Oona King is pretty cool. It’s not often I’d say that about a 40 year old ex-MP, but she is. As the second black woman in parliament (the first was Diane Abbott, elected in 1987), and an MP for the Labour party at just 29 she’d impressed me before I’d even met her, but then she told me about her love of dj-ing and house music. ‘I just love it, can’t get enough. I always will be a house music fan. I used to be a serious wannabe DJ, you know those people that are like “yeah yeah yeah, I wanna DJ, I wanna DJ”. I’ve still got my decks downstairs, that was my birthday present last year, I got a CD mixer. No yeah, I do love my house music.’

No longer an MP, but working in the media, Oona has recently published a book documenting her time in parliament, The Oona King Diaries: House Music. She lost her seat in the Greater London constituency of Bethnal Green and Bow in 2005 to George Galloway, founder of the party Respect and notorious Celebrity Big Brother loudmouth. Oona lost by 823 votes that night, from a previous majority of ten thousand: ‘When I lost the election I was absolutely devastated.’

 She doesn’t sound too brokenhearted, though, as she laughs and chats to me. ‘Winning my seat at Bethnal Green and Bow and losing my seat at Bethnal Green and Bow were two of the three best things that have happened to me,’ Oona says, ‘But the best thing that happened to me probably was finally getting my little boy, after so many years of not having a baby. A psychiatrist would have said I was conflicted… It’s a huge privilege to be the MP, and it’s also a huge privilege to not. I’ve got my life back. I almost feel when I’m in my living room in the evening it’s like I’m engaged in an illicit activity. I couldn’t give it up now. I couldn’t see my husband for more or less a decade. I can’t go back to that sort of life.’

As a consequence of Oona’s support for the Iraq war there were, as she says, ‘lots and lots of crazy things’ alleged about her during the 2005 elections. ‘It was put around that I funded the Israeli army; a lot of my Muslim constituents were that told I wanted to ban halal meat; that I was at war with Islam.’

I ask Oona to comment on the number of women, and of black women, in the House of Commons. She acknowledges that the situation is bad. ‘It is not a representative democracy. That’s the holy grail, really, for modern politics; or should be. Two black women – that’s black or Asian, there are no Asian women – out of 650 odd MPs is a diabolical state of affairs… When I was growing up I assumed we’d won all those battles, but in fact, you know, over 80% of MPs are still men, and the battles have not been won.’

I ask her whether the House is as female-unfriendly as is reported. ‘I was angry about working late virtually every night. The fact is that the House of Commons discriminates against anyone who wants to have a life and discriminates against anyone who has caring responsibilities, and those are disproportionately women; although not only, I mean it discriminates against men who want to see their children. So it does have real modernisation problems; and want to see it change further.’

With a Jewish mother, an African-American father, a grandmother from Glasgow and an Italian husband, Oona is perfectly placed to comment on the future of multiculturalism in Britain, and I ask her how community cohesion can be achieved, something which she has worked intensively for: ‘A lot of people say multiculturalism has failed. I don’t agree with that at all. Multiculturalism is a statement of fact. Multi – many – cultures living side by side, and that’s what happens in London.

‘The point is, it can’t just be side by side, there has to be integration. Trevor Phillips (a black Labour politician and current head of the Commission for Equalities and Human Rights) warned of parallel lives, and I certainly see dangers that need to be addressed, and so I think that the way forward is to make sure that government funding and that sort of thing emphasises the issues that bring communities together, not that divide them. We need to… encourage people to interact more than they have in the past.’

Another issue of concern to the Oxford community is that of homelessness. I ask Oona what is being done to address the problem. ‘The government has put in place the biggest house building programme for decades. The problem is it can’t solve the problem overnight, because the problem itself has got greater. There have been demographic changes. There are more single people living alone, that used not to happen.

‘You’ve got my granny for instance, living in a 3-bedroom flat that her family lived in before, because people live longer. That housing unit isn’t available, whereas before it would have been. So there are lots of different reasons why there has been a reduction in the housing supply. The government’s doing what it needs to do, which is to build more houses, and it can’t do it quickly enough in my view.’

Oona has said previously that she ‘jumped up and down and cried with happiness’ when she heard the news that London had won the 2012 Olympics, and I ask about her hopes for Britain. ‘My hope is that we show why we won the bid, and we won the bid because we said that we would have an Olympics for the world; in London and in Britain we reflect 300 countries or more that live in this one country, so if we could have a lasting cultural legacy and also have infrastructure…so we don’t have white elephants but we do have ordinary people benefiting from the building project, and also that we become a healthier country, otherwise we’re all going to die from obesity.’

Oona is apologetic. She can’t talk any longer because she has to pick up her little boy: having left the House of Commons, she’s clearly ‘got her life back.’

Two weeks ago, James Norrie wrote a comment piece comparing the Parisian student rebels of 1968 to their presumably apathetic and politically disengaged British counterparts in 2008. But what are the French themselves doing during the 40th anniversary of the student revolts?

Walking through a Latin Quarter swarming with tourists and bouquinistes, it is hard to imagine the violent scenes that took place here in May 1968. The French seem to have forgotten that millions of them marched against the establishment. Perhaps they have taken a leaf out of our book under the new Sarkozy government.

If you’re a bit rusty on your French history, let me enlighten you. On March 22, 1968, a group of students led by Daniel Cohn-Bendit carried out a seemingly innocuous protest in the Parisian suburb of Nanterre following the arrest of five students campaigning against the Vietnam war. This would escalate into the monumental movement that saw the shutdown of universities, the biggest workers’ strike of the century, and the eventual downfall of General de Gaulle.

Slogans such as the infamous il est interdit d’interdire covered the walls of the city. Eventually, students worldwide engaged manu militari against a stagnant society born of the aftermath of the Second World War, unease over the Algerian War, and the antagonism between youth culture and conservative mores.

Nowadays, what makes la une is Sarkozy’s latest gaffe, whether it be his texting during an audience with the Pope, his pleas to his ex-wife posted on the Internet, or the latest outfit that betrays his belief that he is actually Al Pacino in The Godfather. His je-m’en-foutisme, possibly stemming from a short-man-dictator-syndrome, is incredibly amusing, but slightly worrying in a country that prides itself on the spirit of revolution and individualism.

During the transport strike in November last year, polls showed for the first time that the majority of people supported the government rather than the strikers. Increasingly, the French are starting to sympathise with those of British sensibilities who view strikes as an effrontery to the stiff-upper-lip school of thought. ‘It is difficult to care about politics,’ says Bruno Veron, a second-year musicologist at the Sorbonne. ‘It’s all one long Big Brother episode. Politicians are celebrities and it’s only about image now. It’s disgusting.’ French students, once renowned for their political engagement, seem to have been put off by the new brand of Hello! Politics.

And it’s not as if French students have nothing to protest about. Merely to get a temporary post, virtually all of them are subjected to a typically poorly-paid internship related to their studies which amounts to near exploitation. And most have to do several of these even after graduation (sometimes in different sectors within the same company) before they are eventually hired. Consequently, they are forced to live with their parents until well after the embarrassing age of twenty-five.

I don’t know about you, but this doesn’t sound like my cup of tea, or, for that matter, anything like the idea of ‘liberté’ held so sacrosanct in the French constitution. A good number of Frenchmen and Frenchwomen head across the channel to London to find jobs, or else struggle for years before they get the golden ticket of a CDI (contrat de durée indeterminé). Add to that the fact that degrees in France are incredibly career-based and one is left with very few options in the job sector.

We should thank our lucky stars that we are free to choose relatively ‘useless’ subjects such as History and still become lawyers at the end. In a country with a red tape preoccupation bordering on fetishism, if you don’t have x qualification then you can’t get y job. So why are French students not building barricades on the Boulevard St. Michel?

Ironically, it was the events of May ’68 that led to this impasse in the students’ situation. In the aftermath of the uprisings, universities suffered from a political backlash. ‘The right did everything in their power to curb the autonomy of public universities such as the Sorbonne,’ says Régis Michel, head curator at the Louvre and visiting lecturer in Political Philosophy and Art at Northwestern University and UCL. ‘The grandes écoles [private establishments such as ENA or HEC] were encouraged to counter mutinous tendencies in leftist centres. We might well say the right succeeded, as the public education system is now in tatters.’

In spite of this hiatus in academia and political engagement, there is still hope for change. Interestingly enough, the depressed situation in French education is remarkably similar to the conditions pre-May 1968. Historians recognise the difficulty of pinpointing the causes of the uprising, precisely because it sprung from a general malaise amongst students due to differing factors.

‘The soixante-huitards felt like they had no real place in society. Above all, they had an overwhelming desire to change the world and to destroy the old values of the time,’ continues Régis Michel. Daniel Cohn-Bendit himself stated in an interview after the movement of March 22nd that students did not want to become the ‘cadres of tomorrow’ – a clear declaration of their refusal to be shoe-horned into nine-to-five jobs for the sake of it. Ten points if you spot the similarities with the status quo today. If Sarkozy continues to plummet in the opinion polls and ignores the ever more restricted opportunities for students, I wouldn’t be surprised if there was trouble down the line.

To be fair, French students do have one thing going for them: the vast majority do not pay tuition fees. At most, they pay about 100EU a year to cover administration costs – a mere pittance. What about les rosbifs? Doing countless internships isn’t obligatory, but we all know we’ll be about £12,000 out of pocket when we graduate. At least.

A thousand students or so demonstrated in London a few years back. But in reality, the lack of political engagement on the student level is, frankly, embarrassing. We can all play political parties at the various student associations at Oxford, but what about real involvement? Granted, Gordon Brown and George Osborne are about as inspiring as stick insects on valium, but George Pompidou wasn’t that much better, and we shouldn’t let ourselves be outdone by the French!

In May ‘68, students of our age assumed very real political responsibilities, and not just in France. There were also widespread protests in Belgium, Germany, Poland, Brazil, Czechoslovakia and Mexico, where 300 students were killed in the Tlatelolco Massacre before the Olympic Games. Students took to the streets to make their voices heard, and they were. Can we really say the same?

Given that the movement began with a small protest against the Vietnam War, it must be said there is something commendable about French conviction, whatever one’s views on strikes and protests. Better that than our own blasé attitude towards current events. And from what I hear, there is little sympathy among British students for the Iraq War. Perhaps we should take a leaf out of the Frenchman’s book, instead of sitting around discussing it over a pint in the KA.