As the EU steps up its opposition to what it deems to be Russia’s “disinformation campaigns”, it is time to shine light on some of the narratives that the Western media has been concocting regarding the catastro­phe currently configuring the relationship between Russia and the West: the Ukraine crisis.

The stance of many Russian supporters and their justification for the Russian government’s actions can be traced back to the violation of the alleged promise made by the US Secretary of State James A. Baker and German Foreign Minister Hans Dietrich Genscher to Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990, that although the newly unified Germany would be part of NATO, the latter would “not move one inch to the East”. The NATO Review, on the other hand, attributes Russia’s belief about the existence of a binding agreement to the confusion in the political environment of the early 1990’s, even presenting NATO’s eastward expansion as the fulfillment of a moral obligation: “the countries of Central and Eastern Europe were finally able to assert their sovereignty and define their own foreign and security policy goals. As these goals centered on integration with the West, any categorical refusal of NATO to respond would have meant the de facto continuation of Europe’s division along former Cold War lines. The right to choose one’s alliance, enshrined in the 1975 Helsinki Charter, would have been denied – an approach that the West could never have sustained, neither politically nor morally.” I will leave this aspect of the conflict aside, however, as it is easy to get lost in the sea of alternative accounts and interpretations of the exact events of 1990. Instead, I will embark upon an analysis of the crisis from a constitutional standpoint, appealing to what Western civilization has elevated to the position once held by religion – the rule of law.

As the scrupulous analysis by Valery Dmitrievich Zorkin, the Chairman of the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation, of the unfolding of the crisis in Ukraine shows, the “bastion of human rights and freedom” – the West, has in fact been undermining the absolute power of its sacrosanct rule of law in supporting and aiding the opposition, which has now become Ukraine’s de facto government.

In the early stages of the crisis the Western media was eager to present the protests in Kiev and other regions of Ukraine as evidence of the Ukrainians having chosen to join Europe. Thus, Yanukovich’s pro-Russian stance was portrayed as his betrayal of the will of the Ukrainian nation. The Western media, however, conveniently omitted the fact that even all the protestors combined in all the regions, who never exceeded 1.5 million in number, could hardly represent the will of a nation of 45 million. Thus, the call for the removal of Yanukovich by Western politicians was contrary to the law given that Yanukovich and the Verkhovna Rada constituted a legitimately elected government. Moreover, Yanukovich’s impeachment itself was unconstitutional, given the fact that at the moment of the decision about his impeachment, only 313 MPs were present, of which 283 voted for his removal from power, which was short of 55 votes according to the requirements of the Constitution for the impeachment of a president.

Even after the illegitimate removal of Yanukovich from power, the Verkhovna Rada continued its work with flagrant violations of the law. The opposition, which came to power in the Verkhovna Rada following the president’s removal, numbered around 150 MPs, leaving it without a constitutional (300 votes) or even an ordinary (226 votes) majority. Well documented stories about the subsequent “persuasion” techniques implemented by the opposition in order to gain a majority, as armed “guards” appeared in the homes of insubmissive MPs, were also conveniently omitted from the Western media’s analysis of the events.

Was the Western media aware of the falsified procedure for the dismissal of Yanukovich, of the use of force and machinations with the deputies’ cards in order to obtain a majority in the Verkhovna Rada, as well as all the other violations of the Constitution and the illegitimacy of the new government? It most probably was as many western as well as Ukrainian journalists were witnesses of these events according to Zorkin. Thus, perhaps the West should cleanse its own media of “disinformation” before that of Russia’s.

Nobody could call Jonathan Powell’s career path dull. He seems to have the knack, or more likely the talent, of finding himself in all the most interesting places at all the most interesting times. He started his working life at the Foreign Office, where he helped to assist in the Hong Kong handover negotiations with the Chinese, took part in the German Reunification talks in 1989-90 and shadowed Bill Clinton on the 1992 campaign trail. And this was just the beginning.

For, in 1995, Tony Blair appointed him his Chief of Staff and, after Blair’s 1997 landslide election victory, Powell became the Downing Street Chief of Staff and worked at the heart of the corridors of power for the duration of Blair’s premiership. The next decade saw him at the centre of Labour decision-making, from the 1997 Election to the Iraq War. However, perhaps unsurprisingly for a former diplomat, it was his role as one of the lead British negotiators on Northern Ireland of which he is most proud, calling it “by far the most important thing I did in my life”.

In 1998, the Good Friday Agreement was signed, finally bringing some peace to that war-torn part of the world. Getting there, however, was the cause of many sleepless nights for Powell. “It was a very frustrating process. I had to go across the Irish Sea once or twice a week, as well as being Chief of Staff at Number 10 and they made you negotiate through the night about things which didn’t need to be negotiated through the night. At some stages, I was tearing out my hair about it. But, in retrospect, I am really glad I did it.”

Given the recent flares of violence in Northern Ireland, I ask him how durable he thinks the current political settlement is, “We are not going to go back to the Troubles again, but if anyone thinks you’re living in a fairy story where everyone lives happily after, you are not. We solved lots of problems, we solved a large part of the violence problem, but we haven’t solved the politics and we haven’t solved the sectarianism. There is a process of peace-building that comes after peacemaking that can take a very long time to solve.

“Once people separate like that, bringing them back together again is very hard. It takes a very long period of time.” The conversation turns to the internal dynamics of the Blair government, and in particular, the role of the Civil Service. Powell and the Civil Service did not always see eye to eye and he thinks that there are lots of ways in which it can improve, telling me, “There is a problem with the British Civil Service. It is probably one of the best civil services in the world but it hasn’t had really major reforms, although it has had reforms, since the nineteenth century and it really does need a change. The trouble at the moment is that it is very much a dynastic order and although we say people come in and out, they don’t really. People still join when they leave university and leave when they retire.

“One of the reasons why it is so hard to reform the Civil Service is because it is underpaid. As a result people don’t want to go into it and civil servants don’t want to leave because their pensions are too good. But we need to try and change that and we need to change the incentive scheme.”

At this point, it seemed appropriate to put to Powell the question every political-nerdcum-American-TV-geek is dying to ask: “Do you think No 10 is more West Wing or Yes Prime Minister?” His answer is immediate, “It is certainly not West Wing. I remember the Chief of Staff in the West Wing, who has died since, came to see me in Number 10. I thought he wasn’t coming for publicity but because he was interested, and then the next day a picture appeared in the newspapers of me and him talking. I know American politics quite well because I started off following Clinton around. So it is not West Wing at all, it is much more Yes Prime Minister. In many ways, Yes Prime Minister is a documentary rather than a comedy. There are an awful lot of home truths in it.”

Powell left Downing Street when Blair did in 2007, and soon after joined Morgan Stanley as an investment banker. Suffice to say, it wasn’t his calling, and he soon left. His next big venture was to set up a charity called Inter Mediate, which carries out negotiation and mediation in “the most difficult, complex and dangerous conflicts” in the world. It draws upon his experiences in Northern Ireland and is rooted in the idea that it is only through dialogue that any resolution can be achieved, a concept which lies at the heart of his new book, Talking to Terrorists: How to End Armed Conflicts.

Powell’s idea is that it is always good to talk to terrorists. Such a proposition does not pass without controversy; take ISIS for example. Following a week in which they have beheaded 30 Ethiopian Christians in Libya, many people would baulk at the idea of giving them legitimacy by talking to them. However, Powell believes we have to take a longer term view, telling me, “I have looked at the negotiations going back since the end of the Cold War and there are certain patterns which have emerged. One such pattern is that every time we encounter a terrorist group we say we will never talk to them, yet we pretty much always end up talking to them. “So my argument with ISIS would be… would we sit down with Mr Baghdadi now and negotiate? No, that would be ridiculous. He wouldn’t want to negotiate. But, if we look back at what has happened in the past, nor is just bombing them going to work. Even if we had boots on the ground, that wouldn’t solve the problem of ISIS. You have to have some longer term strategy. If they have genuine political support, and I suspect they probably do – it would have been very hard for 1,000 fighters to take over the town of Mosul without support from the population there – the chances are we are going to end up talking to them. So the sensible thing to do now is to open up a channel, as we did with the IRA back in 1972, a channel which can be used at some stage to negotiate through.”

However, Powell also argues that we will not be able to negotiate until we get to two things: first, “a mutually hurting stalemate where both sides realise they cannot win and it hurts them to carry on fighting” and, second, “strong leadership on both sides, which allows conversation to happen”.

I put it to him that this still does not answer the question of legitimising them. He tells me, “It is certainly true that armed groups really want legitimacy, they are desperate to be heard, to get publicity. There is a real issue there. The argument I make in the book is that legitimisation is a very short term thing. So, if you take for example the FARC, they started the talks in 1999 to 2001 with the Columbian government, they got legitimisation. Having been completely outcast, they were able to appear on national television. But as they made it clear in the negotiations that they weren’t serious and then rejected a perfectly good offer, they lost that legitimisation when they went back to fighting. So, all you get is very temporary legitimisation, which can be a price worth paying.”

However, whilst that might hold true for specific terrorist groups, I suggest that it still does not answer the argument that by talking to terrorists, you legitimise terror as a tactic. Powell, however, does not buy this, saying, “In normal life, you do not regard talking to someone as a reward and not talking to them as a punishment and thinking about that in terms of terrorism is useful. In talking to terrorists, you are not agreeing with them and that is the point. Talking to terrorists is not the same as giving into them. When we were talking to the IRA, we were not going to give a united Ireland down the barrel of the gun, regardless of the views of the majority of the people in Northern Ireland.”

Our conversation turns to the practicalities of talking to terrorists, which are not all that they seem. “It’s a difficult thing to do as terrorists don’t have a front office where you can pop in and have a cup of coffee and talk to them. So you find a way of establishing channels and it is funny that they work in very odd ways. For example, a colleague of mine who is trying to get in touch with Nepalese Maoists went into Kathmandu and tried everything he could to meet them but didn’t achieve anything. But then he fired off an email to Shiningpath.com which is a website they used in homage to the Maoists in Peru, and to his great surprise he got a reply, and over the next few months, they worked out how they could meet. He went to a small Indian city, was picked up in a motor rickshaw, taken through some tiny streets, into a building, out of another building, into another rickshaw, and ended up in an unfinished skyscraper on the fourth floor and then a member of the politburo came and met him. So it can happen in very odd ways.”

This vignette, whilst not of Powell himself, certainly conjures up the excitement that suffuses the world of international diplomacy. Ultimately, however, it’s neither the excitement nor the glamour of Powell’s job that make his life’s work so enviable. Rather, it is the fact that what he is doing actually means something, namely opening up dialogue where there was none, whether in Ireland or Africa, China or South America. It is this raison d’être which shines through in this interview, and which makes his life of diplomacy so interesting.

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.