Lucie Kinchen, Climate Change student activist

“The time for non-violent activism is now”

Throughout history, non-violent direct action has got results. Without people willing to take action, we would not have many rights which we now take for granted. For instance, as a woman I would not have the right to vote, and racial discrimination would still be enshrined in US law. From Gandhi to Emmeline Pankhurst, people throughout the world have recognised that when governments fail or refuse to act to tackle injustices, it is left to citizens to do something about it. To effect radical and positive social change, individuals need to be empowered to take action.
Direct participation in UK democracy is limited to a vote in the general election every five years or the opportunity to lobby your MP. When these processes cannot deliver on the most important issues the need for action becomes clear. Some call for an ‘exhaustion of the legal channels’, but one could always write one more letter or sign one more petition. The efficacy of mass demonstrations is questionable – one million people marched against the war in Iraq in 2005 only to be ignored. More direct action is needed.
According to the Global Humanitarian Forum, 300,000 people every year die as a direct result of climate change. This number is set to increase, and if we continue emitting carbon dioxide at the current rates we are looking at 250,000,000 climate refugees – displaced from their own countries by famine, droughts, flooding, and wars over resources – by the middle of this century. Our government has recognised this need for change and makes positive noises accordingly: the UK was pioneering in having the first Climate Change Act (2008) to attempt to prevent runaway climate change. But these legally binding targets – to reduce carbon emissions by 80% by 2050 and by at least a third in the next 11 years – are nothing without the actions to fulfil them, and these actions are lacking.
Twenty years ago, Margaret Thatcher said that it would be “irresponsible” not to act on climate change and yet in that time not nearly enough has been done. Even leaders, such as Al Gore, stress that the time for action is now.
Our protest at Didcot power station last week was part of an ever-growing movement of people willing to take non-violent direct action to tackle the root causes of climate change. We need a mass movement, but it needs to be a movement composed of people willing to do more than just switch their lightbulbs off or only boiling the right amount of water in their kettles. We need active social change.

Marius Ostrowski, PPE Magdalen

“The illusion of acting replaces critical rationality”

One of the joys of pure liberal democracy is its steadfast adherence to freedom of speech, allowing anyone to voice any view, however controversial, without fear of suppression. And wherever there is a view to be voiced, an issue to be protested, or an event to be condemned, it is a reasonably safe bet that there will be a gaggle of students there to throw their weight behind it.
Such omnipresent idealism, while very much the norm at universities, is a source of resigned irritation to pretty much anyone who isn’t a student. The students see themselves as the lone defenders of their faith, locked in an uphill struggle against The Man. To the public, they’re a bunch of loud-mouthed, immature layabouts, spoilt brats for whom ‘idealism’ has become warped into weird guilt-trips of liberal self-flagellation, rebelling against the very institutions that made them students in the first place: their private education, their investment banker father, their BUPA health insurance. Student activism is seen by the wider population as thinly-veiled NIMBYist hypocrisy, worse than champagne socialism or krypto-authoritarian ‘liberal paternalism’.
While much of this image stems from negative reactions of inherently socially conservative institutions like the media, Church, state and civil service, there is an underlying problem with student activism that must bear much of the blame: its inherent lack of critical reflection and self-evaluation. Pure activism requires a degree of absolute conviction in one’s cause. Alternative views are targeted and demonised, with the worrying illiberal, anti-democratic aim that they be ultimately suppressed.
The fine line between merely supporting a cause and becoming active on its behalf is defined by one’s openness to alternative points of view – once that line is crossed, it becomes very easy to be consumed by a cause to such an extent that the illusion of acting replaces the critical rationality or emotive reasoning that brought one to the cause in the first place.
Activism is an ironic intellectually-passive modus operandi – one is wholly dependent on the ideologues in the cause’s elite for instructions on what to achieve next and how to achieve it. A healthy dose of sceptical cynicism is pretty much the only antidote, which is what most people think student activists don’t have. Until this view is reconciled with those that the students represent, student activism will remain more of a hindrance than a help to the causes it sides with.

Cherwell has argued consistently since the racism story broke last term that the Conservative Association needs to demonstrate real change, that the real scandal has always been an anachronistic culture amongst it’s membership, and that token gestures are not enough to merit acceptance.

The national Conservative Party, clearly, thought otherwise. Apparently, Conservative Future, to which OCA is now attached, believed that the society was committed to reform. However, events since their affiliation have called into question the authenticity of the Association’s professed desire to change.

There is a widespread suspicion that OCA, having used the national Party as a crutch to regain credibility, will revert to type at the next convenient opportunity. You only have to look at the mutterings of their membership to see why.

‘What more is a society than the sum of its members?’

If OCA is a society committed to modernising, why has its leadership been so reluctant to put constitutional change to its members? One could hardly be blamed for thinking that it might be because members weren’t thought to be sympathetic to moving into the bright new ‘Conservative Future’.

If we needed any more evidence, Cherwell this week exposes that a group of Association members, including Presidential hopefuls and other society notables, have formed both online and presumably off, specifically outlining their ambitions to return OCA to its ‘former glory.’

As a society, the commitment among OCA’s membership to reform is in serious doubt. Moreover, the sanctions against them seem to have been ineffective, given their indirect presence at Fresher’s fair courtesy of ‘brother’ conservative society, the Bow group. What more is a society than the sum of its membership? All this serves to indicate is that, yet again, an outdated, outmoded society is unaccountably rumbling forward into further obsolescence as a political entity.

The political storm that has followed the sacking of Professor David Nutt seems set to intensify at present. What is lacking is a sensible middle ground perspective.

For those who (quite sensibly) rely exclusively on Cherwell for their news, the government’s chief policy adviser on drugs was sacked by Home Secretary Alan Johnson, after he spoke out criticising government drugs policy. In his lecture, he described cannabis as being less harmful than cigarettes and alcohol. He has previously suggested that ecstasy was less dangerous than horse riding.

Since losing his job, two members of the committee which Professor Nutt chaired have also resigned, and many others seem set to follow suit. Now the chief scientific adviser to the government has, diplomatically, suggested that he agrees with Nutt’s view on drugs, though he refrained from criticising Johnson for sacking him.

What we have here, is a divide between scientists and politicians, and it is quite plain that both are being unreasonable.

On one hand, we saw in the debate held in the commons, that politicians seem to have a certain degree of contempt for scientific expertise. One MP commented, “scientists should be on tap, not on top”. This view is disastrously unhelpful.

So too was it particularly stupid for politicians to assert that independent advisers have some sort of duty to avoid criticising government policy. Is that not the exact point of an independent adviser? To provide criticism, expertise and feedback on government decisions? A scientific adviser is not subject to the same sort of collective responsibility that cabinet ministers are, and the Home Secretary seems to have forgotten this.

Yet not everything said was totally without merit. As the Home Secretary argued, Nutt had gone public in criticising Government policy without informing his political bosses. Clearly, there were issues with the working relationship, and despite the fact that I would argue Johnson should probably listen to the expert advice, a breakdown of trust between the two seems a legitimate reason to seek someone else to do the job.

Even the chief scientist who shares Nutt’s views, John Beddington, points out that it would be difficult to see how the two could go on in such a situation.

However, we have to ask the question as to why Nutt acted as he did. There is a widespread, and seemingly accurate, perception, that the committee of which he was chair was, in effect, a rubber stamp for decisions that were in reality made for political reasons. Members of the committee itself have been raising such concerns.

The problem here is that, rather than being up front about the basis of drugs policy, which is that in reality the government wants to appear tough on drugs, the Home Secretary seems to be attempting to claim that policy is scientifically informed, whilst simultaneously ignoring the scientists.

Certainly, we can’t expect Johnson to admit he is merely politically motivated, but he could at least frame his decision based on a moral objection to drug taking, or some other point than the literal harm which the drug causes, because the evidence seems to be fairly clearly set against him.

Instead, he is somewhat ludicrously attempting to contradict scientific experts with anecdotal stories about his constituency, which, while emotive, are clearly not sufficient to inform drugs policy for the nation.

So, what is the conclusion? Simple – David Nutt could have handled the situation better, and because he didn’t he has lost his job. He has undermined an obvious opportunity to influence outdated and unhelpful drugs regulations. However, if the delivery of his message was off, the content was still bang on, and Alan Johnson should have listened to what he was being told a long time ago.