Yes

Hannah Foxton 

When Australian Trenton Oldfield (surely a name destined for infamy) swam in the Thames, disrupting the 2012 Oxford-Cambridge Boat Race as a protest against elitism in the UK, he faced much criticism. Though he narrowly escaped deportation after a prison sentence of six months, he maintains that he was right to “protest against inequalities in British society, government cuts, reductions in civil liberties and a culture of elitism.”

Oldfield’s actions were condemned from many sides. An Oxbridge rower on the day described him as “a mockery of a man” and the judge who sentenced him as “attention seeking”. But after being sentenced, his wife defended him, arguing that the Boat Race was a bastion of elitism and class division.

“Britain,” she claimed, “has convinced many that it is the home of democracy and the gauge of civilisation. Anyone living here today knows Britain is a brutal, deeply divided, class-ridden place.” Much as we might condemn Oldfield, there is no doubt that his criticism touched a nerve. Rowing as a sport is dominated by the white and middle class; a disproportionate number attended public schools that could offer them the expensive training facilities rowing requires.

Why do we give so much attention to a sport that is inaccessible to so many? Why is the Boat Race the highlight of the University’s sporting calendar, rather than football and netball, sports that are played by schools across the UK and are accessible to all? This issue received considerable attention following the 2012 Olympics, where it was noted that of the 10 gold medal winners, the split between state and private school educated was 50/50, whereas only 2/21 on the Great British football team were privately educated. The Boat Race’s place as the university sporting paradigm is a hangover of the Victorian elite that used to dominate Oxford. One can almost hear the Eton Boating Song floating across the breeze,

“Jolly boating weather,

And a hay harvest breeze,

Rugby may be more clever,

Harrow may make more row,

But we’ll still swing together,

And swear by the best of schools.”

Unfortunately, the Bullingdon club seemed to have crawled out of the woodwork, and although very amusing, Gavin Haynes’ report for Vice on the inebriated blazer-wearing supporters on the bank hardly improved Oxford’s image with the general public.

Why does this Oxford-Cambridge stand-off get so much attention? For rowing alone, there are other university races. Each year, Durham and Newcastle hold the Northumbrian University Boat Race, Edinburgh and Glasgow battle it out in the Scottish Boat Race, and various University of London colleges battle it out for the Allom cup, but these contests get very little public recognition. We should replace this outmoded two-horse race with a national universities’ rowing competition, and give a platform to non-Oxbridge student talent.

Which leads to the issue of how many of the rowers are actually students? We all know how it works. A significant proportion of these rowers are postgraduates, from American or Australian universities with incredible records in sporting achievement, who come to Oxford to do year-long courses specifically to take part in the boat race. The degree is a sideshow to their main focus, their sport. This professionalisation of sport, and the globe-trotting gladiators brought into perform, mean the boat ace is not really university sport at all. One of the members of the Oxford Women’s team had won silver in the World Rowing Championships last year.

The only remotely praise-worthy action of this year’s Oxford boat race was the parity between the men and women’s races. Both races were held on the same day, and received the same amount of attention, even if this happened several decades too late.

As Anna Reinicke, who competed in the Boat Race in 2004 and flew over from Hamburg to watch this year’s race told The Observer, “When I rowed, the men had nothing to do with us. Now we have equality.”

But this belated conversion to gender equality cannot save this outmoded institution. In its present format, the Boat Race is a load of rollocks.

No

Ruth Hayhow

The reasons why the Boat Race reflects well on Oxford and Cambridge are so many and of such a glaringly obvious nature that I fear to list them would be both dull and patronising. However, it feels sufficient to set out merely the most obvious.

It can certainly be argued that the standard at which the crews compete is proof enough that the Boat Race reflects well on our university. The standard is almost unbelievably high. I cannot think of any other university level sporting competition that rivals the Boat Race’s quality of athleticism. Both boats are bursting with Olympians, with international level athletes at the top of their game, choosing to come to Oxford to compete.

However, what is perhaps even more important in terms of how Oxford is perceived is the fact that this incredible level of sporting performance is achieved by individuals who are also engaged in obtaining a degree from Oxford. This must go some way to shattering the popular myth that all anyone does at Oxford is sit in libraries, as it reveals to the millions of watching public that the students here are a varied group and that not all of them fit the clichéd stereotype.

I know a good argument must include a rebuttal but I genuinely struggle to think on what grounds the Boat Race might be a negative reflection on Oxford. My only thought is that it might be argued that the Boat Race feeds the unhelpful belief that Oxford is full of out of touch and over-privileged upper class white males.

It might be thought that the supporters who partake in the celebrations on the riverbank do not do much to dispel this impression. This year a video by Vice entitled ‘Talking Politics with Drunk Toffs at the Oxford-Cambridge Boat Race’ seemed to show that Oxford’s student body was still largely made up of ‘toffs’. I would agree that it probably isn’t great for Oxford’s image that its representatives are filmed emblazered and struggling to think of a single problem that effects their lives or enthusiastically endorsing David Cameron on the sole basis of him being a “good chap”. This video is, however, clearly not (nor is it intended as) a serious representation of the Boat Race and the Oxonians who attend it. Shark Tales has conclusively proved that is not difficult to find numerous students who are happy to say and do ridiculous things on camera once they have consumed some alcohol. This willingness to say the ridiculous combined with a little interviewee profiling, editing and the right questions make it easy to paint Oxford and its students in an unflattering light.

However, while it seems hugely unfair to say that the Boat Race propounds unhelpful stereotypes on the basis of the spectators it seems even more unfair to blame this on the sport itself. To say that rowing is elitist and antiquated may not be entirely incorrect. It is a sport that in the United Kingdom is only really available at very few, and normally fee-paying, schools. However, this is yet again not a problem directly related to the Boat Race. Oxford competes in a vast range of sports, so its choosing to competing in such an ‘elite’ sport and one in which it has a such a great history in should not be seen as contentious. Oxford’s rich history is one of its most positive characteristics and so long as it does it best to eradicate any harmful historic ideas it should be proud of this history.

This brings us to perhaps the strongest response to the nay-sayers. This year the University introduced women into the race, removing the anachronistic focus on men’s sports, as the races featuring both genders across the day were all given significant coverage. As a result, this year’s race showed Oxford at its best. Over the course of the day, one could marvel at the sporting excellence Oxford students achieve, whilst watching the University adapt to the modern world without losing a sense of itself or its history.

With the General Election so close, there is something inevitable about the starting point of our conversation. It appears almost impossible to escape its grasp at present and as we approach this most uncertain of elections, partisan loyalties have very much come to the fore.

Indeed, it is a tradition of British newspapers to express their support for one party or another and the Financial Times is no different. In the past, as a “liberal newspaper” in both an “economic and social sense”, the FT has “overwhelmingly supported the Conservative Party.” The FT did, however, in the face of considerable controversy, support the Labour Party in 1997, demonstrating the newspaper’s commitment to a liberal ideology rather than partisanship.

Thornhill notes that the paper “clearly backed the Conservatives in 2010,” but suggests that this year, the viewpoints of its journalists are likely to be more divergent.

“I think that the FT will have quite a fierce debate this year about who we support because none of the parties are economically and socially liberal in the way that is the intellectual heritage of the paper.”

He adds, “For the election, pretty much anyone who has a strong opinion on the subject can come along to a special meeting which we hold to thrash it all out and decide who we are going to back. It will be a very interesting debate this year because it is not patently obvious who we support at the moment and I think within the FT there are supporters of all three major parties.”

One of the most significant developments in this year’s General Election campaign has been the extensive use of social media by politicians and political commentators. The Financial Times has had to adapt to this new wave of social media; its readers demand not only an accurate and insightful print edition published every weekday morning, but instant information available through its website and social media about political and economic developments around the world.

“Like all news organisations, we are adapting as we move. It’s a bit like redesigning the yacht as you are sailing along in a gale: it’s a difficult thing to do.” Adapting to a fast-changing world is not without its difficulties but it creates opportunities too. “We are investing heavily in digital journalism and video podcasts as well as interactive graphics and data. That’s incredibly exciting because you can tell stories and present data in ways you could never achieve with a static newspaper.”

Other examples of the way that the Financial Times is adapting include Fast FT; a rolling news service that has a dedicated team of news reporters working from New York, London and Hong Kong. Whilst the FT “can never hope to compete with Bloomberg or Reuters and the comprehensiveness of what they’re doing”, Thornhill explains that the journalists at Fast FT attempt to “select news items that are the most significant in terms of economics and do fast, quick takes on those of around 200 words.”

Whereas BuzzFeed’s metric, for example, is the number of clicks its pages receive, the FT still prides itself on quality readership. Thornhill explains that the paper “wants to know who is reading what as that has enormous value to advertisers in particular. We are definitely out there in social media, it’s enormously important, but it is not the lifeblood of what we are doing.” Some change is necessary and good for the paper but the FT remains very much committed to its core values and Thornhill is determined to ensure that the foundations upon which the paper’s strong reputation is built are not compromised.

“The information that we provide has to be accurate. If people trade on the basis of the information that we publish, we have to get it right. People are absolutely unforgiving if we get things wrong, far more than a general purpose news site. This is one thing we will never compromise on. Our Editor, Lionel Barber, says that we should be right rather than always necessarily first. It is fantastic if we are first, and that is what we are striving to do. But we never want to be scrambling to publish for the sake of publishing material that we do not know is true.”

Given that people are increasingly using the internet in order to keep up with the news, the future of the printed newspaper seems more uncertain than ever. Thornhill, however, regards the printed edition of the paper as “still incredibly important for editorial and commercial reasons”. Circulation has continued to rise and Thornhill suggests that many readers only read the printed version of the FT.

“They see it as a fantastic snapshot of what is going on in the world at one moment in time. There is an extraordinary serendipity about reading a newspaper; you open a page and see what is going on in the Panama Canal for example. People know what to find and where they can find it.

“A lot of our readers love the newspaper and it remains very profitable in terms of the advertising and subscriptions.”

With the General Election approaching, considerable uncertainty surrounds Britain’s short-term political future. The future of the FT is somewhat less uncertain: its famous pink pages are here to stay.

The Conservatives’ election campaign seems to be based entirely around the claim that Labour is an economically incompetent party. The problem with this is that when we step away from the right-wing press’ depiction of events from the near and distant past we can see that this narrative is little more than unsubstantiated hearsay.

The Conservative wet dream is the Winter of Discontent. Given as proof of the failure of Keynesian demand management, to this day the Right talk of rocketing inflation alongside unemployment high enough to warrant the famous ‘Labour isn’t working’ posters. As proofs of economic incompetence go, this isn’t a great one.

When Margaret Thatcher left office, inflation was higher than at any point in the famous Winter, while unemployment rose to a peak of double the 1.7 million experienced then. Only in the first year of her premiership was unemployment lower than it had been in 1978.

This tendency towards revisionism can again be seen in the discussion around what caused the 2008 Recession. Since the crash, we have repeatedly heard that the Conservatives are “sorting out the mess Labour left”, as Labour wreaked economic havoc while the Conservatives determinedly tried to stop them.

Typical of the narratives in the right-wing press, while this analysis does have some link to reality it’s fairly tenuous and misses the key points. Labour’s spend and borrow policies did lead to a significant deficit, but you would be pressed to find many academic economists who would maintain this as the main cause of the recession.

Instead, they would probably point to the catastrophic global crash of 2008, which many right-wing commentators seem to forget happened. Or, they might highlight the UK financial sector deregulation, which freed up banks to make extraordinarily speculative gambles with the public’s money. The problem with claiming this was Labour’s fault is that the Conservatives under Thatcher began this trend, and wholeheartedly supported Labour’s decision not to reverse it.

Having seen the tendency of right-wing analysts to create false economic narratives, we can turn to the key one now being thrown at us. This is that the cause of the economic recovery has been austerity, and that therefore this is the road the country must continue down.

To start with, even the IMF has admitted that it was wrong for advocating austerity in the UK. The reasoning given in the 2010-11 was that as debt-loaded countries like Greece and Spain were on the edge of defaulting, deficit reduction must take centre stage in economic plans. This gave the Tories the grounds to cut things fast and (as tens of thousands of disabled people with spare rooms for carers can testify) with a spectacular lack of social conscience, arguing that unless the deficit was quickly reduced firms would lose confidence and stop spending.

In hindsight, it seems this was a serious misprognosis. Unlike Eurozone countries, the Government could not default as the Bank of England could create more money by buying the debt itself, and firms know this so would not just lose confidence and reduce spending. Instead, the effect of austerity has been to create an unevenly felt tightening which massively slowed down the rate of recovery. This was clearly seen in the first two years of austerity, as the economy slowly contracted as people inevitably spent less. Osborne points towards the small growth the country has seen recently and argues it is evidence that his plan has worked. However, although it’s true that the economy eventually picked up, this has only been since the pace of austerity was quietly slowed down after 2012 and is in the context of a worldwide recovery.

In the coming weeks, you will hear and read the near constant refrain that, “Our plan is working, we need to stay on it.” On the contrary, the austerity plan never worked. To borrow Nobel economist Paul Krugman’s description, saying things are feeling better now thanks to austerity is comparable to stopping hitting yourself in the face with a book and remarking how the end of the pain is thanks to the clever course of action you took. Rapid austerity measures were never the right course; rather, they are part of a rich right-wing tradition that fails to recognise its own failings and attempts to paint others as even more incompetent.