The alignments of our nation are changing, and the failure of student politics at Oxford to keep up is nothing less than a dereliction of our duty. Of the 58 prime ministers of the United Kingdom to date, 31 were educated at the University of Oxford. This includes Starmer, Sunak, Truss, Johnson, May, and Cameron – all of the last six. This is a legacy which, with a few exceptions, we are right to be proud of. But so long as the Oxford political scene remains stuck in the past, this legacy is destined to fade away in our hands. It is no longer sustainable for our student societies to be overwhelmingly split down a simplistic Labour-Conservative divide, especially one based on farcically outdated conceptions of these parties themselves.
The Policy Institute at KCL concluded in 2019 that, in Britain, “our long-standing party-political structures are struggling to capture the diversity in the electorate, and new parties are emerging as a result.” According to the Policy Institute, the political challenge of our time is to resolve this wide variety of positions among the public. Health, education, immigration, the environment, and the economy are all key battlegrounds where this new explosion of varied viewpoints is playing out. Britain is increasingly characterised by a kaleidoscope of priorities; the days of simple left-right party lines are over.
After all, in Britain we are not seeing the same kind of issue polarisation along strong partisan lines that has dominated so much of recent US politics. ‘Republican’ and ‘Democrat’ are labels indicative of far more than mere voting intention in the US; they designate groups set apart by clearly defined ideological differences. The Pew Research Center’s basket of 10 political attitude measures showed in 2017 that the median Republican was now more conservative than 97 per cent of Democrats, and the median Democrat more liberal than 95 per cent of Republicans.
Though once upon a time it might have been so, British voters cannot be grouped in an analogous way. The decline in party membership is one of many indicators of changing affiliations within the British electorate over the last few decades. At its peak in the early 1950s, membership stood at 2.8 million for the Conservative Party and 1 million for the Labour Party. Flash forward to today and the Conservatives boast a measly 130,000 members, with Labour ahead at only 360,000. Let us not ignore the fact that in the
recent general election, 42.6% of the vote went to neither the Conservative Party nor Labour.
Yet, as Oxford students, we are not responding to this. The 18 ‘political’ societies listed on the Student Union website denote a picture of politics which fails to resemble the changing alignments of our nation. A large part of the problem is that Oxford University Conservative Association (OUCA) and Oxford University Labour Club (OULC) continue to utterly dominate student discussion of politics, despite other alternatives. With the former fixated on their bizarre fetishisation of Sir Jacob Rees Mogg and the latter oft addressing its members as ‘comrades’, a US-style pseudo-partisan polarisation pervades the Oxford political scene.
I admire the political conviction of the committee members on each side, but the stark contrast of Port and Policy against Beer and Bickering is not helpful if Oxford wishes to nurture the next generation of our nation’s leaders. Caught up on dated conceptions of the major British parties, these societies have become caricatures of themselves, and yet students continue to feel that they must align with one or the other. These societies simply fail to cater for the breadth of student, let alone national, opinion.
Nature abhors a vacuum, yet here there exists a void which is yet to be filled. As students, we are bound by an inclination to possess strong political convictions. but it is no longer enough for these convictions to be drunkenly bellowed within the opposing, homogenous blocks of a ‘Divided Oxford’. If we wish to build upon the prime-ministerial legacy of our university, we must shoulder the responsibility of engaging in more careful thinking in order to go on to produce the responses that our nation desires so badly.
The forums which facilitate our political discussion must adapt and multiply in line with the changing alignments of our nation and, indeed, the changing alignments of Oxford. We must no longer feel restricted by the boundaries set by two historical societies which paint a picture of politics now decades behind the state of our nation. We must be willing to do more than drunkenly agree with those whom we are bound to agree with from the offset, and confront the issues our nation faces with nuance. To continue on our current path is to sound the death knell of Oxford’s prime ministerial legacy. It is a desertion of our duty.
