“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.”