Protest stories always make headlines, none more so than those encircling the controversy over Israel, Palestine and the region, but are these for the right reasons? Is it the protest that people consider, rather than the greater issues that prompt the protest?

Of course we have a right to protest, heckle, stamp and shout until we’re heard, but is this really useful to the wider debate? Our focus should be on coming to some sort of conclusion or solution, whatever the issue, rather than simply trying to drown out dissenting opinions.
Monday’s protest at the Union against Danny Ayalon, the Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister, serves to demonstrate quite how unconstructive protests can be.

‘Ayalon was left looking like the most reasonable, tolerant person in the room’

Ayalon holds extreme right-wing views in favour of Israel, which, while not widely accepted outside the state of Israel, should be accepted as viable enough under his right to free speech. But in news stories and general conversation this week, consideration of his views has been largely overlooked, in favour of consideration of the abuse he received. His beliefs have been propounded as ‘wrong’ by the pro-Palestine lobby, but there has been little consideration of them and how best to overcome these.

In order to move the wider debate forward any and all views need to be considered, and then discarded. Shouting over ‘the opposition’ is futile and achieves little.
Heckled from both inside and outside the Unions debating chamber, Ayalon hardly spoke, which was what he was invited to the Union, that ‘bastion of free speech’, to do.

‘Of course we have a right to protest, heckle, stamp and shout until we’re heard’

While many would hold this to be great news, has our level of debate really descended to who can shout the loudest? Perhaps we need to move beyond the playground.
When juxtaposed with those who shouted racist slurs and general anti-Israeli abuse, Ayalon was left looking like the most reasonable, tolerant person in the room at the end of the evening. Most who are familiar with his views would agree that ‘tolerant’ would not be a term used to describe them.

Members of the audience talked at him, voicing opinions they would have expounded regardless then immediately left, while others accused him of crimes he was not involved with. It would have been only marginally less constructive to shout them at a lamppost. Engaging with his arguments would undoubtedly have been far more productive in the long run.

By this stage in our academic careers we should be able to accept that people hold a variety of views, many of which we personally don’t agree with. But by refusing to engage with opposing views and defending our own (well-informed) opinions we stand no chance of progressing or advancing the wider debate.

Sean Lennon, Wadham Football Captain

‘Terry has, quite correctly, been punished’

Fabio Capello had no choice but to sack John Terry. It is important to note here that this is not, as some have suggested, because he is bowing to the pressure of the media circus. Capello has demonstrated a few things during his reign, few less strongly than his personal disregard of the opinion of the press.

Terry has, quite correctly, been punished. Being sacked from the England captaincy will be a bitter blow to a man who clearly took great pride in the job. The decision was the right one; the players’ leader in the dressing room cannot be a man that his team-mates do not trust. From a footballing perspective, this is why Terry had to go. The sacking has sent the right message of attempting to defuse personal drama without having to remove Terry from the squad. The onus is now on the players to both act as professional squad members; neither is receiving preferential treatment, they are both expected to turn up and do their jobs.

Moreover, the England captain’s job is almost as much a PR role as it is a football one. Numerous leaders, club captains, will assert their influence on the pitch, but the England captain is also essentially an ambassador for the footballing nation. Retaining Terry would hardly have sent the right message about the integrity of the England camp. The punishment was sufficiently stern without taking any rash steps; Terry remains an essential cog in the England set-up, especially with Rio Ferdinand’s worrying form and fitness.

Two further reasons exist why the punishment need not be repeated at Chelsea. Firstly, Wayne Bridge is no longer a Chelsea player, so there is no need to appease the wounded party. Secondly, and rather more pressingly, Chelsea’s only focus is the success of their own side. John Terry is still the most effective leader of a side seemingly marching toward the title, so Carlo Ancelotti would have to be bananas to dethrone his captain. If football clubs took the time to punish players for every personal indiscretion, club bosses would never be able to leave the office for the paperwork.

‘The strength of the media response is laughable’

The strength of the media response is laughable. The punishment should be accepted as it is, and the footballing nation should move on. So please God can we let the hyperbole and moral superiority die? I frankly don’t care what sort of a character he is, if he can stop Torres et al in South Africa, I’ll be cheering him on just like everyone else. Besides, Chelsea fans aside, the nation’s supporters have a rather humorous stick with which to beat him. Surely punishment enough.

Andy Dolling, Keble Football Social Secretary

‘Capello has given in to media pressure’

I, like many, was not surprised to hear that Fabio Capello decided to strip John Terry of his England captaincy following allegations that he had an affair with Wayne Bridge’s ex-girlfriend. After all, was it not the most suitable way in which to deal with the issue in terms of giving the nation’s press what they wanted? The plight of a national hero is seemingly quite an attractive prospect to the British media, papers having riddled their front and back pages with the story and intensely advertised the affair on television in an attempt to profit from the misfortune of the former figurehead of England football. Capello perhaps did do the right thing if his intentions were limited to preventing public controversy surrounding himself – the media brought the issue to the fore, and its pressure has led Fabio Capello to the sensible conclusion. But is media pressure not a very poor justification for sacking the man who so many believe to epitomize English football and its fighting spirit?

The pundit, Mark Lawrenson, in his case for John Terry being sacked, stated that as England captain one has to be “squeaky clean”. But this is arguably down to the fact that the press in this country is so keen to make a villain of successful people if they slip up. This may be a wild claim, but just look how politicians get treated by the British media – the same apparently goes for a leader in a sporting environment. The captain of any football team should, in an ideal world, be judged for his performance on a football pitch, both as a leader and a player. In terms of these attributes it would be hard to criticize Terry, and without the media’s attack on his personal life, football fans across the country would still be completely behind the man who wears his heart on his sleeve and has been known to shed a tear at his side’s defeat.

The logical conclusion, if one assumes like the media that the England captain should possess positive characteristics other than simply those present on a football pitch, would be to give the position to a well-rounded respectable individual. However, considering the alternatives to John Terry, one’s mouth is not watering at the prospect of impeccably behaved role models, as Rio Ferdinand takes over as captain with Steven Gerrard as his vice. Perhaps not keeping to the “squeaky clean” theme, Fabio Capello has without hesitancy appointed an accused drug cheat and a violent thug who starts fights in nightclubs. These men have had their low points and the nation has stood by them due to their ability as footballers – it is a great shame that Capello has given in to media pressure and not done the same for John Terry.

What is Parliamentary Privilege?

Parliamentary privilege is the name given to the constitutional protections which Parliament and its members enjoy – the special rights of the two chambers of Parliament collectively and the rights of members individually.

These rights are those which are seen as essential to the functioning of Parliament, notably freedom of speech, which was given statutory force in the Bill of Rights in 1689 which declared that proceedings in parliament shall not to be impeached or questioned in any court.

How does Parliamentary Privilege relate to the expenses?

My own view is that the administration of expenses does not constitute a proceeding in Parliament and is not a matter which parliamentary privilege should properly protect. It could be argued , however that the that the payment of these expenses was essential to the discharge of an M.P.’s duties and hence was covered. The scope of parliamentary privilege is highly uncertain. If these M.P.s are considered immune from prosecution there will almost certainly be subsequent legislation to amend the law – though it would be unlikely to be applied retrospectively.

Has a similar situation ever arisen before?

No situation similar to the expenses prosecution has arisen before but M.P.s have been charged with criminal offences.

How likely is it that the MPs will be protected by the privilege?

If the M.P.s argue successfully that they cannot be prosecuted in the ordinary courts, the House of Commons authorities will have jurisdiction to consider the cases. The range of penalties at Parliament’s disposal (which used to include the power to imprison ) is restricted effectively to reprimand and expulsion. Given that the M.P.s in question will probably have stepped down by the time of any trial such a punishment would be damaging primarily to their reputations .

Are British Parliamentarians immune from prosecution?

There are a number of examples of M.P.s being charged with criminal offences. These cases include Jeremy Thorpe (for attempted murder), and more recently Mohammad Sarwar (for electoral fraud). Both were found not guilty.

Gillian Peele is a fellow and tutor in politics at Lady Margaret Hall.

The offices of Transform are in Easton, Bristol; a neighbourhood adjacent to the infamous inner-city suburb of St Paul’s and the two boroughs share all the hallmarks of urban decay. Both areas were hubs of afro-carribean immigration in the aftermath of World War II and in the decades since have been plagued by racial tensions, gang violence and drug abuse; in particular heroin and crack cocaine. It is perhaps appropriate then that the offices of the UK’s leading drug policy think tank should be located here, surrounded by circumstances the likes of which have both fuelled and created the drug problem in England and around the world.

‘We wouldn’t see the global regime shifting substantially for about another ten years’

Inside their modest offices I met Danny Kushlick who founded Transform in 1997, and is now their head of policy and communications. Since its inception, Transform has openly and actively advocated for wide-ranging reform of current national and international drug policy with an end to bringing about the demise of drug prohibition and ushering in a new era of controlled regulation. In this spirit they recently published a 215 page report entitled ‘After the War on Drugs: Blueprint for Regulation’ which outlined how society would regulate the use of drugs in the post-prohibition world.

For many this might seem hubristic, that drugs are and will remain illegal seems axiomatic. Kushlick is firm in his belief that the world outlined in the report is now within sight, he concedes that ‘we wouldn’t see the global regime shifting substantially for about another ten years’ but adds that ‘it is difficult to envisage prohibition going on a lot longer than that in its current form because it is so counter-productive, so 2020 would be a good time for scanning the horizon for significant geopolitical shifts’.

‘We have the wind at our backs for the first time’

‘Geopolitics’ is a word that Kushlick uses frequently when talking about drug policy, and serves to emphasize that although based in Bristol, Transform sees itself as having a voice in the international debate about drug policy. Now more than ever Kushlick feels that what he and others like him have to say is being heard; ‘drug reformers all around the world are talking about having the wind at our backs for the first time in my incarnation as a drug policy campaigner’. He argues that three developments of recent years have served to call in to question the foundations of the war on drugs.

The first is the Obama effect or ‘the not George Bush effect’ whereby a ‘very conservative pressure has been replaced by fairly liberal one’. The second is the recession which, he reasons, has made ‘very counter-productive and expensive wars look terrible on the balance sheets’. Finally he cites the escalating violence in Mexico which has spilled into the US: ‘to have Phoenix, Arizona as the kidnap capital of the U.S. as a result of turf wars between dealers, and to have regular beheadings and heads rolling around on disco floors on the border looks terrible for the US and feels very different to wars going on at a great distance’.

For all his optimism, Kushlick does not downplay the forces arrayed against the legalization and regulation of drugs, without prompting he poses the central question that faces all drug policy reformers: ‘How do you actually undo a regime that has been around for fifty years, and held in place by some of the prime movers in geopolitics throughout the world?’. He characterizes the war on drugs not as a rational policy approach but as a ‘blind machine’ which has no ability to adapt to changing circumstances and which not only ‘doesn’t work but worse than that it actually creates what we call the drug problem’.

These statements are not revolutionary; Kushlick cites Barack Obama and David Cameron as two prominent politicians who have publicly called into question the basic rationale of the War on Drugs. Lying at the heart of the problem is what Kushlick calls the ‘threat based approach’ which is central to a policy of prohibition. By looking at drugs primarily as threat, he argues, drugs have been turned purely into a security issue and excluded from potential policy debates concerning ‘public health, criminal justice, poverty, conflict, development, human rights because effectively it has been removed from the normal policy-making world and put into the world of security’.

Kushlick argues that as a result of this monomaniacal focus on security, little effort has been made by governments to treat drugs as they would any other area of policy. Thus one of the main aims for Transform is to call on ‘policy makers from the normal policy world to assess the War on Drugs against normal policy indicators: is it working? Is it value for money? Is it increasing security and developing public health and enabling young people to live high quality lives? No? Therefore we are doing it wrong.’

Transform is acutely aware that they run the risk of appearing too radical and stress the reasonable nature of their programme, similarly Kushlick framed many of their proposals in terms of providing a more flexible approach to drug policy. For him the prevailing drug policy is a frustrating one, relying too heavily on force and too little on nuanced social issues, as he says, paraphrasing Abraham Maslow, ‘If the only tool in your toolbox is a hammer, the only things you’re going to see around you are nails’. In the final analysis for Kushlick, regulation makes sense as rather than being a move into the unknown it is a ‘move into the known: which is controlled and which is democratic’.

To those skeptical of Transform’s vision of the post-prohibition Kushlick is both pragmatic and defiant: ‘It’s not utopia, there are difficulties, clearly, with putting in place that regime. But overwhelmingly we win by putting in place a normal regime: we know how those work’. For him the fulfillment of Transform’s project is not simply wishful thinking, it is almost inevitable; ‘We’re going to win big time. In ten years I’m going to be looking for a job’.

Read ‘After the War on Drugs: Blueprint for Regulation’ at www.tdpf.org.uk

As an alumna of St Anne’s in its all-women heyday (sorry, chaps) I had to laugh at the stories in the papers this week about the night-time goings on at Newnham College, Cambridge. It seems no tabloid can resist a story involving overprivileged, over-educated students getting pissed, throwing up at the Bullingdon Club or posing naked for good causes.

Last year’s TravelAid calendar was a case in point. I mean to say… Oxford girls minus their kit punting on the Cherwell with only a boater to preserve their modesty or posing nude in historic Oxford locations… enough to give the man in the street a heart attack. The week before we were treated, courtesy of the red tops, to the lovely Brittany, reading Social and Political Sciences at Cambridge, getting her boobs out for a student newspaper. Postmodern or what?

The basis of this week’s flimsy tale was that Lizzy Cole, the President of the Newnham JCR, sent an email to students requesting the girls keep down the nocturnal noise level as bedroom walls in Newnham are exceptionally thin. Particularly amusing as I have just been given the honour of becoming a ‘Visiting Member of High Table’ at Newnham. But mostly it made me laugh because it reminded me of my own time at St. Anne’s.

 ‘Far from engaging in liberated sexual activity, all men had to be out of your room by 11pm’

I read Law at St Anne’s from 1969-72 which was the era of the first ever Women’s Liberation conference, held in Oxford, the Paris student riots, and the high point of the Sixties sexual revolution. But not at St Anne’s.

Indeed there was a rule that far from engaging in liberated sexual activity, all men had to be out of your room by 11pm. This had various unintended consequences, including sexual marathons which had to finish at exactly 10.59 or sneaking men over the walls in the early hours. It also led to lengthy and passionate post -11pm farewells outside the porter’s lodge. Every night there were at least a dozen couples gathered there necking for Britain, to the amusement of the other students, and the intense irritation of the porter.

No one ever knew if or how this rule could actually be enforced, but there were tales of Fire Practices at dawn which revealed the presence of scores of freezing males assembled in the main quad minus their trousers. The John Radcliffe Hospital, we were also reliably told, recognized the syndrome of boyfriends with broken legs acquired falling off the college walls. You can imagine the scene. Junior doctor to Oxford boyfriend: ‘So, was the sex worth the fracture?’

Even more hilarious was the rule that while any member of the male gender was actually in your bedroom, one foot must be on the ground at all times. To the adventurous amongst us this was a clearly a challenge to engage in a game of Twister, the Kama Sutra version.

When I became a writer I discovered that this same rule was imposed in 1930’s Hollywood. According to the famous Hays Code, one foot must be kept firmly on the floor in all bedroom scenes. I love to think that the sex censors of Tinseltown drew their moral codes from the governing bodies of Oxford women’s colleges.

So when I next visit Newnham High Table I will explain to the women of the JCR that they can easily solve their night-time problem if they simply ban men and reinstate the practices of St Anne’s in the Sixties as interpreted by the legendary Cecil B. de Mille.

Maeve Haran is the author of ten novels. Her latest, The Lady and the Poet, dramatizes the forbidden affair between John Donne and Ann More. 

Life isn’t fair, and life never has been fair. I cannot do open heart surgery, as I am too stupid and squeamish. Nor can I run a 4-minute mile because I would start, wheeze and sweat alarmingly, and then die. There are any number of things I cannot do.

However, just because they are innate, that doesn’t mean I can’t be mocked mercilessly for them, for example my inability to do many sports. If I am on a football pitch, and someone calls me a useless so and so, I have a choice on how to react. I can laugh. Or I can throw my toys out of my pram; complain to the team, the local newspaper and everyone who will listen to me without punching me in my whiny moaning face. This was the course of action of the York woman who found a card saying “Santa loves all kids. Even ginger ones” so offensive she complained to Tesco and had it removed. This situation, of course, has its pros and its cons.

The more worrying side of it is that she found the card “absolutely disgusting”. And even worse, so did her “friends”.

It appears that, in this day and age, if one woman can’t take a joke, no-one can. This poses a huge problem for any creative industry. In the world of TV, five or six complaints, the national press gets hold of it and spins it into thousands more. Not a week goes by without some member of a broadcasting company, usually the BBC, having to apologise for something the vast majority of people probably couldn’t give a damn about.

The problem with the BBC, of course, is that all viewers pay for it. This makes some of them believe that every single programme must be to their tastes. The BBC serves an entire nation. Obviously there are going to be programmes that offend some people. But there are many other licence fee payers. None of them personally own the BBC, and therefore cannot control its entire schedule.
And Tesco should have done the same when confronted with the mad woman and her card crusade. The world has had enough of people being offended on the behalf of everyone else. Some good natured ribbing, be it because of hair colour, girth or height is not the end of the world.