University staff at Oxford and across the country will conduct another day of industrial action on 3 December in response to an ongoing argument over pay.

It has been confirmed that members of UNISON, Unite and the University and College Union (UCU), will walk out again unless the pay dispute is resolved.

Union members are discontented with a 1% pay offer, which the UCU claims has resulted in a real-terms fall of pay by 13%.

However, the Universities and Colleges Employers Association (UCEA) argues that pay awards in the higher education sector have been in line with the major public sector bargaining groups over the period 2008/09 to 2013/14.

UCU head of higher education, Michael MacNeil, commented, “Staff have suffered year-on-year cuts in the value of their pay and have made it clear that enough is enough. We remain committed to trying to resolve this dispute and the employers now have until 3 December to sit down and positively engage with the unions. If they don’t, then our members and those from our sister unions will be out on strike again, as well as continuing to work to contract.”

A spokesperson for the University of Oxford said, “The University respects the right of individuals to take part in lawful industrial action. Contingency plans are in place aimed at minimising any disruption or inconvenience such action may cause to students, staff, and visitors to the University.”

Nathan Akehurst, a prominent member of the student movement ‘Support Our Staff’, told Cherwell, “Academics will be striking again because employers have failed to negotiate in good faith. Little, if anything has changed since last time. It is important that students continue to show their support and given the enthusiasm of people last time I believe support could be expanded for the second strike.”

Xavier Cohen, another student who has been involved in ‘Support Our Staff’, said, “I fully support academic and non-academic workers from UCU, Unite and Unison who are taking further strike action. Myself and many other students care greatly about workers’ pay, workers’ conditions, the gender-pay gap and the path of marketisation that higher education continues to be dragged down. “

He added, “Although limited strike action may not be enough to make the government comply with workers’ demands, I am sure students will be out again en masse to support their staff.”

Students at Somerville have been subjected to decanal action after their involvement in recent Halloween celebrations.

After receiving noise complaints, the deans shut down the party and noted the violation of several college rules. As a consequence, those involved were fined £20 each.

An email sent by the dean, Dr Annie Sutherland, to members of the Somerville JCR and residents of the Vaughan building states that, “On Thursday 30 October, a large group of Vaughan residents decided to have a Halloween party, breaking several college rules and incurring complaints from other students as well as fellows who live in the adjacent buildings. Alcohol was consumed, loud music was played until 2am in the morning and students from other colleges were present.

“Despite the duty dean’s requests to clean up the building after the party had been closed down, the Decanal Office was informed by the Housekeeping Department that the scouts were forced to clean up vomit on Friday morning.”

Somerville’s college rulebook states that all parties or gatherings must end at 10.45pm on weekday evenings, with quiet music permitted between 8am and 11pm, whilst events involving the consumption of alcohol are prohibited without the prior permission of the Catering and Conference Manager.

The college rules also maintain that a maximum of 8 persons are allowed to be in a student room at any one time, and that any guests from outside college must be signed in at the Porter’s Lodge in order to comply with fire safety regulations.

Due to the violation of these rules, the deans have proposed monetary fines for all those involved, giving these students until 10am on Wednesday 13th November to step forward. If a list of participants is not provided, however, all residents of the Vaughan building will be fined as the “next smallest entity”.

The email continues, “The only repercussion this time will be a small monetary fine, which, the Decanal Office has decided, will be incorporated into the JCR budget and will thus stay within the JCR. We hope that this decision will encourage all students involved to come forward out of fairness to their fellow residents of Vaughan building who were not present at the party.”

One Somerville student has claimed that, as first year only accommodation, the Vaughan building may already receive more attention from the deans when compared to other parts of the college, due to noise-levels.

Another student living near to the scene of the party comments that, “Music was played rather loudly upstairs and it seems that this was simply a Halloween party that escalated a little further than the college would allow. Although rather inconsiderate towards members of Vaughan who were in bed at the time, many students were awake past 2 o’ clock given the nature of the occasion (Halloween).

“I believe it’s therefore somewhat unrealistic for the deans to require gatherings to be limited to eight people and for parties to end at 10:45pm, particularly on a night such as this, and for the consumption of alcohol to require so much regulation inside college.”

Godfrey Bloom resents the idea that he’s ever offended anyone. As a man who’s been criticised heavily in the press over the last year, he has resisted the urge to cry “offense” harder than most politicians. As he notes,  “I’ve been vilified and misquoted in the media for the last eight years – I found that upsetting, I found that offensive. We need to get to the point where people aren’t held back from saying what they think because of perceived ‘offense’, mock ‘offense’.”

Since arriving as a UKIP MEP in 2004, this ‘offense’ has dominated his career. Last month, a decade of gaffes culminated in his expulsion from the party.

In June he’d referred to UK aid sent to ‘bongo-bongo land’, and at conference in September he jokingly called a group of women ‘sluts’, before hitting journalist Michael Crick with a party programme. The whip was withdrawn on 21st September.

Bloom blames the political climate for his treatment. “We seem to take the most shallow view of politics. I mean, when I raised in my speech in Birmingham, for example, the fact that we’re sending one billion pounds a month in overseas aid with no audit trail, when they are closing A&E wings in hospitals … all people wanted to talk about for the first twenty-four hours was the fact that I’d used the word ‘bongo.’

“Who was offended? The answer is nobody was offended. That’s the truth of it, nobody was offended.”

The media are also culpable. “The people who write these things, I think you’d agree, tend to live in more metropolitan areas. It’s in London, not even all of London, where everybody around the dinner table agrees and everybody in the Westminster-bubble agrees with what they’re saying, even if it’s out of touch with the rest of the country.” The media are unrepresentative, he notes, “I’ve never had a bad piece written about me by somebody who had taken the trouble to get the train up here.”

But Bloom has also chosen his notoriety – he’s aware of the political value of generating controversy. He describes the need for ‘spice’ in articles and speeches. “People need to be outraged, even if it’s fake most of the time; they need to be outraged, or amused, or laugh. Otherwise I wouldn’t sell an article… My articles need a bit of spice, otherwise nobody would read them.”

This ‘spice’ was Bloom’s downfall. He’s been constantly accused of misogyny ever since he stated in 2004 that women “don’t clean behind the fridge enough.”

Yet he remains adamant he’s not sexist. “I’ve always been a very big supporter of women, the advancement of women in both sport and business, and I also sponsor ladies’ equestrian sport. All of which is very well documented, but none of which is ever touched by the newspapers because it doesn’t touch the pigeon hole… What it might actually give an indication of is that any accusations that I’m a misogynist are clearly ridiculous.”

Nevertheless, his views on gender are undeniably provocative. He constantly refers to gender differences “that we don’t fully understand”. He refers to men’s dominance in music. “If you were to sit down with pen and paper, and I’m a keen classical music buff, you would get your first hundred great works of musical genius and you would not in your first hundred names… come to a female name.” While he hasn’t “the faintest idea why”, Bloom maintains that gender is too inexplicable to legislate on.

Since leaving UKIP, Bloom has attacked the party. This week, he told The Times that Nigel Farage has “lost touch”. Today he’s similarly critical of UKIP. “I would like to see an admission that drugs policy both in America and in the United Kingdom in the last couple of years has been a dismal failure… it’s something that UKIP are absolutely determined not to talk about.”

“Politicians are only interested in what’s going to happen in 2015, electorally. How can it be that the country has 1.3 trillion pounds of debt? … The answer is that it’s the most unbelievable incompetence, and failure to address fundamental economic issues, and I now feel much freer to address those.”

Bloom differs from UKIP economically. He’s an advocate of the Austrian School, condemning Oxford University because “you won’t have a single Austrian economist, not one. There’ll be Keynesians, and some Chicago School, both schools of which have palpably failed completely. But your undergraduates are still being taught the most ridiculous nonsense in their economics classes.” His libertarian agenda has been “side-lined” by UKIP in the last eighteen months.

Yet Bloom can’t escape his politician’s mind-set. He refers to UKIP as “we”, and is evangelical about its strengths. “The media tends to worry about Conservatives switching to UKIP, but the long and the short of it is that it isn’t like this. I mean, I won a Labour seat up here – most of my activists are Labour, old Labour. So this Conservative Party splinter group thing doesn’t play.”

UKIP has won voters who’ve been “abandoned” by Labour and the Tories, “the artisan classes”, who are “pithead winders or joiners, people like that, the real middle England people who are conservative with a small ‘c’, used to vote Old Labour, and have a picture of the Queen in the parlour.”

Bloom’s party career is over. He’s described anybody who enters politics as “insane”: “I went into politics for the same reason my father climbed into a spitfire in 1940 – it was to save the country.”

For Bloom, there’s too much emphasis on delivery, not enough on policy. “It’s a bit like you getting a message – I send you a message with a very important letter, and you then spend hours agonising over the choice of envelope, and how I addressed it.” Politicians “need a hide like a rhino. I hide most of my stuff from my wife: she’d be horrified.”

This disillusionment with politics doesn’t mean Bloom is leaving Parliament. He’s unsure whether he’ll stand again in 2014, now the whip is withdrawn. “People are asking me to. People are saying for God’s sake, let’s send an Independent! Somebody who doesn’t represent any party, will you stand again? The answer is I don’t know.”

Although this optimism about re-election seems delusional, Bloom’s populist ramblings have won him thousands of fans. As he says, he’s been elected by those “completely and utterly disengaged” from mainstream politics – maybe Bloom will be gaffing through Brussels well into his seventies.

The People’s Supermarket (TPS), a cooperative effort set up on Cowley Road in 2012, is facing probable closure due to debt.

Subscribers to the mailing list received an email this week providing details of the organisation’s troubles. An extraordinary meeting is scheduled for 19th November, in which shareholders will be able to vote on the future of TPS.

TPS is a community project funded and run by its shareholders, of which there are approximately 500. Shareholders who work volunteer shifts are rewarded with in-store discounts.

TPS told its members, “Our negotiations with the landlord’s agents were not as positive as we had hoped. The cooperative owes £7,000 in rent and a further rent instalment of £7,500 due in December.”

Unless the deadline is met, TPS will lose its premises on the 2nd December. The email stated, “As things stand, we neither have access to enough cash to pay the landlord nor enough confidence in the business to accept a loan of the amount needed.”

As well as issues with funding and turnover, one of the causes of the probable closure is a lack of volunteers to run the supermarket itself. The email explained, “The volunteer and shift leader rotas continue to have huge gaps. Individual members have covered these so far.

“We don’t think it is fair to rely so heavily on very few individuals. Our takings did not pick up to the extent we had hoped for and would have expected based on last year’s sales. Employing somebody is therefore not an affordable option in the foreseeable future.”

Although TPS’ troubles are rooted in underuse, there are staunch members and users who are saddened by its potential collapse.

Abigail Burman, a second-year historian and regular shopper at TPS said of the closure, “I’ll really miss the supermarket if they close.  Their bread selection is unparalleled.”

TPS is calling on its members for financial support in the run-up to the meeting, saying, “We will be collecting donations in the shop to pay back some of our outstanding debt to members and suppliers.  We also invite members whose membership has expired to donate their renewal fee for such payments.  Finally, we invite members to donate items for sale in the shop. The revenue from these sales will be used to pay back creditors.”

Wadham’s tortoise was caught in a blaze on Monday  after a lamp which was left on overnight to keep him warm started a fire in his enclosure.

The beloved tortoise, Archibald Manshella, who is still in his first year at Wadham, escaped unscathed after four fire engines were called out to attend the scene.

Wadham’s tortoise officer, Joseph Williamson, explained how the tortoise survived the blaze. He told Cherwell, “The UV heat lamp got too close to the wooden side of the tortoise’s enclosure and it caused a very small fire. The vivarium that the tortoise lives in is large in size and so he simply snuggled up on the other side, well away from the fire. The UV lamp caused an area of burning around 10cm in diameter.”

He noted that Archibald has recovered well from the incident. He said, “The tortoise is absolutely fine, if anything his encounter has made him more active and excitable than ever and he was promptly eating a nice bit of watercress minutes after he was taken out of the enclosure.”

He added, “No person or tortoise was hurt in this incident and the response of both the college members, staff and fire department was rapid and efficient. I would personally like to thank the Oxford Fire Department particularly for their help in the incident.”

Williamson also said, “There won’t be any formal sanctions for this incident, as far as I know, due to its accidental nature. I and the SU President, Anya Metzer, are now working with the college to make sure this doesn’t happen again and how to maximise the welfare of the tortoise in the future.”

SU president, Anya Metzer, assured that plans are being made to ensure Archibald’s future safety: “I have met with the Senior Tutor and the Tortoise Officer to discuss the incident and future course of action.

“The Tortoise Officer is looking into ordering a fire-proof vivarium but since hibernation time is nearing the tortoise will soon be moving into a fridge, which is where they are left to hibernate.”

She commented that Archibald is an important member of the JCR because, “in the event of a tied vote in the SU the tortoise gets the deciding vote. The tortoise always votes in favour of the motion due to its ‘radical desire for change’.

“Everyone is very thankful that the tortoise is OK as his welfare is paramount and he is much loved in the SU.”

Research carried out by Future First found that 40% of 16 to 19 year olds who attended UK state schools, and 45% of those on Free School Meals, didn’t know anyone in a career they would like to work in.

The Back to School campaign, run by educational charity Future First in partnership with The Independent’s ‘i’ newspaper, aims to solve this problem by allowing former students to reconnect with their former schools and act as much-needed role models, supporting the aspirations of young people by offering help and advice.

Students from universities up and down the country were asked to sign up for the scheme during this year’s Back to School week, which ran from the 12 – 19October, but between OUSU’s stall at the fresher’s fair, and the postcard sent to staff and parents by the Widening Participation team, Oxford had by far the highest number of sign-ups, a total of 124.

As Rachel Pickering, Vice-President for Access and Academic Affairs at OUSU, points out, “This is 88 more than signed up from Oxford in 2012 and accounts for nearly 5% of all national sign ups from 12-19th October! We’ve signed up three times as many people to this excellent scheme than any other student union; an amazing feat which really proves just how engaged our students, staff and alumni are in outreach and access work.”

Schools in Oxfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Milton Keynes and Swindon also benefitted from the University’s enthusiasm for the scheme through a donation of 1000 books by Oxford Unversity Press, again facilitated by Widening Participation.

Tara Prayag, the University’s Head of Widening Participation, said: ‘Our staff make countless visits to schools throughout the year to encourage students to think about higher education, but there is no substitute for schoolchildren being able to hear directly from students who were in their position only a few years ago.’

Flora Sheldon, publicity co-ordinator for the Oxford hub and co-ordinator of Music for the ‘Schools plus’ tutoring programme, was also delighted by the scale of Oxford’s participation in the scheme, saying “It’s great to see so many students, staff and alumni have signed up to Back to School week. There’s often such a strong view that Oxford is stuck in its own exclusive and elitist bubble, but the success of this initiative shows that Oxford is full of motivated people who want to share their experience and knowledge with others.

“There are many programmes running in Oxford, Schools Plus being one of them, which are trying to break down these stereotypes and reach school children to raise aspirations and expectations. I congratulate those involved with Back to School week and hope that people continue to volunteer their time and effort to this worthwhile project.”

Matthew Gompels, Keble Academic Affairs and Access officer, and President of student-run outreach programme ‘Keble at Large’, commented “It’s great to see Back to School Week getting such comprehensive endorsement from Oxford students, especially as it is only one of a number of schemes designed to put students at the heart of Outreach work.

“With all the bad press that seems to stick to the University and it’s students, events like this along with school visits, tours and UCAS advice, are a good reminder that Oxford students are passionate about Outreach and Access.”

Worcester College has announced plans to build a new lecture theatre on one of its tennis courts.

The planned building would include not only a lecture theatre but also additional meeting rooms and a studio. If planning permission is granted, it will be completed in early 2016.

The Estates Bursar explained why such a project is necessary, saying, “Worcester has no facilities of appropriate size – we have a  forty-seat lecture theatre and a seventy to eighty-seat flat meeting room, so we need one so that we can accommodate entire year groups, and generally improve student facilities.”

The plans have been met with enthusiasm by Worcester students, Alfie Hinchliffe, the JCR President, said, “The Worcester JCR loves the plans for the new lecture theatre. It’s not as though it’s going to be a noisy, lengthy, disruptive building project that will obscure the views from our existing accommodation like Exeter’s proposal would, will it? Oh wait… But in all seriousness, the theatre plans look good. In fact Worcester students love building. We’ve spent the past year building a very impressive new relationship between ourselves and the Exeter JCR. Admittedly there was some disruption (and the roof is very garish) but it does have excellent views of a future with us living together as happy neighbours.”

Hinchliffe’s comments touch on previous contentions between Exeter and Worcester over Exeter’s plans to develop what was previously Ruskin College. In Trinity last year Worcester’s Provost, Professor Jonathan Bate, sent an email to Worcester JCR encouraging students to complain about Exeter’s plans, noting such issues as “inappropriately garish and intrusive materials proposed for its roof and upper level.”  Such comments were met with criticism from his own students.

In this instance, Exeter’s Rector Frances Cairncorss has been slightly more reserved, encouraging Exeter students to attend a public consultation. “Since this may affect the views from our new Walton Street Building, it would be useful for as many people as possible to have an opportunity to view and comment upon their proposal,” Cairncross said.

However, Exeter JCR President Ed Nickell appears fully behind the plans: “This lecture room is a good thing for Worcester students and Exeter JCR would never stand in the way of that. Just as Worcester JCR did not stand in the way of Exeter increasing our currently paltry accommodation provision. There is much more solidarity amongst JCR members than amongst Heads of houses! Thanks to this solidarity, Worcester will gain a lecture room and Exonians will escape evil landlords, mouldy bedrooms and exorbitant rents.

A public consultation will be held at 2pm on Thursday 21 November.