Cosy liberal consensuses beware: Claire Fox is hov­ering behind you ready to take her hammer of impassioned free speech, irreverence and controversy to your skull. In the current climate, anyone who will defend bankers, the News of the World and Richard Littlejohn with eloquence and flair is that little bit different. Fox is the director of the Institute of Ideas, an organisa­tion with a brief to “get people to challenge and think about the big social, political and cultural issues of the day and to challenge the or­thodoxies around them.”

She’s a reg­ular guest on Radio 4’s the Moral Maze. She also appears on other com­ment shows such as Question Time, often arguing firmly against the grain, and as such attracts a lot of ve­hement anger. She mentions the ti­rade against her following a column she wrote in the wake of the Savile scandal, arguing “We shouldn’t reor­ganise society around child protec­tion”. For these comments she was condemned as “a paedophile apolo­gist, full of hatred for the victims of abuse.”

Challenging orthodoxies definite­ly seems to cover it; she’s highly criti­cal of what she sees as the modern political consensus, where “the big rows don’t happen anymore” and po­litical debate mostly consists of “managerial tinkering around”. But if she stands firmly outside the cen­trist spectrum, it’s equally hard to establish at which end; her views are hard to box into a right or left-wing framework. Her earlier political life was certainly radically left wing; she was a member of the Revolutionary Communist Party, and used to pub­lish LM, the re-launched version of the magazine Living Marxism, and it was out of this basis that she found­ed the Institute of Ideas. While she still identifies as a Marxist in some respects, she believes that today “you can’t have a relationship with Marxism in an organised sense, be­cause there’s no organised expres­sion of it”. She explains how the “vi­brant culture” on the left dissapated in the 80s because “when the Berlin Wall went, symbolically people be­lieved there was now no alternative to capitalism… so there was a real shaking up on the anti-capitalist left; a lot of left-wing groups folded, not because they felt there was no al­ternative, but it felt like everything got stuck.”

These days, however, she acknowl­edges “sometimes I’ve got more in common with the people on the Right than I have with the Left”, mostly, it would seem, due to a com­mon currency of Libertarian thought. She says the Institute is “committed to overcoming the bar­riers for people to discuss freely, but then to live freely.” Does she accept the label ‘Libertarian’? “It’s not that I’m embarrassed about it, but it has connotations, usually associated with the free-market” — which she wouldn’t say she conforms to.

Talking to Claire, it is certainly re­freshing to hear someone trying to have “the big rows” again; someone not only with an unapologetic con­viction in their values, but also a deep commitment to rational, intel­ligent analysis, rather than what she describes as “whinging.” Her asser­tion that “a lot of politics has been reduced to attacking the rich, or at­tacking bankers, or getting preoccu­pied with who pays what tax” strikes a chord especially; it can be weary­ing witnessing the same tired and not particularly imaginative debates and identity politics being played out over and over again in the media. She argues this is out of line with the history of progressive left-wing thinking; “The point isn’t whether people are rich, the point is whether it’s a system which can move society forward, that’s what the critique was, not a kind of shrill, ‘beat-up the rich’ attitude… It’s an immature kind of name-calling, that’s not politics”.

The main focus of her at­tentions, however, is un­doubtedly not the econom­ic sys­tem, but de­fending freedom, or fighting for more of it. It’s a debate that has been of particular importance to her re­cently in light of the Leveson Inquiry, which she is an uncompromising critic of. She states passionately, “If anything, even prior to Leveson, we didn’t have enough press freedom. I don’t think we had too much free­dom, but too little.” She is convinced that the result will be “a journalistic class who are walking on eggshells and worried that they’re going to say the wrong thing: it’s not going to create a climate of real dedicated in­vestigative spirit and truth-seeking.” In fact she thinks the whole premise for the inquiry was dubious, for most of the actual abuses perpetrated were illegal and should have been dealt with by the law, but the term ‘press culture’ became one on every­one’s lips. “It gave the green light to Leveson, an une­lected warlord, to set up a wide-ranging commission, appointed by a Prime Minister, and investigate ‘the cul­ture of the press’. If that was happen­ing in some authoritarian regime you’d be suspicious… Once you say ‘what do you not like about press cul­ture’, everyone was queuing up with complaints, and it got wider and wider a remit.”

She also attacks what she sees as hypocrisy in the process: “It was fine for Leveson to read every­one’s emails and text messages and read them out aloud… You couldn’t make it up. They were alright, because they were the good guys; that was the as­sumption.” She accuses the lib­eral press of a similar hypocri­sy; “They imagine that they’re the right-on journalists, and any­one else investigating anything is down in the gutter… Nobody com­plains, in those circles, about the kind of tittle-tattle on Have I Got News For You, or in Private Eye, be­cause that’s our kind of people talk­ing about our kind of people, not those grubby people over there read­ing tabloids with the wrong kind.”

That’s fair enough, but surely there has been a real insidious nastiness in ele­ments of the press that was completely legal: I ask, should we do anything to try and eradicate this? I put to her the Lucy Mead­ows case, in which a transgender teacher committed suicide shortly after re­ceiving at­tention in the national press, and the Mail’s branding of Mick Philpott as a ‘Vile Product of Welfare UK’. She ac­knowledges there can be nastiness in the press, but says “journalism’s not some nice, polite activity… part­ly it’s about trying to give the public access to the greatest truth you can possibly have about everything… At the core of it is this idea that you will need to be able to say the unsayable, and pursue things which people don’t want you to pursue.” It is inter­esting to hear her defend press free­dom in these fairly absolutist terms, even admitting, “Sometimes the me­dia tell lies, and they sometimes de­stroy lives. I know that. Of course I know that.” Yet she maintains “the alternative of state censorship is not one I’m prepared to countenance.”

It’s a recurrent theme in her poli­tics, the determination to “prioritise freedom.” To quote Marx, she says, “You can’t pluck a rose without its thorns.” And it is so with freedom; the thorns may be Richard Little­john, people finding out how to make bombs on the internet, drink-driving, child abuse. “If you want a free society, it means that you have to put up with the possibilities of freedom.” Yes she believes in the law, which can deal with people who commit these crimes, but in a sense she thinks they have to be free to make them, unless we are to build a society built on “distrust”, with a danger of “organising things around victims.”

Aspects of her politics may seem to lack compassion, and to dismiss some of the con­cerns of the liberal centre base a little too easily. This is, I think, not simply on moral panic and the infan­tilising of the public, but also a genuine concern for the wellbeing of the individu­al. While I think her ideology may need to take more account of this be­fore I’d find it fully convincing, Fox is in person warm, funny and engag­ing. When we discuss left-wing jour­nalists she cackles “I don’t like ‘em, I wouldn’t have them round for din­ner, and I don’t take them too seri­ously.” This embodies her attitude to politics; sure it’s a serious business, but it’s one that should be free, inter­esting, surprising, and maybe just a little bit fun along the way too. She thinks that post-Leveson, no journal­ists will be willing to “rock the boat.” I’m sure she’ll still be at it, though.

YES!

Alex Rankine 

I am writing this at 4.30 in the morning. Macroeconomic wage theories have been hanging over me the entire night like a grim-faced gargoyle but even less pretty. The main equilibrium I am trying to preserve right now is mental, which is strung between the twin poles of caffeine-fired desperation and the primal, Maslovian need for sleep.

Things did not have to be thus. I could have treated my degree like a job, dutifully arising with the rowers at dawn for a healthy breakfast before settling down in the library. I could have done all the reading on the list, carefully considered all the subtle gradations and different angles one could take on the issue, and set to my work with a profound mastery of the material. But that would be all too sensible now wouldn’t it?

University is not a nine-to-five gig. At any given hour somewhere in col­lege there will be somebody working. We work at 3am, we work at 7pm, we work on the biblical day of rest and get annoyed by the ringing bells. More pertinently, we procrastinate at all of those times, a process every bit as taxing as work. Procrastination is an Oxford institution. We spend far more time with it than we do our friends, ignoring its guilt-inducing looks when we linger in hall, coming back from evenings out with it in tow and taking it to bed with us.

The lack of enforced structure in our days (scientists aside) is one cause of exhaustion, but is there a workload issue specific to Oxford? Certainly, we get a great deal of the stuff; three chunky assignments in a week is par for the course. Sometimes the quanti­ties become absurd and it transpires that our tutors are not talking to each other and thought we did not have much else on this week. But we knew we would get a lot when we signed up for this. One of the attractions of Oxford is that by the time you leave you will know far more about your subject than students at other more easy-going institutions, even if that knowledge is simply to realise that what seemed straightforward at A-level is in fact a subject of fathomless depths, an ineffable sea of centuries-accumulated scholarship. Oxford makes us go swimming in this ocean a lot more than most universities. Drowning may be the more apposite description at Oxford.

I would venture that a major part of the problem is the eight week term, which demands that learning be con­ducted at a breathless pace, and leads to the ridiculous situation where most of us are at home for nearly as much of the year as we are at univer­sity. It is understandable why our be­loved tutors want us to clear-off and leave them to their research for as much of the year as possible, but the consequences are dire for students.

Our University existences become an intense bubble that admits little room for unplanned circumstances. Those who have been made to feel sorry for daring to fall ill during term-time will know what I mean. And the skills that such an intense system builds are not primarily aca­demic. Both Cherwell and OxStu have run pieces this year about how stu­dent degrees feel more like blagging than learning. These early morning turn-arounds and the need to chance your way weekly through job-inter­view style tutes may be good practice for life in the corporate world, but that is surely not what Oxford is try­ing to prepare us for?

NO!

Anna Cooban 

Any wander through your college library at 2am will tell you that students at Oxford work harder than the average student. The charac­teristic dark shadows under the eyes, pale complexion and a general sense of hollowness are symptomatic of the exam period – or what other students may call ‘summer’. It is certainly true that the workload undertaken by the average Oxford student is far from average, but is this ‘too’ much? My an­swer is no.

Perhaps nobody can quite prepare for the academic onslaught they will face in their first ever Michaelmas. No one can reinforce enough how preva­lent the ‘little-fish-in-a-big-pond’ syndrome really is when you arrive and discover that your neighbour is a world debating champion fluent in 5 different languages or that your college mum has already been head­hunted by NASA. Suddenly your pal­try three or four A to A* A-level grades­seem far less impressive. However, to suggest that the workload surpasses our expectations or is too much to handle is to suggest that freshers walk into these hallowed halls only to be surprised that Oxford is not like most other universities.

Quite frankly, you get what you sign up for. The extra demands required by an Oxford degree are certainly a shock to a system honed by the help­ful rigidity of A-level mark schemes and – in many cases – the support of eager teachers. To discover that your tutor has a career beyond marking your essays shatters any hubristic il­lusion that students are the centre of Oxford’s intellectual sphere when, arguably, the greatest product of this institution is its wealth of academic research.

Nobody is forced to work particu­larly hard and there are certainly many who choose to do the bare min­imum, content with the strangely revered ‘gentleman’s third’. The late Christopher Hitchens is a testament to this philosophy. Not content with the trappings of an Oxford degree or the impending sense of lifelong failure should he fail to work to 3am on a Friday night, he told the system where they could stick it and became one of the most prominent thinkers of his generation, due in large part to his departure from the mainstream.

Carol Vorderman is another whose Cambridge third did not hamper her success as a mathematician, nor did Hugh Laurie’s third prevent him from winning two Golden Globe awards. And for those that choose a no less admirable, yet still ‘conventional’, path from top degree to top job in the City, three years stuck in the con­fines of the college library is but a snapshot of the work-life imbalances suffered by an investment banker or commercial lawyer. Working hard is therefore self-inflicted and although some degree of pity is warranted for the prelims student who is in the li­brary earliest and leaves latest, these types are usually so ambitious that, whatever their academic outcome, professional success is a given.

There is no doubt that Oxford students work hard. There may have been a discrepancy between our expectations and the reality of our workload before we arrived, but this is no way disproportionate to demands of the stereotypical Ox­bridge graduate job. Perhaps a 30- year subscription to Vitamin D sup­plements is a worthwhile investment if we choose to continue down the path of being conventional.

If you’re reading this as an undergraduate, it’s likely that Erwin James served longer in prison than you’ve been alive. I’ve been to many talks in Oxford, but there have been few more powerful than this one, held by the Howard League for Penal Reform.

In 1985 James Monohan, James’ real name, was sentenced to life with a minimum of 14 years for the brutal murders of theatrical agent Greville Hallam and 29-year-old solicitor Angus Cochrane. He was released in 2004.

It’s an emotionally confusing moment as you feel sympathy for James’ evident pain in recalling his crimes, yet you know that he caused great pain to others through them.

Many years after his sentencing for life in 1984, James won a prize for prose writing aimed at prison inmates, and was later approached by the Guardian to write a regular column from prison, ‘A Life Inside’, an unprecedented move in British journalism.

But James is not really just attacking the prison system; it is more a deep-rooted criticism of society: a society in which he was given a criminal identity aged ten, experienced a severe lack of love in the care system, and never
felt valued or believed in by anyone.

The same criticism carries across to the prison system; that people are likely to fulfil the identity and role you give them, so prisoners who are brutalised and given no responsibility or purpose are going to become unable to cope
well with the outside world.

Thus, he argues that prison culture is hugely detrimental; he talks of the “psychological warfare” of prison, with “so many damaged people living in such close proximity to each other.” “The common currency is fear” and prisoners “don’t want to show they’re human.” 

One story is particularly disarming. One prisoner would smoke joints and get his pet cockatiel, ‘Priscilla’, stoned off them. When James adds “I saw him carried out in a body bag the next day”, our initial laughter is cut short. 

However, you don’t even need to believe that we should make prison better for the sake of prisoners, for it is in society’s best interests too. “If you don’t take an interest in how our prison system is run, the same cycle will continue.”

James describes reoffending rates as a “national scandal”, and it’s hard to disagree with him: in 2011 a shocking 90% of those sentenced in England and Wales were reoffenders.

What are his ideas to change this? He emphasises the importance of education, of staff who respect prisoners and help them value themselves, of responsibility, and, in general, of making prison a place with some meaning, rather than just a place in which to temporarily remove people from society and take away their liberty, only to throw them back into it unprepared and damaged.

Erwin James doesn’t have a coherent blueprint for penal reform in this country, nor has he squared the fundamental philosophical and ethical debates
of criminal responsibility, free will and justice. His real idea is that we need to find the possibility for humanity within the prison system, for the sake of everyone.