An Oxford Professor of demography announced this week that the UK’s total population is likely to spiral to over 75 million by 2050, threatening to reopen a row with student groups about his views on immigration.
In a report to the House of Lords, Professor David Coleman heavily criticised the government’s policy on immigration, arguing that accelerating population levels will strain public services to breaking point.
Coleman has previously been attacked by Oxford University student group Student Action for Refugees (STAR) for his involvement with the Galton Institute, which holds conferences on human eugenics, and Migrationwatch.
In February 2007, Wadham third-year Kieran Hutchinson Dean attempted to organise a petition calling for the University to “consider the suitability of Coleman’s continued tenure as a Professor of the University, in light of his well-known opinions and affiliations relating to immigration and eugenics”.
Professor Coleman responded to the petition, saying, “It is a shameful attempt, of the most intolerant and totalitarian kind, to suppress the freedom of analysis and informed comment which it is the function of universities to cherish.”
Teresa Hayter, author of ‘Open Borders: The Case Against Immigration Controls’, refused to take part in a King’s College London discussion group last January when she learned Coleman would appear alongside her.
“The statistics produced by Migrationwatch are used by the tabloid press and the British National Party, with the clear intention of stirring up racism and hostility towards immigrants,” she said.
Attempting to dispel claims that liberal border controls are good for the economy, his report states that Labour’s ‘open door’ policy on immigration currently costs every British household £350 per year.
“The absent-minded commitment into which we have drifted to house a further 15m people must be the biggest unintended consequence of government policy of almost any century. There are no merits in the promotion of population growth in itself and many reasons to regret it, especially in a country as crowded as the UK,” he said.
“It is by no mean unavoidable, being almost entirely dependant upon continued immigration. It might be thought worthy of discussion. In official circles there has been none.”
Immigration Minister Liam Byrne recently set out a twelve month programme of “sweeping changes” to the UK’s immigration system, which includes a points-based system whereby immigrants are judged on their employment value, as well as a system of fingerprint visas for foreign nationals.
Coleman accused the government of “irresponsible” immigration policies, which he said only prioritised economic benefits.
“The government’s immigration policies seem to have been based on calculations of economic consequences alone, which is not at all responsible. It is a recognised principle that population growth has a negative impact on the environment. Not only do immigrants need to be housed, they also adopt the higher levels of living standards in the UK which has significant environmental consequences,” he said.

It is a sweltering July day: the Russian weather, like the Russian soul, is a creature of passionate extremes. Natasha and I are sitting in the garden of her dacha in the abundant countryside, just a half hour drive from her flat in the centre of St. Petersburg where I have been lodging for the past month. We get on well: we share interests in travel, literature and music, we make each other laugh (Natasha has a sharp sense of irony). She makes allowances for my faltering Russian; I know how to make the right noises when she produces a jar of home-made, home-grown, utterly disgusting fruit kampot (translation: sludge). Natasha is intelligent, well-educated, and well-travelled. Under the USSR, she trained as an engineer; now she is a journalist for a local newspaper.

We are discussing the recent diplomatic furore over the murder of Alexander Litvinenko; tentatively, I suggest that the Russians and the British have two very different ways of looking at the issues – it all depends on your point of view. Natasha explodes:
“It is double standards – British imperialism. You want us to give Lugovoi to Britain, but you refuse to give the criminal Berezovsky to Russia. It is an insult to the Russian nation. So please tell me how there can be another point of view!”
I hesitate. Suddenly I am not so sure… what is the other point of view?

On November 23rd last year, Alexander Litvinenko died after three weeks of media frenzy at his bedside. Litvinenko (author of articles such as Is Vladimir Putin A Paedophile?) had been an outspoken critic of the Russian government and Putin in particular. After his death it was discovered that he had been poisoned by a rare radioactive isotope, polonium-210. On the day he fell ill, he had lunch with a pair of former KGB agents.
Litvinenko’s murder was the stuff of spy novels. The six-month investigation followed a radioactive trail through London’s restaurants and hotels, on to British Airways planes, and finally to a reactor in a Russian nuclear power plant. On the 28th May, the Foreign Office issued an official request to Moscow for the extradition of Andrei Lugovoi, in order to try him in Britain for Litvinenko’s murder. Moscow refused. Britain responded by expelling four Russian diplomats from London; a week later, Moscow expelled four British diplomats. Russo-British relations were the chilliest they had been since the cold war.

The British and Russian sides have since found themselves in mutually uncomprehending deadlock. The British were appalled that a British citizen could be murdered in Britain, and his assassin walk free. One outraged contributor to the BBC website wrote: “For foreign assassins to murder someone on the streets of London using a radioactive device which has infected goodness-knows how many other people is completely shocking.”
Russians see things rather differently. First of all, it would have been contrary to the Russian constitution for Russia to extradite Lugovoi, since Russia has no extradition treaty with the UK. But anyone familiar with Russian politics knows that that is no real obstacle: Russian law is so full of ambiguities and loopholes that, with a bit of political will, most things are possible. The real sticking-point for Russians is the double standards which Britain seems to have applied when dealing with the matter.

Natasha explains it to me: Russia has submitted numerous requests for the extradition of Boris Berezovsky, a billionaire oligarch and political dissident who is wanted in Russia on charges of fraud and corruption. Why should Russia hand over Lugovoi to Britain when Britain refuses to extradite Berezovsky?
What’s more, she says, Britain’s actions in the whole affair show a fundamental disrespect for Russia, what she’s so fond of calling ‘British imperialism’. Russia offered to try Lugovoi in a Russian court, but Britain declined the offer. This, she says, is indicative of Britain’s patronizing and offensive attitude towards Russia.

Unsurprisingly, the Russian media agreed with Natasha’s version of events. Lugovoi was presented as the victim of slanderous allegations; people came forward to tell how they had been approached by the British secret service to spy on Russia. Nearly everyone I talked to felt that Russia’s pride had been insulted by Britain’s actions, and that standing up to Britain was the right thing for Putin to have done.

To us, Russian allegiance to Putin often seems incomprehensible. In the western media, Putin is characteristically portrayed as a rather shady character, a power-hungry former KGB agent. His record on human rights is appalling. Russia is second only to Iraq in terms of the number of journalists killed there. The press is notoriously biased, with all three of the major television networks linked to the Kremlin. The Russian military policy in Chechnya is equally dubious, with reports of torture and murder of civilians by the Russian army. Corruption persists in Russia’s institutions.

With all these problems, it may seem hard to understand how Russians can still have affection and respect towards Putin, but they really do. He commands around seventy percent of the vote. His recent announcement that he will consider standing for Prime Minister when his term as President comes to an end was greeted with widespread celebrations.

At his annual live phone-in event, in which Russian people are invited to send in questions which he then answers on a live TV show, Putin was seen laughing and smiling, at ease with his adoring public. Here is one exchange:
Caller: I don’t want to speak to you, presenter, I just want to speak to the President.
Presenter: If you ask your question, the President will answer…
Putin: I’m listening.
Caller: Is that you?
Putin: Yes, it’s me.
Caller: Is that really you?
Putin: Really.
Caller: Oh my goodness, thank you so much, thank you so much for everything!
And with that she hung up. Such adulation is not uncommon in Russia. So why do Russians feel this way about Putin, a man who to many western eyes is corrupt and dangerous?

When Putin came into power in 1999, Russia was going through one of the harshest economic crises in its recent history. Now the Russian economy is among the strongest in the world, and still growing. This has had a huge effect on the lives of ordinary Russians. The average monthly wage has risen from a paltry $65 in 1999 to $540 in 2007. Foreign luxury goods are now commonly available in Russian cities, and not the preserve of the super-rich. Poverty levels have almost halved; unemployment has fallen by 3.5 million, or around 40%. All in all, life in Russia is (economically speaking) overwhelmingly better now than it was eight years ago.

But that isn’t all. What matters to Russians as much as – if not more than – Putin’s economic reforms is that he has restored their pride in Russia. When they see Putin refusing to extradite Lugovoi to Britain, standing up to American proposals to build a missile shield in Eastern Europe, or defying threats against his life to travel to Iran, they feel that he has forced other countries to give Russia the respect it deserves once again. Russians have a fierce love for their country, and in putting Russia back on the world map, Putin has won their hearts.
It is often surprising for a foreigner to hear Russians say that life was better under the communists than it was in the years following perestroika (Gorbachev’s program economic reforms in the late 80’s). In some countries of the former USSR where life is still hard – and in the poorer parts of Russia – people are still saying it. The reason they give is that in those days, it was easier to get by, and that is what is important. It is surprising for us because, according to the moral bran we have grown up eating for breakfast, a free and democratic political system is the only kind of political system worth having: it is from this point only that any other ideas and hopes we might have can grow.

But on what basis do we believe this? Putin is often criticized by western analysts for reversing many of Yeltsin’s democratic reforms. This is denounced by those campaigning for democracy and freedom of speech, but, for the majority of Russians, it has not been a negative step: they don’t mind what Putin’s politics are – however abhorrent we may find them – because life is getting better. Who are we to tell them how they should want their country run?

Natasha tells me: “You don’t understand Russia. We do not care about politics – we care about Russia. All I know is this: Vladimir Putin has made the word ‘Russia’ mean something again.”

A CONTENDER for the Liberal Democrat leadership has claimed he “can’t remember” writing an article advocating the use of hard drugs which appeared under his name in an Oxford student magazine in the 1970s.
Chris Huhne, who is one of the favourites to take over from Sir Menzies Campbell as leader of the Liberal Democrats, wrote in favour of Class A drugs in the February 1973 edition of Isis while he was an undergraduate at Magdalen College.
The article, published under the heading ‘Oxford Escapism’, presents a beginner’s guide to illegal drugs and praises those willing to experiment with them.
“There are a number of people who are open-minded about experimenting with drugs. This tolerance is welcome, and it is only with the aid of this tolerance that drugs can be put in their correct unsensationalist place as a social phenomenon with great and respectable antecedents,” it says.
The text, which is accompanied by a drawing of a hand holding a syringe, also discusses the enjoyable nature of taking opium. “Opium is available in Oxford and, in its natural form can be safely experimented with. Colours, movements and shapes are serenely beautiful, as beautiful as a dream and as realistic as George’s [an Oxford café] at 7.30 on a Monday morning.”
Of LSD Huhne writes, “Acid is manufactured in the labs and is the only drug which is getting cheaper. The considerable number of students at this university who drop acid are well-balanced, highly intelligent people. If one is able to live with oneself then acid holds no surprises.”
The piece, which Huhne wrote as an 18-year-old undergraduate, states that drugs such as opium, LSD, and amphetamines should be an “accepted facet of our society”.
Since then, however, Huhne claims to have no recollection of the article. He told The Times, “To be honest I don’t have any memory of it,” and while insisting that it was his private business whether or not he had taken any of the drugs mentioned, he stressed that “the views that were [expressed in the article] are certainly not my views as they are at the moment.”
He added that he was not entirely responsible for the article’s content. “I was basically putting together large hunks of that, so God knows who wrote it and did anything and I wouldn’t attribute it to me if I were you. I may have edited the piece but as I say I was just bringing together whole loads of stuff.”
His exposition on the benefits of hard drugs was published as part of a longer article on how to “escape” the trials of being a student at Oxford.
Huhne studied at Magdalen College and gained a first-class degree in Politics, Philosophy and Economics. He started writing for Isis early on in his university career and eventually became Co-Editor.
Extracts from the article have been printed in national newspapers as Huhne goes head-to-head with his rival Nicholas Clegg for the Lib Dem leadership following Sir Menzies Campbell’s resignation.
Huhne is one of several political figures whose past has recently come under scrutiny for drug-related reasons.
Earlier this year Home Secretary Jacqui Smith earned the nickname ‘Jacqui Spliff’ after she admitted to smoking cannabis a number of times while an undergraduate at Hertford. Smith later said that her behaviour had been wrong and urged people not to use the drug.
Conservative Party leader David Cameron, who graduated with a first-class degree from Brasenose, also admitted to smoking cannabis as a student at Eton, and speaking to the Independent, a friend recalled him “occasionally [having] a joint or something” while a student at Oxford.   Cameron has repeatedly refused to answer questions on whether he took drugs while at Oxford.

Back in those halcyon pre-Oxford days, the library was a place one might  quite easily walk past every day for twenty years and never enter. Local libraries entertain a smattering of blue-haired old women seeking out the latest Mills or Boon and a couple of over-eager children with a lack of social life; they have never been exactly one for pulling in the masses. At university, though, things change. Much as we hate to admit it, the Bodleian is quite simply the place to be.

With its grand total of 38 libraries, and over 6.5 million books kept in those mysterious, Harry Potter-esque caverns stretching under Broad Street alone, the academic reasons for paying the odd visit to an Oxford library seem pretty obvious. What magnetic force, however, has us working there non-stop is a rather more difficult egg to crack. Is it simply the rather sadistic pleasure we get in seeing that it’s not only we who are desperately attempting to struggle through Ulysses before Monday morning? Or is it a staged mating ritual in which sitting opposite someone in the library provides the perfect opportunity for that inter-college branching the club situation can’t always provide? 
There’s certainly an element of voyeurism involved in library working; more than one of us has whiled our morning away wondering if the girl sitting on the far corner got her coat from Topshop, or debating whether the student opposite’s use of colour pens could benefit one’s own work ethic. At the same time, however, the library forces us to work without the temptations inherent in working in one’s rooms; it is, at least theoretically, rather more difficult in a library to a) spend half your day on facebook b) have a massive tantrum about one’s workload or c) talk to one’s current flame on the phone for an hour (though all, I will declare from eyewitness evidence, have been managed by certain individuals within library premises at least once.)

From that first anxious trip to the intimidating industrial-sized photocopier, to that tentative attempt to negotiate the purgatory of telnet and make a stack request, Oxford libraries are certainly – for the novice at least – a habit which is at first hard to understand. By the end of your first year, however, be assured that you will return home as a hardened library snob, happy to march into your local library and express contempt over their lack of copies of whatever obscure text is on your summer reading list. Now, isn’t that a nice thought?
 

PEMBROKE JCR are hunting for a group of students who scrawled offensive messages on photos of freshers pinned up in the JCR.
In an email sent out to students last Tuesday, JCR President Chris Bennetts explained that he was forced to take down the photos after upsetting messages were graffitied over them.
“It was to be expected that there would be some jokey amendments made to the photos, this happens every year and is absolutely fine, but some of the comments and drawings on this year’s pictures crossed a line,” he said.
Bennetts added, “It was a very stupid and inconsiderate thing for someone to do and we are investigating who is responsible.”
One Pembroke student, who wished to remain anonymous, said he was disgusted by what had happened. “I heard that people went round and wrote on girls’ pictures stuff like ‘virgin’ and on one guy’s picture they‘d written ‘never seen a clit’,” he said. “For freshers who’ve just arrived in Pembroke, it gives a pretty awful first impression, and those responsible are obviously completely idiotic or just plain malicious.”
Others expressed concern about the impact of the incident on the College’s reputation. “This doesn’t look very good for the College’s image, harassing the freshers like this. If that’d been me I’d have been properly messed up and really upset,” said one second-year.
Another member of the JCR agreed, saying, “It’s not a very Pembroke thing to happen. Whoever did it is clearly an arsehole and should man up and apologise to the College.”
The JCR Committee have said they will not tolerate such behaviour and are trying to encourage a more united student body. In his email to the JCR, Bennetts warned, “This is not something we are prepared to tolerate. A key message coming from the JCR this year is one of inclusion: everybody should feel able to participate in the JCR’s work and activities. The comments posted on the pictures ran contrary to that aim and were totally unacceptable.”
JCR OUSU Rep Chris Thursten said that the culprits’ identities were currently unknown, but that if discovered, they would be disciplined by JCR members. “This is basically people being twattish. We’re trying to get rid of this ‘cliquishness’ and push for a more inclusive college. Some of the things that were written were really nasty. If we find out who it was we’ll be having words with them,” he said.

This house believes that children need heterosexual parents:
A packed and glorious debate.Though not one whose outcome was ever in question – as opener James Dray puts it, ‘we live in Oxford; everyone’s gay’ – you might expect the Proposition to muster a more forceful argument than that children might get teased a little at school. Alas, they do not, leaving the evening void of any real intellectual titillation. Luckily, the debate’s aesthetic merits more than compensated.

Dray, clearly not believing his own argument, serves up ten minutes of charming banter before adopting his serious voice, and then it all goes tepid and tenuous. He did at least trot out the line ‘some of my best friends are gay’ with superb irony, speculate on Tryl and Omkar’s ‘exquisitely dressed’ hypothetical progeny and introduce the terms ‘rimming’ and ‘fisting’ to the debating chamber.

Opposition opener Wan also amuses, but is incisive along with it; like a whippet armed with a rapier, he plays on personal emotions with aplomb and carries all before him. This lad will go far.

Archdeacon Norman Russell favours the rhetorical tactic of attrition, and subjects the floor to a long and dreary siege. Maybe he hopes disease will break out in the opposition ranks – the coughing certainly becomes more widespread. Rev. Gaston answers with a staccato delivery like the bursts of a machine gun across an abandoned battlefield. And the battle is certainly over.

The audience subjects Stephen Green to an immature but effective sally of interruptions; Holmes and Truss deliver sound and sober speeches in opposition; Edward Leigh MP makes up in fist-clenching and citing ‘our heart of hearts’ as a legitimate statistical source, what he lacks by way of a rational thought process. A decisive victory for the opposition, with many audience members moved by the eloquence of the arguments delivered
Adoption crises; rafts of statistics; UN conventions; the opposition have all the points, but what makes this debate so one-sided is their utter conviction. Future speakers take note: believing your own rhetoric really does make a difference.

So you’re a year older than everyone else and twice as mature? That’s a good start to being a Gap Year Bore.
Got a deep mahogany tan and natural highlights? 52 grubby woven bracelets on your wrists (which will be entirely white when you eventually cut said bracelets off)? Been to South America? Thailand? Australia? Or all three? Great. You’re a star candidate for a Gap-Year Bore.

Now all you need to do is take every opportunity to bring up your amazing experiences washing lepers / breastfeeding orangutans / educating shanty-town orphans. Wearing your battered Havaianas and badly dyed pyjama trousers to lunch in the rain might create an opportunity to bring it up. Or you could just compare everything to its Third World equivalent: “this Red Bull is nothing like the Thai original. It’s laced with LSD, it’ll blow your mind!”  Or even “I just can’t get used to the taste of Coke after drinking only Inca-Kola when I was in Peru for a year…” While it’s lovely that you went out there and broadened their horizons, the rest of us are quite happy with our narrow little Oxford worldview. Keep your dreadlocks and ethnic scarves. We don’t care.

Even worse than hearing all about the Gap-Year Bore’s experiences is being stuck in a corner listening to two of them talk to each other. Inevitably they’ll have been to the same beaches and met the same people – fellow travellers called Brett and Jonty, probably Australian or Irish – God forbid anyone should talk to actual Thai people, you know?

If you do manage to wriggle out of that corner, though, and find pale wintry people in normal attire, you should be on your guard for another type of GYB – the Corporate Gapper. While others were gallivanting around the world the Corporate Gapper was beavering away building up an enviable CV at a blue-chip management consultancy or accounting firm, slaving away 9-5 with perhaps the odd awkward lunchtime strip-club outing with the Junior Partners. No endless stories here – that’s because there are none. Yes, you were paid £10 an hour for a bit of photocopying and a lot of idle facebook, and yes, you came out with a sky-high boredom threshold and shedloads of cash but you’re lacking in terms of amusing anecdotes. Luckily you can make up for it by offering your pals several years’ worth of recruitment spiel. “You get a nice fat bonus for every new innocent you corrupt, with fancy dinners at Freud’s thrown in!” Sounds fab. Unfortunately these lose their appeal once you’ve been to one and realised the hidden price – sharing your evening with the dullest people you’ve ever met. Beware children! You’re only a free cocktail away from eternal damnation in the bowels of the City.

Still, even if you resisted the charms of the Travel Gapper and the Corporate Gapper there are others, for example the Stayed-At-Home-And-Watched- Jeremy-Kyle Gapper. If you’re one of these, you won’t bore your new pals with what you did on your gap year, but will probably be so boring anyway you won’t have the opportunity. Although you will have an astonishing knowledge of relationship dynamics among the dregs of society.

Didn’t take a gap year at all? Don’t fret, you can be a Pretend Gapper. You feel so left out you’ll eagerly try and join in with tales of how you found yourself on the terrible-test-of-endurance that was your Outward Bound expedition in Year nine Easter half-term.

But beware, if you’re still reading this, perhaps feeling oh-so-smug and superior to all those silly, shallow gap-year types, you may be an Anti-Gapper: one of those who is so bitter about their own lack of interesting experiences that they will spend hours bitching about everyone who does have something to enthuse about. Gap years may not make you bigger or more clever, but they’re probably a lot of fun (or, if you went the accountancy route, at least they’re lucrative). So don’t dump on people’s stories, and maybe (possibly) they won’t dump on your own less spectacular offerings. If they do, tell them, in the words of GCSE poetry guru Simon Armitage, that “it ain’t what you do, it’s what it does to you.” And if you still feel left out you could always take a gap year of your own.

A MAGDALEN student was temporarily banned from Facebook after uploading a photo of a Brasenose fresher’s penis taken during a drinking game.
The explicit photo was snapped during a naked run around the Radcliffe Camera earlier this term after a night of heavy drinking in the Brasenose bar. This involved a ‘bleep test’ during which, for every two pints a participant failed to consume, that student had to remove an item of clothing.
At the end of the game students then ran around the Rad Cam. While three students took part in the run, only one was fully nude. One of the other students used a sock to protect his modesty while the other kept his boxers on.
The Magdalen second-year, who wished to remain anonymous, found her account had been disabled by an administrator after uploading the photo.
She said, “I tried to log in and it said that the account had been disabled. Someone had to have complained about the photo. I was banned.
“We were playing drinking games and later on we decided to do a ‘bleep test’ with shots of beer. There were thirteen levels and people who lost had to run around the Rad Cam naked.”
She added that she only regained access after writing letters of complaint to Facebook.
Another Brasenose undergraduate added, “He didn’t seem that drunk and backed out quite quickly, he wasn’t pressured into it. Some of the other colleges have quite a bad reputation whereas we didn’t force anyone. A lot of people had told him he didn’t need to do it, and loads of people refused to do it. But he didn’t seem that bothered about it. He did it after the whole thing was finished.”
The student involved, who also preferred not to be named, said, “We had been at formal hall where we had some wine and then went on to the bar. I vomited at stage five, and most people did at some point. After the bleep test, as we were heading off to Filth, the forfeits were naked runs around the Rad Cam. I was meant to do three laps and did two.”
He added, “I think it was quite funny, but I have no particular desire to be tagged in the photographs. I might not have done it if I was sober.” He said that he did not complained to the Facebook administrator and had not even seen the offending photo.
Earlier this year then Union Secretary Ben Tansey received a £50 fine after being caught wrestling naked with two other men.  Tansey was discovered by a porter at Lincoln College during the late-night antics.  The former secretary had returned from sports drinks and was according to a witness, very drunk.  The incident was the second time Tansey has been caught wrestling naked.

Here’s a random fact: 99% of women want a man in a plain white t-shirt or a plain black t-shirt, v-neck or round-neck, along with a pair of jeans – although that part is almost irrelevant. Personally, I would opt for white. It is effortlessly chic, makes boys look tanned, if not already emphasizing a tan, and for some reason gives them the appearance of having an amazing body (regardless of what it is actually like) all because of the connotations associated with a simple white t-shirt. Think about the man in the Diet Coke ad during the 11am Diet Coke break and how he drove the girls in the office crazy. It has nothing to do with his muscle bound physique – trust me. It’s the effect of the white t-shirt.

Let us go back to basics – we are talking primitive. How many episodes of desperate housewives do you have to watch to see that clothes sometimes associated with menial work are attractive. Marlon Brando in A Street Car Named Desire. James Dean in A Rebel Without Cause. Iconic films, iconic images, iconic men – iconic white t-shirt. A white t-shirt in the right fit costs nothing. It has no social associations with it. Anyone could wear it. The emphasis is on the man himself, not the clothes, the accessories or the pretense. It takes confidence to rely on nothing but a plain white t-shirt – and everyone knows that confidence is every man’s best accessory.

The idea of something that is accessible to all and yet so good is summarized in the philosophy of Andy Warhol…He talks about Coke in the same way that we can view the ‘White T-shirt’. Slightly paradoxical that I should be using an artistic genius with a confused sexuality’s ideas to illustrate why men should dress a certain way – but here it goes. Replace ‘Liz Taylor’ with ‘James Dean’, ‘Coke and Coca Cola’ with ‘White T-shirt’ and ‘Drinks and Drinking’ with ‘Wear and Wearing’: “America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it….”

The idea that anyone can wear a white t-shirt, and everyone looks good in one, is the same as the idea that anyone can drink a Coke and everyone (ok, almost everyone) likes the taste. Fashion is all about perception and associations. What do we associate the White T-shirt with? White t-shirts on men is like the underwear as outerwear trend for women. Cool, so un-metrosexual it’s great, the white t-shirt is a non-statement piece that makes a statement, or if you prefer, the statement piece that doesn’t. Nobody would ever think that a man is wearing it because of any of the above, even after reading this article, but when they do, the effect will be almost lynx like.

Style is in attitude. What a cliché, but it really is true.

 On a final parting note, I wanted to highlight a few more pertinent facts vis-à-vis the plain t-shirt. First, if you stick to white or black t-shirts – a girl I was speaking to about this today even recommended grey – you are guaranteed never to make a fashion faux pas. What I hear? “Fashion is about being daring. About trying out new things, about being original”. Well guess what! Wearing a white t-shirt is daring and original but for some reason, it still gives the impression that you just don’t care. Why? Because you are not a brand or logo slave – you see P-Diddy and Ashton Kutcher with their t-shirts saying silly things like: ‘I’m a teenage Millionaire’, ‘Jesus loves me’ and ‘Gucci’ or to bring girls into this ‘J’adore Dior’, ‘Team Jolie’, ‘Team Anniston’, ‘My boyfriend is out of town’ and ‘I’ve got the golden ticket’. Do you really want to look like some other kid in Hollywood? I’m even bored of ‘I love NY t-shirts’.

Anyway, I don’t want to slate logo bearing t-shirts too much, because they can be quite nice, and certainly fun and facetious. All that I am saying is that simplicity never goes out of fashion, and there is something natural and therefore attractive about it. By the way, I am half joking when writing this lauding article of an item of clothing that so many men take for granted, but boys: if you don’t believe me about this whole white t-shirt thing, ask the first girl you see after you read this. I dare you.