Alright, I confess it.  I voted to remain in the NUS in that ill-fated referendum last term. Admittedly, I was mainly persuaded by the scare mongering propagated by the Yes campaign; I might lose my much loved and treasured McDonalds discount in the event of disaffiliation. Yet, the nobler part of me (one that rarely holds sway) was also attracted to the idea of being part of a national movement of students from across the country, fighting for their interests and for fairness in a world where there is little enough of it. However, this movement will only survive and flourish if its direction and agenda are decided by the students it purports to represent.The NUS cannot hijack the apathy of the vast majority of students to mount campaigns supported only by an outspoken minority.

For sure, many of the campaigns that the NUS mounts, such as fighting the tuition fee rise or increasing awareness of LGBTQ issues, are not only admirable ones, but also ones that the majority of students support. However, their latest shenanigans cannot be so labelled. They have proposed an “alcohol impact” scheme in which certain universities strive to fulfil a set of criteria. These include trying to get universities to limit commercial pub-crawls on campus and putting an end to “irresponsible drinks promotions”. In other words, they are trying to manage your alcohol intake for you. I am not saying that their entire proposal is a bad thing; the emphasis in the campaign on highlighting the provision of cheap non-alcoholic alternatives and the desire to develop a café culture are both sensible measures that will help to make those who don’t like to drink feel more included.  Yet, the package as a whole is certainly not an uncontroversial one; the means to the end of abolishing the binge drinking culture, as laudable as that might be, potentially include increasing the price of student drinks and limiting the range of a student’s social activities. 

I do not begrudge our universities, or even the Home Office, launching such a campaign; it is their right to try to make our society as safe and healthy as it can possible be. But for our own lobbying group to act against the interests of so many students is intolerable. They have no mandate for such a programme from the students they represent. It is certainly not a clear-cut issue. Further regulating the consumption of alcohol on student campuses could be seen as just driving binge drinking out of secure areas and into more dangerous ones.  Students would increasingly turn to supermarket alcohol, making the safe havens that are student bars increasingly depopulated. This would damage the sense of community in universities, as the Student Union is often the social hub of the campus.

Why should all this concern us? After all, I am quibbling about a very small part of a campaign that is not even being implemented in Oxford. Seemingly the epitome of irrelevant. But such a view misses the point that in all this, the NUS is claiming to wield the overwhelming might of student opinion in fulfilling its ideological aims. Yet, as far as I am aware, no such consensus exists. The NUS is not the government; it cannot claim to be working for the benefit of its members contrary to their wishes. It is a movement representing a particular constituency and therefore should ONLY act when its constituency agrees with what its doing. It is at its best when it is fighting against tuition fees, bargaining for discounts for the NUS extra card or campaigning for the rights of disabled students. But at its worst, it is a meddling, undemocratic, sectarian institution that campaigns without the mandate of its members. Attempts to suppress the consumption of alcohol definitely fall into the latter category and it is with acts like these that the NUS shoots itself in the foot. In doing so, all it achieves is to damage its own credibility in the eyes of students across the country.

Nick and his co-founders Josh and Otto see their new app as solving an age-old student problem, namely that “anyone who has been to or hosted a house party knows that the music there is usually comprised of a nightmarish mix of drunk kids plugging in and out their phones, beer spilt on laptops, and long silences as people wait for their YouTube videos to load.”

DJs or playlists are not the solution, because they still fall prey to endless complaining about what is actually being played. “Every music service out there is designed to cater to your personal preferences, but most of the time when people listen to music, they are with other people. We wanted to build a music service that was designed to be used by multiple people at the same time, whether they’re hanging out with friends, at a party, or at a bar.”

The founders of Jam set out to democratise the choice of music, starting out with house parties as a “first use case”.

With Jam, “people can request any song they can think of, and up-vote others’ requests in the queue, so the most popular songs get played the soonest.” Eventually, Josh, Otto, and Nick hope that Jam will be able to automatically select the music played at an event based on the common tastes of those attending. They also hope to overcome the Spotify requirement, so that eventually anyone will be able to use the service from the music they already have on their phone.

The trio are all 22-year-old seniors in the University of Michigan’s College of Engineering. The project was conceived out of a senior design class, in a course deliberately designed “to give students an opportunity to pursue projects they might not otherwise have time for”. According to Nick, such creative courses are increasingly common in engineering schools, which now directly compete with tech start-ups for young talent.

Jam seems to form part of a common trend among tech start-ups, namely that it was begun as a group of friends aiming to create something useful for themselves, but soon transformed into an increasingly successful business model:

“We were all very passionate about Jam from the outset, so it was an easy decision to continue development when the class ended in December. From January to March we poured thousands of hours into the project, and finally released our first version in April.”

Jam has been hard work, but Nick says it has been “extremely gratifying” to watch its popularity grow. “Jam is really a passion project for the three of us, so even though it has been exhausting, it has also been a ton of fun. We have gotten a pretty amazing response from users; without doing any marketing or promotion, we have built up a base of several thousand users in 41 countries.”

Despite this success, the trio are still awaiting investment before committing to pursuing Jam fulltime. We get the sense, however, that they are reluctant to let go: as Nick says, “Anyone who has ever worked on a creative project knows how easy it is to lose objectivity; when you’re that close to something, when you’ve worked and worked and fretted about it for months, it is very difficult to put yourself in an outsider’s shoes, and you can never really know how people will react. I get a huge rush every time we get an email from someone telling us they love Jam, or receive another good review on the App Store, or watch as ten more people in another country download the app.”

By most standards, 2014 has been a big year for issues concerning race at Oxford. March saw ‘I, too, am Oxford’ go viral as non-white students took to Tumblr, wielding placards inscribed with incensed one-liners. Within weeks, a university-wide Race Equality Summit had been set up with Oxford’s own powers-that-be joining the conversation.

You have probably also heard that just before the end of term, the same people behind the ‘I, too’ campaign launched a zine off the back of their earlier success. Entitled Skin Deep, it essentially spells out the core philosophy powering the placards in its call for “a post race writing… which claims that race is a fiction, which is only ever given substance via the illusion of performance, action, and utterance”.

For some, this “race as fiction” approach goes a long way in explaining their experience of Otherness. Unsurprisingly, it has proven particularly relevant to those who have an Occidental suffix like ‘-British’ appended to their identities; after all, if you have been bred in the same socio-political petri dish as most white Oxonians, it is perfectly conceivable that, for you, the particularities conveyed by an ‘ethnic’ background really do start and stop at the skin.

No surprises, then, that a significant portion of the ‘I, too’ and Skin Deep campaigners are long-term citizens of the West, who resent being told what great English they speak when they have spent their entire lives based in New York or London. Other campaigners, whilst not British, are nevertheless the sort of global elite who have embraced the West conclusively enough to protest, against all appearances, that yes English is their first language.

In cases like these, race may genuinely be a form of unhelpful fiction that deserves to be overlooked. But personally, as an international student, I cannot help but feel a little alienated by the assimilative racial programmes du jour which argue that people ought to be treated like they’re all ‘the same’ inside, regardless of ethnic particularities.

Like other non-Brits I’ve spoken to, I get nervous about what the word ‘same’ is meant to imply in this context: that there exists some ideal version of ‘Oxford’ that I’m supposed to have the capacity to ‘be(come)’, in spite of my tinted skin and completely un-English background. Far too often, I have seen the phrase ‘the same’ elaborated into an irrational expectation that under the skin, all Oxonians ultimately are — or even worse, ought to conform to — some combination of British, white, and middle-class.

It has been precisely this expectation of underlying, unrelenting sameness that has produced some of my most unsettling experiences here at Oxford. Truth be told, I can live with being asked regularly if English is my first language; I have an accent that is clearly not local, a fact which makes this assumption somewhat more understandable.

But I cannot, as I have discovered, live with friends and tutors who insist on belittling non-European forms of belief or social organisation to my face, on the blanket assumption that the whole world buys into — or worse still, should want to buy into — their own society’s myths (If you’re a working adult who still lives with your parents, then you must be a sponge; if you take the occasional dose of Traditional Chinese Medicine then you must be superstitious, or living in the dark ages).

Similarly, I felt wronged when a university supervisor informed me point blank, one day, that I was on the “wrong side of History” for erring on the side of so-called Asian-style democracy, rather than agreeing with his fancifully liberal and privileged British abstractions about what a Southeast Asian utopia should look like (Whose history was I on the wrong side of? His?).

On a less subtle note, I also remember feeling mildly disturbed when a British friend once proclaimed, half tongue-in-cheek, that he could form a real friendship with me only because I was Singaporean, and therefore “just an English person with yellow skin on” (“Actually,” I told him, “I’m very yellow on the inside too.”).

As I see it, then, the logic of ‘race as fiction’ applies to some of us here at Oxford more than it does, or should do, to others. On the one hand, there is admittedly no doubt that it works well if you do count yourself as British at heart, like many of this year’s most vocal campaigners. There’s also a certain amount of truth in its foundational premise that race does not make a person — I am well aware that my ethnicity is not the sum of my personality, and I feel a little slighted whenever people assume straight off the bat that I read physics or do kung fu.

But on the other hand, it is perhaps worth asking ourselves just how far this attitude can be applied to the entirety of the international student community since, in many cases, race does signify a whole plethora of genuine cultural differences for them.

How far can you treat everyone like they are the same, before coming across as disrespectful in your refusal to acknowledge genuine points of uniqueness rooted in ethnicity, and the expression of this through performative social beliefs? What is this ‘same’ that we’re all meant secretly to be, anyway; is it shorthand for ‘culturally British’?

And what if, horror of horrors, the very skin colour you want to brush aside turns out to be the best route to approaching someone who does not identify with your culture, and wants people to take a more active interest in his own?

In Oxford, of all places, the legitimisation of ethnocultural differences ought to be the basis from which genuine cross-cultural understanding can develop. I, for one, feel that if my skin makes me seem culturally distinct from the average British person, then it is only doing a good job of telling the truth.

I am different on the inside, and would much rather have this fact cast out into the open and be treated positively as the Other that I am, rather than as the standardised, generically British person whom people would prefer me to be. 

On February 26th this year, the European Parliament voted in favour of legalizing selling sex but criminalizing its purchase. This is indicative of a growing international movement towards criminalizing the client, or ‘shifting the burden’; first adopted by Sweden in 1999, this has become known as ‘the Nordic model’. Supporters say it will decrease demand for prostitution while protecting the rights of individual women.

However, The English Collective of Prostitutes, a network of activists who advocate for the rights of sex workers, are strongly opposed to this increasing support for the Nordic model. For Laura Watson, a spokeswoman for the organization, the only way the safety of sex workers can be guaranteed is complete decriminalization. Their manifesto powerfully asserts the way that both current UK laws and the Nordic model ‘criminalize sex workers, divide us from our families and friends, make us vulnerable to violence, and set us apart from the rest of the community — separate is never equal.’

In the UK, it is currently legal to exchange sex for money, but Laura tells me that laws which criminalize certain activities in the sex industry inevitably endanger the sex worker. “Everything you can do to keep yourself safe is illegal. So, for example, working together in a house, if there are two or more people inside, that’s illegal. The laws are very draconian.” Women are forced out of the relative safety of brothels onto the street, or away from their colleagues and security networks: it is very difficult to protect sex workers when part-criminalization preserves stigma and prevents equal treatment in our legal system.

In light of the EU vote, the UK is being urged by many to adopt the Nordic model. However, its central premise is not entirely new. “Kerb crawling is currently illegal, and so we already know the effects of criminalizing clients… basically, police crackdowns disperse women into dangerous and isolated areas”. Police crackdowns are perhaps the most harmful consequence of the part-criminalization of the sex industry. Often, crimes such as ‘controlling prostitution for gain’ conceal an agenda which works to eradicate sex work from our communities at any cost. “The Ipswich murders, in which five women were killed, happened in the wake of a police crackdown.”

This is the central criticism of systems which criminalize clients: their attempt to decrease demand drive the sex industry ever further underground, so that services are used by clients who are more determined, unconcerned about breaking the law,  and more likely to be disrespectful, derogatory or violent. Aggressively targeting clients also results in a culture of non-collaboration with the police among sex workers, for fear of losing business. It is therefore clear that if we cannot prove that criminalizing clients has led to an increase in violence, these laws have certainly not increased protection or relations with the authorities, as is often claimed.

Advocates for Nordic-style legislation often claim that it reduces demand for sexual services. Some official reports have indicated that Sweden’s laws have cut prostitution in half. However, this is an assertion which has been disputed; others contend that sex work in Sweden is simply less visible, and that a reduction in sex work is merely a reduction in street work, so that the majority of prostitution is now conducted online or in private apartments. One report by the Swedish National Board of Health and Welfare asks “Has the extent of prostitution  increased or decreased? We cannot give any unambiguous answer to that question… it is difficult to discern any clear trend”

Its supporters claim that if prostitution was decriminalized entirely, exit services which allow women to leave prostitution would be compromised, because the industry would be considered a more legitimate choice. However, Laura is quick to dispel this myth: “In fact, criminalization means that you can’t leave prostitution, because if you have a criminal record it’s incredibly difficult to get another job. We are also campaigning for services which allow women to leave prostitution if they wish.”

One of the most important issues to consider in legislating prostitution is human trafficking, which is often used by anti-prostitution campaigners as evidence of the intrinsic problems with the sex industry. However, the extent of trafficking in the UK is uncertain, due to inadequate research, and multiple cases of repeatedly inflated statistics, as comprehensively detailed here. While no one is disputing that trafficking is a problem which must be confronted in the sex industry, the ECP and other campaigners see trafficking as another excuse for social cleansing. In Laura’s experience, “victims of trafficking are not getting help and are instead targeted for arrest and deportation, which is despicable. Anti-trafficking efforts are used to raid brothels and target immigrant women.” She gives an example of anti-trafficking raids in Soho, in which “No victims of trafficking were found. But two hundred police officers, with dogs and riot gear, raided the flats…dragging women out in their underwear, smashing the place up. The idea that this is how we should treat victims of trafficking is a complete sham, and a cover for their real agenda.”

The English Collective of Prostitutes campaign for adoption of total decriminalization, a model which has been tested in New Zealand since 2003. My conversation with Laura so far has indicated that the biggest impediment to sex workers’ safety is social stigma attached to their profession. We discuss a successful case of sexual harassment brought by a sex worker in New Zealand, in which a tribunal ruled that ‘Sex workers are as much entitled to protection from sexual harassment as those working in other occupations’: I ask her if she thinks such a ruling would be possible in the UK. “I think that it would be very unlikely to happen here. It’s a largely criminalized industry currently and is very stigmatized as a result. The fact that such a conviction could happen demonstrates that in New Zealand, things are definitely moving forward.”

Attempts to eradicate the sex industry entirely, consciously or unconsciously, whether under an anti-trafficking or womens’ rights agenda, have often had disastrous consequences for the safety of sex workers. The UK’s 80,000 sex workers are among the most vulnerable women in our society: around 70% of women in prostitution are single mothers who do not receive social benefits. My conversation with Laura has convinced me of the need to forget abstract morality and listen to sex workers themselves, to scrutinize laws which, in her words, “currently do everything they can to sabotage whatever you’re doing to keep yourself safe.”