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.

The food over here never gets spicy. Note to self: never mention this to the Indian guy selling curries at Gloucester Green. He will remind you of the reason why your mother never added chilli powder to your food. And never get a third helping of the spicy salsa at El Mexicana either. Your tongue will refuse to register any other taste for the next day. Ex­tra beneficial in the case of Hall food – not so beneficial when it comes to G&D’s ice cream. As a Mumbaikar, there’s nothing that gets on my nerves more than a lack of spices, not even government policies about cutting short my visa. I cannot stop grumbling about the lack of variety and spices. In fact, I was given recently a bottle of Nando’s Extra Hot Sauce and chilli flakes just so that dinner could be more peace­ful. But there are a lot of things that I wasn’t prepared for – or had not even considered even in the craziest notions. So here is my list of ‘oh-I-was-never-prepared-for’:

1. Cornmarket Street on a weekend.

I come from a city of 21 million people. I have travelled on local trains where I’ve had to stand on someone else’s feet for space (not really.) It can be said that I have experienced the ‘hustling and bustling and sweltering’ of aamchi Mumbai. But nothing – special emphasis on ‘nothing’ – could have prepared me for the Nightmare on Cornmarket Street. It is impossible, nay inconceivable, to find a path from Broad Street to Starbuck’s. That moving contraption of shop­ping bags manages to grab every square inch of the cobbled street from 9am on Saturdays. Any attempt to break through ensures that you land right on your butt in the middle of Broad Street. Resigned, you pick yourself up, whine about the tourists, and trudge to get instant coffee from Tesco.

2. Tesco hours on Sunday

It’s Sunday. The one day you can get up in the afternoon, next to a half-eaten box of chips and cheese, when you dare to open Netflix and binge-watch in pyjamas. By the time you’re finally bathed and dressed and want to grab some breakfast, Tesco is shut. At 5pm. Not only Tesco – it’s the whole of Oxford. Coming from an environment where Sunday is the one day every shop or restaurant extends its operating hours, the sight of silver shutters on a Sunday still man­ages to confound me.

3. Oxford vocabulary

I can understand five languages but the Oxford dialect is one that will eternally elude me. Starting with battels, sub fusc, matriculation and stretching to the big Latin ones which only Classics students understand, it seems like a new word is always there round the corner just wait­ing to jump at you. 

4. Being confused about home

This was least expected and the most welcome of the lot. Never have I been more confused. I can no longer exclude Oxford when I’m talking about ‘my home’ or ‘my city’. It has, in this very short time punctuated with ridiculously long va­cations, become an integral part of my identity.

Much has recently been made about the lack of diversity amongst this year’s Oscar nominees. This is not as much a surprise as it is another fervent reminder of the state of race relations in the USA. For all those decrying this as a storm in a teacup, it is emphatically the opposite. On a basic level, television and film represent a daily interaction between the individual and the representations of identity that society imposes upon their culture. The images that we see on the TV screen demonstrate to us how our own identities are perceived by society and how we are expected to act. 

Whatever your views on the concept of reverse-racism, and whether or not racism is predicated on the norms of the society in which it occurs, it cannot be seen as racist against white people to call for greater diver­sity on the screen, especially when the start­ing point is there being no African-American actors on the list. Charlotte Rampling, star of Dexter and Broadchurch, foolishly claimed that it was “racist to whites” to criticise the nomination list for its lack of diversity. She has since clarified the quote, arguing that she meant that she only wished every film was judged equally on its merits. In a roundabout way, this really gets to the heart of the issue. It is not only that no African-Americans were nominated for the Oscars this year. It is that African-Americans played an integral part in the past year in cinema, but their talent has been ignored. Every film is clearly not being judged equally on its merits. It is telling that somehow the Academy has managed to nom­inate the only white people involved in a film about gangster rap – the writers for the film Straight Outta Compton. Even more glaring are the omissions of Idris Elba from the Best Supporting Actor role and Michael B. Jordan in the Best Actor category following his spell­binding depiction of a boxer attempting to reconcile his family’s past in Creed. To imply that putting these performances on the nomination list is merely an act of tokenism is sim­ply pigheaded.

It is worth being clear as to how these nomi­nees are actually decided and how a winner is cho­sen. The members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences – more col­loquially known as ‘The Academy’ – choose nominees from their own field. The shortlists of nominees are collated and the whole Academy then votes. This illuminates one key undercurrent in this whole debacle – that the Academy, as an institution, is highly exclusive, unrepresentative and nepotistic. In order to become a member, you either have to have been nominated for an Oscar or be invited in by two separate members. And so, when entry into the elite and exclusive society is based on back-scratching and who you know, it is easy to see why accusations of an absence of diversity have been raised.

Many further accusations have been made of how the only times that an African-Amer­ican has been nominated for an Oscar is for depictions of slavery, or roles confined to the era of Jim Crowe. Take 12 Years a Slave, a most notable example of this. That being said, this critique is not strictly accurate, or true. In fact, as George Clooney recently pointed out, the Oscars did, in fact, make some progress in the period either side of 2000, with Morgan Freeman’s nom­ina­tions for his roles in Million Dollar Baby and in The Shawshank Redemption, respectively, as well as Will Smith’s for his tear-inducing performance in The Pursuit of Happyness.

Moreover, since the furore around diver­sity has erupted, the Academy has pledged to increase the representation of ethnic minorities and women as well as imposing slight restrictions on membership to ensure that all members have been working in their respective field at some point in the last 10 years.

Progress is admittedly slow. These rule changes may effect a small level of change, but the truth still remains that images and portrayals of race and culture have an impor­tant impact on the discourse surrounding race in America.

This is the year when Leonardo diCaprio might just receive his Oscar. Hollywood remains as white and WASPish as ever, unrep­resentative of its global and multicultural audience. It’s time to open up a conversation about the diversity of actors and filmmak­ers and start to breach the subject of the wealth of talent in the African-American community hitherto overlooked. This year’s Oscar season should be a wake-up call.

It’s been a few weeks since Richard Cairns, headmaster of the co-educational independent school Brighton College, suggested that pupils attending girls’ schools are at a ‘huge disadvantage,’ and I am still seething. Cairns suggested that although girls may leave single sex education with a clutch of A*s, this achievement will mean nothing “if they cannot meaningfully converse and communicate with male colleagues”.

Cairn’s remarks amount to nothing more than low-level misogyny. The fact that girls attending state school single-sex education earn more than their co-ed counterparts counts for nothing; the increased uptake of STEM subjects irrelevant, if they cannot talk to men.

He has a point. Everyone knows what happens if you go to a girls’ school. It stops you from being funny, impedes your ability to communicate with the male gender, and turns you – God forbid – into a lesbian.

Despite the old dictum that men come from Mars and women from Venus, we do in fact speak the same language. Girls who attend single sex schools do not need extra classes to perfect their ‘manglish’, or a translator in the boardroom. In fact, research demonstrates that women who attended single-sex schools earn more than their co-ed counterparts, suggesting a perfect ability to communicate, and more importantly, the self-confidence to believe that their contributions are worthwhile. A study showed that girls who went to mixed comprehensives were earning an average of £7.92 an hour in their early forties com- pared with £8.33 for those who went to girls-only comprehensives. The difference between mixed and all-girl grammar schools were more marked, at £10.18 and £11.18, respectively. Another charge leveled against the girls’ schools is the fear that your daughter will morph into the stereotypical oversexed hockey stick freak, obsessing over every boy who happens to cross her path, from the postman to her male teachers. When I was at school, this was partly true. We would grab token boys for proms or parties. It didn’t matter how pimply guys were, how little they washed, how totally devoid of interesting conversation they were – we would secure them for prom. Girls without brothers or a life outside of school were intrigued by boys, only to arrive at university and realise within two seconds that not all men were inherently funny, dashing and charismatic. We often professed undying love for our male teachers; one girl even gave my best friend a life-sized cardboard cutout of the beautiful maths teacher for her birthday – surely every girl’s dream. Another got the name of her English teacher tattooed on her butt after a drunken night in Ibiza.

The ‘bitchiness’ myth – the idea that any building with too many women inside it will dissolve into a cesspit of cat-fighting – is part of an ingrained misogyny that rears its pale, male and stale head whenever we talk about single-sex education. Believe it or not, women can survive just fine without men before the age of 18. Teenagers are cruel. For many people, secondary school is the most miserable time of their life, as you are forced to navigate a toxic mix of hormones and increasing responsibility. But this has nothing to do with being in a single sex environment, and everything to do with the thorny process of transitioning into adulthood and finding your place in the world.

Are girls’ schools pupils oversexed? Well, yes, obviously. But so are all teenagers. And what’s fantastic about a girls’ school environment is that students become less afraid to embrace their sexuality, and less insecure about their bodies. Other girls at mixed schools lived in fear of a tampon falling out of their pencil cases and revealing their secret uteruses (usually so well hidden!), while in my single-sex school we were busy under the desks, casually popping them in and out in the middle of French. There was an openness around sexual desire, where girls spoke about how keen they were to lose their virginity, professing it as loudly as any stereotypical teenage boy would.

On the other hand, studies show that single-sex education can have a detrimental effect on boys. It shows that boys taught in single sex schools are more likely to be divorced or separated from their partner by their early 40s than those who attended a mixed school by. So, send your girls to girls’ schools, and your boys to mixed schools – I see no flaw in the plan.

Yes: Katt Walton 

Homosexuality is a disease,” “I want to put my face in your boobs,” “You’re so sexy when you dance,” “When our school used to play sport with state schools it was like community outreach.”

It’s just banter, lads, why are you getting offended? We are deep into a social ruling that has discrimination masquerading as ‘banter’, assault being ‘asked for’ and misogyny veiled as a ‘compliment’. We are in a lad culture epidemic.

If we play word association with ‘Oxford’ the most likely things to come up are: gowns, dreaming spires, rowing, intelligence and Harry Potter. There is actually a darker underbelly to Oxford, which creates an unsettling atmosphere that perpetuates victim blaming and hatred. This is lad culture. Many of you may be thinking: what is lad culture and is it something ‘radical feminist killjoys’ have invented to blame when ‘patriarchy’ is used too much? 

In reality, this problem has pervaded our community to the point where these ‘lads’ think it fine to grope a girl because they’re on a crew-date and ‘that’s what you do’ or when rugby initiations involve a stripper because ‘it’s tradition’. Since when did intelligent students forget morality and integrity, just to be hailed as a ‘lad’ with substandard and offensive banter?

There is a subcategory of lad culture at Oxford that encapsulates the main issues in our University. I’m talking about the public school boys, Rolex and Comme des Garçon ones, wearing vintage garms painfully sourced from eBay in an attempt to look wavy. This new grade of lads is arguably more dangerous.

Oxford is a melting pot for the elite, with a hugely disproportionate number of privately educated students being admitted. For example, 58 per cent of Christ Church’s admissions attended fee-paying schools. Given that they make up only seven per cent of England’s schools, Oxford is clearly not representative of reality.

Private, and especially public schools, are a breeding ground for lad culture, which is often drilled in to boys from preparatory age. Boys are told to ‘man up’ and not to be a ‘pussy’ or to ‘stop acting like a girl’, and they are brainwashed into believing masculinity is based on patriarchal elitism. 

The microcosmic environments of boarding schools help to perpetuate overwhelming social behaviours which see sexism and classism as second nature and become ingrained as normality. This spills over to university life when privately educated students are forced for the first time to interact with state school admissions.

The grating small talk I endured centred around my education. “Where did you go to school?” they would ask, and when I started to say it was a state school in Greater Manchester many people simply turned their backs eager to find their own social circle. Befriending this crowd is impossible: the second these ‘lads’ realise you don’t have a friend who owns a chalet or understand how to laugh at jokes about mining and ‘Northern yobs’ you’re cast out. When did it become standard for this level of offensiveness to be heralded as ‘normal’?

As a northern queer woman I am constantly reminded of my marginalised identity and how it is ‘taking up space’. I have been shut down in social situations when I’ve called people out for sending round pictures of disabled children ‘just for the bantz’ and that when someone says ‘homosexuality is a mental disease’ it is ‘just some people’s sense of humour’ and I need to learn to deal with it. I have become uncomfortable in my own college due to the proliferation of problematic views that are tolerated by the argument of ‘free speech’, and this so-called banter which seems to constitute law in our university.

I am sick of being assaulted in clubs when I kiss my girlfriend because a guy wants to ‘join in’ whilst his mates scream a chorus of ‘LAD!’ This is not what I should have to accept and it isn’t what you should either. Unsurprisingly the most common reason overall for not reporting incidents were that students did not feel that what had happened was serious enough to report. This is the epidemic we are in right now. Women are second guessing assault in clubs because lad culture indoctrinates us into believing that boys will be boys. State-educated students are embarrassed by their humble backgrounds after they hear of friends hiring castles for their birthdays.

I’m not saying that wealth and lad culture are synonymous but I am saying that the environments many privileged students come from cultivate the ideologies that contribute to this new class of lad culture. Oxford needs to stand up and realise it has an elite agenda which is contributing to the alienation of low income students, women and the queer community because our identities are not valid in the public school lad scene.

No: Bishan Morgan

The representation of lads in popular culture is hardly positive: boozy sports teams with beer-spattered bibs, chanting vulgarities and hurling misogynistic abuse around like rugby balls. Yet I want to challenge this simplistic understanding of ‘lad culture’ and demonstrate that Oxford’s ‘lads’ are remarkably progressive.

First of all, the term ‘lad culture’ is highly problematic. We should bear in mind that it suggests there is some kind of unifying, central movement, which is simply not the case. There is no solidifying ideology between different people, or even different times, that constitutes lad culture. It is a term crucially applied to certain kinds of behaviour rather than a driving force for that behaviour. As such, we should not understand ‘lad culture’ as a monolith: it has taken many different shapes and forms over multiple decades.

In the 1960s, the conception of a ‘lad’ was very different from today. It referred to a man of spirit and vigour, and was often used in phrases such as ‘a bit of a lad’, or ‘quite a lad’. This idea of bravado is still extant today – you only have to look at sites such as UNILAD or The LAD Bible. The word ‘lad’, then, was centred on acts of daring, and was largely free of the negative connotations it has now. 

If we fast-forward to the 1990s, lad culture was a promising, liberating ideal. It was a subculture associated with Britpop music – Oasis belonged to the era of the New Lad. Lad culture enabled men to express themselves, and women to behave just as freely. As well as the lads, there were ‘ladettes’, which the OED defines as “a young woman characterized by her enjoyment of social drinking, sport, or other activities typically considered to be male-oriented”. The lad culture of the 1990s was, then, an emancipatory ground for both men and women, lads and ladettes. 

It was only in the 2000s that lad culture was hijacked by the sexism with which it is now commonly associated. A primarily liberating movement gave people the freedom to act as they pleased, which necessarily entailed the misuse of this freedom. Boorish misogynists began expressing their boorish misogyny, and lad culture gained its new associations.

Yet, I argue, there has been a steady process of ironising and growing self-awareness within lad culture in the 2010s, which popular conceptions in the media have yet to catch up with. If you hear someone describing themselves as a ‘lad’, chances are it was intended ironically. People are starting to realise that branding themselves with the word ‘lad’ is too serious a mode of self-expression, or in other words, that it’s uncool.

The changing face of lad culture is symptomatic of subcultures in general, which don’t tend to last very long. When was the last time you heard someone describe themselves as a mod? The 1960s, most likely. Social groups move in and out of fashion, and the boozy, sexist lad is starting to head that way too. A straightforward patriotism for a particular subculture, such as lad culture, is not compatible with a society which increasingly prides itself on relentless irony. 

In this milieu of cultural reform, the link between lad culture and sexism, homophobia, and racism can be difficult to define. Is the subculture itself responsible for the actions of some of its members? We should start to view lad culture not as an inherently backward, misogynistic entity, but as something which promotes homosocial bonding and freedom of expression.

Lad culture’s transformation is exemplified by the latest marketing approach taken by The LAD Bible. In a recent interview with BBC Radio 5, Mimi Turner, the company’s marketing director, pointed out that a quarter of the ‘lads’ reading the site are women. The LAD Bible is updating itself to stay relevant, removing features such as Cleavage Thursday and Bumday Monday under direct pressure from university students.

Yet lad culture is not only transforming on entertainment sites, but also in Oxford. When compared to the rest of the country, there is strong evidence that Oxford is actually one of the most progressive places with regard to lad culture. Take ‘Good Lad’, an organisation that was founded in Oxford and run by Oxford students, which has now expanded to 14 other universities.

The organisation runs compulsory workshops once a season for every rugby team to promote ‘positive masculinity’. These workshops present a more nuanced approach to issues of sexism and inequality than, say, a simple reminder of consent laws: they facilitate intelligent conversation through open debate. They cover challenging issues, such as how to deal with a teammate who repeatedly makes intimidating, sexist comments.

Trinity College Rugby Captain Alec Fullerton attended a Good Lad Workshop at the end of Michaelmas term 2015 and described how “people enjoyed the platform for discussion – they responded seriously to the issues at hand.” This seems like an enormous step forward in challenging women’s inequality and pioneering ground for a new conception of ‘Good Lads’. In summary, the idea of what constitutes lad culture is changing towards something that promotes, before anything else, liberty and homosocial bonding. The positive changes made by entities such as the Good Lad Workshops and The LAD Bible are transforming perceptions of lad culture, to free the once-promising subculture of the 1990s from its sexist associations. Lad culture is not the by-word for misogyny it has come to mean: it is a complicated, heterogeneous entity, which is transforming as we speak, and Oxford is at the forefront of progressive social change.