It might feel like we’ve only just got rid of our holiday hangovers (if not the extra weight),but businesses all over the country are eagerly stocking shelves with all things pink and overpriced in anticipation of Valentine’s Day.

With the date falling on a Friday this year, many a student will again find themselves attending whatever traffic light/lock-and-key party is offered by ever-inventive club promoters. Some see these events being as pointless as they are predictable, because students don’t need much encouragement to lock lips with a stranger to the romantic sways of Lil Wayne. But whatever your take on the consumer cringe fest that is 14th February, students are starting to play the dating game by different rules.

According to a 2010 survey, only 20% of female and 17% of male students in the UK expected or even hoped to meet their life partners at university. This suggests an emphasis on casual relationships and that, by deductive reasoning, there must be an awful lot of us here in Oxford aiming for either a Blue or a First.

Clubbing dominates the nightlife at most universities and the combination of beer goggles and conversation-crushing speakers is hardly conducive to a search for lasting love. You’d be hard pushed to find any student headed to Wahoo with hopes of finding “The One”; night-time encounters tend to mean short-term, lasting for hours or even minutes.

And, apparently, this scenario is more than satisfying for many students, since we continue to make up the lion’s share of clubs’ custom. But since the decline of the pub, there are many looking for a new way to meet people in a somewhat less intense environment.

Enter Tinder – the mobile app which has sparked a craze. Spreading like wildfire from California, the site has averaged over two and half million daily users since the beginning of the year.

This new dating app gets users to select or reject nearby singles based on pictures and mutual interests, which it finds via Facebook. It is not the first popular app with the aim of improving its users’ love lives. Grindr, Tinder’s lustier, male-only predecessor, has been around since 2009.

Meeting your partner online can still have a stigma in some circles, but developments like Tinder might be a step in the direction of change. Dubbed “shallow” by some, but “no-nonsense” by others, the app has been successful in capturing the attention of its 18 -to35-year-old target audience and in normalising the kind of match making that has been smirked at for years.

Dating services made the leap from the back pages of newspapers to the forefront of the web a long time ago and recent figures show that over one fifth of new relationships in the UK begin online.

Online dating website eHarmony, though miles away from the non-committal platforms of Tinder and Grindr, has been responsible for nearly 4% of recent US marriages and matches users based on personality profiles.

A single friend recently remarked that the dating culture at university is “practically non-existent”. This certainly doesn’t have to be the case. Maybe it’s time for our generation to begin to embrace the technological alternative.

When I arrive at the offices of the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) to interview Mark Littlewood, they are a hive of activity. The IEA, a free-market think tank, was founded in 1955 after one of its founders, Anthony Fisher, became acquainted with the economist Friedrich Hayek. Fisher was eager to promote free-market ideas and came to Hayek to ask how he could do so. Hayek suggested that he should ignore politicians and instead reach out to intellectuals – and so the IEA was born.

Littlewood has been Director General of the think tank since December 2009, having worked in the past at the human rights group Liberty and as Head of Media for the Liberal Democrats. However, he began the “intellectual journey” which led him to become a libertarian when he was reading PPE at Balliol.

Talking about his Oxford experience, Littlewood is scathing of the politicised nature of the JCR at the time. “Part of it was preposterous. You know, let us write to the President of Guatemala pledging solidarity or something, which I thought was a complete waste of time– a waste of a stamp. It was frivolous, stupid, sixth form debating society stuff.” Bearing this in mind, I ask whether he saw any joke candidates while he was at Oxford. “No, in my experience of Balliol JCR elections, they were pretty damn serious. Turnout for the JCR presidential election was something like 80 per cent – it was higher than for a general election. It was an enormously politicised environment.”

Littlewood is unusual amongst political commentators for wanting a higher rate of government cuts. He argues if the public were aware of the extent of state spending, they would want to reduce it. “If you look back at the UK during our highest period of growth, the state accounted for about 10 per cent of GDP in Victorian times. The former Soviet Union, most economists agree, had a state sector which accounted for about 70 per cent of national income. In broad terms, we were touching 50 percent. Now, we’re in the mid to high forties. So we have decided we want a state sector that is slightly closer in size to the Soviet Union than the fastest growing economies in the world.”

“If most people knew that the state accounted for about half of what we’re spending in Britain, they would be horrified and it does seem to me that the basic essentials, including a welfare safety net, can be provided for a proportion of what we’re presently spending.”

He does not suggest the state should be unexpectedly cut tomorrow. “I don’t think you can suddenly announce the abolishment of the state pension system.” He continues, “I would want to return to the core principles of the Beveridge Report: that welfare should be aimed at a subsistence level and in normal circumstances be temporary.”

This remains a minority view, but it is becoming increasingly popular. I raise with him the extent of the growth of libertarianism in the UK. “It does seem to have been growing, and we’ve been doing everything we can to marshal that support and not steer it, as such, but make sure it is resourced.” The number of ways the IEA has contributed to this growth is impressive. The IEA spends about a quarter of its income on student outreach. This ranges from giving out free copies of Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom to helping establish the Liberty League (a confederation of Hayek and freedom societies). The IEA also funds the Freedom Forum, a gathering for undergraduates who are involved in Hayek societies. “The first one, three or four years ago, was attended by about 70 or 80 people. I think last year’s was attended by about 200 people and at the one this year, we’re expecting about 350 people.” Reflecting on this success, he says, “I think I’d be much less lonely on campus, if I was at Oxford today, than I was in the early 1990s.”

Littlewood sees the role of the IEA as providing “the intellectual equipment” to facilitate the growth of this movement. “Whether they become MPs, journalists, businessmen, authors, filmmakers or whatever – my view is that we need libertarians everywhere. We’ve got to find the brightest and the best young people who are on our side and give them every source of encouragement in their careers and in their intellectual thinking.” This is quite a risky strategy for a think tank to pursue, because it does not yield easily measurable results.

I ask him whether he sees the emergence of UKIP as part of this trend. He says that, strictly speaking, the answer is no. “Their broad instincts on the economy are in a free market direction – I don’t know whether they will stick with the flat tax idea, but their instincts are in the direction of a much smaller state. They are particularly impressive in the area of lifestyle freedoms. They have cornered the market in being pro-freedom to smoke, drink or rock ‘n’ roll. Farage himself is practically a libertarian. I think you have to distinguish the leader from the party. I know some people say they are one and the same; I don’t buy that. Farage himself is unambiguously the most libertarian mainstream politician in Britain – I mean he wants to end the war on drugs.”

Littlewood is as much a social libertarian as he is an economic libertarian. He recalls speaking at the youth conference of UKIP and saying something he suspected would get him booed. “I went and said, I think you’re wrong on immigration. Why should the state control people’s movement? You believe in the free movement of capital and don’t believe in the introduction of exchange controls. But why do you think, when it suddenly comes to the free movement of labour, that there should be a state imposed cap?” The reaction he got was the opposite to what he had expected. “I think Young Independence, the youth wing of UKIP are very libertarian leaning. There is a good chance UKIP will emerge as a fully-fledged, classical liberal party.”

It remains to be seen whether Littlewood and the IEA’s strategy to expand libertarianism in the UK will succeed. “We’re probably going to have to wait two decades, before we start shifting the climate of opinion”, he says. Regardless, Littlewood remains optimistic.

“It’s extremely unlikely that I’ll be the Director General when the rewards of these efforts are reaped. But it’s a crucial thing for think tanks to do – whether of our orientation or not.”

Yes

As I was leaving my department building at the end of last term, I was surprised to find two homeless men standing over my bike in deep discussion.

Having already had a bike stolen from the St. Giles area, I was naturally suspicious of their attention. I asked them sharply what they were doing. One of the men, answering frankly, told me that my bike was not secure, and that all someone needed to do was release the front wheel and walk away with a moderately valuable frame. He went on to tell me that certain components of my bike were ideal for a project he was putting together with “reconstituted” parts. “This is my job,” he shrugged finally –it was clear that this was more about survival.

Handing out spare change to beggars comes with its own set of problems. Bob Price, Leader of the Oxford City Council, has said that alcoholism and drug abuse are two of the issues which make dealing with homelessness so complicated. Many of us are instilled with the belief that money handed over to rough sleepers will invariably be spent on unhealthy addictions. But, in Oxford just as elsewhere, it is still essential that homeless people can hope to make a small income from donations from the public.

For one, the 56 beds at O’Hanlon House, the shelter operated by Oxford Homeless Pathways, are almost always full, according to Chief Executive Lesley Dewhurst. The shelter is even prepared to offer floor space when temperatures drop below freezing for three nights in a row. But with austerity cuts of up to 40% expected to hit very soon, it is likely that the growing number of homeless people in Oxford will be forced to pay for accommodation elsewhere.

Figures show that there were 19people sleeping rough in Oxford in November 2013, compared with 12the previous year.

Monetary handouts are a short-term solution which can only be effective when employed in tandem with the work of charitable organisations, offering support to those overcoming addictions or illnesses.

But, as Mark Johnson of the Guardian (a rehabilitated drug user and former rough sleeper) argued in2012, every donation by a member of the public to a homeless person helps to prevent a crime.

If we are feeling charitable enough to hand over a few coins to a less fortunate individual, do we automatically have the right to dictate how that money should be spent? Whether it goes towards a hot dinner or heroin is not necessarily any of our business: we can still be pleased that we have alleviated an individual’s need to resort to theft to meet the same ends.

Back in 2000, the Labour government’s ‘Change a Life’ campaign, which discouraged members of the public from making small hand-outs to the homeless, was condemned as a failure by major charities including Shelter and Crisis. Oxford City Council’s policy makers seem oblivious to this failing.

Giving directly to the homeless will not turn their lives around, but it will prevent them from turning to crime until they are ready to seek the social support they need.

Louee Dessent-Jackson

No

While giving money directly to the homeless might feel like a moral imperative, it is actually counterproductive. Giving money will often merely contribute to prolonging rough sleepers’ terrible situation.

Homelessness has recently made headlines in Oxford – Cherwell recently reported that the number of rough sleepers increased by more than 50% since 2012, and the City Council recently pledged a £235,000fund meant to ensure that no one spend two consecutive nights on the street – but it is clear that this problem is far from anything new.

Writing on this same issue in 1891 Oscar Wilde came to the same conclusion; people who give directly to the homeless “very seriously and very sentimentally set themselves to the task of remedying the evils that they see. But their remedies do not cure the disease: they merely prolong it. Indeed, their remedies are part of the disease.”

The reality is that the way to help the homeless is not to give money directly to them. There are several reasons for this. Over 65% of American homeless people, according to a US Department of Urban Housing and Development report, have chronic drug or alcohol problems. Last year, the anti-begging campaign “Your Kindness Could Kill” attended Freshers’ Fairs at Oxford and Oxford to encourage students to give money to the Oxford Homeless Medical Fund instead of to those begging on the streets.

Seeing as the homeless generally have no practical way to save money, most money earned will be spent very quickly, and often on the same drugs or alcohol that stop homeless people, or those who work with them, from improving their situation. Giving money to the homeless is an admirable act, but studies show that improving their situation comes not just from giving them money, but from the resources and funds with which measurable improvements can be made in their lives.

Anything from new clothes, to rent money, to job or skills training will show a genuine improvement in their living conditions, and contribute to getting them off the streets. Giving money risks doing the opposite.

But one of the most insidious effects of giving money to those who beg is how it incentivises people from improving their lives.

We generally don’t give to beggars indiscriminately, but based on the perceived level of their need. They are more likely to let their appearance or situation deteriorate, in the knowledge that our sympathy will increase. It’s a vicious cycle.

As Wilde says, “it is easier to have sympathy with suffering than with thought.” The way to help the homeless, if one is serious about it, is to donate to a homeless shelter, a homelessness charity, or even volunteer to help, yourself. Giving directly to the homeless is merely a salve on our own consciences.

It makes us think that we’ve given our requisite pound for the day and that we can forget about the social ills around us. But it is counter productive. Though well intentioned, giving directly is part of the problem, not the solution.

Nick Mutch