From the outset, I will make one thing clear: I voted in every OUSU election for every position for which I was eligible to vote because, unlike Russell Brand (at least when it suits him), I believe in the importance of voting. It appears to be the only thing we can do to exert any influence – however small – on the future of OUSU. And yet, I completely understand why students might not choose to vote: the fact that the vast majority of candidates usually come from a narrow ideological hegemony that can’t possibly represent the views of the average student; the fact that OUSU often seems irrelevant; and that the voice of the ordinary student after election time seems minimal to non-existent strike me as possible reasons, for example. None of these are answered by dismissively telling people to ‘just engage’ and casting aside those who don’t.

Firstly, we cannot escape from the fact that OUSU Council’s democratic credentials are dubious at best. No matter how much you bother to engage with it, you don’t have a vote unless you are a rep, so the obvious question appears: why bother turning up? The argument that turning up might manage to convince reps to vote a certain way obviously has some appeal, perhaps borne out by OUSU Council’s rejection of a ‘no platform for fascists’ policy. But given the overwhelming majority with which a motion not only condemning Le Pen’s visit to the Union but absurdly mandating that the OUSU President canvas every single student in Oxford to join the mob outside passed, I think it’s forgivable to wonder whether the former was simply an outlier.

The suggestion that this problem will be resolved by lobbying OUSU reps strikes me as disingenuous; ultimately (in my old JCR, anyway) the final decision rests with the OUSU reps themselves unless they are mandated to vote a certain way, and it is certainly not a satisfactory response to tell us to mandate our reps on every motion. For a start, have the people who would respond in such a way ever considered that maybe students don’t want their JCRs to be openly political, and would rather use their JCR meetings to discuss whether to fund a magazine or event; or buy new assets for the JCR; or hust for non-executive positions over some pizza in a friendly atmosphere rather than be forced to turn their JCRs into contentious political battlegrounds in the name of controlling OUSU’s political ravings?

Ultimately, this points us to what I see as the root of the problem: that OUSU believes it is entitled to have party-political opinions at all and claims a right not even claimed by elected governments, namely to speak for us – to own the thoughts in our brains, the air in our lungs and the tongues in our mouths. When OUSU steps beyond representing the interests of students to the University on student issues – such as welfare support, academic feedback, contact hours and support for rusticated students, among other commendable things – and claims that it has the authority to speak for us in the party-political arena despite the plurality of experiences and opinions in Oxford, it quickly abandons its credibility and holds itself out as a vanity project whereby ‘student leaders’ can claim that their opinions represent far more people’s than they do.

This problem is only borne out by the kind of candidates many positions traditionally attract, the vast majority of whom are unashamedly left-wing or far-left, with very little room for right-wing, or even centrist ideas, a picture which certainly holds true in the NUS to which we remain affiliated. This perpetuates a vicious cycle: far-left candidates tend to dominate positions; said candidates then use their positions to enunciate their political opinions, in all of our names, on any issue into which they can get a word; said statements fuel the impression nationally that all students think this way; and as a result centrist and right-wing students feel that next year’s election is inaccessible, and don’t stand. And so the cycle continues.

The election of a ‘joke’ candidate to President in MT13, seemingly followed by business as usual from everyone else, only reinforces the impression that reform from the inside is doomed from the start which is why criticism of OUSU from those outside the OUSU bubble is so important . OUSU doesn’t stop claiming to represent you because you don’t attend Council . When OUSU sabs represent their politics as speaking for others through their positions, we must reserve the right to disavow such a representation. When disaffiliated Colleges do not get their votes back from OUSU, we must reserve the right to remind it that it has no claim to speak for those Colleges.

Life in the echo chamber is always more comfortable than the realisation that your position demands you also serve the interests of those outside it. Until such a realisation takes place, OUSU remains open to criticism from all those in whose names it claims to speak.

As Chomsky told us in his great work Media Control: The Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda (2008), the media can convince you to believe anything. And because all student journalists are power-obsessed and all-round evil people, rather than the ordinary students struggling to complete their degrees that they pretend to be, we are going to convince you to vote for RON.

This newspaper has always considered itself a voice for the voiceless, and that is why we have chosen to speak up for the only candidate that no one is speaking for. RON is not just a nice guy. He represents the ability to be OUSU President in all of us (quite literally).

Students have for decades found RON excessively funny – especially since we got to know him personally in all EIGHT Harry Potter films. And yet we haven’t voted for him. We have also refused to admit to ourselves that the only reason we find an acronym which sounds like a name funny is because student elections are so boring.

And aren’t these current elections even more boring than usual? The only position candidates seem to have taken on any issue is “we like nice things”. In fact, we at The OxStew have decided this is the election that almost no one is talking about. So much so that whenever the student press talks about it, it is only really talking to itself (meta).

This election has been dull even compared to those held two years ago (because let’s be honest, last year was pretty boring too). In that election we had a candidate who stole someone else’s website and offered an OUSU petting zoo as the solution to all our welfare needs. We also had a candidate so obscure a certain student publication could not be bothered even to spell their name. We are of course referring to the unstoppable #Jane4Chang slate. Few thought that Jane could provide us with the chang we need. So when Trup offered us change, we took that instead. But two years later we’ve noticed that every candidate offers change, while very few offer chang. And in retrospect it has become clear that we should have taken chang while it was on the table.

The problem isn’t the candidates, who are all charmingly inoffensive, it is the quality of debate and what happens to them when they are elected. OUSU make voting in their elections less appealing every year by adding more and more positions that no one wants to run for. Dare to vote this year and you will even be attacked by a chain of spam emails.

The truth is that OUSU is an organisation which displays bureaucratic tendencies of the worst kind – whether it is allegedly spending £40 per person on sending people to a Free Education demo, when an Oxford Tube ticket is £14, or spending £1,222 on an event that eight people attended. Never has an annual income of nearly £1 million been spent on so little. After all, imagine what your Common Room could do with £1 million? And that is the only joke in our satire column this week.

Yes – Freddie Hopkinson

Last Friday’s attacks on Paris represented an attack on our way of life. This year has been marked by major atrocities in France, Kenya and on British tourists in Tunisia, not to mention the chaos that has unfolded across the Middle East. The changes that have seen the rise of Islamic State (IS) across North Africa and the Middle East have spawned a new wave of terrorist attacks – attacks that aim to bring their seemingly distant conflict to our doorsteps. By mercilessly targeting civilians, groups like IS and Al-Shabaab want to polarise our response to current events. Through terror, these groups intend to dehumanise the conflict and to make us respond as unreasonably as they have. Our attackers want to make us feel and behave like we are afraid: we must not let them get their way.

The tragic loss of 129 innocent people in Paris on Friday must be understood from a global perspective. Whether in the 10th arrondissement, or a Kenyan university, an assault of this kind represents an attack on one of the things that we in the West have come to value most; the democratic public space. Our communities work on the basis that we believe that we will be safe when we go out to the shops, to a restaurant, a rock concert, or a political meeting. Our democracies have been built on an understanding that public space matters and that we should not have to live in fear of lawlessness. It was natural for us to revile the horrors of last Friday night not only because of their brutality, but because of their expressed intent. The young people that committed these crimes did them wanting to break our wider faith in our public spaces. If we respond to them by abandoning, or increasing the government management of these spaces, we will be letting the extremists have their way. If fear of attack drives us from our squares, railway stations and universities, we will be accepting the terrorists’ agenda.

No doubt, one of the biggest political winners from France’s tragedy will be the hard right Front National. Only last academic year, we here in Oxford were unfortunate enough to host Marine Le Pen and her rhetoric of senseless Islamophobia. There is a real danger that the exposure to such extremism as we have seen over the last few years will poison our previously tolerant multiculturalism. Whether it is through our approach to Syrian refugees, or our interaction with our own predominantly moderate Islamic community, there are already signs that some people’s patience is beginning to be eroded.

In my opinion, one of the best things Western Europe has begun to achieve since the end of the Second World War has been a consensus that we can gain from a truly tolerant society. If the attacks that have occurred across the Western world since 9/11 have done anything to break down this consensus, I believe that we have truly lost out. Indeed, true defiance of the sectarianism of our harassers should mean a heightened effort to get to know and to tolerate our neighbours. Just like the Australian response to the Sydney coffee house siege of last December, the strongest message we can send to the people that perpetrated these crimes is our support for continued tolerance, integration and cooperation. We should not dignify our attackers with the pleasure of seeing decades of hard work and social process undone at the pull of a trigger.

In the short term, part of the fallout from Friday’s attack has been renewed calls for intensified involvement in Iraq and Syria. President Hollande has vowed that France will destroy IS, sending the Charles De Gaulle aircraft carrier to the Eastern Mediterranean to provide a much larger base for the French aerial bombardment of IS. Yet, even here there is a real danger that we will overreact. Part of the reason why Britain and other countries have been so reluctant to follow the US air force into Syria is that it is unclear how positive an impact our intervention can have. In part, these attacks need to be understood as an invitation from IS to step up our involvement in the Middle East. The extremists want us to fall headlong into the conflict in Syria and Iraq because, on the ground, it will be the biggest propaganda coup they could hope for. In response to continued terrorist attacks, we need to maintain what so far has been a cautious foreign policy. On their domestic front, we should be careful not to privilege IS any more than we already have with the image of freedom fighters defying interventionist Western forces.

Ultimately, drawing from our British experience of terrorism, we need to encourage others to carry on as usual. One of the more amazing images that I can still remember from the 7/7 bombings in London was that, the next day, London commuters were seen taking the Tube to work as if nothing had changed. Despite the emotional turmoil wrecked by the events of the previous day, Londoners reclaimed their public transport system from the memory of their attackers. By carrying on as normal, ordinary people defied the fundamentalists. No grand statement, or policy change carried such a charged message as the resilience of the population. What had started as an anti-democratic assault on British foreign policy was quickly overridden by a collective statement of people power. Londoners did not forget the terror attacks, but, by keeping on as before, they began to forgive them. In the rest of the world, as we saw in London, we can only hope that people are strong enough to respond in a similar way this time around.

No – Harry Gosling

People, cities, countries have a remarkable ability to bounce back. Parisians, Paris, France as a whole will recover from this latest atrocity and life will quickly return to normal. In many ways this is an inherently good thing – terrorist organisations thrive off the spread of fear. The West must not cower but stand up to this vicious affront on its values.

Yet herein lies the problem. Once life returns to normal, once media coverage subsides, and once people begin to carry on with their every-day business, it becomes easy to forget Islamic State (IS). It becomes easy to regard it as a distant problem and to underestimate the threat that it poses not only to the West but to citizens in Iraq, Syria, and other parts of the Middle East.

In the past, the ‘keep calm and carry on’ attitude has been the correct response to the atrocities committed by violent terrorists. Yet this time is different. The violence seen in Paris last week, as well as in Ankara and Beirut, has been indiscriminate; even Al-Qaeda advises against such indiscriminate violence for fear that it could inadvertently cause the death of Muslims. Although certain Al-Qaeda cells have breached these guidelines on numerous occasions, their attacks generally reflect more careful targeting, such as with the killings of Charlie Hebdo staff in Paris earlier this year.

Indeed, despite increasing evidence of the willingness and ability of IS to launch spectacular, indiscriminate attacks on European soil, there has hitherto been a relatively insignificant response from Western powers. The ease with which recruits have been able to continue to travel to IS’s stronghold in Raqqa, Syria is astonishing.

Yet even the ability of radicalised young Europeans to take a plane to Turkey before continuing by road to Raqqa is not quite matched by their ability to return home. This isn’t a point about refugees – although Europe’s response to this particular crisis will necessarily be of considerable importance – rather it is a simple statement of fact. Estimates by security services suggest that at least half of the jihadists who have gone to Syria since the beginning of the Civil War four years ago have returned to their home countries. Undoubtedly they have come back brutalised, well-trained, and in many cases ready to commit acts of violence. 500 such individuals are estimated to be in both France and the UK.

Indeed the failure to stem the flow of jihadists between Europe and Syria is only one aspect of the failure of the West to act. There have been few changes to military campaigns either: when IS attacked the government-held city of Palmyra in Eastern Syria in May, the international coalition coordinating attacks on IS in Syria decided not to react for fear of being accused of propping up the Assad government. IS was thus able to seize Palmyra, terrorise its citizens and destroy its ancient ruins.

Coordinated gun attacks are becoming an increasingly regular feature of European life. These attacks require relatively little organisation, at least compared to the kind of attacks that used to be staged by Al-Qaeda. This reduces the amount of “chatter” available to be picked up by the security services, making foiling all of these kinds of plots in advance an almost impossible task. Indeed as the IRA once warned, “You have to be lucky every time; we only have to be lucky once.”

Devoting more resources to the security services cannot be the solution. Instead, the West must take a more affirmative stance against IS in Syria and Iraq. Countries are at present cautious about launching air offensives that could lead to civilian casualties. This needs to change. The West should act to crush IS, its attempts to establish a caliphate, and its poisonous ideology that is helping to radicalise young Muslims across the world.

It is easy to critique this kind of interventionist policy by pointing to past Western invasions of parts of the Middle East. Yet whereas Al-Qaeda is ineradicable because it can survive by going underground, IS’s raison d’être, and the reason why it has appealed to so many young Muslims, is its pretensions to the establishment of a caliphate. Undermine its territorial ambitions and you take away both its resources and its ideology. The propaganda value of the caliphate would disappear and so the pull that IS exerts on some young Muslims would surely diminish.

On the domestic front, keeping calm and carrying on is not an option either. If attacks are becoming a more regular occurrence, as appears to be the case, then some considerable thought needs to be given to the security of public spaces in major European cities. Any place where citizens gather in large numbers appears to be vulnerable. Israeli-style security checks are likely to be politically untenable but life cannot just continue as normal. Greater numbers of armed police and more secure venues are one way in which governments should respond.

Question marks also hover over the availability of automatic weapons in Europe. Britain is largely the exception here with its strict gun controls. For countries inside the Schengen zone in particular, however, automatic weapons are proving relatively easy to move between countries. Ramping up border checks could help to stem the problem.

Paris changes everything. The kind of indiscriminate violence witnessed last week in the French capital means that this time, the right approach is not to keep calm and carry on.

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Illustration: Ella Baron

As a Frenchman mandated to write this feature before the Paris attacks happened, I have both the fortune and misfortune to be in the position to express my feelings about the events that took place on 13th November in Paris; this is not an easy article to write. Yet I want to give you an impression of what, as a French national living abroad, my reaction has been to this horrifying attack.

A couple of days later, I am still struggling to wrap my head around the sheer scale of what happened. More than 130 people died in Paris last Friday in what is the deadliest terrorist attack ever committed on French soil. Ever since Friday, I can only wonder what we could have done to avoid it. I can only ask myself, what did those people do, what did my country do, to deserve this?

I greatly dislike the obvious answer that has been offered in the aftermath. Yes, we could have stayed out of Syria, and thus not angered extremists into reacting in the way they did. We could have refrained from bombing Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. We could have put the abstract security of our people ahead of the very real and horrifying deaths that happen every day in the Middle East. Some individuals living in Middle Eastern countries would rather us let them sort themselves out without our meddlesome interventions; some people here would be happy to let them have at it. They would say, why should we care about people who don’t seem to share any of our Western values? The answer is that these values, and the basic rights that they protect, come with a contingent set of duties that bind us to the fate of all people, not just our own people.

Reducing our perspective to only our own country would mean ignoring the countless horrors that take place every day around the world; if we truly believe in the defence and promotion of basic human rights and welfare, then this belief must be applied universally. All people, regardless of where they are in the world, deserve to be considered equally. We must show an unyielding commitment to defend the basic rights that make us all human. This fully justifies contributing, in whatever way, to finding a solution to both Syrian conflict, and the issues in much of the Middle East more generally.

The question is, do we actually consider these basic rights to be universal? There has been a great backlash against the huge movement of support for France, or at least the lack of equivalent shows of support for similar tragedies. Examples of this include the lack of media coverage of the bombings in Beirut on the day before the Paris attacks or the university shooting in Kenya in April, which has resurfaced due to the very similar number of casualties – 140. I fully understand the frustration many people feel when a shooting in a major European capital completely overshadows equivalent tragedies in non-European regions. As a French person, I also cannot feel anything but overwhelming gratitude for the unbelievable support for my country in the wake of what happened.

Cynically, it is sadly the case that many people intuitively feel more strongly about tragedies in communities that are close or similar to their own than in communities that are geographically or culturally more distant; the reaction to the Paris and Lebanon shootings supports this observation. My hope, and the only hope one can have in a change in these intuitions, is that this newfound solidarity in the Western world will set a precedent. My hope is that mass move- ments of condolences and anger towards perpetrators of such horrific attacks become commonplace in the future.

Changing human nature is a very difficult task; yet I would rather consider the international gathering to stand with the French to be a step in the right direction towards a more empathetic and compassionate global community.

These are harrowing times for my country; I have stopped counting the number of times I have read the word ‘horror’ in the past few days. Yet it is important to look to where we go from here. When I do so, I see a ray of light. When I see the international response to this tragedy, the sheer number of people who have chosen to gather together around the world to condemn this horrifying crime, I feel hope. I am grateful to those who have expressed concern and anger following the Paris attacks. The response that I have witnessed over the past few days has also reminded me that people across borders and beliefs can unite when faced with an unacceptable act of terror; I remember that there are some values, visible through the prism of what we cannot condone and must oppose, that we all share. We can and should use these values to fight those who would divide us.

For now, Paris must continue to grieve. Those individuals who died in this terrible atrocity will not be forgotten and their deaths should act as a reminder that Paris and the rest of the world must stand up to acts of evil. But Paris, France and the West more generally must also continue to look beyond their own borders. A death is a death wherever it happens in the world. The outpourings of support for the people of Paris, and the demonstrations of solidarity, are remarkable, and it is my hope that in the future a similar level of sympathy will be shown to more distant communities suffering from similar atrocities.

Terrorism only works if it succeeds in making us afraid. The perpetrators of this attack thought that they could weaken us by spreading fear into our hearts. They have only strengthened us. It is reactions to horrifying situations like this that suggest that maybe, in the future, we can live in a world where no terrorist attack goes unanswered; and that is the best comfort one could hope for.