“Loony, entitled, race hustlers” and “hoity-toity grievance mongers” are the names given to the members of the #RhodesMust Fall movement. Denigrated as militant activists, the protests of #RMF have led many media enterprises to call its members childish and unruly. But does the stereotype of students as ‘militant’ and encouraging censorship have any founding?

‘Wait But Why’ has conducted research into the Y Generation in light of their high rate of depression and general unhappiness. We are a generation raised by the baby-boomers whose expectations of life were lower than the reality. We, however, have expectations vastly higher than reality; the Y Generation is, unfortunately, full with people suffering from superiority complexes and ‘middle-class angst’. It is this attitude that has begun to cloud political debate and has given left-wing politics a bad name.

But, contradictory to what the journals such as the Daily Mail and Spectator would have you think, #RMF is not entirely composed of ‘the Y Generation stereotype.’ In fact, #RMF raises some very pertinent and relevant issues around diversity in Oxford, but unfortunately they are issues that are being compromised by the attitudes of its members.

Oxford has never given in to the ‘political correctness’ movement, and undoubtedly it never will. Free and open debate is certainly the most effective way of confronting opposing views. The Oxford Union, one of ‘Britain’s last pillars of free speech’, provides a forum to discuss even some of the most controversial views.

Speaking to the Telegraph, Vice-Chancellor Louise Richardson said “We need to expose our students to ideas that make them uncomfortable so that they can think about why it is that they feel uncomfortable and what it is about those ideas that they object to”.

She, along with other academics, have argued that the Rhodes statue can serve an educational purpose, standing as a reminder of the atrocities Cecil Rhodes committed. Similarly to Richardson, The Oxford chancellor, Lord Patten, says that university is a place where people should engage with ideas, rather than attempt to shut them down. He says, “We should tolerate freedom of speech and freedom of inquiry right across the board. That’s what a liberal, open society is all about”.

Further to this, Patten has said that students in support of the #RMF movement “should think about being educated elsewhere”. He suggests China as an ideal place of study, given that they are not allowed to talk about ‘western values’.

But we should not play the ‘free speech’ card without acknowledging what the #RMF movement is truly about. As the non-white students of Oxford are acutely aware, the university’s student population is overwhelmingly white; however, the solution is not obvious. As more and more graduates struggle in the evermore-competitive job market, Oxford cannot introduce any form of discrimination.

As Richardson says, “In Oxford’s case we are not competing nationally, we are competing internationally. We are competing for funding, we are competing for staff so we are really operating on a global market, which was less true historically.”

Oxford can, however, make efforts to combat internal prejudices. The application process, it has been often claimed, is highly weighted towards those with confidence in interviews who fit the Oxford ‘type’ – i.e. students from private schools. It has also been statistically proven that of two candidates with the same grades, a black student is much less likely to receive and offer than a white student.

Delingpole would have us brush over the atrocities of Rhodes as “autres temps, autres moeurs”, but this would be vastly overlooking the issues and problems that remain in the present day. His claim that Oxford is “colour-blind” is, of course, highly naïve. It is a fact that two hundred years ago the Western world supported slavery of Africans, a business that took away African people’s identities and nationalities, grouping them all under the heading ‘black’, or ‘other’. This notion of ‘otherness’ is still present today, and is a notion that will not disappear without considerable effort from all people of all races. Therefore, to say that Oxford is a fair, unbiased institution is inaccurate as it ignores the racist undercurrents that – unconsciously or otherwise – still govern Western society.

As Richardson puts it, “There are far more important things to be dealt with at this university than whether a statue that stood I am not sure for how many years – stands or falls.”

It’s a vote so important that Republican front-runner Donald Trump told his supporters: “[Even] if you caught your husband cheating the night before, you’ve got to go to the caucus.”

The Iowa caucuses, held on February 1^st, mark the start of voting for the next President of the United States. Iowa, a mid-western state with a population smaller than New York and Los Angeles, has held the important role of first-in-the-nation state on the long road to the White House since 1972.

Caucuses, a political tradition important in Iowa even before its admission to the Union in 1846, are simple political party organised meetings. Next week there will be such gatherings across the state in over a thousand precincts. The outcomes of those discussions in libraries, community centres, and high schools will help determine who is elected the most powerful person in the world. 

The caucuses are open to all voters who are eligible to vote at the general election, and those who are not members of the party can register on the day of the event. Although held concurrently in the same locations and treated with the same high-level enthusiasm by candidates and the media, the rules for the Republican and Democrat contests differ.

At the Republican caucus, a secret vote is taken by straw poll. Those votes are aggregated to announce a winner. That’s the person who will receive the focus of media attention afterwards.

As the straw-poll vote is taking place among Republicans, Democrats down the hallway undergo a more active voting procedure. To vote for a candidate, Democrat caucus-goers have to congregate in different parts of the room to highlight their support for a particular candidate. There’s no secrecy, voters tie their mast to a campaign in front of family, friends, and neighbours.

Then, the number of people is counted and anyone caucusing for a candidate with less than 15% of support in the room is told their candidate is “unviable” and a second vote is held. Cue for attempts to cajole other attendees to support your candidate. This takes the form of spirited debate, but it has been known for voters to bring cookies as a means to entice people to their side.  The process continues until there are no candidates with fewer than 15% of the vote remaining. The final percentage tallies from across the meetings in the state are communicated with the central party office.

For both parties, the voting system demands high-energy and organised support. Campaigns have to identify those Iowans prepared to attend a political debate on a winter Monday evening and advocate for them.  In return, voters expect personal campaigning from Presidential applicants. Such an undertaking combined with Iowa’s first-in-the-nation status means that candidates arrive in Iowa early and visit often. After Hillary Clinton announced her candidacy for the Democratic nomination last year, her first campaign activity was to go on a road trip through Eastern Iowa, in a van nicknamed “Scooby” after the Mystery Machine van in the television show.

Compulsory tour stops on the campaign trail include the Iowa State Fair, important for a state whose economy is heavily dependent on agriculture. Photo-ops with corn dogs a must, and candidates are expected to stand on the stump and explain why they should be the voters’ choice. Trump garnered attention by arriving at the State Fair by helicopter.

Iowa’s position as the first-in-the-nation is certainly a boon for the state. Its primacy focuses candidates’ attention on the needs of people in this mostly rural state through many low-key events and plenty of direct personal interactions with voters. However, the reason for the sequencing is less coordinated than might be expected; more due to practicalities than planning.

After the disastrous Democratic Convention in 1968 – an event plagued with disruptions, protests and the handing of the nomination to a candidate who had stood in no primaries – the Democratic Party undertook reforms to give voters influence in choosing the party’s nominee.

In Iowa, a State Convention was organised to select delegates to attend the 1972 National Convention. The available date for the conference centre was May 20^th. To elect people to attend the State Convention, previous conventions and caucuses had to be organized. Richard Bender, who worked on the logistics for the Democratic Party said he required thirty days between precinct caucuses, the district conventions, and the state convention to have the necessary administration sorted.

The reason for the 30 day buffer period? The Iowa Democratic Party was using an antiquated mimeograph machine to make copies of all the materials, and the office’s mimeograph machine was slow. The result was that Iowa was the first state to vote between presidential contenders, handing it massive attention from candidates and the press.

Cliff Larsen, the Democratic chairman at the time reflected “We knew we were going to be first or one of the first when we thought about it. As I always say, we had a slow mimeograph machine, but we weren’t stupid. We knew we were going to be early in the process, but when the national press showed up, we were totally amazed.”

The press coverage of Iowans gathering together to discuss who they think should be president is immense. The key for campaigns is about setting expectations so that whatever the result is, it looks like a success.

In the Democratic race, this comes down to the fight between Senator Sanders and Secretary Clinton. With the backdrop of her disappointing third place finish in 2008, and a result that helped propel Obama to greater name recognition and an eventual win, the Clinton camp is keen to re-assert authority. Sanders hopes to build on advances in support in recent polling. Moreover, he will hope to demonstrate that #FeelTheBern (a campaign slogan tying in his anti-establishment credentials) is not a sentiment just held by those in the more liberal Northeast.

On the Republican side, the caucuses will provide a testing ground to see whether Trump’s dominance in polls comes through in practice and is supported by the necessary grassroots organisation. For Senator Ted Cruz, the outcome of the caucus will show whether he has been successful in his attempts to position himself as the anti-establishment candidate instead of Trump.

However, given its prominence in the electoral cycle, the results of the Iowa caucus are certainly not conclusive on the overall race to the White House.  Few non-incumbent candidates have gone on from winning the caucus to winning the Presidency; Obama in 2008, George W.Bush in 2000 and Jimmy Carter coming second behind “uncommitted” in 1976. Indeed, Bill Clinton came forth in 1992 with just 3% of the vote, before going on to win.

That Iowa rarely chooses the eventual winner led Governor John Sununu of New Hampshire, the state whose primary vote comes next on the electoral calendar to declare: “[Iowans] pick corn… New Hampshire picks presidents.”

For most, it will be how the results stack up to expected outcomes which will be important for the campaigns, rather than who wins the caucus.

For Pablo Iglesias, Spain’s most vocal and authoritative critic of austerity, politics is “the art of accumulating power”. Yet after Iglesias’ recent electoral success (Podemos claimed 69 parliamentary seats and, along with them, the potential to enter a governing coalition) it becomes necessary to ask what type of power the European left should deploy.

Can emergent anti-austerity parties in Britain, Ireland, Portugal and Greece actualise their goals by ‘playing the game’ of bourgeois democracy? By vying for the same legitimacy and respectability as their conservative counterparts and subordinating distant ideals to concrete, pragmatic policy decisions, can they reform the EU (and indeed wider systems of class oppression) from within? Is this tactical position preferable to a more grassroots, bottom-up activist movement (like, say, the Socialist Workers’ Party) which refuses to dilute its programme in the sphere of establishment politics? Or should this very dichotomy between ‘state power’ and ‘people power’ be subject to question?

Those who believe that state power is inherently corrupting have, unfortunately, been vindicated by the actions of current anti-austerity governments. In Greece, Syriza’s full-scale capitulation to Troika-imposed cuts and privatisations was not the ‘only option’, as Prime Minister Tsipras maintains. It was the result of a political strategy which tried to retain power within the limited framework of contemporary economic orthodoxy. 

Their failure to adopt a parallel currency, nationalize the Bank of Greece or insist on debt reduction (in other words, their failure to directly challenge the forces of neoliberalism) stemmed partly from the dogma that conscientious governance implies an abandonment of leftist principles. 

Similarly in Portugal, new Prime Minister António Costa has stated his intention to cut €46 million from the public sector, while simultaneously using €2.26 billion in state funds to bail out Banif, one of the country’s largest commercial banks. For swathes of the organised left, political credibility depends on disowning class politics.

This submission to EU spending rules paralyses the both the Portuguese and Greek governments’ capacity to implement policy or legislate in an autonomous manner. So far, Costa has made only superficial adjustments to the last budget, many of which will be off set by new price hikes on rents and utilities. Meanwhile, Tsipras’ ‘parallel programme’ – that last relic of Syrizan leftism, intended to alleviate the impact of austerity on critically impoverished Greeks – was withdrawn in December. 

If this analysis is correct, and the left’s most recent democratic victories have been followed by a betrayal (in which progressive parties become spineless reformists or unprincipled administrators) one might argue that opponents of austerity should not overstate the import of parliamentary success. However, the alternative offered by ultra-left fringe groups (like the Communists in Greece, the Workers’ Party in Portugal or the SWP in Britain) is no more capable of reversing the Europe-wide assault on welfare, public industry and labour rights. It relies on a doctrinal approach which spurns the particularities of real, situational politics for the abstracted ideals of ‘working class solidarity’ or ‘socialist revolution’. 

For such organisations, electoral politics is pointless before a major shift occurs in the distribution of wealth and power. It is barely worth pointing out that Lenin had to run capitalism in order to replace it. Nor should it be necessary to ask how a bankrupt, financially asphyxiated nation could conceivably democratize its wealth. Yet the kind of poor logic whereby the end point – ‘socialism’, ‘the transformation of the economic base’ – must also be the first step, prior to any practical maneuvering within capitalism, is still prevalent in anti-austerity discourse. Overreacting to cynical politicians like Tsipras, it elevates the quasi-religious ideal of socialism above real-world political calculation.

Is the solution, then, to establish a comfortable balance between these poles of idealism and pragmatism? That was the initial aim of Corbyn’s Labour, which strove to preserve its unqualified anti-austerity message while employing a ‘broad church’ approach, including centrist politicians on the front bench, to avoid the appearance of a fringe party.

But the result of this method was perpetual self-contradiction: divisions emerged over Corbyn’s plan for a “people’s quantitative easing”, while the Shadow Chancellor first supported George Osborne’s fiscal charter to demonstrate “economic credibility,” before swiftly rejecting it to “underline our position as an anti-austerity party.”

Therefore, in lieu of a harmonious middle ground, perhaps we should question the value and reality of this fantasist/sell-out binary. The structural constraints of liberal democracy can be overcome if the leftist party is directly accountable to its supporters: a pragmatic instrument, whose only purpose is the strategic implementation of their (visionary, idealistic, but also wholly sensible) aspirations. Uncompromising opposition to austerity within an opportunistic parliamentary setting is the short-term goal. Unless that can be achieved, left formations like Podemos will either accumulate useless power, or fail to gain it in the first place.”

Historically, corporations have always gone to great lengths to avoid paying taxes, and Google, with its ‘double Irish’ arrangement, is no different. In fact, not only is Google fiscally resident in Ireland, a country with a very low corporation tax rate of 12.5 per cent, but due to this special arrangement, its Irish taxes are further decreased. Its subsidiary pays intellectual property royalties to an entity in Bermuda, where corporation tax is a flat zero percent. 

Internet companies have the advantage of being able, thanks to their tangled networks of subsidiaries, to channel their revenue in whatever way is most fiscally advantageous. Check out your bank statement. When you sit in your college room and buy something from Amazon, you are not paying a company based in the UK, but one of Amazon’s subsidiaries – in this case, Amazon EU SARL, conveniently located in Luxembourg. 

Therefore, when Google agreed to make a £130 million back-tax payment to the UK it seemed like a victory for the HMRC. Since 2005, Google has paid only £70 million in tax for all its profit produced in the UK, which is a steady 2.77 per cent. Corporation tax in the UK is 20 per cent, and it has fallen by 10 per cent from its 2005 level. This means that, over a decade, on an overall estimated £7.2 billion profit, with an average tax rate of 25 per cent, that’s £1.8 billion of tax. If one subtracts the £200 million already paid by Google, that is still £1.6 billion unpaid, which is a lot of foregone expenditure on nurses, doctors and students. 

This is of course an oversimplification. I am assuming that the yearly profit was constant and that the tax rate fell by 10 per cent in 2010, but it gives a rough idea of the sheer magnitude of unpaid taxes by just one of many corporations in one of many countries. These figures are produced by tax avoidance expert Prem Sikka, professor of accounting at the University of Essex, who also directly attacked Chancellor George Osborne, stating, “Osborne will probably chicken out of explaining and say that the Treasury does not discuss individual tax payments but they have instigated this by talking about it, so that is out of the window.”

Leaving aside political criticism and the usual empty accusations, this deal once again brought a widespread phenomenon to public attention which, in light of recent government cuts, cannot be ignored anymore. Amazon is adept at these practices: in 2014, British customers paid £5.3 billion to amazon. co.uk which, according t o Companies House fi lings, was a 14 per cent increase. The profit, r e p o r t e d by its Luxembourg subsidiary, however, was a meagre and some w h a t conspicuous £34.4 million. From this, it is clear that they paid only £11.9 million to the UK in tax. 

In 2014, Facebook paid £4,327 in corporation tax. Let me say it again: Facebook paid four thousand three hundred and twenty-seven pounds in corporate tax to the UK. This is due to an accounting loss of £28.5 million in the UK – that is, after paying out £35 million to its UK team in bonuses. Facebook effectively operated at a loss, which allowed it to pay less corporation tax than the average employee. Its UK revenue, on the other hand, was £105 million, and it is also opening a new 227,324 square foot office space by Tottenham Court Road in London. Corporate tax avoidance through subsidiaries is legal, common and less frowned upon than one would imagine. The so-called “battle” Osborne embarked against with his ‘Google Tax’ plan is just one example of many actions that countries are taking on in their attempts to reduce it. 

Google’s £130 million deal with HMRC sets a bad precedent: tax expert Richard Murphy stated that this deal is “undermining the new international tax consensus” because “what was agreed is far removed from what is required for sustainable corporation tax in future”. 

There is a delicate balance between the needs of a country and those of a corporation. Corporations are often categorically portrayed as the enemy, and sometimes this is well deserved. But it is in the interest of corporations to pay as little tax as possible, largely because wealth is reinvested and redistributed within the company – and this is followed by some benefits to the state. 

Matt Brittin, head of Google Europe, put it explicitly, saying, “What companies should be doing is hiring people and providing services that help other people” and stressed the “£11 billion of value that companies in the UK get from using [Google] to help export and growth… that’s value that wouldn’t be there were it not for [their] product.” Whether that’s a persuasive enough argument not to make their “do no evil” motto sound anything less than hypocritical is for you to decide.

The Third Punic War between Rome and Carthage started in 149 BC and ended on this very day, February 5th – but that is, rather bizarrely, 5th February 1985. The Romans took Carthage in 146 BC, but caught up in the general hubbub of razing a city to the ground and sowing its fields with salt, and quite understandably forgot the proceedings for an official end to the war. 

This detail passed the world by until the 1960s, when some historian – presumably with too much time on their hands – picked up on it. Eventually, then, the mayors of Rome and Carthage got involved (Ugo Vetere and Chedly Klibi, also leader of the Arab League at the time) and arranged to sign a treaty, 2,134 years after war began, in the Tunisian president’s villa looking out over the Mediterranean.

This wasn’t just a big act of self-indulgence and neoclassical onanism: Vetere and Klibi declared that they wanted to symbolically “reinforce the relations of friendship and cooperation between the two cities,” so the Mediterranean could remain “a haven of peace and well-being”, a meeting point “not only for the nations of the region but for the whole world.” 

It might seem like a flippant gesture and clichéd sentiment, but the context of the Punic Wars is anything but trite: Rome and Carthage fought bitterly for political and economic dominance over the Mediterranean, each side desperately selling the story that the other had to be wiped out. As pressures mount on Europe and fear is weaponised more and more, it’s essential we avoid the traps of worrying only about ourselves and dehumanising the rest. A bit of flippancy or the humour of a silly gesture are oddly effective antidotes to both.

For us here in Britain, the refugee crisis is a distant problem. Newspapers every day have another story about the crisis, another photograph of refugees arriving on the Greek islands from the Middle East. Although these stories and photographs are heartbreaking, and despite the fact that Cameron has been criticised for calling refugees in the camps in Calais a “bunch of migrants” (followed by Chris Bryant’s reminder that the majority of Parliament is in some way descended from immigrants), the refugee crisis is still to many something incomprehensible and frightening, but also far removed. 

This is not so for the Greek islanders of Lesbos, Kos, Chios, Samos, Rhodes and Leros, who see thousands of refugees arriving every day and who have just been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize 2016. 39 refugees drowned off the west coast of Turkey on January 30th alone, leading a number of Greek footballers, players for AEL Larissa and Acharnaikos, to observe two minutes of silence before their game. For Greeks, the refugee crisis is on the front door. The inhabitants of these islands received 900,000 of the refugees who entered Europe last year. BBC Europe Editor Katya Adler stated recently that Europe will continue to receive around 2,000 refugees each day. Europe’s leaders continue to debate what should be done. The German Finance Minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, is proposing a plan to improve living conditions in refugee camps in an attempt to decrease the numbers of refugees seeking a new life in Europe. Europe remains, in Adler’s words, “in crisis mode over migration again.” Even in this fraught political climate, with the leaders of Europe in discussion over their next actions and Denmark imposing laws to strip refugees of their valuables, the Greek islanders continue to work on the front line. 

An international group of academics has nominated the islanders for the award, and the national government has declared its support for those nominated. Matina Katsiveli, one of the founders of Solidarity Networks, the volunteer group which is expected to be nominated, said there is “reward enough in the smiles of people we help”. Photographs of people such as the Greek Army Sergeant Antonis Deligiorgis, who saved an Eritrean refugee from drowning in the sea at Rhodes, have circulated across the world. Yet we still do not see the effort of other islanders – the fishermen, for instance, who have given up their work and livelihoods to rescue people from the sea.

Academics from Oxford, Princeton, Harvard, Cornell and Copenhagen have therefore teamed up to nominate a people who have responded to the refugee crisis for the Nobel Peace Prize, despite the economic crisis they face, with compassion and speed. Whether giving up their homes to refugees or risking their own lives to help save others from the Aegean Sea, these islanders most certainly deserve the nomination, if not the Peace Prize itself. 

A petition on the website Avaaz for the nomination of the islanders has garnered around 500,000 signatures already. According to the same petition, “On remote Greek islands grandmothers sung terrified little babies to sleep, spending months offering food, shelter, clothing and comfort to refugees who have risked their lives to flee war and terror.” Spyro Limneos, who works for Avaaz, said, “ The people involved in the solidarity networks organisation helped the desperate even when the government weren’t willing to recognise that there was a crisis. By opening their hearts, the islanders sent a powerful message that humanity is above races, above nation.” Surely this is reason enough for the islanders’ nomination?

The Nobel Peace Prize was established to recognise people seeking to find some humanity in a troubled world; in 1976, for example, Betty Williams and Mairead Corrigan were nominated for their founding of the Community for Peace People, which tried to find reconciliation in a troubled Ireland, while last year the National Dialogue Quartet won the prize for its “decisive contribution to the building of a pluralistic democracy in Tunisia in the wake of the Jasmine Revolution of 2011.”

Honouring groups in this way shows the necessity of rewarding those who find it within themselves to work together for the sake of others, a remarkable and often unrecognised feat. Individuals are just as deserving, but nominating or awarding the prize to a group of people sends a different message, especially in today’s political crisis. It tells of the hope found when people, ordinary people, unite in a Europe divided over the refugee crisis.

Oriel has accepted £100 million to redesign the College as a Disneyland franchise, The OxStew can exclusively reveal.

It is understood that the executors of the estate of the famed animator Walt Disney approached the College after it emerged that any decision on the modification of the fabric of the buildings could be bought with a nine-figure donation. 

A Disney spokesperson confirmed the bid but would not give The OxStew a specific figure. In a statement, Disney said, “Oriel College has a proud history of making decisions based on offers of massive donations of cash from individuals and corporations. The College will benefit hugely from the partnership. Turning a college into a family-friendly theme park is in keeping with the economic realities of modern academia and will be great for access.”

However, the spokesperson conceded that the transition process might encounter some teeth­ing problems, admitting, “Applicants below a certain height should note that they may not be offered a place.”

Under the proposed plans, Oriel’s front quad will have a miniature railway installed and will be renamed ‘Mr. Rhodes’ Wild Ride’, whilst the portraits in the hall will be replaced with pictures of Mickey Mouse, Pluto the Dog and, in a radical move for the generally conservative col­lege, Snow White.

One Oriel insider, who asked only to be identi­fied as a first-VIII rower and member of the Grid­iron Club, told The OxStew, “Personally, I’m on the fence. I think that Snow White’s inclusion is a step in the right direction, but a lot of people are call­ing it positive discrimination and labelling it as a cynical move by the College to appease female students.

“I have some sympathy for that. I’d rather they put someone up there who had earned it. Like Goofy, maybe.”

Concerns have also been raised about the non-inclusion of some of Disney’s most popular fran­chises. Whilst the boathouse will be converted into a ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’-themed water ride, the College dismissed calls to remodel the JCR along the lines of the castle in Frozen as “ri­diculous”. A JCR motion condemning the “lack of vision” in college management has been tabled, due for debate whenever the student body feels confident enough to make it all the way through an open meeting without it descending into a shouting match.

Further modifications to the College include the possibility of an age-restricted “scary” ride that would take visitors out over the High Street for a close-up view of the iconic art adorning the college, and a history-based rollercoaster rec­reating the early 1980s, when women were only allowed on-site if they were cleaners or the wives, girlfriends or mothers of students or fellows. 

Meanwhile, a bidding war has erupted be­tween Lockheed Martin, a sub-Saharan militia leader, and the Neapolitan Mafia for the rights to rename the College itself, believed to be worth in the region of £10 million, with a reported discount for payments in pre-laundered money.