‘Come in, sit down’ Polly Toynbee whispers, her hand pressed against the telephone speaker. ‘I’m just about to go on the Jeremy Vine show. So sorry about this.’
So I sit silently in the front room of the columnist’s Clapham house, pretending to read a copy of the Financial Times.
She listens to hold music, waiting to be put on air to discuss the government’s new Equalities Bill, the subject of her column that day. A brief chat with a researcher, and then she’s live on Radio Two, with all the lines you’d expect from one of the country’s best-known left-wing commentators: ‘…Need to think carefully about how they might address that balance and even things out…need to question themselves about whether the way they spend is fair…’
A Guardian columnist since 1998, Toynbee has been writing on social affairs for the best part of forty years. In person she is exactly how she appears in her by-line; the same friendly-but-firm gapped smile, and as far as I can tell she’s wearing the same necklace today as she does in her twice-weekly Guardian headshot. Loved and loathed in equal measure, she has been banging the social equality-drum for her professional life, and is the author of A Working Life, Hard Work and, most recently, Unjust Rewards: Exposing Greed and Inequality in Britain Today.
As she speaks on the radio, I look around the room. It’s hard to imagine this ever being the shabby, run-down area Toynbee claims it was when she bought the place thirty-seven years ago. The road outside is silent, green, and the whole interior smells upper-middle class. (I mean that literally. There’s a certain smell unique to these sort of houses; probably a combination of well-treated wood and organic food.)
She hangs up and we begin our interview, which starts on the subject of Oxford. Toynbee came to the University in the sixties, but dropped out after a year and a half reading history at St Anne’s. Having read her articles and books on social equality, mobility and class, I had imagined her decision to leave Oxford would have been a political statement against perceived elitism in the institution.
The truth turns out to be slightly different. ‘The Cherwell was beastly to me,’ she says. ‘I don’t know if it’s still poisonous, but it was poisonous in those days. I was being got at, a great deal at the time…by this nasty gossip column.’ Ooh-er. ‘And there is so little genuine, interesting gossip or politics around in Oxford that once you’re in their sights, you’re sort of roasted.’
‘I didn’t leave in a great, sanctimonious, ‘I am very shocked by the elitism of this place’ way. It was just very nasty in my day’.
After dropping out of Oxford, Toynbee worked in a number of low paid jobs. ‘[I had] the insane idea that if you worked with your hands in the day and in the evening it leaves you free for greater artistic endeavour, like writing novels and poetry,’ she says, half-smiling. ‘I very quickly discovered why not many people who work in these places actually have the energy to do much creative writing in the evening.’ However, she returned to work in factories and other minimum-wage jobs as research for her later books exploring life on the poverty line. At this time she was also writing pieces as a freelancer, eventually leading to a job on the Observer.
In her most recent book, Unjust Rewards, Toynbee accompanies a group of children from an inner-London school on an AimHigher trip to Oxford. (‘The yellow limestone building of St John’s left the Brent students almost breathless with amazement,’ she writes in one chapter. ‘They could see that gaining a place at Oxford would be like climbing Everest without oxygen or crampons.’) I ask her how she feels about the University’s selection process. Although she has ideas on how admissions could be changed, she tells me that who Oxford lets in or how they select students is not really the most pressing issue.
‘How would it be if Oxford and Cambridge took the top two students of every sixth-form in the country? It means that even the less good schools get to send good people and you’ve got to be the best of your class,’ she suggests.
‘But actually I think it’s terribly unimportant.’ So why the almost constant media interest in Oxbridge applications and other stories from the universities? ‘It absolutely obsesses newspaper editors who are trying to get their own children into Oxford and Cambridge. I think it’s terribly unimportant who goes there’.
Instead she argues that most money and attention should be put into schemes for the youngest, rather than obsessing over who is admitted to ‘elite’ universities. ‘Most resources should go into children’s centres and all of that for the very youngest. By the time you get to passing A-Levels…there’s not a whole lot universities can do about it’.
She tells me that if she were education minister, she would significantly increase investment in children’s centres and the youngest. ‘At the moment we spend least on nursery, next least on primary, then on secondary, and most per capita on university. And really, by the time you’ve passed your A-levels, you’re going to be fine. You’re assured a decent life ahead. Whereas, what happens before you’re five pretty much sets your future.’
A columnist rather than a politician, she speaks in monologues rather than sound-bites, making her almost impossible to interrupt. But she explains things so simply that you rarely want to. To support her view on nursery schools, she cites research which follows the progress of students from different backgrounds. ‘A bright child from a poor background and a dim child from a rich background are tested when they are toddlers.
‘By the time they’re six, the lines cross and they go in the other direction. The poor child, however talented, falls down, and the rich child goes up, because the rich child has such advantage in terms of teaching stimulation…family pressure to try hard, do their homework and so on.’
To combat the unfair advantages given to children of wealthy families, she argues that we need better trained nursery staff to ensure all are given an equal start. ‘Being a nursery school teacher is not being a nursery assistant; sixteen or seventeen year old girls who themselves failed at schools so they think they’ll be nursery nurses.’
She praises Labour’s new under-five’s programme, which is set to open 3,500 new sure-start children’s centres across the UK, calling it ‘the biggest addition to the welfare state since 1945. The only question is whether they will have the funds.’ And despite her certainty that the party will lose the next election – ‘I can’t quite think what it would take for it not to happen now,’ she says, and refers to the decisions facing a Conservative government in the future rather than conditional tense – she is supportive of many of the current government’s actions.
‘I have felt very encouraged by a lot of things Labour has done. We’ve given them a lot of praise for the things they’ve done well. Education has improved no end.’ So why do things seem to have gone so wrong now? ‘Inevitably, after ten years of finding that [social change] is much harder then they thought, that it is very slow…they got weary, I think’.
Unjust Rewards condemns the culture of city bonuses, and the vast and growing gap between the rich and the poor, at a time when the seriousness of the economic situation had not yet been fully realised. I ask whether she thinks she might had played a part in predicting the credit crunch. ‘We were out ahead saying how dysfunctional the whole bonus system was,’ she replies.
‘But I can’t say we predicted quite what would happen or how bad it would be…If, when we’d written that book, we’d said ‘And therefore we expect to see the imminent demise of capitalism,’ I can’t think we’d be have taken very seriously,’ she says, and she laughs out loud.
As she makes me a cup of tea at the end of the interview, I see that for all her polemical opinion pieces, radio appearances and books, in person Toynbee is softly spoken, friendly and patient to explain her point of view, however unpalatable it may be for some. An icon for middle class liberals everywhere, she insists she plans to keep going for ‘as long as my editor will let me.’ Can you forgive the Cherwell for all the beastly gossip it wrote about you now, Polly?

Let’s begin with the facts. Larry Flint came to speak at the Oxford Union last term – past speakers have included Jenna Jameson and Ron Jeremy. Is it just me, or is that pretty much a who’s who of the pornworld? No, it’s not just me. But there’s more. It is also possible to find back issues of Playboy in the Bodelian. Check on OLIS if you don’t believe me. I’ll go on A couple of terms ago Rock Oxford organized that infamous naked KY jelly wrestling travesty at Kukui, and showcased a topless woman carrying an albino python. But despite an alleged police investigation and some pedestrian statements of outrage from feminist groups, they all seem to have gotten away with it. What I’m trying to say is that Oxford seems to be down with porn in the mainstream. Or at any rate that it is tolerated, just like everywhere else. Because it is legal, of course, provided you are 18. So unless you’re some kind of prepubescent child prodigy with pushy parents, chances are that if you’ve matriculated, you are allowed to look at porn. And why not? Even take part in some. There, I said it.

But hold your horses, what about looking at porn online? Now we’re entering Oxford’s twilight zone of IT regulations, college bylaws and Proctorial disciplinary procedures. I asked the Proctors what they thought about this and they pointed me to the statutes and regulations- although they did say “obviously if students are living in private housing with their own internet connection and accessing porn there, that’s up to them and it wouldn’t be a disciplinary matter”. The University’s Policy on Offensive Electronic Material reads as follows: “The University provides computing equipment and access to networks for the furtherance of the academic work of staff and students. It is a misuse of those facilities, and may in certain cases be illegal, for a user to receive, transmit, display or store offensive or pornographic material using University equipment for other than bona fide academic purposes, and such misuse may result in action being taken against those responsible” (this policy was adopted by the IT Committee in November 1995). So the simple answer is that no, Oxford University isn’t down with the porn.

But let’s get to the bottom of this. But what do they mean by “misuse”? Isn’t looking through someone’s 1300 pictures on facey-b equally a misuse of network resources? And isn’t using Twitter a general “misuse” of everyone’s time? I believe it is. So my feeling is that this is not really what is at issue.

What actually happens when you look at porn online? I decided to investigate. So I went on the interwebs and looked at some porn. And nothing happened. What do these regulations actually mean in real terms? I was interested to know whether anyone had ever got done for this kind of stuff. Does anyone actually care what students get up to in the privacy of their bedrooms?
I talked to the IT officer at my college. He said “there are no grey hidden agendas, we are obliged by law to take an interest in what you do. When it comes to porn, there are two things that concern us: a) whether it is legal and b) whether it is copyrighted”. Yes my friends, the law is the law, and apparently there were once some copyright issues concerning a film called “Cockpit Cowboys” starring one Alex Stevens. Then I asked him whether he knew how much porn people look at on the college network. It transpires that last month Redtube was ninth most visited website in college, accounting for just under 2% of all internet traffic at St Anne’s, dwarfed by Facebook at 12% and Googlevideo at 24%. The figure for all pornsites combined was estimated to be below 4%. This struck me as rather tame, considering 37% of the intertubes are choked with porn. What emerged from our conversation is that as far as the IT department is concerned, bandwidth (how much internet you’re using up) trumps content. “What I’m interested in is volume” he said. They are clearly more bothered about students streaming endless seasons of Sex and the City then about them watching two randomers having Sex on the Settee.

The freedom to surf isn’t enjoyed everywhere in Oxford, however. At Wycliffe Hall, for example, you are only allowed to go on godtube.com. Ok, this may not be true. In Somerville there is a traffic monitoring device called WebSense which prevents users from accessing certain websites. What do students make of this? I asked the obvious candidate, OUSU’s VP for Women Rachel Cummings who replied rather sensibly that “colleges have a right to prevent networks from viruses, but not to be our moral guardians. They shouldn’t be deciding what students are allowed to view; attempts to do so in the past have clumsily prevented people doing legitimate research”.

Of course, some content is downright depraved and probably shouldn’t be looked at by anyone. Videos involving a 2:1 ratio of girls and cups come to mind, for example. Moreover, some porn isn’t legal here or anywhere else. In the UK, as of 26 January 2009, it is illegal to possess extreme pornography (roughly defined as that which is grossly offensive, involving corpses, animals, serious violence and/or genital mutilation) carrying up to a three year prison sentence.

The morals of this tale are several fold. First off, it seems that IT officers have better ways to spend their afternoons than to sift through what you’ve been up to online. So chill, chances are you are not being watched by anyone – unless, of course, you are breaking copyright law or eating up all the bandwidth. Second, we are neither at school nor at home, so the university should take it easy with the whole loco parentis thing at least be consistent across colleges. Why am I allowed to surf porn when Somerville isn’t? And how come that kid down at Wycliffe has never even heard of porn? Third, if you’re going to look at porn, at least try to make sure you’re looking at something legal (underage (obviously), extreme or copyrighted stuff is off limits). Fourth, try getting laid a bit more and give that hand a rest.