Winterson’s novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, standing as a testimony to Wells’ creative use of cinema to capture emotions normally monopolised by the written word.

This ambitious film is elevated by the performance of Frankie Corio. Her depiction of childish excitability and emerging self-consciousness in the face of older teens in their holiday resort endears her to the audience. Her im-

provisation of the line “I’m going to record it in my mindcamera” was a brilliant reflection of an eagerness to please her dad and keep his attention. As my friend put it, “she’s definitely been 11 before.”

A personal stand-out scene was Sophie’s karaoke performance of REM’s Losing My Religion. The choice of song, one of my dad’s favourites, felt especially poignant in a film that puts such relationships under a microscope. Corio’s awkward mannerisms capture the beginning-of-the-end of childhood innocence, and a slow introduction to teenaged embarrassment. This likely was aided by Corio’s own discomfort with singing, stating that “I hated it, I hated every moment.” The scene also precipitates one of the most striking moments of the film, when Sophie is locked out of their

hotel room after a depressive drinking spiral leaves father Calum (Paul Mescal) unconscious and naked in their bed. When Sophie simply covers her dad in a sheet and dismisses it the next day as “no big deal”, the audience is made painfully aware that this is not a new occurrence.

Mescal’s Oscar-nominated performance is equal parts delightful and torturous. His affection for both Calum and Sophie, and Frankie, is apparent both on and offscreen. He has described being “drawn to the script” because of its portrayal of a single-parent relationship that is centred around love.

A magical combination of great acting, visually arresting shots and poetic explorations of depression, love and innocence has made Aftersun

a universally acclaimed debut. Following the film’s 121 award nominations, all eyes are on Wells to see what she creates next.

Aftersun is now streaming on MUBI.

Image credits: Kevin Kunze via Wikipedia

‘Questions in a World of Blue’:Ciana Russo’s Short Film Premiere

Saturday evening saw a well-attended Magdalen College Auditorium for the premiere of Ciana Russo’s first short film ‘Questions in a World of Blue’. As asked for on the invitation card, most in attendance wore a blue piece of clothing; in my row, I spotted a royal blue sweater, a cyan polo-shirt, a navy pair of chinos and two Oxford Blue scarves.

The film begins with a quote from Laura Mulvey, professor of film and media studies at Birbeck, University of London: ‘Woman’s desire is subjugated to her image […] as bearer, not maker, of meaning.’ Through this choice, the director wants to set a statement: ‘Growing up’, Russo tells me, ‘I watched spaghetti westerns, mafia movies and neo-realist Italian films, all of which were directed by men.

As much as they gave me an appreciation for storytelling and a love for the medium of film, it was important to address what I had to give as a female filmmaker, and Mulvey’s idea of the difference between woman as bearer of meaning versus maker of meaning re ally resonated with me.’

The film begins with two girls sitting in a cafe, discussing their lives and remarking on the strangeness of con templating the complexity of other people’s lives. Then, we see the exact complexities of one their lives; we follow the development of the relationship of Mr. Blue (Monty Jones), described as ‘Routine Romeo’, and Blue, whose actual name is Margot (Marianne Nossair).

Just as the film itself, the relationship is fast paced: ‘A week of Blue and he (Mr. Blue) was

hooked’. However, the quick and thrilling connection built between the pair is matched by an equally abrupt end: Blue moves on and ends the relationship. Mr. Blue writes a letter to her, and the film

‘Questions in a World of Blue’ sees an all-Oxford cast filmed with a litany of cinematographic techniques, such as static frames, extreme closeups, and a variety of transition methods interspersed throughout its 12-minute running time. Further effects such as the switch between black and white shots and colour film, as well as Sebastian Thomas’ instrumental song ‘Mistral 2’, helps in creating a special atmosphere.

the film only developed fully after a long process of revising the script, watching more films and crystallising in her mind exactly what story she wanted to tell.

‘Questions in a World of Blue’ will be shown at this year’s Oxford University Filmmaking Foundation (OUFF) short film festival. Russo is currently fundraising to show her creation at other film festivals throughout the UK.

ends here; we remain with the open question of what is to come next for the two protagonists. It is left to us, with our own complex lives and our imaginations, to answer this question.

Regarding her inspiration for the film and in how far her own experiences inspired her, Russo states: ‘I knew that I wanted to make a film centred on women, so it was easy when writing the script and the initial café scene in particular to draw upon conversations I’d had with my own friends.’ However, for Russo,

Hopefully, this will not be the last time we hear from Russo. In fact, she is already working on shooting her next movie, inspired by Sofia Coppola’s 2006 film ‘Marie Antoinette’, depicting the dreamlike state of an essay crisis occurring through the twilight hours.

Illustration credits: Yii-Jen Deng

Cosimo Schlagintweit

Editors: Susie Barrows, Asmaani Shukla oxstu.food@gmail.com

D ate Nights for Valentines/ Palentines

It’s nearly the most marmite day of the year: Valentine’s Day. Everyone knows the key to a good date is good foodwhether you’re spending it with a special someone, or celebrating Palentine’s with your friends, here’s our top things to eat and drink this year on the 14th of February.

GOING OUT: Quod, High Street

If you’re really splashing the cash this Valentine’s Day, then head to Quod on the High Street. It’s definitely pricier than your standard Oxford restaurant, but it is delicious, and the atmosphere is very fancy (think pretty lights, proper tablecloths, arched windows…). If you sit near the window, it’s perfect for people-watching too, as it looks straight onto the busiest crossing on the High Street. You’ll feel definitively wined and dined: it’s a place that will make you almost (almost) want to go into investment banking purely so you can afford to eat there more often.

Kazbar, Cowley Road

An absolute gem on the Cowley Road. It’s well worth the walk even if you live the other side of Oxford; this charming tapas bar is a glimpse of sun in the midst of cold, rainy Hilary. Whether you eat inside in the ambient candlelit indoor seating, or al fresco on their piazza shared

with neighbouring Cafe Coco, you are sure to have a good evening. Tapas is always a good idea for a date, dispelling any opportunity for food envy, plus it’s always romantic to share your meal. It can be easier on the bank account too as you can decide how much or how little you want to get, and if you underbuy, you can always buy more dishes later. It’s perfect for Palentine’s celebrators too: the more friends you bring, the more dishes you will get to try! Don’t leave without sampling their port sangria - it’s my second favourite drink in Oxford.

The House, Wheatsheaf Yard

My favourite drink in Oxford is only available in a little cocktail bar just off the High Street - The House. Named after its neighbouring college, Christ Church, this bar is the whole package: atmosphere, drinks quality, and price, if you go at the right time. A ceiling full of fairy lights greets you as you enter, creating that ideal romantic ambience for your date. But what’s great about this place is their happy hour - on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Sunday from 5pm-9pm, Friday from 5pm8pm and Saturday 4pm-8pm, you can enjoy their cocktails for half price, coming in at about £6 each. I know creamy cocktails aren’t for everyone, but try the Mint Chocolate Martini - an enticing mixture of crème de cacao and crème de menthe shaken with milk and cream creates a

LUNCH BREAK

This Week: Love Coffee

by Susie Barrows

I’ve recently become very obsessed with a cafe on the High Street: Love Coffee. In the two weeks since I first visited, I’ve been five times, saying perhaps more about my caffeine addiction than anything else. Yet while their coffee is undeniably delicious, their lunch options are the real show-stealer.

Offering a range of paninis, baguettes, bagels, and Greek pas-

cocktail that tastes like alcoholic mint choc chip ice cream.

STAYING IN:

But Valentine’s Day shouldn’t be about spending lots of money. Spending time with people you love is the whole point, so there’s no need to go out anywhere fancy if you don’t want to. Here are some good options for food and drink if you’re planning to spend the night at home with your loved ones.

Cook for each other

Cooking for each other can be even more romantic than a meal out, with the added bonus of including an activity you can do together followed by getting to eat the delicious food you’ve created! This is a great activity to do with friends, too - why not all contribute a starter, main or dessert to make up a full meal?

Tesco Finest Meal Deals

You still want something a little fancy with the benefits of cooking together but without the drawback of being high-effort - enter the humble Tesco Finest meal deal. This absolute steal offers you a main, a side, a dessert and a bottle of wine for two all for £12: their steak is remarkably good! If you’re feeling a little bougie, you could even upgrade to the M&S versionalthough I haven’t yet tried that, so can’t vouch for its quality.

Don’t blame me if it’s not worth the extra cost.

Charcuterie Board

But wait, my student budget won’t stretch to a meal out, and I don’t have a kitchen to cook in, you say! Never fear, this is where the charcuterie board comes in. It’s essentially a ‘picky bits’ meal but disguised as something fancier because it’s got a fancy French name. Pick up some cheese, crackers, salami, olives, grapes, whatever catches your eye. Grab the 3 for £5.50 canned cocktails in Tesco if you both want something alcoholic to drink as well, or smoothies or bougie fruit juice if you don’t. Now’s the real clincher: the presentation. Put on your fairy lights/lamps/anything that’s not the overhead light, to set the mood. Add a Spotify playlist of romantic love songs on your Bluetooth speaker. Blankets on the floor, pillows, whatever you have. And then lay out the food. You have yourself a romantic, thoughtful, indoor picnic, without the need for cooking (or washing up) and at a price you can decide yourself - you can buy as much or as little as you want.

Go forth and romance - happy Valentine’s/Palentine’s-ing!

tries, as well as cooked breakfasts, this is a perfect place to go whether you’re looking for a sit-down lunch or a takeaway. Prices range from about £3-8 depending on whether you opt for a pastry or a cooked meal, but all worth the cost.

The OxStu recommends: Avocado, brie, tomato and basil panini (£5.25 eat-in).

Susie Barrows

Image Credit: Susie Barrows

Arts Week Arts Week Arts Week

What to expect:

Workshops from theatre to photography Events

Performances

Guest Speakers

Editors: Emily Hudson, Anna Bartlett, Jasmine Wilkinson oxstu.green@gmail.com

Climate Anxiety: A narrative in need of change

In contrast to the stereotype of the spirited young student, brandishing placards on the streets of university towns, British students today appear to be politically disengaged. As Brazilian students took to the streets over Bolsenaro’s sweeping education cuts, British students seem to accept their fate entering a postpandemic economy with a distinct lack of adequate skilled work, and a dismembered housing market in a kind of apathetic stupor. Even some of our closest neighbours - the French - continue their long held tradition of youth uprising as seen in recent cost of living related protests across the country. Somewhere we seem to have lost our historic culture of rebellion and by doing so have allowed our living standards to be trampled on. We know things are bad, but worse, we seem to believe that we can’t do anything about it. This outlook seems to culminate in an unstated despondent worldview adopted by the British youth - and is associated with widespread pathologies. Many teenagers now harbour palpable climate anxiety which, although it can be overwhelming, is not yet a registered mental illness and so sufferers are offered very little (if any) support. Depression is the most treated condition by the NHS and is increasingly affect-

ing younger ages. Eating disorders have increased by two thirds since the pandemic, mostly amongst young girls.

This is not typical teenage angst. It goes hand in hand with austerity-driven cuts to youth services and the first generation to have a lower expected quality of life than their parents. It is not hyperbolic to suggest that being young in late capitalist Britain is close to being classified as an illness.

The familiar well-wishing comments often spouted by the babyboomer generation like “I know what it’s like to be young” no longer have much of a ring of truth or grasp of the reality of being young in the 21st century. Treating these problems as if they were caused solely by an individual’s neurological imbalances or family background is essentially a form of victim-blaming and by doing so, any question of social systemic causation is made impossible.

Instead, teenagers channel their malaise into never-ending echo chambers, else drown it out by doom scrolling or better yet, ignore it completely. If a plant was wilting we wouldn’t diagnose it with ‘plant-wilting-syndrome’, we would change its conditions. Yet when humans are suffering under bleak conditions, we are told something is wrong with us and are expected to keep pushing

through. The most effective therapy would be structurally addressing the societal causes of malaise among our generation. We need to search outside the individual for solutions to the pains of our generation to address collective trauma and anxiety. By doing so we may finally help to address their causes.

concern amongst the population or politicians to secure the action needed. Take the recent Tory leadership contest - while neither candidate was an out-and-out climate denier, neither did they propose any satisfactory course of action for the future of Britain, and the fracking-fanatic Truss even came out on top.

of these two phenomena occurring concurrently. Leaders will only be pressed to act if they are spooked by drastic collective action of the people, and our climate anxiety will be best kept at bay if we see the change we need and can be a part of it.

The more politically inclined among the population may remember the words of British Home Secretary Suella Braverman late last year, as she blamed the ‘tofueating wokerati’ for the civil disruption caused by various protest movements in November and December. This type of content would have once gone down well with a certain demographic, and likely still does. However, by the time of the next general election, scheduled to be held in January 2025, a quarter of the British population could be vegan or vegetarian, according to a 2019 report by Sainsbury’s. The question for the government, then, is how

Building collective mental resilience will be essential to our fight for climate action long into the future. We need to be equipped to both deal with the catastrophe we face as well as fight back against impending threats to our lives, livelihoods and futures. The collective aspect of this is important as the climate crisis is an issue we all face and must all confront; we must not forget that we are more effective when we act synergistically.

Climate anxiety can be isolating and so erodes collectivism as people lose hope in their futures. It is a paradoxical phenomenon because it is experienced to some extent by almost everyone who knows the scale of destruction we face, and yet it has not inspired sufficient

It seems the gap between public sentiment and policy action can be attributed to three possible causes. The first is that not enough people know enough about climate change which is evidently an issue with the media and education system. The second is that people do not transfer belief into actions (voting or otherwise)they may have other priorities or simply don’t care enough. Or lastly, it could be that people act enough but it is not translated into policy which is a problem with the political system or politicians themselves.

All of these are certainly contributors, as my experience campaigning in environmental movements brought me into contact with members of the public in each of these three categories. But what can be done about them? There is a fine line between instilling enough fear in the public to spark action, and fear-mongering in such a way that action seems hopeless. We appear to have a deadly mixture

The scoop on ‘Veganuary’

the two – presumably mutually exclusive – demographics will match up. The question for us, meanwhile, is when, and how, did this particular line of attack become so obviously tonedeaf? A large part of our answer may lie in that yearly challenge that many people around the UK and beyond are embracing right now: Veganuary.

Veganuary is a UK-based nonprofit organisation launched in 2014 which encourages people across the world to go vegan during the month of January. In the nine years since its launch, the campaign has become a household name, extended its reach around the globe, and incentivised, directly or indi-

rectly, the production of thousands of vegan products and many more vegans. There is a lot to be said for attempting such a change in lifestyle during this event, which has now become as much a part of the national calendar as dry January (although it’s a brave man or woman who attempts both at once).

Aside from the publicity, encouragement, and camaraderie which comes with joining in with a global initiative rather than going it alone, a significant advantage of becoming vegan during January is that this is also the month that restaurants and grocery brands tend to release their new vegan products

for the year. ‘Veganuary’s’ of the past have seen the introduction of such big names as the McPlant (2021), Starbucks’ Beyond Meat Breakfast Sandwich (2020), and even the ethereal Greggs Vegan Sausage Roll (2019). This year, look out for Burger King’s new Vegan Bacon King, and, in supermarkets, Impossible’s game-changing frozen vegan nuggets (trust me.)

According to the organisation itself, Veganuary in 2022 saved the lives of 2.16 million animals, having had 629,351 participants. Of course, the exact impact is near-impossible to quantify without knowing the individual habits of each of the 630,000 participants, but

Therefore the solution to these parallel problems seems clear: present the solutions alongside the problems. The media and education systems must change to first address the scale of the issue for those still in the dark but just as importantly, they must also address what can be done about it as this is key to containing climate anxiety while keeping pressure on the powers that be to address the issue urgently. This is the clearest way we can address both climate anxiety and the climate crisis itself.

If not addressed together, these issues risk turning public sentiment even further inward, paralysing it with fear and adding to our generation’s hapless pile of comorbidities which will erode the collective mental resilience we will need to push for vital climate justice. We need a narrative of hope which addresses the challenges of being young in Britain today while being realistic about the future we face.

by Anna BARTLETT

the staggering statistics make the basic fact clear: that this movement has become a big deal. Not everyone loves animals – that’s your business. Generally, though, people enjoy having an ozone layer and oxygen to breathe. Which brings us to arguably Veganuary’s most compelling angle – the environmental factor.

Even the most well-intentioned must consider whether they have the financial backing to support their lofty ideals, and the student is certainly no exception. So, is veganism feasible on a student budget?

read more online...

by Daisy BRESSINGTON

“being young in late capitalist Britain is close to being classified as an illness.”

Editors: Emily Hudson, Nicole Hasler, Archuna

Should we really ‘learn to live’ with Long

Opinion | by Archuna

Russell T Davies seems to have a penchant for all things apocalyptic. And sometimes, it feels like I’ve woken up into his dystopian imagination. It can’t just be me feeling this way, can it? I remember what it felt like to watch Turn Left. There was a thrill in seeing Donna Noble’s universe calamitously deteriorate in front of her very eyes. But in 2020, this adrenalinedripped nightmare of a world became a fiendish reality.

Like Donna Noble, my Christmas had been with the family, enjoying a rare getaway from the City. On New Years’ Eve, my sibling scrolled through their Twitter, casually telling me of a mysterious outbreak in Wuhan. Little did we know that the New Year would change everything. In 2019, we didn’t have a mass pandemic that would spark international lockdowns, the mass culling of animals and the deaths of almost fifteen million people. We didn’t have healthcare staff going to the hospital like it would be their last, often without any adequate form of protection. We didn’t see violent footage of mourning families around burning pyres, with a black fungus maiming its victims. We didn’t see so many businesses shut down for good, as hospitals and funeral morgues struggled to contain themselves. And we didn’t expect so many to carry on, content with this violent status quo, being infected with a virus whose long-term consequences are only now beginning to be realised.

The pandemic has been a struggle for survival. I’m thinking of all the remarkable souls who’ve needlessly had to leave this world. I’m grieving for the entire neighbourhood of Tamil elders that my family loved and knew, who lost their jobs and then their lives, as we were told to ‘live’ with the virus. Today, the BMJ estimates over two million people in the UK to have Long Covid. Thousands of NHS staff with long COVID risking losing their pay, 71,000 children in the UK

are now struggling with Long Covid, with a growing number now permanently disabled.

Long COVID has meant days where I’m unable to walk, feeling confused and helpless as throbbing, disabling sensations assail my entire body. ‘Long Covid’, by its very phrase, is more than a state of medical deterioration. It is a linguistic, physiological and social identification with the virus. When people disregard COVID, they are disregarding people.

COVID-deniers have often used their distrust in the medical and scientific establishment to justify their stance. It is ironic that the very spread of the virus has now made others more susceptible to the lifepossessing power of these very authorities. Numerous people who never took COVID seriously - friends, students and professors - have now told me to ‘see a GP’ about my disabling Long COVID symptoms. To have support at any official level requires medical documentation - a dependency on the very institutions that many COVID-deniers have long foregone. I must confess that I’m reluctant to seek medical consultation myself- why must I have to endure a profession that has a history of gaslighting and poorly serving people that I know and care about? Medical racism and saviour-complex ableism is tiring enough! There have been many saddening tales of medical professionals gaslighting and trivialising people for their Long COVID experiences. Yet few around me seem to worry, let alone know, about the long-term impact this disease could have on their own autonomy. It is an abject failure of public health awareness, which begs the question:

Where did it all go wrong?

In the early months of the pandemic, the UK Government and its respective health agencies issued awareness adverts that emphasised washing your hands, over wearing masks.

During this period, Boris Johnson, the then PM, flaunted his disregard for the Government’s own official advice by shaking hands with hospital patients. I remember wearing a mask on the Tube, only to be greeted with baffled smirks. Perhaps it was the conflicted public health messaging that helpedfuel misunderstandings about

Covid?

altogether. Disabled, chronically ill and psych-incarcerated communities have long been commenting on and accurately predicting the ways in which COVID will affect people - some even calling it a ‘mass disabling event’. The authority of this lived experience, however, has often been widely ignored.

COVID. If washing your hands at your own discretion was enough to prevent the spread of COVID, then was it even as bad as the flu?

Meanwhile, the WHO took over two years to admit that COVID was an airborne disease. So what went wrong? Policymakers and health officials should not go about tackling a novel virus by sitting and waiting it out. However, this often happened, with public health officials initially denying now established facts about COVID due to a ‘lack of evidence’. The prioritisation of evidence-based medicine over sensible precautions and proactive strategy has arguably contributed to plenty of inconsistent messaging, when research was still rolling out. Furthermore, what did they deem as ‘evidence’? As scientists awaited data from surveys and trials, the evidence of lived experience was disregarded

The images of the Wuhan outbreak made it perfectly reasonable that COVID could have been airborne. However, even a few months into 2020, GPs would appear on national television and act as though hand-washing and insignificant social distancing were the causes of concern. The medical education system and its recruitment process is perhaps also to blame here. In “How Doctors Think”, the author Jerome Groopman reflects on his own profession’s tendency to work within known frameworks and protocols, but not beyond formulaic presuppositions. The lack of intuitive wisdom here, which many an ancient grandparent may instead possess, has again thwarted any meaningful prevention of Long COVID. A medical education system that rewards textbook-learners but ignores or even penalises intuitive actors certainly does not equip them well for the novelty of a pandemic.

The media’s propensity to misreport information surrounding COVID is also problematic. Take for example, a recent study published in the BMJ which suggested that longCOVID symptoms in mild patients resolved within a year. While many experts critiqued this study for its methodology and the contradictory evidence available, it didn’t prevent newspapers from uncritically hailing it as fact.

Perhaps also the misunderstandings of Long COVID stem from misperceptions surrounding COVID (Sars-CoV-2). Many still imagine COVID to be a lung condition and not a vascular problem. However, there is now ample evidence to show that this virus can lead to vascular damage and multi-system

dysfunction. It is hardly a surprise when ACE-2 receptors, associated with COVID, are situated in the lungs but also in other areas of the body such as the gut. The long-term implications of COVID, then, can be far-reaching: from heightened risks of chronic gut conditions to neurodegeneration to paralysis to damaged immune systems to rapid ageing and increased risk of cancer.

Virologists, disabled and marginalised communities have long commented on the longterm consequences a disease like COVID might have on the body. A person with HIV, for example, might take several years before the worst of its effects are known. Similarly, HPV may not be an immediate threat to the body but can cause cancer in the long-run. What’s to say, with all the testimonial and scientific evidence increasingly emerging, that COVID cannot do something similar? The short-sighted understanding that COVID doesn’t kill but is acceptably ‘mild’ has merely fuelled the rise of our Long COVID crisis.

What noW?

We now face an army of viruses. As variants blend, reinfection soars and immunity declines. A GP once laconically told me that ‘diseases don’t read textbooks’. So in this uncertain time, it is imperative that we do not repeat the same mistakes of the past. As individuals, we must act more proactively in ventilating our air , maintaining precautions and testing regularly. However, we can also protect our communities and ourselves by putting pressure on our officials to test and trace more efficiently and provide more employment protections for those potentially down with COVID/Long COVID.

And if we fail this time, the dystopia will only get worse.

Image credits: Anna Shvets via Pexels

“71,000 children in the UK are now struggling with Long Covid”

Deputy Editor: Florence Allen

Section Editor: Vivian Gu

identity@oxfordstudent.com

Content warning: war, rape, islamophobia

Smajo

Bešo OBE, academic and the founder and chair of the Bosnian Genocide Education Trust was in Oxford on Holocaust Memorial Day to share his experiences of persecution in the Bosnian war and rebuilding as a refugee. Born in Bosnia a few years before the outbreak, his testimony reveals a sharp shift from the religious tolerance of his early childhood, to living in a warzone, facing starvation and seeing atrocities committed against family and friends. Smajo and his family were brought to the UK in 1994 and built a life in Newcastle, where he now works, as part of the ‘Bosnia Project’. He established the Trust in 2020, after 7 years of campaigning and educational work, with the aim of humanising history, giving a voice to those who lived through the genocide, and promoting awareness and peace.

We start by talking about Bosnia, and I ask Smajo about his experience growing up Bosnian and Muslim. He begins by showing me an image of his beautiful home town, Stolac, in southern Bosnia, around two hours from the Croation city of Dubrovnic. He describes how Stolac “was always known as the ‘Bosnian Museum in the Open’ for having the highest concentration of cultural heritage in the region, and having this beautiful historic core. The town grew around the central mosque, you had the mosque, and then Ottoman architecture, and all these beautiful stone buildings. For a town that has a population of about 18,000, it has museums, archives, librar-

ies – several famous poets came from here.” He explains that the town is predominantly Muslim but also religiously diverse and highly tolerant, gesturing to the minaret of the mosque as well as the Orthodox Christian Church. “The Catholic church was actually gifted to the Catholic Church by a Muslim family, about a hundred years ago, which is on the other side of town. Religions co-existed perfectly. In this region, there was a system called the ‘kum’ system. It’s kind of similar to the ‘godparent’ system we have here. It wasn’t individuals that were kums, it was families, so it was an informal system, but it had one very important informal rule; that your kum family had to be of a different religion, or a different faith. Our kums were Orthodox Christians. This dates back to my grandad and great-grandad. It’s not just that we in Bosnia recognise these differences, and it’s not that we said we are all the same. We weren’t the same. But we said ‘we recognise these differences and we value these differences’. These were the beautiful things that made us Bosnians.”

For Smajo growing up, the first signs of brewing antiMuslim hate were confusing in a modern place with such a rich history of tolerance and resistance. He recalls, upon being pushed to the ground by a Serbian friend ranting about Muslims, “at the time thinking ‘what has this got to do with me?’ I don’t think I even realised I was Muslim, because religion was such a private thing for people in Bosnia.” Indeed, he emphasizes the tolerance surrounding him, where “people existed with no differences, especially

for us kids – I didn’t know what someone ‘was’, I just knew that they celebrated Christmas in their house, and they came to our house when we celebrated Eid.” Bosnia, as a country, and particularly the region Smajo describes, additionally “has a very rich anti-fascist history, Bosnians were in the partisans, and partisans were the multiethnic anti-fascists that fought against the Nazis, so there are many anti-fascist monuments throughout this region.”

His pride in his country and cultural heritage obvious, I ask whether he has returned many times since leaving and whether he feels the country has changed. He tells me his family’s story – his father first came to the UK in January 1994 after being released from a Croatian concentration camp, on the condition that he could not return to Bosnia. Smajo and the rest of his family arrived in July of that year as part of the Bosnia Project, an initiative set up by the British government and various humanitarian agencies, and planned to stay for a short time before returning. In 1997, his father and sister were prevented from returning to their hometown, which was in controlled territory. Him, his mother and brother finally managed to get back, escorted by international peacekeepers, in 1998. On their first visit back, they found “our house was torched by our neighbours, literally everything that we had was taken from us, looted, destroyed. There was basically nowhere for us to return.” They returned to the UK, Smajo and his brother attending school and university, and struggled with six or three month visa extensions before eventually getting settled status to remain.

He still goes back to Bosnia regularly, but is aware of lingering divisions existing in the country; “I go back every single year, because Bosnia is a beautiful country, my friends love visiting with me. But sadly, Bosnia is a divided country. The Peace Agreement, it was forced onto the Bosnian Government, and the Bosnian Serbs

that committed the genocide were rewarded with 49% of the country.” In this 49%, he says, you see the celebration of war criminals, as on the 9th of July every year many Serbs in that part celebrate the creation of that state, which is also the start of the Bosnian genocide; “That happened only a couple of weeks ago. Thousands of people are there.”

Smajo is aware of the cutting contrast between two communities, one which actively celebrates committing atrocities against the other. “It’s wonderful having events and saying ‘never again’,” he says, “but actually what does that mean because literally two weeks ago someone was celebrating a genocide, murder, rape. In that 49% of the country, Muslims and Catholics and Jews and Roma were either systematically killed, executed, or if they stayed alive, they were put into concentration camps or expelled. 60,000 young girls and women were raped in Bosnia. Rape was used as a genocidal tool.”

Mostar, a neighbouring town, is similarly ‘beautiful but divided’. He says, “on one side, the predominantly Bozniak, predominantly Muslim side” – he clarifies, to avoid simplification, that Bosniaks are predominantly Muslim but not entirely – and “on the other side you’ve got the Croatian ultranationalist fascist party. There are street names named after Nazis from the second world war because Croatia was a puppet state for the Nazis and

they occupied Bosnia in the second world war.” He feels concerned that such divisions are being continually entrenched, “In other parts of the country, there’s something called the ‘two schools under one roof’ system, where you have one school, on one side you have the Croat kids, and on the other side you have the Bosnian kids. And if they’re not mixing – what kind of future do they have if they’re not getting to know each other? In the 1990s, everyone knew each other, and awful things happened. Now, if people don’t know each other, imagine there was another war, what would actually happen? I think it would be a million times worse.” Though Smajo says a multi-ethnic character still persists in some areas, modern-day ties to fascism and nationalism are palpable, and the future uneasy because of it. “Just before I went home this summer, the Croatian president was in Mostar to celebrate the formation of the paramilitary units that committed these atrocities. This is an EU president! How is this allowed to happen? How does the EU, how does Europe, allow this to happen? If you celebrate war criminals, people that kill, rape, how can you have a better future? If Bosnians have done something, I’m the first one to call it out, we have to, because there shouldn’t be this hierarchy of suffering. But when you celebrate people that committed the most awful atrocities on European soil since the holocaust, what kind of future can you have?”

The full interview with Smajo is available online:

‘Peace isn’t just the absence of war’: Smajo Bešo OBE Founder & Chair, Bosnian Genocide Education Trust

“60,000 young girls and women were raped in Bosnia. Rape was used as a genocidal tool.”

Editor: Blane Aitchison oxstu.pink@gmail.com

Pink

Becoming Wholly Other

When I was younger, my sister Ella and I would often imagine what our lives would be like if they were drastically different. Lots of kids (and adults!) still think like this, and we’ve probably all asked our friends those theoretical questions like “What would you buy if you won the lottery?” or “If you opened a restaurant, what would your signature dish be?” or “If you could have one superpower, what would it be?”

Now, about 15 years later, I find myself asking similar questions. Similar, but bleaker, and with answers that require too much thought to be fun.

It reminds me of a good friend of mine who likes to imagine the parallel universe versions of herself when she’s sad, or when something doesn’t go as well as she wanted them to. She imagines the ‘parallel her’ getting everything she wanted, and then she makes peace with the loss, and just moves on.

I love this approach, and I loved hearing her talk about how it helps her, but when I tried it myself, I had an overwhelming feeling of “why should I have to imagine it?”

“Why can’t I have what I want?”

Why can’t I have what I want?

Why can’t I have my cake and eat it too?

Why can’t I have a best friend to confide in, someone who wants to spend time with me, study with me, have their lunch with me, and then go to a club with me at the end of a long week?

Why can’t I be indispensable to other people? When will I be valued as a friend?

Why can’t I be anyone’s first choice? Why can’t anybody meet me where I am, instead of always making me compromise?

Why can’t I have the confidence to stand up for myself for the first time? Why do I always let people walk all over me until I can’t stand it anymore and then lash out and make everything worse?

Why can’t I go to the shops and buy those clothes I’ve always wanted to wear?

Why can’t I be naturally confident, and bubbly and warm, and instantly make friends wherever I go?

Why can’t I get anything right the first time? Why do I spend so much of my time trying to pick up the pieces of my previous failed attempts at making things better for myself?

Why? Why? Why?

What is wrong with me?

I suppose, with all things considered, there’s nothing ridiculously, overpoweringly, fundamentally wrong with me; I’m healthy and capable and usually happy, but that still doesn’t make me feel any better about myself. If anything, it’s almost worse. I feel like a sliver of everyone else around me. They’re all so different to me in that they never seem to have these problems – they’re like an entirely different species.

“I wish I could be who I always wanted to be.”

I wish I could be who I always wanted to be.

And maybe, one day, I can be. But I’ve spent years trying to be true to who I am inside and trying to encourage my self-evolution into something wholly different to how I was born, and it still feels as distant as ever.

I hope that tomorrow I can get just a little bit closer to my dream me; that soon I’ll begin my metamorphosis from a strange, lumpy caterpillar thing into a beautiful butterfly, or at least a really cool moth or something.

I hope that one day I’ll be able to look back on all of this with rose-tinted spectacles and laugh at how angsty I used to be just because I felt I didn’t fit in.

And until then, I’ll keep on trying.

Image Credit: Blane Aitchison.

Holly Coleman

Putrid, Cheap and Joyful; In Defence of the Four Candles

Jack JACOBS

When the Duke of Wellington exclaimed “Being born in a stable does not make one a horse”, I doubt he had Wetherspoons in mind. In fact his unwarranted shame at an Irish origin was the exact reference, and a highly offensive one at that. Yet, beyond these hibernophobic remarks, a message stands clear. Why is it that those who frequent an establishment feel a shame at what it may define them as? I have never thought of myself as a horse (so far, at least) yet have an unashamed appreciation of my stable. This stable is, of course, the Four Candles, and unlike Jesus’, there is always room at the inn.

Moving past this literary horseplay, It seems sensible to start with the inevitable complaints. We all know them; the classic “It reeks of sick”, the more understandable “It’s too crowded”, and even the seductive arrogance of “it is full of terrible flirts”. Now, despite this sounding like a standard STEM lecture theatre, all seem fairly legitimate. There is nothing more disgusting than the glistening gag of someone’s hall dinner ending up in the loos, and its scent curling through the building. So too is it infamously crowded, second only in population density to Atik’s “cheese floor”. As for the terrible flirts, I would strenuously deny their existence, although perhaps this is more a reflection on my conversational standards than anything else. But, all this misses the point. It is not that Wetherspoons seeks to

be classy, nor free from these criticisms. Instead, it centres around three key principles that need to understood – people, place and price.

Let us start with the people. The bouncers are the first you meet, and never disappoint. In my many visits, I have been graced with the ever-original “cute photo mate”, the slightly more inventive “that’s a shit haircut”, and my personal favourite, “well if you can’t even pull those doors you got no chance of pulling full stop”. The chat is top tier, even if their emotional charm isn’t. But once past the gates, you can find almost everyone you have ever met in your Oxford experience. From sports teams to subject classes, postgrads to priests, they will be all found in Oxford’s ironically alcoholic Mecca. I can certainly attest; many of those I was first introduced to in Spoons remain dear friends, and ones I am continually grateful for.

This begs a further question- why go? Well, place is the next component worth considering. As any curious clubber will know, it lies on the perfect route towards the centre of Oxford nightlife, Atik and

THE BEST OF THE ROAST

Sunday has come, and Rordon needs it. Foolishly believing that wearing a kilt at Burns night was to be the only time any balls would be exposed for their inability to garner enough demand, Rordon has not been best pleased. Of course, one thing has been constant; his ever lacking chat in the Atik smoking area, which remains cheesier than the dance floor itself. So, tuck in, as Rordon reports back on this weeks news of Megabops and minor burns.

COLLEGE HAS NO BALLS

One college ball has been cancelled this week due to insufficient funding. Afraid to run the event on a significantly reduced budget, the college cancelled the event and confirmed that they had no balls.

Other college committees, namely those with balls, emphasised that drastic downsizing measures could have be

taken to save the event. “Frankly, the committee needs to learn to take better care of their balls. They need to keep tight hold of their balls, and hopefully within a few years, all of Oxford can be there to enjoy their balls,” commented one student.

SECOND DEGREE BURNS NIGHT

As Rordon glared through this week’s hall menu, he was pleasantly surprised to find a typically exotic themed Oxford formal – Burns night. And so, in allusion to his coincidental (and apparently Scottish) namesake, he donned a full kilt, dusted off the bagpipes, and rewatched Braveheart “for research purposes”. Yet, despite a whisky fuelled ceilidh, in which he busted moves “that are certain to come out next Bridge Thursday”, the culinary choices of the evening were not to his liking. “It’s bloody steaming” he exclaimed, as his first mouthful of haggis seared his tongue. Later describing it as “more piping hot than the bagpipers procession”, it soon

Bridge. The folding warmth of its doors becomes merely a convenient means to the greater end of Bridge thursday. The braised blue carpets, sweat-sticking tables and famously fake paintings make it a suitably rogue environment for the antics of an Oxford night out. So too is its layout secretly conducive to socialising; the potentially dangerous inclusion of a mezzanine makes for a perfect escape from the flurry of downstairs. Hence why once you have secured your table, you can effortlessly mingle between awkward acquaintances and future friends, as you fight your way to the bar for that much needed pint.

One cannot of course ignore the budgetary element. Whilst the Four Candles may have been the best thing to happen to Oxford’s social life since the admittance of women, it can, for repeat offenders, still pose a dangerous threat to one’s bank balance. Yet, whereas other pubs are serving the war crime that is £6 for a pint, the £1.79 Greene King IPA is the Four Candles’ saving grace. You simply can’t beat it on price, and this is where Spoons effortlessly wins. It is, after all, the main attraction – on a limited student budget, financial discipline is a must.

became clear that Rordon was not a fan of Scotland’s culinary culture. All in all, Rordon finished with his all too familiar cry of “where’s the lamb sauce”, leading him to conclude, as any economics student would, this really was Scotland’s Gross Domestic Product.

ADMISSION OF GUILT

“We gave them an offer they couldn’t refuse”, Rordon was told this week, as he sat down for an exclusive interview with an Oxford Admissions Officer. The conversation marked the news of 3700 undergraduate offers having been sent out this year, a deluge of freshers that’s said to be putting dollar signs in the eyes of Atik owners and bike thieves alike. The interview produced shocking revelations, however.

“Of course, 100 or so of the offers we send out every year are complete mistakes,” the officer told Rordon. “I’ve dropped biscuits on the keyboard, filed the wrong forms. Once, we accidentally

This was what first drew me to convert. Having been London raised, I was no stranger to excessive pint prices. There are of course Wetherspoons’ in London, although most are raucously rogue with local eccentrics, and can be deceivingly expensive. It was rather that the Four Candles had the respectable sociability of an ordinary pub, given its centrality to the Oxford night out, whilst being suitably cheap. At this point, I do seem to fall into the very establishment pose I have sought to dismantle, although as I must note, I am only now a convert, and so can merely help but relent at my past. So too can I not profess to it being an easy ride; from an allergic reaction after downing a pitcher, to the glaring distrust of the validity of my ID by the bouncers, it’s certainly been an experience, yet there seems nowhere I’d rather end up on a night out.

In short, it is, to continue my alcoholic tirade, the “perfect cocktail” of price, people and place. It seems instead a societal snobbishness that relents at supposedly uncivilised drinking (with the very standards of what constitutes civilised very much up for debate), that puts people off. In simple terms, no one is above Spoons. Of course, there is certainly more on this journey; the alcoholic didacticism of a “Spoons night” is ever enthralling, and so perhaps my dreams of an all day visit may be fulfilled. So too may my very ramblings seem like proof of a productive visit, although whilst I lament my literary sobriety, I must contend it would have added an artistic flair. Yet, it is in this I can conclude two things. First, I am not ashamed of my stable. Second, I might as well be a horse.

Image Credit: Milo Dennison

accepted Malala Yousafzai because I thought she was Malia Obama. Oh yeah, tons of people who aren’t supposed to be here.”

It’s a bizarre confession, but perhaps a reassuring thought that those of us suffering from imposter syndrome might not be going crazy after all.

SAINT’S AND WINNERS

In this year’s Saint’s and Sinners Megabop, Rordon was delighted to find himself winner of the best dressed award. Dressing as “Christ Church Puffer Guy”, the Judges noted that “he seemed to fit all the categories of the night”, being “the greatest symbol of Lust, Gluttony, Greed, Sloth, Wrath, Envy and Pride in Oxford”. Nonetheless, the evening was not to his liking, explaining afterwards that “even Hell isn’t this crowded”, in clear reference to the Park End cheese floor, as he pushed through the scrum to the smoking area.

Editors: Susie Barrows, Jack Jacobs, Jack Meredith

Rordon Gamsay

Deputy Editor: Dani Kovacs

Section Editors: Bradley Beck, Joe Sharp email: oxstu.sport@gmail.com

As the round reached its closing seconds, Eubank looking sharper, he exchanged his right jab for a triple chain of huge right uppercuts, slamming yet again through Smith’s guard. Smith stood immobile on his feet as shouts for lateral movement rang out from the red corner. Smith looked weak but was saved by the bell. Round 3 to Eubank.

As the bell signalling round 4 rang, Eubank looked to be gaining purchase in the fight, only to be met with a stronger Smith. Eubank attempted round 3’s right uppercut, though to little avail as Smith smartly dodged it. A huge chain from Smith backed Eubank back up into his corner before a solid uppercut and a mighty left hook sent Eubank sprawling to the canvas. The 33 year old clambered back to his feet almost immediately, though visibly dazed and unsteady. The referee, Victor Loughlin, tentatively allowed Eubank to continue as he was on his feet before the count was out, but Smith’s expeditious attack sent an already injured Eubank crashing to the canvas for a second time in 20 seconds. With Eubank’s second fall, Loughlin called it, waving his arms to a visibly dismayed Eubank securing Smith’s win by TKO 1m 9s into round 4. The ensuing scenes were complete bedlam with members of both fighters’ camps descending upon the ring as Smith’s predominantly home crowd erupted into exaltation.

The loss, Eubank’s third of his professional career, incidentally now putting him level with Smith on losses, will come as a blow to the seasoned fighter. Losing in as big a fight as this won’t help quash the growing trend of him coming up short when stepping up to a big fight, be it Saunders, Groves or now Smith. Smith on the other hand provided a stunning display of scouse masterclass, returning from a shaky third round with an explosive victory, surely dispelling any remonstrations to the efficacy of his ‘slow starting’ style.

Whether Eubank will activate the rematch clause in his contract remains yet to be seen, though this seems unlikely given Smith’s declaration that any rematch would take place on ‘my [his] terms … at 157 or 158 [lbs]’. Regardless, Smith’s undeniable skill in TKO-ing a fighter as experienced as Eubank, not to mention Eubank’s 2” height and 6cm reach advantage, only reaffirms his place at the forefront of British boxing.

Sport

A Case for Influencer Boxing

The concept of social media influencers branching out beyond their virtual lane is not a new one. In fact, one of the long-established early steps in the prototype Youtuber’s career is releasing some form of ‘merch’ line - generally, bulk-bought hoodies and tees plastered with their logo, courtesy of the family ironing board. As laughable as buying a £30 T-shirt with a picture of a car you don’t own on it may seem (yes, there’s a guy that really does that), such ventures are both enormously popular and extremely profitable. For confirmation of this you need only look as far as the commercial success of the likes of the Sidemen, who have nurtured what began as a spare bedroom-run endeavour into a now multi-million pound apparel enterprise with collaborations with prestigious sportswear brands like Ellesse. So is it fair that influencer-endorsed clothing, sports drinks and even alcohol are seemingly publicly venerated, but as soon as they turn their attention to boxing they are met with hostility?

For a start, it is worth noting that celebrity crossover boxing, of which influencer boxing is a denomination, is not a new concept. The phenomenon goes back some 40 years and has seen the likes of disgraced skater Tonya Harding, Canadian PM Justin Trudeau and The Greatest himself, Muhammad Ali, step inside the ring. With such an esteemed and varied history of competitors, it seems unfair to criticise influencers participation disproportionately, simply owing to their profession outside of the sport.

Besides, it’s not as if influencers are leveraging their notoriety into mainstream professional contracts and leaving other pro fighters out in the cold, nor are they seeking representation through the likes of big promoters like Eddie Hearn or Frank Warren. Instead, as seen with the ‘Misfits’ outfit, founded by KSI and co, influencer boxing is evolving according to its own set of rules. Though ‘Misfits’ is officially licensed and sanctioned by the PBA, this is little more than a token status in order to qualify as ‘professional’; the PBA is an independent London based body and is a far cry from the prestige elicited by the likes of the IBF, WBA, WBC or WBO. Despite officially ‘professional’ status and a few sensationalist claims to garner interest, the influencer scene holds no real pretensions to claiming true professional status and therefore surely cannot be considered a threat to the true, professional sport.

The one exception to this is Jake Paul (6-0), fittingly nicknamed ‘The Problem Child’, as he is the only member of the influencer boxing demographic to have consistently fought under professional, regulated conditions across the last five years, albeit against often decrepit opponents whose primary discipline does not lie in boxing. He is also the only influencer turned boxer that has apparently abandoned social media as his primary focus in favour of devoting himself to the sport entirely. Somewhat

among the influencer scene has ensured packed out stadiums at every event with some 10,000 fans reportedly having attended the most recent ‘Misfits’ event. The influencers’ entry into the boxing scene has undeniably been a resounding success, and it hasn’t gone unnoticed, as the rapidly emerging streaming service, DAZN, have signed on to platform the Misfits events with a PPV. Though the days of influencer boxing being gratuitous ending has irritated many, the difference between the £11.99 for Misfits’ most recent event as opposed to Sky Box Office’s bank-crippling demand of £19.95 in exchange for the full Eubank Jr. vs Smith card is not insignificant. Yes, the influencer events aren’t free and yes, the fights themselves are far from professional standard, but the price of the PPV reflects this and for many, it is seeing their favourite internet personalities in the ring at all, that compels them to gracefully hand DAZN their credit card information.

unsurprisingly therefore, Paul is the only fighter to have secured a professional bout with a notable opponent with any sort of self- respecting record: Tommy Fury (8-0), younger brother of the infamous two time heavy-weight champion Tyson Fury (33-1-0). Though the confirmation of the bouts future is a development of only the last week, Paul securing the fight at all only lends validity to the influencer scene, regardless of the result.

That being said, it’s not as if the amateur(ish) influencer boxing scene is unpopular, nor for that matter, unprofitable. It is quite the contrary. The breadth of viewer and subscribership

The truth is, that the issue of influencer boxing is only an issue at all for the type of traditionalist boot-cut-jeaned believers in the ‘good old days’ that you tend to meet on a Monday morning down your local spoons. The purity of the sport isn’t ‘poisoned’ by influencer boxing; the two are mutually beneficial. One provides a platform for some of the greatest fighters to ever walk the planet, battle 12 rounds in pursuit of eternal glory, and the other engages younger audiences, brings in future revenue and maintains interest in a sport that is becoming increasingly inaccessible through extortionate pay-per-views and insurmountable pricewalls. Ignore the remonstrations of the former Top Gear presenter types, sit back, and enjoy the fight.

Is influencer boxing making a mockery of the sport or is it a great way for it to reach an entire new audience? Patrick Groves gives his thoughts.

A night of glory for Smith, and one to forget for Eubank.

Despite officially ‘professional’ status and a few sensationalist claims to garner interest, the influencer scene holds no real pretensions to claiming true professional status and therefore surely cannot be considered a threat to the true, professional sport.

Sport

30 years since Fever Pitch – what has changed?

Sports editor Bradley Beck reflects on the messages of Nick Hornby’s 1992 classic book considering today’s game.

Any event of any significance has a footballing shadow”, writes Nick Hornby in his 1992 memoir Fever Pitch –a masterful account of his life as a football fan. Having just finished reading what is described by many as one of the greatest football books of all time, it feels necessary to reflect on Fever Pitch’s key messages and how they apply to today’s game.

The core theme throughout the memoir is Hornby’s belief that the highs and lows of watching Arsenal mirrored those in his personal life – as if the team’s performance closely reflected his mood at the time. This running comparison sets the book aside from many other accounts of football – as there is a distinctly open nature that breaks down the wall between the game and the supporter. This perfect correlation may seem unrealistic to many, but Hornby’s emphasis on his devotion for the game sets him on a level far above the average fan. This theme is one that has stood the test of time, and will continue to do so, with sporting success being an unwavering driver of happiness.

A relatable segment of Fever Pitch is Hornby’s description of his time studying at Cambridge. The author discussed how he was enveloped in

football throughout his degree – playing for his college and watching both Cambridge United and Cambridge City. Hornby recounts this period in a way that showed how football can act as a comfort blanket when being faced with the unknown. My first term at Oxford matched this experience, with each game being a moment to look forward to.

While these personal thoughts about football are clearly timeless, many of Hornby’s experiences are far from anything a fan would witness today.

A major talking point during Fever Pitch is the glaring lack of fan safety that persisted, without repair, in the build-up to the Hillsborough disaster in 1989. Hornby frequently mentions situations in which he found himself in a human crush – to the extent that it became an expectation when watching the game. Hillsborough sparked changes to the fan experience that were decades too late, with all-seaters replacing the decrepit remains of stadiums far past their prime – a change that Hornby, despite being a regular on the standing terraces, eagerly accepted.

With these changes, the game’s demographic has changed – most noticeably at the top of the English

ladder. Stadiums, once squeezed into residential areas to bring in fans on foot, have expanded alongside the financial growth of the game to form giant complexes that are accessible from anywhere. Ticket prices have soared beyond the value expected with inflation, leaving a Hornby-like lifestyle of regular attendance unattainable for most fans.

Another experience Hornby recounts in Fever Pitch is the discrimination that was rife on the terraces at Premier League games. Despite numerous campaigns beginning operation with the aim to tackle this problem in the years since the book’s release, the issue is still undoubtedly present. Where discrimination has been less openly voiced in the stands, it has been replaced by hateful social media content – a problem unimproved in the past few years.

Fever Pitch’s account of Arsenal ends midway through the 1991/92 season, in which Arsenal slumped in form after earning the league title dominantly the previous season. Since this conclusion, the side clinched 3 more titles in the following 13 years – including the iconic “Invincibles” season of 2003/04. Wenger’s post-Fever Pitch climax marks the beginning of a drought that is approaching 20 years in length, however Arsenal are sitting comfortably at the top of the Premier League table at the halfway mark this season. Yet, as Hornby emphasised throughout his book, it is important not to become hopeful too early.

Deputy Editor: Dani Kovacs

Section Editors: Bradley Beck, Joe Sharp email: oxstu.sport@gmail.com

Eubank Jr. vs Smith: A Stunning Scouse Masterclass

Like many boxing fans around the UK, my otherwise vacant Saturday night was thankfully filled (albeit all too briefly) by Chris Eubank Jr. and Liam Smith’s main card at Manchester’s AO Arena. Admittedly, Sky Sports’ painfully extortionate demand of £19.95 to access the full PPV was a little out of my student loan funded budget, and so I resorted to more illicit means of watching the fight.

Eubank (32-3), though usually fighting as a middleweight, made weight at 159lbs during Friday afternoon’s weigh-in, with Smith (33-1-3) matching his weight to the pound. Eubank looked to put last year’s doomed ‘bout that never was’ with Conor Benn behind him, seeking what he hoped would be a sure and controversy-free victory against the Liverpudlian. On both counts, this proved not to be the case. Thursday’s press conference quickly turned sour, the pair trading uppercuts for caustic personal insults regarding Smith and Eubank’s respective personal lives and sexualities, the latter of which prompted Eubank to don a rainbow armband to Friday’s weigh-in - a much needed symbol of homophobia’s unwelcomeness in the sport.

With the controversy-ridden buildup fuelling them, the pair looked steelyeyed and hungry for victory as they stepped out for Saturday night’s ring walks. Smith was out first, emerging from his dressing room a little before 11pm to a rapturous AO Arena, dispelling any notions of Mancunian-Scouse acrimony. Although, perhaps fortunately, my ‘wool’ status leaves me firmly

out of this particular debate… Eubank soon followed, though the Brightonian’s entry to the ring was met with a comparatively subdued reception, to the extent that even I could discern the chorus of booing over my 140p and typically intermittent internet stream.

Eu- bank, clad in white trunks to Smith’s black, made his way to the centre of the ring. The pair touched gloves and the bell sounded. Eubank landed the first blow on Smith, glancing, but a hit nonetheless. As round 1 progressed it became increasingly clear that this was a cautious start from Eubank, with Smith landing a flurry of quick right hands and catching Eubank with a decent body shot in the dying seconds of the round. As the bell concluded a somewhat uneventful round, Smith looked to be ahead, but only just.

As round 2 got underway Eubank was more purposeful from the onset, with his favoured jabs starting to reveal themselves. But Smith was yet to back down, throwing a big left-right hook combination, both ducked by Eubank, before landing a clean(ish) overhand right. With Eubank looking more alive and Smith’s last minute whirl of semi-accurate big hooks, round 2 concluded looking level, with Smith still ahead overall.

Admittedly, Sky Sports’ painfully extortionate demand of £19.95 to access the full PPV was a little out of my student loan funded budget, and so I resorted to more illicit means of

From round 3’s onset, Eubank’s favoured right jab made its first proper appearance. Eubank landed a right hand to Smith’s head, working effectively through his guard as Smith returned the favour with a body shot.

Patrick Groves