Yes

Patrick Oisin Mulholland

“Okay, you all know the rules so let’s get on with it, shall we? Ten points for this starter question: Premiering in 1962 and currently in its 44th season, the popular TV quiz series, University Challenge, has been won most frequently by which institution?”

“BUZZ!”

“Magdalen, Solomon.”

“Magdalen College, Oxford.”

“Correct! University of Manchester would also have been acceptable. Your bonuses are on …”

University Challenge! Yes, it’s that time of year again. The final is upon us – or rather, it was a fortnight ago, but that is not to say the dust has settled. Far from it! In fact, the storm rages on relentlessly. With colleges from Oxbridge taking up the much-coveted places in the final two, it may not be difficult to guess why there is debate over the show’s current format. Since its inception, Oxford and Cambridge colleges, as sums of their respective parts, have taken home the trophy a grand total of 24 times. All in all, that’s slightly over half of the 44 tournaments that there have been. Still not latching on to what’s at issue here? Not to worry.

The question before us is one of propriety, of fairness. During a 1987 interview, Bamber Gascoigne, Jeremy Paxman’s predecessor, had this to say about the survival of the show,

“There was resistance, particularly… on the grounds that we were elitist… There were far more Oxford and Cambridge colleges that kept coming on.”

In fact, in the 37 matches broadcast in the most recent series, an Oxbridge college has featured in a staggering 22. Such an imbalance has renewed calls for an end to collegiate participation and the distillation of two teams – one for Oxford, one for Cambridge. This way we could expect 13 Oxbridge matches at the very most. Of course, that’s assuming the very unlikely state of affairs that both teams make the final after both having lost their first rounds and one of their quarter-final matches, and – further still – not having the chance to meet each other before the final! Pardon me while I take a deep breath…

Whilst such a viewpoint has my sympathies, I cannot help but feel it is rather misguided and here’s why – neither Oxford nor Cambridge are monoliths. Think about it. Each college retains its own identity and, but for an annual boat race and a shared old town, there is very little that truly unites us.

Intercollegiate rivalry is fierce. No matter how hard I try I will never be a Wadham zealot or even a student at St Hugh’s (the geographical approximation to Oxford of what the Falkland Islands are to the United Kingdom). For goodness sake, just look at Torpids! There’s a reason why my fellow Trinitarians go to the Thames to see The Lady Elizabeth recast as a trireme, emulating the Battle of Salamis. Few, if any students can find it within themselves to rejoice in another college’s triumphs. And – let’s be frank – if they did, it would be a little weird.

In any given year, University Challenge may reliably anticipate 120 applications before whittling them down to 28 TV-primed-teams. Speaking on BBC Radio 4, Peter Gwyn, the executive producer, outlined the tiresome efforts exerted in “cajoling” and “badgering” students to apply.

A thorough selection p rocess – including a test – ensures that the procedure is meritocratic, insofar as it is possible. The best teams progress.

Doubtless then, we find the same names cropping up again and again. Presently, there are three institutions that nurse a strong culture of competitive quizzing – they are Oxford, Cambridge and Manchester. Make no mistake about, in some of these institutions, quizzing is taken very seriously indeed. Some even go so far as to employ coaches. And, with all the tenacity of an Olympic weightlifting crew from the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, they perfect their craft; the fruits of which we have seen in Manchester’s harvest in recent years under the watchful tuition of Stephen Pearson.

To this end, the collegiate approach is a godsend, not an injustice. In the words of Cameron Quinn, a finalist in this year’s contest, “What individual college teams allow for is a dilution of the concentration in Oxbridge of both cultivated quizzing skill and accumulated cultural capital.” This way, the programme remains not just enjoyable to watch, it also fulfils the equally important function of continuing to be competitive. The simple problem here is that pooling every ounce of talent into a single team from each of Oxford or Cambridge would almost certainly render them invincible.

In what has since become infamous, the Manchester team of 1975, featuring one David Aaronovitch, rattled off absurd answers in protest against ‘elitism’. Surely that cannot be a point of contention. I mean, come on – take a step back; you are partaking in a bourgeois test of bourgeois knowledge. “[Initiation into bourgeois culture and values] is one of the things universities are for,” explains Quinn, “and Oxbridge is the institutional initiator into the bourgeoisie par excellence.” It’s inescapable. There is no appreciable golden standard of fairness; it will always be a balancing act. And, with a respectable mix of semi-finalists year after year, I see little cause for complaint and little cause for change.

No

Sara Semic

I get as much enjoyment out of testing myself against the contestants on the intellectual battleground of University Challenge as the next person. However, by allowing the two most elite institutions in our higher education system to submit multiple teams, forming over a third of the contestants, the show upholds the bastions of privilege in our society and further perpetuates the Oxbridge bias. Although pitting rival colleges against each other might make entertaining TV, there’s no denying that Oxbridge has a disproportionately amplified voice in the media as it is – be that presenters whose alma mater is Oxford or Cambridge, or just general media coverage – and by consistently allowing inter-college matches to play out, we’re only dishing out more space and time devoted to Oxbridge.

Previous attempts at quashing the Oxbridge multi-team rule, such as in 1975 when a Manchester University team, headed by journalist David Aaronovitch, expressed their disdain by answering every question with “Trotsky” or “Lenin”, have failed to turn around the minds of the show’s producers. But 40 years on, why are we still complicit in allowing this preferential treatment? Why is it that Oxford and Cambridge’s collegiate system is still regarded as unique, qualifying the universities for multiple plus ones in this exclusive party when other universities, like Durham, have several colleges too? The reason given for why Durham’s colleges are collapsed into a single team, competing with Oxbridge colleges which have a fraction of their student cohort, is that they have not acquired ‘proper’ college status as defined by Oxbridge criteria. Despite the fact that here too we are taught within university faculties and by tutors across the whole board of colleges, Durham’s separate college identities can be cast aside because their raison d’être is seen as primarily for accommodation.

It makes perfect sense that the network of universities under the University of London qualify for separate teams, given that UCL and LSE are in fact stand-alone institutions with thousands of students. But how is it fair that whilst Sheffield University may submit one team, handpicked from its 24,000 students, so too can St John’s Oxford, with its 390 undergraduates and 250 postgraduates, simply because of its longer history or by virtue of its endowment being ten times that of Sheffield’s?

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Then there are those who profess that having a single Oxford and Cambridge team per series would result in the creation of a UC Frankenstein’s monster, an unbeatable ‘super’ team dominating the competition and turning it into Eggheads. The aficionados of the show love nothing better than to see non- Oxbridge teams conquer an Oxbridge team, and by having combined Oxbridge teams, this occurrence, they claim, would be much rarer.

But this assumption that combined Oxbridge teams would pool all the best players into one unstoppable team is predicated on the centuries-old notion of Oxbridge’s intellectual superiority and quite simply smacks of arrogance – the idea that no other miserly, redbrick university could have a shot at competing with such a formidable opponent is unfounded and downright snobbish. Yes, there might currently be a string of Oxbridge teams in the semis, but is that not to be expected given the inflated number of Oxbridge contestants? Furthermore, institutions like UCL, Durham, Imperial and Manchester have frequently been strong contenders, consistently making at least the quarter finals in many series.

It may be that Oxford or Cambridge will still have a winning team every few years competing as an inter-college amalgamation, but at least it will be on an equal playing field. We need to abandon the conceited and unproven assumption that an Oxford or Cambridge team would walk to victory. And we ought to stop glorifying the peculiarities and quirks that make Oxford and Cambridge so exclusive, and where better to do so than on such a well-known and liked TV programme?

Running an entire country takes a great deal of trust and popular support. The difficulty comes when, as we see in Brazil at the moment, that trust and support erodes and a country’s newly elected leader is left with little power over their own fate. With only months passing since our presidential election, 63 per cent of the population now support impeaching our new president.

At the end of last year, Brazil was in an election frenzy. Two candidates were considered by most analysts to be the clear favourites: Dilma Rousseff (who was standing for the incumbent Workers’ Party) and Aecio Neves (representing the largest opposition party, the Social Democrats). The run up to the election was more fraught than any other in recent history. With violent fluctuations in the polls and a freak accident in which one of the main candidates, Eduardo Campos, tragically died in a helicopter collision, the battle for power made the contest taking place in the United Kingdom look remarkably smooth.

After months of tireless campaigning, in the end it was Rousseff who won the day, as she emerged with the narrowest electoral margin in modern Brazilian history. However, the road since has been anything but smooth.

Within weeks of the polls closing, people were voicing concerns that the Workers’ Party had defrauded the elections. While in many other countries this problem could be rectified by calling a recount of votes cast, our use of voting machines ruled out this possibility. The result it that the ruling party is plagued by the damning accusation of illegitimacy, undermining it at every turn.

Perhaps even more problematic have been the many corruption scandals that have come to light in the past months, detailing illegal interactions involving the Workers’ Party and Brazil’s most valuable company, Petrobras. Consider the English people realising that BP (but a BP with far larger assets and more control over the economy) had been running a huge scheme of bribery that washes billions of pounds out of the company directly to the Conservative Party. Terrifyingly for the people of Brazil, this is what has been happening at our largest petroleum company. The result has been widespread public condemnation of the party and the launching of an investigation which has led to the arrest of many people, including none other than three leading figures in the Workers’ Party.

Naturally, these events have played directly into the hands of the opposition. Somewhat unsurprisingly, the numbers calling for Rousseff to be impeached have been growing rapidly, despite the fact that there is still no direct proof that she was involved in the bribery scheme. Millions of people have taken to the streets in protest, while in a recent national poll 63 per cent supported her impeachment. The significance of this is shown by the fact that only four months after entering power, more people are now calling for her constitutional rejection than voted for her in the first place. Brazilian politics is unique in many ways.

However, what is true there (as of all other democracies and quasi-democracies) is that the Government must attempt to realise the will of the people. Fail this and your support will fail you. As shown so clearly in Brazil, that is politics.

We are four months in and it has already been quite a year for leading human rights barrister Dinah Rose QC. She has triumphed for The Guardian in the Supreme Court, successfully challenging the Attorney-General’s attempt to resist disclosing letters written by Prince Charles to government ministers, and been hailed as “the finest advocate of her generation” by a leading human rights organisation. She describes the greatest challenge of the case as “a statutory provision that expressly permitted the Attorney General to override a decision of the court… The question is how do you persuade a court that exercising that power is unlawful?”

The case has been hailed as major triumph for freedom of information, but those hoping they can now eavesdrop on the Prime Minister’s weekly audience with the Queen will have to think again. “I don’t think there’s any comparison,” Rose explains. “The whole point about Prince Charles is that he’s not performing any constitutional function which is what the Upper Tribunal had held.”

This is far from the first occasion in which Rose has overcome the executive’s desire to keep information hidden from public view. She acted for Binyam Mohamed, who was the subject of extraordinary rendition to Guantanamo Bay where he was held on the basis of statements extracted under torture in the presence of a British government agent who had provided information to be put to him. While Mohamed was still in Guantanamo, Rose was instructed by Clive Stafford Smith to seek an order requiring production of relevant documents from MI5. The case was fiercely resisted by both the British and US governments, who released Mohamed, “probably not coincidently,” Rose suggests, in the hope it would bring an end to the claim.

Rose rejects suggestions that Britain has been left less safe because of US reluctance to share information on terrorist threats with the UK authorities as a result of that decision. “I think a number of years of litigation have left me somewhat sceptical of the rather histrionic claims about damage to national security that sometimes get made by MI5 and MI6. I think that it has always been understood by both the Americans and the British that there are no absolute guarantees of secrecy where you have an independent judiciary and the rule of law.”

Mohamed’s case is one of a number in which Rose has appeared against the government on claims arising from the so-called ‘war on terror’. These included appearing before the Investigating Powers Tribunal because the Government was believed to be accessing communications between two Libyan dissidents who had been kidnapped and tortured, Abdel Hakin Belhaj and Sami Al Saadi, and their legal advisers.

She thinks it “extremely difficult to know” how far the UK government has been complicit in extraordinary rendition, commenting, “We know of a number of cases in which it happened… We also know that the original categorical denials that any flights passed through British territory in Diego Garcia were untrue. And in fact, at least two rendition flights stopped and refuelled in Diego Garcia. There have been question marks about whether prisoners may even have been held there. We still don’t know. Whether we ever will, who can say?”

She thinks the fight against Islamic extremism has had a corrosive effect on some of our national institutions. “There’s… a great temptation for governments to use episodes like that as an opportunity to increase the powers that they exercise, whether through anti-terrorist legislation, or through exercising other powers such as increased surveillance or monitoring of digital communications and I think that certainly in the early years of this century there were some really serious abuses of power.”

Much of Rose’s work involves the Human Rights Act 1998, and she has been vocal in her opposition to Conservative plans to repeal the Act and replace it with a ‘British Bill of Rights’.

“I think that the Human Rights Act is effective not just because of the substance of the rights which it contains, which are for the most part fairly uncontroversial, but also because of the constitutional mechanisms that it provides for enforcing rights.”

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She notes in particular the “delicate balance” struck in Section Three between parliamentary sovereignty and the protection of fundamental rights, and the problems this conflict might pose for a domestic bill. “Nothing that’s come out of the Conservative party shows any sign that that issue has been understood.”

Once a prominent member of the Liberal Democrats, Rose resigned in 2013 in protest at their support for the Government’s move to increase the number of cases heard in secret.

When I suggest that these sorts of compromises are inevitable in coalition government, she tells me, “I think it’s obvious that if you’re involved in a coalition you have to make compromises but I thought then, and I still think, that a party has to remain true to its fundamental identity. And the unique feature of the Liberal Democrats in British politics was the priority that it attached to civil liberties and the rule of law. I was extremely disappointed to see them prepared to throw that away.”

She also criticises the Liberal Democrats for voting with the Conservatives to slash legal aid. When asked whether she thinks that the Bar can survive the current assault on public funding for legal assistance, she replies, “I think that’s a really difficult and important question. I think that some parts of the bar will survive [but] I think that the Criminal Bar, the Family Law Bar and the Employment Law Bar have all been very seriously adversely affected.”

She thinks the Bar will be a lot smaller in the next ten years. Does that mean she would recommend current students against considering a career at the Bar?

She explains, “It’s a very difficult time for anybody to go the Bar,” and that no one should “attempt it lightly”. But for those with the right attributes and personality, “it can be extremely fun”.

Rose confirms she has no political ambitions herself, which means that future governments can look forward to being held to account by her well into the future.

Once she is ready to pass that challenge on, it remains to be seen whether there will be an independent Bar to take her place.

Nobody is denying the awfulness of the recent news of around 1000 migrants drowning in the Mediterranean Sea. Every year, thousands of migrants make this risky journey from Libya to Italy in pursuit of a better, more peaceful life, whilst at the same time many also end up meeting their deaths at sea.

This year, according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM), the composition of the latter group is at least 30 times higher than it was in 2014. What’s important, however, is that we do not see the people who have lost their lives as mere statistics or, as has been so insensitively exemplified by Ed Miliband, as a means of securing some last-minute votes in time for the upcoming election. Conservative MPs have accused the leader of the Labour Party of implying that the current Prime Minister is largely responsible for the rise in the number of migrant deaths. In a recent briefing Ed Miliband claimed, “David Cameron was wrong to assume that Libya was a country whose institutions could be left to evolve and transform on their own.”

He went on to say, “The tragedy is that this could have been anticipated. It should have been avoided.” Well, yes, Miliband is in many ways right here. The tragedy could have been avoided from the time he decided it would be a wise idea to support the UN-authorised air strikes against Gaddafi, which is where things start to get a tad awkward for this PM-wannabe. To be fair to Ed Miliband, he had good intentions. He believed that voting in favour of these air strikes would prevent the threatened massacre of Libyan citizens in Benghazi. Whilst they were certainly successful in helping to bring down the Gaddafi regime, the country has ended up descending into utter disarray, forcing many to flee from their homeland and make the often-fatal journey to Europe. Of course, now that we have this serious issue on our hands (note the deliberate use of the word ‘our’), we need to begin to invest in ways of ensuring that rescue operations are at their optimum in order to prevent a further 1000 deaths during the heavy migratory season.

I agree with Labour in taking the stance that the European community – which includes the UK – must initiate such a course of action, no matter their unwillingness to open up their borders to more immigrants. >However, it is extremely suspicious that Ed Miliband would choose to raise the urgency of such decision-making now, despite the fact that he has had four years worth of Prime Minister’s Questions to bring up the issue (which, might I add, he failed to do).

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He did this despite the even more telling fact that reversing the EU’s policy on the decrease of rescue boats is nowhere to be found in Labour’s election manifesto.

The party has instead been focused on appealing to the more, let’s face it, xenophobic portion of the electorate through its promises to control immigration. It appears Labour have dug themselves a hole regarding their migrant policy. When interviewed on Channel 4, Shadow Home Secretary Yvette Cooper claimed, “It was wrong to withdraw from the European search and rescue programme and I think that needs to be started as soon as possible.” It would certainly be wrong to argue that Europe does not have a moral duty to improve rescue operations. Nevertheless, when asked whether, if elected into power, the party would be willing to send British ships to rescue migrants, Cooper dodged the question by simply re-iterating the need for the European system to be restored.

Similarly, when interviewed on BBC Radio 1’s Live Lounge, Miliband refused to disclose the number of Libyan migrants he would allow into the country, stating that he was not going “to pluck figures out of the air”.Clearly, this inclusive, all-accepting party is afraid of admitting their willingness to admit more African migrants into the country.

Former Defence Secretary, Liam Fox, claimed, “Miliband is trying to weaponise drowning migrants.” Sadly I have to agree. The convenient timing of his remarks and yet the lack of commitment to concrete change is telling of a politician in election-mode.Instead of the tragedy of the man politicising migrant deaths, candidates need to stop thinking about the possibility of losing the election, and rather think about a much graver possibility. The possibility of losing thousands more lives at sea.

The words above were used by Lib Dem candidate Layla Moran, speaking to me in a video interview for Cherwell, to describe Oxford West & Abingdon. It was a sentiment echoed by the Conservative candidate Nicola Blackwood, who won the seat five years ago with a margin of 0.3 per cent. She told me she would be “fighting for every vote”.

Of course, it’s politically convenient for the two frontrunners to portray the seat as a close one, as they hope it will encourage all their supporters to turn out on the day, and to vote tactically. But is Oxford West and Abingdon really a key marginal?

A Lord Ashcroft poll from September 2014 told a rather different story. He found that the gap between the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats had widened to eight per cent, with the Lib Dem share falling to 30 per cent.

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This is all part of a Lib Dem narrative we can see playing out across the country. Their time in government with the Conservatives seems to have poisoned their brand, with voters angry at the level of co-operation visible between Nick Clegg and David Cameron. Those who voted tactically for the Lib Dems in order to keep the Tories out feel betrayed, and many who supported the Lib Dems on ideological grounds have been dismayed at some of the measures that Liberal Democrat MPs have voted to support, including the Health and Social Care Act and the bedroom tax.

For students, this dismay centres on tuition fees. The NUS has come under fire for its aggressive #liarliar billboard campaign against the Lib Dems, but a poll by Cherwell (below) shows the collapse in student support for Lib Dems that was also revealed by a poll of students nationwide in April. Perhaps the NUS shouldn’t be playing political games, but it would be hard to argue that they aren’t reflecting the general views of students in expressing anti-Lib Dem sentiment.

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Of course, our polling data is not particularly reliable. 177 students from Oxford West & Abingdon filled out the survey, and the incredible success of the Green Party perhaps reveals that students from the left are keener to participate in surveys. But then, it might also suggest that they’re keener to turn out and vote.

It must be disappointing for the Lib Dems to see so many left-minded voters (65.9 per cent of respondents), and yet such meagre support for their own party. Seemingly, supporting the Lib Dems is too high a price for students to pay to unseat a Tory MP.

Layla Moran, however, remains confident that Labour voters will return to the Lib Dem camp on 7th May, since realistically, she’s the only one who can beat Nicola Blackwood. If that happens, Labour and Lib Dem support combined would be enough to win the seat; it’s just a question of whether left-wing voters trust the Lib Dems enough to vote tactically.

The incumbent: Nicola Blackwood, Conservatives

Oxford West and Abingdon had been widely viewed as a Lib Dem safe seat, until Nicola Blackwood stormed to victory in 2010. Boundary changes had moved muchof the city into Oxford East, and brought rural voters into the constituency, meaning the Lib Dems lost many of their key supporters, and Conservative voters were drafted in. Blackwood ran on an overtly Christian platform, which must have won her a fairly signifi cant number of votes, as then-MP Evan Harris facedattacks from Christian groups over his views on abortion and euthanasia.

Probably the most controversial moment of Blackwood’s tenure at Westminster came over the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill of 2013. After intimating tostudents that she would vote in favour of same sex marriage, in response to a letter signed by 38 JCR and MCR presidents, she ended up voting against the bill,for which she was condemned by OUSU. Blackwood told me she did this to protect religious freedom, saying, “What I think we should have done is separated civil marriage and religious marriage, so that only civil marriage would have been regulated by the state, and religious marriage by the churches, mosques,and synagogues.” She went on to emphasise, “I am a firm believer in the separation of church and state.”

Revelations that members of pro-fox hunting group Vote-OK have campaigned on her behalf, and that she accepted a £10,000 donation from hedge-fund boss George Robinson, who, as Layla Moran took great pleasure in pointing out to me, was signed up to the same tax avoidance scheme as Jimmy Carr, must worry students who don’t want such a right-wing MP. But Blackwood is happy to defend her record, and insisted that it is not her responsibility to turn away people who wanted to help her campaign.

On the topic of George Robinson, she told me, “The incident happened over three years ago, he’s paid back the taxes which he shouldn’t have not paid, and I don’t think it’s for me to sit as judge and jury.” She wanted to make clear, though, that she had no time for tax dodging, declaring, “I’ve voted consistently for stronger measures to crack down on tax avoidance.” Nicola Blackwood is in a strong position to keep her seat, but must be wary of complacency in an ever-changing political landscape.

Layla Moran, Lib Dems

Oxford West and Abingdon’s most likely challenger isn’t from Oxford at all. In 2010, she stood as the Lib Dem candidate for Battersea, coming third with 14.7 per cent of the vote. However, it seems she’s done the groundwork and earned a crack at regaining one of the Lib Dems’ old heartlands.

Moran is basing her campaign on the fi rm belief that Oxford West & Abingdon is “a centre left constituency”. She told me she wants Labour voters to “lend” her their votes, saying, “We need to get a coalition of the Left together.” Indeed, many of the students who told Cherwell they would be voting Labour in Oxford West and Abindgon might have voted Lib Dem if this were the 2010 election. But trust in the party has evaporated, especially among students, and Moran must fear that this will be borne out on 7th May.

She addressed students’ concerns over the now-infamous broken pledge on tuition fees with a rather familiar refrain, fairly pointing out, “We didn’t
win the election, I wish we had.” She also insisted that the Lib Dems hadn’t fully reneged on their promises, telling me, “The second part of that pledge was about a more progressive and fair system. We did deliver that.” However, clearly she didn’t feel that the party had done enough, as she told me that if she had signed the pledge, “I would have voted against tuition fees.” Positioning herself as a supporter of free education, she nevertheless criticised Labour’s plans to reduce fees to £6,000, calling them “a gimmick”, which would only help middle-class students.

Sally Copley, Labour

Sally Copley is in the rather unenviable position of a Labour candidate polling in third place. Despite Labour’s strong showing in Cherwell’s poll, the chances of Labour causing an upset in Oxford West and Abingdon are extremely low, judging by Lord Ashcroft’s poll, which gave Labour 18 per cent of the vote.

However, Copley remains confi dent. A working mother, she told me she wanted to see “more mums in Parliament”, and positioned herself as more left-wing than Labour in general. This came out as we discussed immigration. After the infamous ‘Controls on Immigration’ mug produced by Labour, many have accused the party of participating in a ‘race to the bottom’ on the issue. According to Copley, she wants “to say more about the benefits of immigration to the UK”, and was withering in her criticism of the Coalition, pointing out, in reference to the recent tragic deaths of 900 migrants in the Mediterranean, “It is actually a current Conservative-Liberal Democrat policy to let children drown in the ocean.”

She was circumspect, though, about Labour’s own attitude towards immigration, and while she stopped short of saying that the party was just trying to take working-class votes back from UKIP, she said that the rise of that particular party made things “difficult” and that “what Labour’s trying to do is show that it has heard concerns”.

Layla Moran wants Labour supporters to switch to the Lib Dems, as, she says, they represent the best opportunity to beat the Conservatives. Perhaps Copley would agree, ‘for the greater good’? “They’ve borrowed our vote,” Copley agreed, “but they’ve squandered it.” She pointed out that many people voted tactically for the Lib Dems five years ago, and ended up with a Conservative-led government anyway.

And the rest…

One of the other candidates for Oxford West & Abingdon couldn’t be reached for an interview. He’s also stopped turning up to hustings and no longer answers his emails. His name is Alan Harris, and he’s the UKIP candidate. His sudden disappearance seems to be the direct result of the exposure of certain activities on Facebook.

Last month, anti-UKIP group ‘Hope Not Hate’ posted screenshots taken from Harris’ Facebook page. One, from October 2011, read, “Why cant i say in my own bloody country black is still a colour and gay are still queers [sic].” Another, from February 2013, which was posted on the wall of fellow UKIP candidate and former Oriel porter Dickie Bird, read, “A bacon sandwich – a piece of English heritage the fucking Muslims don’t want.”

Harris blamed hackers, and argued that he would never say anything bad about gay people as his son is gay.

It’s certainly not clear, however, that Harris is the most extreme candidate in this election. That title might have to go to Mike Foster, of the Socialist Party of Great Britain.

His party, he told me, “is in favour of abolishing the entire political system as we know it, and replacing it with a world of common ownership and free access”. Anyone who’s watched five minutes of Prime Minister’s Questions might be inclined to agree with this, but Foster is a little unclear on
how this will ultimately be achieved.

He’s certainly not hoping, he says, to be elected to Parliament, and instead is using the election as a platform to encourage people to think about socialist ideas.

Another man who seems to have thought about socialist ideas is Larry Sanders of the Green Party. He was withering in his criticism of the constituency’s two leading parties, telling me, “A very very small number of rich people are running the country. The Tories are their best allies; the Lib Dems will go with anyone who allows them to put a suit on in front of the cameras.”

Sanders, whose brother is running for President of the USA, also responded to criticism of the Greens’ anti-austerity politics, remarking, “You can find an economist for everything. The whole austerity story is a lie, it’s a fabrication.”

Helen Salisbury is also vehemently against Conservative austerity, but her party, the National Health Action Party, has narrowed its focus to defend the NHS from what Salisbury termed “galloping privatisation” by calling for the Health and Social Care Act to be repealed.

She insisted, however, that they were not a single issue party, and that there was far more to health than hospitals.

It’s highly unlikely that any of the candidates featured here will win the election. However, although they might not be influential in this immediate sense, some of their ideas may well shape the political discourse of the years to come.