Frank Turner arrives at the Union without the fuss one might expect from someone whose shows sell out in seconds. Alone but for his guitar, from the minute he’s ushered in to the packed room to begin his talk he’s relaxed and eloquent, somehow managing to seem at home in the Union’s ostentatious Library.

A common theme emerges as he talks: he constant conflicts of ideas and identities that come with being a performer. There’s a clear tension between his old, anarchist politics and his new libertarianism. He vigorously defends his position as “not-a-protest-singer”. As a teenager, he listened to a lot of punk rock and from there, he claims, it’s a slippery slope to “obtuse and obscure” political opinions. Reflecting now, he remarks that “sitting in squats talking about how agrarian communism would work after the revolution is pointless”. At the end of the day, discussions like that are only for the pleasure of those taking part and “there’s a word for that – masturbation”.

This retreat from anarchist thinking and his shift towards liberal and libertarian ideas has left lots of people disillusioned. Turner says people think their favourite singers are Jesus, as long as they sing what they already think back at them. They get upset when they realise that they don’t believe the exact same things. “There’s just a lot of effort involved in constantly justifying your political position to others. I’m a singer, not a politician, and can’t be bothered with it at the end of the day.”

Instead, Turner often avoids telling people how to live. One of his most contentious songs, ‘Glory Hallelujah’, openly criticises organised religion, but he is quick to say that this is only his opinion. While he doesn’t believe in God himself, he has a religious family and isn’t “one of those ‘I won’t step foot in a church’ people. They need to get over themselves.” He recently played a gig in German church which caused a lot of excitement among fans, debating whether he would sing ‘Glory Hallelujah’ in church. After meeting the vicar and enjoying his hospitality, he decided that it would be a silly and rather meaningless gesture. As he summarises, “I’ve grown out of running around trying to piss people off needlessly. Life is way too short.”

There is another conflict within Turner’s music, between his ‘folk’ label and his punk background. When he chose the genre, he says he did so as a statement of intent. Sick of appealing to angry teenagers in skinny jeans alone, he instead wanting to play music to a broader group of people. Sitting on a stage with an acoustic guitar was the most change possible to make.

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Illustration: Sage Goodwin

There’s no doubt it was a successful one. While Million Dead, his former punk band, was successful within its demographic, Turner’s solo music has reached thousands more people. Take my mother, a vicar in her late forties, who sings along to his music in the car on the way back from church. However, the folk community were not overly welcoming to the former metal artist, quickly pointing out that he was mislabelling himself as a folk singer given that he doesn’t sing covers of traditional songs.

Turner disagrees. “Folk”, he argues, ought not to be a label applied to songs like ‘Barbara Allen’, which sit unheard in museums. The point of folk is to bring people together, that people can sing along without any special knowledge and without belonging to a particular demographic. Though it is a contentious example, a song that fits more honestly with the original intentions of folk would be “something like Angels by Robbie Williams, because you can walk into a bar and start singing it and know that people will join in.”

Aside from politics and religion, a common theme of folk music is a love of home and country. This is something that Turner possesses but struggles to balance with his need to keep on the move. “I have, in my life, a real tension between homesickness and wanderlust and I haven’t yet figured out a way of resolving that problem” he admits. However, this is not a bad thing. “I suspect if I did”, he continues, “then life would become less interesting. In a way, art comes from unresolved situations. I think happy, settled, functional people don’t tend to make good art.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald once observed that “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function”. Frank Turner is a man who wears these contradictions on his sleeve. That being said, I’m not sure he’d thank me for the comparison to Fitzgerald. He admits that he’s wary of writing “proper” literature, especially poetry, although he’s considering having some of his tour diaries published as prose. When pushed on whether he is influenced by literature as well as rock and roll, he is reticent. He happily lists some of the poets he likes –Larkin, Auden, and “stuff like that” – he himself does not consider his work within that genre. Rather, Turner is proud of his affiliation with rock and roll as an art form.

“People have historically been quite rude about rock and roll as serious art,” he says. “To me rock and roll is proper art, but it’s also disposable art, it’s adolescent art. What’s great about rock and roll is that it’s music about being young and pissed on a beach and getting your first kiss and then dancing until dawn. Sometimes people want to make rock and roll into this high art and I love it because it’s low art. It’s almost a sort of Liechtenstien thing. It’s pop art.” He grins wryly, seeming pleased with the pun. “All my influences are rock and roll.”

And with that last declaration, we’re done. As we’ve been talking he’s been putting his coat back on so that he can dash down to catch a train to London and film his tribute to Pete Seeger for Newsnight. For a man who’s on his longest break from touring in seven years, he’s still remarkably busy, and yet he can still spare a few minutes to chat to a student newspaper.

As he runs down the stairs, I realise that this is why he is a true folk singer – he’s open to everyone prepared to engage with his work, and he makes it worth their effort. 

Whilst I don’t share the politics of the ‘Reclaim OUSU’ slate from last term’s elections, I’ve never heard exactly what OUSU is put so well. Every student herein Oxford is a member of OUSU, whether their common room is affiliated or not.

Do Oxford students deserve a better student union? Of course they do. That’s why ran to be OUSU President, and it’s why I’ve made increasing OUSU’s budget my priority for the year. OUSU isn’t the student union that Oxford students deserve because the University has starved it of funding for years: in 2012, the SU’s block grant was less than£400,000 compared to the Russell Group average of £1.6 million.

But the caricature I saw presented of OUSU by proponents of Oriel JCR’s disaffiliation motion didn’t accurately represent the hard work of the full-time and part-time student officers I work with. What has OUSU ever done for students? It has won first year exam resits, the most generous bursaries in the country and Sunday opening hours for the Rad Cam, to name just three things.

Claims that OUSU wasn’t representative of students when it opposed the idea of fees spiralling up towards £16k simply do not stand; OUSU Council’s voting membership is primarily JCR/MCR representatives, and 20 out of 23 JCRs who considered the topic in their own colleges voted to support OUSU’s stance.

Just last week, OUSU provided JCR presidents with a day of training which received an overwhelmingly positive response and has empowered them to do the best job possible for the students in their colleges. We don’t have an antagonistic relationship with JCRs/MCRs – we work closely together to make sure that we can win for students as members of their colleges, and as members of the wider university.

This week, OUSU has advised JCR presidents on their college rent negotiations and made sure that the university will finally allow students who suspend their study (‘rusticate’) to access libraries and the counselling service. The divide between common rooms and OUSU is an artificial one: we’re all students trying to make this university a better place to study at, and this city a better place to live in.

OUSU was built by students protesting against a university that wasn’t listening to them. They recognised that JCRs and MCRs doing a fantastic job in colleges couldn’t take on the university without a central student union uniting them.

Today, it’s still true that students are stronger when they work together – it’s the only way to make sure that we win an academic environment and student experience that lives up to the university’s world class reputation.

OUSU is all of us – so roll up your sleeves and get involved.

You can tell everything you need to know about Norman Finkelstein’s incisive, passionate, and articulate manner by reading the brutal censure of President Obama he offers. When I suggested that Obama was handling the Israel-Palestine conflict better than his predecessors, Finkelstein responded, “President Obama is a stupefying narcissist devoid of any principles whatsoever. On the Israel-Palestine conflict, he has been every bit as wretched as his predecessors.” This is a man who spares no blows in defence of his chosen cause.

One of his most famous moments occurred when a student at Waterloo University broke into tears upon meeting him, telling him how deeply offensive his views were to those who died under Nazi rule. Rather than backing down, he told her that he had no sympathy for her “crocodile tears” reminding her that, as much as he hated bringing up the Holocaust, his parents had lived through the concentration camps too, and he “found nothing in their suffering and their martyrdom to justify the torture, the brutalisation, and the demolition of homes.”

He continues his bitter tirade against Obama by telling me what he believes to be the true story behind his election. “When rich financiers who decide these elections had their behind the scenes meetings with the candidates, they thought to themselves, well he has a nice smile, he’s African American, and underneath it, he’s a total cynic. We can work with this guy.”

There is only one major difference, he tells me, between Obama and his predecessor. “Bush, if you study him as a character, actually believed what he was saying. What he was saying was very simple-minded as he had the mentality of a fraternity member: here are the bad guys, here are the good guys, here is the home team, here is the visiting team, we cheer for the home team. He actually believed what he was saying.” On the other hand, “Obama doesn’t believe a word he’s saying, he’s a total cynic and in thrall to power.”

The topic of conversation reverts to the Israel-Palestine conflict. While he is a trenchant critic of Israel, he never hides his scorn for the tactics of those whose actions he thinks are counterproductive to producing a working settlement. He refers to the Campaign for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) as a “hypocritical, dishonest cult.” Finkelstein is remarkably critical of the 1993 Oslo accord, which was the first time Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organisation recognized each other’s legitimacy, and also started moves towards the peace process. In fact, he tells me, the idea that there is any kind of peace process is simply a way to continue legitimizing Israeli occupation. After signing the agreement, he claims, “Israel had no intention of withdrawing from the occupied territories, it was the opposite. When the First Intifada broke out in 1987 in the occupied territories, it turned into a public relations disaster for Israel, and was a significant drain on their army, because several hundred thousand troops primed to fight wars of aggression were now bogged down in police work, chasing little kids who were throwing stones down the Kasbah. The Israelis reached a conclusion from the First Intifada; they had to normalise and rationalise the occupation, like the British did in India.”

Considering the lack of progress towards resolving the conflict, I ask him if he sees a resolution in future. My attempt to make him put a timescale on peace earns me a witty admonishment. “In 1916, Lenin lamented the fact that he would never see a revolution in Russia. World War One came and shuffled the deck. He was a shrewd political tactician, with a fantastic political eye, yet even he couldn’t see a few years in the future – far be it from me to make these kinds of predictions.

“However, if and when the Palestinians decide to engage again in massive civil resistance to the Israeli occupation instead of being, as they have been in the last few years, passive and quiescent things may change. Then again, I’m not really hopeful, because I don’t think anything short of a massive popular movement will make them [Israel] budge.” 

This leads onto the deeper question of the proper role of non-violence in protest and resistance movements. “In some places, such as during south Lebanon in 1978, I don’t think non-violence would have been effective because no-one cares what happens in south Lebanon, and Israel can continue to get away with its murder and mayhem. In south India, where the government is dispossessing huge populations, I don’t think non-violence is going to work there either, because nobody knows what is going on, and nobody cares, so the army can just go in, commit massive atrocities and it doesn’t raise a single column in a US or British newspaper. The Israel-Palestine conflict is different, it is right in the public eye, it’s in the media’s eye so in the face of a non-violent resistance Israel would have much difficulty using violence to try and suppress it. In Palestine, nonviolence is a viable option, but only because it’s in the public consciousness.”

He asks rhetorically, “Has then the Arab Spring made progress on the Palestine situation more likely?” He also has strong views on this issue. “The Arab Spring and what preceded it in Turkey, that is the emergence of governments which identify ideologically with Palestine, and despite how pragmatic, or, one might say, ridden with corruption these governments are, they won’t tolerate Israel carrying on like a gangster state. When Israel invaded Gaza again in November 2012, they [Palestine] made it very clear to Obama that they have their own red lines, and Israel will not be able to carry on as they did in 2008-9, when there was a protracted massacre in Gaza.”

I ask when the world is full of conflict, what is it about the Israel-Palestine conflict that has consumed his undivided attention. “The only reason that it consumed my entire adult life is because it didn’t end. If it had, I would have gone and invested myself in some other cause or injustice. But I’m not a quitter and I don’t think it’s a moral thing to suddenly get bored with a conflict because it’s no longer trendy or creating headlines.

“You should have the moral backbone to stick with your cause regardless of how popular it is. I owe it to my friends over there in the occupied territories to stick with it until there is resolution.” Whether you admire Finkelstein or see him as some kind of attention-seeking demagogue, you cannot deny that he has one of the strongest moral backbones of any intellectual of our age.