The Oxford Union often gets a bad press: phone hacking, sponsorship scandals and accusations of rape are but the tip of a large iceberg of pathetic hackery and woeful incompetence. Yet, I have an inkling that this entire high-octane, low-importance drama is just smoke and mirrors. It acts as a cover for the real disgrace that plagues the Oxford Union, namely its total and utter inability to do what it says on the tin. 

Essentially, the scam runs a bit like this: a snake oil salesman-cum-Union hack introduces himself to an impressionable fresher. The hack then proceeds to paint a picture of the Union to the fresher as some land of milk and honey, using big names like Elton John and Morgan Freeman to persuade the fresher in question that membership of the Union is the best idea ever. The fresher momentarily gulps at the whopping price (currently £248) but buys membership and doesn’t use it for a year.

Then suddenly, some big names get announced and the now former fresher gets excited. Maybe this whole Union malarkey wasn’t as worthless as he thought. He arrives 90 minutes early, confident that he is keen enough to get a seat. 

But, alas, when he arrives, the queue is already far too long. In fact, it wouldn’t even have mattered if he’d arrived three and a half hours early because even then he wouldn’t have got in. 

This is the situation faced by Oxford students today, many of whom want to go and watch the Union debate tonight on the EU with Clegg, Farage and José Manuel Barroso. This event is the sort of reason why they joined the Union in the first place: influential figures debating issues of national importance. This was why they spent over £200 on membership.

Yet, what they did not realise was that the £200 does not buy access to big names on its own – to gain entry, they also have to be willing to queue for five hours in the freezing cold, with all the knock-on effects on their health and work which that entails. When I turned up to check the queue at 3.50pm, it was already well out of the gate, as you can see above. 

It is in this situation that the true pitfalls of the Union become painfully transparent. Essentially, they have lied to us. They claimed that all we had to do was pay a little over £200 and then we would be able to watch all these famous names at the click of a finger. The events of today, and of many other days, show this not to be the case – a whole lot of unsustainable queuing also has to be thrown into the mix. Potentially a good solution to this would be a ballot system, but that will not help us today. One thing we can know for certain though is that much like the deficit, we are not all in this together. For, whilst the vast majority of Union members have to queue for hours to see their  favourite speakers, the rather unpleasant inhabitants of hackworld can just swan in at 8.15pm to their comfortably appointed front row seat. Now, for me, that is one injustice too far. 

Read Cherwell’s report on the situation.

Last month, in a shock decision, the House of Lords moved to delay financial measures approved of by the House of Commons:  a reduction in working tax credits (WTCs). A twist of fortunes that is likely to have elicited a smile across the faces of Asquith and Lloyd George’s ghosts, no doubt. Whether we play this off as a constitutional crisis, a triumph for working people or a disaster for fiscal responsibility only but one thing is for sure – the Chancellor has been sent packing. Ignominiously sent packing. And with that, the Treasury finds itself back at the drawing board in Whitehall, ahead of next week’s Autumn Statement. Meanwhile, what’s to happen next is anybody’s guess.

 But let’s take a step back: why the furor?  In an effort to stem the tide of excessive welfare spending the government has sought to rollback on uncontrolled borrowing. And be under no illusion:  with 1% of the world’s population, 4% of the world’s GDP and 7% of global welfare spending it is, indeed, excessive. That is, excessive and/or grossly inefficient. Take your pick.  

Tax credits, in of themselves, have little to do with the payment of tax. Rather, they are a series of means-tested benefits that were introduced under the last Labour government to alleviate the burden on low-paid families. And secondly, they come in two types: the ‘Working Tax Credit’ and the ‘Child Tax Credit’, for those with children. However, now things are about to change. The current Tory majority government has drafted plans that would see this scheme being phased out, and reworked into a newly revised Universal Credit. These proposals, tabled in the name of “a low-welfare, low-tax, high wage economy,” are the latest in an attempt to siphon off £4.5 billion a year in savings from an item that accounts for 14% of our nation’s welfare bill.

Hardly the darling of the Left, WTCs haven’t always had Labourites swooning. Unquestionably, the policy has had its fair share of critics from both sides. Left-wing activists have long claimed that while tax credits are paid to the poor, they really come under the bracket of ‘corporate welfare,’ enabling retail giants to dish out lower wage packets. Similarly, and on the flipside, wage subsidies have enjoyed political popularity as they encourage work over welfare. Credits assist everyday low-earning workers. They make easier the lot of families working tirelessly but still struggling to make end’s meet. Hardworking families. Or, as they’re more commonly known, Cameron’s target audience in the last General Election. That is why the government has come under fire from some quarters, for sweeping the rug out from underneath the feet of those who are “doing the right thing.” A difficult sell.

In a report conducted by the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), it was found that low-earning single parents would be the hardest hit – losing £1,000 a year, as a result of cuts. This covers roughly three million people. Whilst, on the other end of the scale, middle earning couples with no children will be £350 better off. Is this a case of marginal returns and minimal gains? A study from the Census Bureau in America would seem to suggest so. It surmised that tax credits go a long way to reducing want. For instance, if the EITC were to be eliminated, the rate of child poverty would rise from 16% to 23%.

Where tax credits are concerned, the oft repeated refrain of, “if we want to have more money to spend on health, education and national infrastructure, we must be prepared to rein in welfare,” falls on deaf ears. This initiative alone is not enough to run a surplus, of course not. Instead, it is part of a package. A package that includes a National Living Wage, new personal allowance thresholds (£11,000 by April 2016 and £12,500 by 2020) and a doubling of the amount of free childcare for three and four-year-olds. Higher tax thresholds will save basic rate taxpayers £825 a year and lift 3.8 million people out of the tax system altogether. 600,000 families stand to reap the rewards of extended childcare, worth an extra £2,500 a year. So, where’s the catch? The answer: fulltime employment. Anyone who has landed themselves a fulltime occupation will likely notice an appreciable difference in their standard of living. Yet, for those in part-time work – those that make up the majority of tax credit recipients – they are at a distinct disadvantage. That is the sticking point, and that where I depart the train.

There is much to be said for promoting employment, especially when it comes at little or no cost to the taxpayer. Cameron has tried to achieve this through raising the minimum wage, but it remains to be seen if this will be enough to guarantee peoples’ security. A lot hinges upon a high-performing economy. And, without that, these policies seem detrimental to a particular, frankly destitute, segment of society. We need assurances. Osborne is right to reform tax credits, he is right to speak of “easing the transition in the interim” but it was also right – ‘equitably,’ if not constitutionally – for the Lords to vote down his plans. Now, the Chancellor has an opportunity to recast his ideas and develop them, in the full light of day and through robust debate. The Tories are still the party of the diligent. While Miliband was happy to kick off about zero hours contracts and “a low wage economy,” Labour seems more than willing to have the taxpayer subsidise low wages. It is unproductive and it is inefficient. Whether or not John McDonnell is on board with “a low-welfare, low-tax, high wage economy” is a little iffy, yet in principle he shouldn’t be. Of the 76p an hour the government forks out in tax credits for someone on the minimum wage, 72-79% goes directly to workers- the rest doesn’t. What a waste! Let’s acknowledge that and sort it out. 

“We have our ancestors looking over us as we endeavour to take their country back, putting our own people first in our own country. Is that too much to ask?” Paul Golding and his herd of entirely white Britain First thugs think they know what Britishness is, and they’ve decided they’re going to fight for it. Unfortunately, no one else seems to have an answer to that question.

David Cameron recently tried to define Britishness as “freedom, tolerance, respect for the rule of law, belief in personal and social responsibility and respect for British institutions”, which doesn’t seem to come to much more than a declaration of support for human rights and a point about British institutions that seems a little circular. Others take a wilder, more fun approach, chucking together Monty Python, PG Tips, Shakespeare and chicken tikka masala. There must be something here, if on a superficial level, but it does feel a bit dishonest in the face of the diversity of the country, across groups of age, class and ethnicity. As for the definition of Britishness that mourns the loss of our genocidal empire, well, that one can make like the economies and collective mental health of colonised countries and collapse catastrophically.

There is such a struggle here. Are you English? British? European? A Londoner? What are British values? How do we fit the royal family in? The Church of England? What’s left? And if you believe there isn’t anything left, that Britain is just a splodge of land with no distinguishing features to its culture, does that really, truly fit the experience of people in this country?

 The problem, the cause of this big impasse, is that we’re still working with outdated assumptions about the nature of cultural identity. One of these is the link between ethnicity, ‘origin’ and cultural identity. It’s always been clear to many British people of colour that there are still misleading and exclusionary links between these things. “No, but where are you really from?” is nearly a worn-out joke in the British Asian community, if not in other communities too. You’ve just met someone new, you exchange names and they ask where you’re from. “Ealing,” I reply, “how about you?” The response far too often fits a neat little formula: “Oh, no, I meant where are you really from?” It’s clear what the disconnect is, and I doubt it would be there if I were about three shades less dark on the Dulux scale.

They rarely, probably never, mean any harm, but the assumption is there. At some level, in some way, the visual parts of my Punjabi Sikh ethnicity – skin colour, the proportions of my face, luxurious thick hair – lead to assumptions about my cultural identity, and that of anyone like me. After all, asking someone where they are really from in this context is really about belonging to a culture – and this is a common, widespread experience. On a sidenote, I’m glad to say that these conversations are rare in Oxford, but it’s worth bearing in mind that many people experience them as well-intentioned but deeply hurtful micro-aggressions, that happening again and again create a real experience of ‘not belonging’.

The whole connection between ethnicity and cultural identity is outdated and irrelevant. There’s a good 13 per cent of the country that isn’t white, most of whom identify as British and most likely are as British as the next person, whatever that’s supposed to mean. Even if we recognise this intellectually, as a country we still haven’t shaken off the remnants of our past mindsets.

The other limiting aspect of our approach to cultural identity is a focus on finding one particular ‘Britishness’, or on trying to reject that concept entirely. We need to understand that cultural identity just doesn’t work in that way anymore – several cultural identities can co-exist in the same person, and identity is something fluid and changeable, dependent on a thousand factors. A good case study of this is this generation of young British Indians. They’re more traditional British Asian when they are around the previous generation, more contemporary British Asian if they’re listening to Panjabi MC, and more vanilla British in a myriad of other situations. There is no fixed identity, and often no particular cultural identity at all other than however much of an identity that person has created for themselves, territory many British Asian novelists have explored.

This new nature of cultural identity, and consequently of Britishness, is most clear in minority communities, but they’re just the flashpoints of a wider change. We’re still looking for a fixed, discrete Britishness, but we just can’t find it, and never will. Maybe the new generation of British people of colour, as culturally rich as we are culturally confused, can offer a hint. Once we’ve rooted out those last subtle old racist assumptions, we should embrace the confusion and complexity that is the reality of contemporary cultural identity. With that done, we’ll hopefully be one step closer to pulling together an understanding of ‘Britishness’. If nothing else, Paul Golding won’t be too pleased about it, and that can only be a good sign.

With Halloween long past us and our days shortening into emaciated slivers of daylight, we have found ourselves once again in that premature inauguration of the Christmas season. Bleeding red with the great spectre that haunts America, the hobgoblin of cultural Marxism, Starbucks has found itself at the centre of an uproarious controversy over their new, minimalistic seasonal cups for Christmas. After unveiling their new cups, which are now plain red sleeves which otherwise mask a shockingly overpriced coffee, our perennial Christmas crusaders have located this year’s strategic outpost for the war on Christmas. With their heavy artillery of jaundiced Twitter posts and the ultimatum of a boycott, it seems as though war has indeed broken out over pumpkin-spiced frontiers.

Starbucks’ bold move to remove the outlines of Christmas paraphernalia has been interpreted as indicative of a pernicious trend warring against all things Christian in America. One of the leaders of the campaign against the cup posted on Facebook, “Starbucks removed Christmas from their cups because they hate Jesus.” Not being particularly good at discerning the underlying motives behind simple cup-designs myself, I confess a great degree of admiration for the sheer deductive penetration exhibited by this comment.

“What next?”, we all ask in horror with baited breath. First our favourite, monolithic coffee company de-Christmasises their cups, then we wage a genocide on evergreen trees, then ‘cultural Marxists’ have us celebrate Stalin’s birthday (the 18th of December; close enough!) in lieu of Christmas? When will it stop, when will the Jesus-hating powers that be, let civil American Christians celebrate the arbitrarily calculated birthday of their Lord in peace and without harassment? Let Christmas be Christmas: a time for bickering, sanctimony, and feeling uniquely and directly assaulted by anything that does not reek of social theocracy.

If there is anything to be taken away from this it is not an awareness of certain American Christians’ persecution complex but rather the dangers of tokenism and the toxicity of consumer culture. When Christmas becomes largely identical with the consumption and exchange of Christmas goods, it is only predictable that many will react with dismay when one of those goods becomes modified so as no longer to be unambiguously a Christmas good. When the content our experiences of holidays, social life and festivities are made out to be consumable, we have already let the invisible hand of the market squat on our souls.

It is precisely the link established between our needs, projects, and desires for those products which we consume which is really the malady at play in this strange pantomime.

Our deep-seated commitments and desires, from friendship to religious practice, all suffer when our agency as consumers becomes a necessary vehicle for them. Our anger at the likes of Starbucks masks a greater deficit in our love of Christmas festivities and ritual. When people feel that Christmas is constituted by a set of goods, which include disposable cups housing overly sweet seasonal coffee – that is the war on Christmas. Those at fault are not primarily the corporations but those who have reduced their agency to basic commodity consumption and fetishism.

“I find the academic literature on this so timid and so bound by caveats…it needs somebody to stick a big stick with a flag on it in the middle of the territory and to pose a thesis in a non-scholarly way.”

 Paul Mason, Channel 4 Economics Editor, award-winning journalist and lifelong fan of Northern Soul, has a radical and controversial insight on the future of capitalism. He sets out his own take on the future in his new book PostCapitalism: A Guide To Our Future.

 I met him in Mr Blackwell’s nineteenth century office on the top floor of Blackwell’s bookshop, shortly before he spoke in their Academic Book Week about the future of a world after capitalism. Mason sported a beard, jeans, and a leather biker jacket. His book boldly sketches out a vision of society in 2050.

 I began by asking him whether he sees this as the beginning of the end for capitalism, or just for neoliberal capitalism.

“Neoliberal capitalism most clearly cannot go on. The endless expansion of the money supply because of fiat money – that is money not linked to metal or global output – is in conflict with a world where the bargaining power of labour is so low that it cannot maintain its share. You get the endless expansion of credit, financialisation of ordinary working lifestyles, and the stagnation of incomes. All this is going to create a situation in which the credit system has to be elastic – to constantly expand so that people can live – and still the incomes against which the credit is being expanded do not rise.

 “Neoliberalism has now been through three boom-bust cycles: the Asian crisis, Dotcom, and the structured finance crisis that led to 2008. Neoliberalism cannot go on, but its strategic problem is that all credit is premised on the idea of return payments with interest out of growth from the market economy. My thesis is that there is a non-market economy growing alongside capitalism, based on information technology, that will compete with capitalism and the market for certain areas of economic life. It has already won the competition in the sphere of encyclopaedias and web hosting software, but lost in the sphere of platforms where taxi drivers can interact with each other.

“My hypothesis is that capitalism can be superseded by a post-capitalist, non-market form of society, but I also leave open the possibility of post-capitalist survival and what that would mean colonising. The only market that remains is one of human micro interactions – today we have sex work, tomorrow we may have to have friendship work: these are the last tier for economic rationality. I do not think there is enough value in them to sustain a third industrial revolution. Wonga and Uber are very impressive businesses in their time, but they are not the third industrial revolution.”

 Mason sees information technology as being at the heart of this change, but I asked him if this is purely an illusion of freedom. Is this ever expanding digital age tying us down to giant digital corporate companies, allowing them to further chain us into a cycle of consumerism?

“These are chains, but let’s try and relativise it. The first thing is that what the tech giants are doing are farming and commercialising their externalities, the spill overs, the free stuff that we create. I interact with you or 200 or 1000 people on Facebook, a third thing is created out there in the cloud – a network effect. All the business models of the tech giants are dedicated to capturing the value in that network effect and selling it. It is a chain: information should be free and we should utilise our own information.

“I am not in the dystopian school that sees everything like The Matrix. I don’t think that they are surrounding us with information barriers and prisons that are unbreakable. On the contrary, I think that they are breakable through network action.”

We move away from discussing his book, and turn to Europe and the EU referendum. He tells me that he did not have a necessarily eurosceptic critique of the euro or EU, but that he does have a democratic problem with it.

 “It is losing its democratic raison d’être because you cannot go on imposing austerity on states that cannot repay their debts. Right-wing populism has a logic to it if mainstream conservatism cannot answer the central question – that is, we signed up to an economic union that has become basically a currency union that does not work. It is not the ever closer union that is the problem, it is the currency union that does not work and the unwinding bureaucracy.

 “The EU is transforming itself into a kind of non-rule of law situation. The Euro group is not a legal entity so it is a joke when things like the Euro group take decisions that look like economic warfare – what they are saying is that their might is right. In a way it seems strange to put it this way because I am very for the rights of migrants and refugees, but the people who have forced their way across the European frontier have destroyed several things: Schengen, Dublin. The free movement laws are all in tatters because some people could get in. It is great for them but it is not great now for all the people I met in Morocco, all the sub-Saharan migrants who are trapped in Tangiers. They cannot barge their way in; many of them will have an equal claim to asylum in Europe as the people who came from Syria. So what you are getting again is might is right, it is not the rule of law. That is my big fear; that the British electorate, through a combination of right-wing populism and quite logical left-wing outrage at what Europe is becoming, will make people ultimately look at it and think maybe we do not want to be in it.

“My fear is not that we leave the Euro but that a chaotic exit takes place because a combination of frustration and outrage cannot produce a logical outcome. If you think it is bad now, wait and see what we are going to have to do to make a bunch of bilateral trade deals if we are outside the EU. That is a danger that we will have to hawk ourselves around as a country to the highest bidder because we now have to do 200 trade deals with everybody who we formally traded with via the EU.”

After our interview he signed the Blackwell’s book, joining the likes of Muhammed Ali, and then led an engaging debate on the future of capitalism.