Tuesday 12th May 2026
Blog Page 3

‘If he wanted to he would’: The problem with TikTok dating advice

Jessie Jukes
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‘If he wanted to he would’: The problem with TikTok dating advice

“If he wanted to he would”. Look under the comments of any TikTok video about dating and you’ll see it repeated over and over again; it’s a promise of clarity, an explanation, a definitive answer to any and all problems that could arise in a relationship. But relationships aren’t that simple. With the rise of TikTok, and the generic, algorithm-driven dating advice that comes with it, we are continually encouraged to seek a one-size-fits-all answer to our problems. As more of us turn to an app rather than our partners or friends for advice, we risk reducing complex dynamics into 30-second videos that assume the worst, and ask for the impossible. TikTok has no shortage of “dating experts”, and their advice offers a bleak and overwhelmingly negative outlook on our relationships.

Today, I opened TikTok to see a video entitled “At the end of the day, dump him”, in which the creator listed a number of ‘flaws’ deemed worthy of a breakup. Among them, the simple act of questioning if your boyfriend has cheated on you: “at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter whether or not he was actually cheating on you, the fact is you’re questioning [it]”. Now, in some cases, this might be a valid point  – yes, of course your boyfriend shouldn’t be making you feel like he has cheated on you. But I can’t help but wonder about the effects that this sort of content has on relationships where this isn’t the case. Or relationships where one party is naturally prone to doubts, and is convinced by someone they’ve never met to dump a boyfriend who is “trying his best”, because – as this TikTok put it – “his best ain’t it”. Every relationship is different, and when we simplify all problems down to one issue with the exact same solution, we strip away the nuance that real-life situations often require.

These TikToks, along with offering an overwhelmingly negative outlook, encourage unrealistic standards for our dating lives. Entering this side of TikTok, you are met with a barrage of content centred around communication.We’re not meant to be reachable 24/7, but by telling us to expect this, these “dating experts” are only setting us up for failure. Creators often make assertions about how long it should take to receive a reply to a text message (their answers all differ), but also about how often you should see one another (on which they also can’t agree). Their advice is the same for developing relationships; I have seen countless Tiktoks claiming that if someone is interested in you, they will make the effort to seek you out. But the reality is that this kind of constant open communication isn’t natural. If your partner is working, busy, or even just in need of an hour to themselves, not texting back  does not mean that they don’t care about you, and TikTok should not tell us that it does. 

This kind of advice doesn’t just set unrealistic expectations, but actively discourages real communication. Instead of having a conversation with our partners, we are encouraged to analyse, dissect, interpret, and ultimately to assume the worst. Even where there were no issues in the relationship, this ensures that they can be easily created. Tiktok constructs a paranoia, whereby taking time to reply to a message suddenly represents a lack of interest, spending too much time with friends becomes a sign that they don’t care. We begin to hold our partners to unrealistic standards, quietly “testing” them to see if they will fail, rather than being honest with them about what we need. But relationships aren’t built on mind-reading. A simple conversation would suffice to fix most of the issues that these TikToks claim to resolve. But that wouldn’t generate enough views. And therein lies the problem. 

The people making these videos know exactly what will work to gain more clicks, more likes, more followers. They know that the more dramatic they are, the more likely their viewers are to continue watching, and this in turn ensures that the TikTok algorithm suggests similarly outlandish videos. And so the cycle continues; we see a video telling us that something our partner did is breakup-worthy (like when they took too long to reply to a text the other day), and we watch it until the end. This ensures that we are shown similar content. We then begin to overthink (how long will it take them to reply to this text?), and draw the worst possible conclusions when we don’t get the desired outcome. All the while the comments section continues to whisper “if he wanted to he would”. And so we continue to doubt our relationship, watching more videos for an explanation – and the one provided is ultimately generic and hollow. 

At this point, the problem isn’t necessarily the relationship at all. It’s the way that we’re being told to interpret it. These videos, through capitalising on an insecurity, manage to create problems even where there were none, so that their creators can then offer a solution. These TikTok “dating experts” may offer us a quick fix to our problems, but relationships don’t need generic answers or universal solutions – they need communication. So, if we want a relationship, maybe we should look away from our screens and towards the person that we want to build it with.

Honorary Degree recipients announced for 2026

Ilya Rosenbaum
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Honorary Degree recipients announced for 2026

The University of Oxford has announced its 2026 honorary degree recipients, with seven individuals to be conferred with degrees at the Encaenia ceremony on 24th June. 

The honourees come from a wide variety of careers. Those awarded include former world number one tennis player Billie Jean King; economist and Nobel Laureate Professor Daniel Acemoglu; and former chief executive of GSK, Dame Emma Walmsley DBE. They are joined by dancer and choreographer Carlos Acosta CBE; biochemist Professor Katalan Karikó  and Nobel Laureate Professor Shuji Nakamura; and Emmy nominated filmmaker and historian Henry Louis Gates Jr.

The University has been granting honorary degrees since the 1400s, whilst the Encaenia ceremony can be dated back to the 16th century, assuming its current form around 1760. 

Recipient Billy Jean King won 39 Grand Slam singles, doubles and mixed doubles titles, including winning a record 20 Wimbledon championships. She is also known for campaigning to equalise prize money in professional competitions across both womens’ and mens’ professional championships. Carlos Acosta was awarded a CBE in 2014 and retired from Classical Ballet in 2016, but continued to choreograph and perform.

Professor Acemoglu was awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2024 alongside two others for “studies of how institutions are formed and affect prosperity”.  Fellow recipient Professor Nakamura was also awarded a Nobel Prize, for Physics in 2014, for emitting energy-saving efficient blue light-emitting diodes, whilst Professor Karikó won a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discoveries enabling nucleoside-modified mRNA vaccines.

Dame Walmsley worked at GSK for 15 years and served as Chief Executive Officer of GSK for 9 years, retiring in December 2025. She is joined on the list of honourees by Henry Louis Gates Jr, known for his work as a literary critic, professor and history, as well as a literary critic. Gates was nominated for an Emmy Award for “Exceptional Merit in Documentary Filmmaking”  in 2022 for his work as Executive Producer for the documentary Frederik Douglas: In Five Speeches.

Honorary degree recipients are recognised for their distinction in their field or service to society. Previous honorees include former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, former Chilean President Michelle Bachelet, and Monty Python comedian Sir Michael Palin. Decisions on recipients of honorary degrees are made by a selection committee. Encaenia 2026 comes after Lord Hague awarded eight honorary degrees in February this year in a Special Honorary Degree Ceremony to celebrate the beginning of Lord Hague’s term as Chancellor at the University. 

The ceremony involves the heads of colleges, university dignitaries and holders of Oxford doctoral degrees in Divinity, Civil Law, Medicine, Letters, Science, and Music. The honourees assemble and walk in procession to the Sheldonian Theatre. There, they are introduced by the Public Orator with a speech in Latin, and finally granted their new degrees by the Chancellor, Lord William Hague. Students at the University may attend the ceremony, with tickets released on  5th May. 

Oxford research changes scientists’ understanding of the development of complex life

Stanley Arlidge
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Oxford research changes scientists’ understanding of the development of complex life

A collaborative study by researchers from the University of Oxford’s Museum of Natural History and Oxford’s Department of Earth Science, alongside experts from Yunnan University in China, has shown that complex animal life developed earlier than previously thought. 

According to a University of Oxford press release, the new discoveries include fossils containing the distant relatives of starfish and sea cucumbers. Relatives of deuterostomes, a group of which humans are a part, were found in the Ediacaran period for the first time.  Some fossils even contained species completely unknown to science. One of these new species, according to a statement by co-author Dr Frankie Dunn, “looks a lot like the sand worm in Dune”. Dr Luke Parry, another co-author on the study, said in a statement these discoveries reveal “a transitional community: the weird world of the Ediacaran giving way to the Cambrian”. 

The work, published in the journal Science earlier this month, is based on new discoveries at a fossil assemblage known as the Jiangchuan Biota in Eastern Yunnan, China. It shows that some complex life forms whose development was previously traced to the Cambrian explosion – a period of rapid biodiversity growth 535 million years ago – were in fact present in the late Ediacaran period (554 – 539 million years ago). 

Gaorong Li, the study’s lead author, told Cherwell that these finds help “bridge what once seemed to be a sharp gap between the Ediacaran and the Cambrian. It shows that…some of the anatomical and ecological foundations of the Cambrian Animal life were already in place beforehand.” 

This team drew its conclusions from discoveries made by Li in his earlier work on the Jiangchuan Biota. In 2022, he “noticed some puzzling specimens” of algae which differed from those previously known about in the area. By 2023, he and his colleagues realised that the site “preserved not just algae but also genuine animal body fossils”. The preserved animal fossils were the focus of this latest research.  

Li began his work on the Jiangchuan Biota in Yunnan before making the move to Oxford. Reflecting on the partnership between the two universities, Li told Cherwell: “The collaboration was crucial because it brought together complementary expertise.” Yunnan possessed the “field experience” from “years of work on the Jiangchuan Biota”, while Oxford had the “expertise in worldwide Ediacaran and early animal fossils”. 

University announces new Centre for Korean Studies at Schwarzman Centre opening

Isaac Gavaghan
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University announces new Centre for Korean Studies at Schwarzman Centre opening

The University of Oxford announced plans to establish the Oxford Centre for Korean Studies, at the official opening of the Schwarzman Centre over the weekend. 

Approved last month and set to open in October, the centre – which will have an estimated budget of  £3.76 million – forms part of a gradual increase in Korean language and history academic provision at the University over the last two decades. 

In 2006, the University also created an Associate Professorship in Korean History, followed in 2007 by a Professorship in Korean Language and Literature. The new centre is being led by the two current holders of University of Oxford professorships in Korean history and language, Professor James Lewis and Professor Jieun Kiaer, respectively, as well as Dr Young-hae Chi, a Korean language lecturer.

For undergraduates, Korean can be taken as an additional language if they are on a course with Japanese or Chinese as the primary language, whilst for graduates, a Master’s of Korean Studies program is available. Since Michaelmas Term 2024, Korean classes have also been offered by the University’s Language Centre.

Korean media outlets have depicted the centre as a response to the “Korean wave” in global popular culture, referencing the growth in popularity of South Korean cultural exports, including films, K-pop, and K-dramas. The Centre for Korean Studies also reflects a broader trend in increased study of East Asia at Oxford, with the Nissan Institute of Japanese Studies opened at St. Anthony’s College in 1981 and the opening of the University’s China Centre in 2008.

Professor Jieun Kiaer, of Hertford College, described the centre’s future English-language scholarship into Korean culture as important for the long-term continuation of Korean studies. 

The opening of the Centre included a free day of events and performances, including performances by the Scottish Ensemble and Chamber Choir Scola Cantorum, alongside the display of artwork created using artificial intelligence and theatre productions. Speaking ahead of the opening, John Fulljames, director of the Schwarzman Centre’s cultural programme, described the Centre as a “new public home for the humanities” and “a place where we can all come together to make sense of what it means to be human in today’s world”.

Oxford Competition Dance dazzles in first place

Niamh Tooher
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Oxford Competition Dance dazzles in first place

Going into Loughborough, OUCD’s Varsity loss on 21st February still stung fresh. Losing to Cambridge had been a difficult result for the team, particularly after our win the previous year. Despite an unusually warm and welcoming atmosphere from Cambridge (it’s always friendly, but often on Varsity day tinged with a subtle frost), the team left feeling deflated. 

With a national competition ahead of us, however, there was little time to dwell on our sorrows. Falling between Varsity and Loughborough, our annual showcase allowed us time to refine our pieces and, most importantly, rediscover our love for performance, growing closer than ever as a team.

Two weeks can make a world of difference. With the Loughborough University Dance Competition taking place from 7th to 8th March, this short window of time required the team to learn quickly from our loss, coming back stronger than ever.

Loughborough is the closest thing competition dance has to BUCS: with 29 universities, over 1,400 dancers, and a full weekend of competition across multiple styles, coming out with a win is the victory of all victories. Less about a single rivalry, the day determines national standing.

This year, for the second time in three years, OUCD reigned victorious. A well-earned first place in this national competition almost healed the wounds we had nursed after our Varsity defeat only two weeks before. Adding to our success, OUCD were awarded Overall Best University, alongside two other headline titles: Best Dancer, won by Josh Redfern, and Best Choreography for Advanced Contemporary, choreographed by Christie Sardjono. To come away with all three awards is something the competition has never seen before.

Beyond that, the results were consistently strong across the board. OUCD placed second in the Commercial category (choreographed by Grace Hillier), and third in both Contemporary (choreographed by Christie Sardjono) and Wildcard (choreographed by Alex Somers). A consistently strong performance across a diversity of styles is one of OUCD’s key strengths.

This breadth is typical of OUCD. As a team, we train across a range of styles, including ballet, jazz, contemporary, commercial, and hip hop. Not everyone does everything, but the overlap between dancers means each piece is built from a slightly different combination of strengths.

The choreography award for Advanced Contemporary reflected a painstaking process that began months earlier. Pieces are developed gradually, through rehearsals that involve a lot of reworking, refining, and, if we’re lucky, Christie exclaiming: “Holy sh*t, that looks really good!” Like any piece of artwork, by the time we present them, they’ve usually changed quite significantly from where they began.

Dance occupies a slightly ambiguous position within Oxford sport. We train at Iffley, deal with injuries, and go through Sports Federation processes like any other club. At the same time, competition is partly subjective: performance, storytelling, artistry, and movement quality matter just as much as technique. That can make results harder to predict, but also makes outcomes like this particularly significant.

For President Ruby Suss-Francksen and the team, the result was a strong way to round off the competition season. Coming so soon after Varsity, it also offered a different perspective on how the year has gone overall, complementing other recent milestones – most notably securing our first ever Extraordinary Full Blue for Lucy Williams after her ‘Best Dancer’ award at the same competition last year, and increasing our provision of half blue awards. While Varsity remains an important marker, Loughborough is a broader one. To finish first there, and to do so ahead of Cambridge, among others, was a reminder of what the team is capable of on a national stage.

With the competition season now over, OUCD will turn to Trinity Term performances, showcasing our national standard choreography at Brasenose Ball and Magdalen Ball. That said, Loughborough stands out not only as a peak in OUCD’s competitive year but in its entire competitive history.

‘It happens here and it’s our responsibility to stop it’: Oxford’s anti-sexual violence campaign

Beatrix Arnold
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‘It happens here and it’s our responsibility to stop it’: Oxford’s anti-sexual violence campaign

CW: Rape, sexual violence, sexual harassment.

With each headline, the world becomes increasingly desensitised to sexual violence. 62 million men go unnoticed, swept up by the information overload of the online sphere; the reality becomes ineffable, obfuscated by over-saturation. Memes about Epstein, jokes about Clavicular, and discourse on the manosphere have seeped into our digital vernacular, such as to become ubiquitous, and, consequently, normalised. Nor, in the University of Oxford, is abuse of power, on the level of both students and staff, an alien concept. The result of this over-abundance is not to destigmatise a sensitive topic, but to train us out of outrage and into critical stultification. For the co-presidents of It Happens Here, Aparna Shankar and Maddie Gillett, and the two policy officers, Isobel Cammish and Abby Smith, literacy about consent and sexual violence is needed now more than ever.

It Happens Here, established in 2013, is an anti-sexual violence campaign led by Oxford students, which advocates for policy change at the University, as well as running events and offering support services for students. They were instrumental in the 2021 launch of the Safe Lodge Scheme, providing a point of refuge for students in distress. Likewise, their campaigning played a major role in effecting the University’s ban on intimate relationships between academics and their students in 2023. 

The very structure of the campaign’s team – including a BAME rep, a Class rep, a Disability rep, and an LGBTQ+ rep – is shaped by their recognition that an individual’s experience of sexual violence is influenced by the confluence of all aspects of their identity; reprising an ossified approach in each unique case risks forfeiting nuance and sensitivity. By embedding their values into their team’s set-up, the society has committed itself to an intersectional approach. 

Aparna, who began working on It Happens Here as BAME rep, is keen to emphasise that “people of colour face intersectional barriers when it comes to reporting sexual violence”. Not only do people, and particularly women, of colour experience higher levels of sexual violence, but, furthermore, issues of self-blame “can be compounded by racial differences”.

Nor is race the only factor which can aggravate such cases. For Maddie, who started out as LGBTQ+ rep, the work of It Happens Here would be incomplete without nuanced consideration of how queerness can influence how a person experiences sexual violence. “You can’t talk about sexual violence without talking about the practice of safe sex”, she notes. This becomes a problem when, as is all too often the case, “safe sex is taught from a very heterosexual lens”, generating additional hurdles in the process of coming to terms with, or even recognising, instances of sexual violation. 

It Happens Here, along with numerous other student societies, including Class Act and OULGBTQ+ society, was disaffiliated from the SU a few years ago, as part of a broader transformation of SU structure. The change had profound ramifications for the campaign: having lost their funding, “for a while we just weren’t really up and running”. Without this stable source of income, Aparna explains, “we rely a lot on college JCRs which can be unreliable. And so when we’re putting on events, it’s a bit more difficult.

“We are managing it, and that’s why it helps to have such a large network, because it’s not just committee members who can apply, anyone could apply to help us get funding from their college.”

The challenges induced by the dearth of funding as a fallout from the SU disaffiliation are only compounded by concomitant struggles to ensure engagement. It Happens Here is, Maddie admits, “not a very well-known society”, and losing the network that came with the support of a centralised administrative body meant that “we went a bit underground, because it’s a big structural change to navigate.”

Yet the problem has its roots in something beyond the practical. It is, perhaps, an inevitable corollary of the nature of the campaign itself. Sexual violence is necessarily an uncomfortable topic, but just as commonly a misunderstood one as well. The new presidents are intent on addressing “the many intricate and complex ways that sexual violence goes unreported and not talked about in society”

As a result of the myriad misconceptions that surround the issue, the campaign suffers from a lack of consistent engagement. “I’ve had a lot of people come up to me and go, oh, I haven’t, you know, I haven’t been a victim of sexual violence, so can I still come to the events? And absolutely you can.” Aparna explains. “It’s a collective effort. So, I want people to feel comfortable coming to our events, even if they’re not a survivor of sexual violence.”

Yet the problem with engagement is not limited to those who have no experience with sexual harassment. Even survivors often face difficulties, whether external or internal, when seeking help from the community. “There’s another barrier to sexual violence. It’s not an obvious thing that happens to people, as in sometimes it takes people a long time to realise if they have been sexually assaulted or raped, or if they’ve survived some sort of sexual violence.” 

It’s difficult to keep the thread of the narrative taut within the chaos of university life, of events large and small, of conflicting emotions. After all, everything blurs when held too near. The realisation can take months for some – for others, it takes even longer.

“I always think of it as, you know, if someone walks past you on the street and just slaps you in the face, you know, you’ve been slapped in the face, you know?” Yet sexual violence is rarely so clear-cut, particularly since, as Aparna notes, “you’re made to feel like what happened to you doesn’t matter.” The tendency to complicate the issue with introspection is dangerously prevalent, in large part attributable to “that inherent self-blame reaction towards it”, and the “challenges of invalidating yourself”.

Often, this is exacerbated by semantic difficulties, as Aparna explains: “I think that even the term sexual violence can be unhelpful sometimes, because people tend to have an idea of what they think sexual violence looks like, I don’t know, a stranger in an alley who uses a weapon, for example.” The harsh picture that the term conjures up belies the reality. It is an inherently violent experience to have one’s boundaries crossed, regardless of whether there was physical injury involved, regardless of who the perpetrator might have been. A hazy conception of what falls within a certain definition “can stop people from accessing these forms of support. They might see something like the Sexual Harassment and Violence Support Service and think, oh, that’s not for me, because my experience wasn’t inherently violent, there’s probably someone else who might need it more than me.”

Reporting sexual violence is inevitably a harrowing process. Pain requires proof, consent becomes a negotiation, and the burden falls on the survivor to explain a story they never asked to tell. Yet for every psychological barrier to seeking help overcome, an institutional complication arises. Safeguarding provision at the University, as well as the process of dealing with a case of sexual violence, all too often becomes mired in bureaucratic reticulation, an oppressive complexity that is, on the whole, exacerbated by Oxford’s collegiate system. When responsibility for student welfare is divided between individual colleges and the central University, a transparent procedure to follow when seeking help is elusive. 

“The college system means there’s a lot of inconsistency in policy,” Maddie points out. “Whereas in some universities there’s a centralised policy on spiking, for example, each college is different here.” 

When students are immersed in the microcosm of a particular college, they are less likely to be familiar with wider university resources. “I don’t think many people know about the Sexual Harassment and Violence Support Service. I don’t think people know about centralised welfare, things other than uni counselling.”

The tendency towards insularity inherent within the collegiate system, as Isobel notes, carries the potential to help or harm: a close-knit community can provide a crucial support network in a time of crisis, or, conversely, entrap a survivor in oppressive proximity to the circumstances, or even to the perpetrator, of what they’ve experienced. Oxford’s landscape narrows with the ever-hovering possibility of confrontation, or familiar places become corroded by association. 

Yet this is only part of the picture. For Oxford’s postgraduates, who make up just over 50% of the student body, the structure of the University generates additional problems. “At least in my experience, postgrad students feel really disconnected from central university bodies,” Abby explains. In her fresher’s week, the topic of sexual violence “wasn’t even covered.”

“There’s an assumption that because we’re all older, there are just things that you don’t have to lecture people about and you just assume that they know, which I think can be really harmful… everyone’s coming from a different background, a different system, a different structure, you can’t assume that we are all on the same understanding.”

Beyond the college system, antiquarianism, inevitably, characterises much of the University’s make-up. Apart from inculcating an intimidating atmosphere of grandiose severity, which, rooted as it is in patriarchal tradition, can act as a deterrent in reporting cases of sexual violence, Oxford’s long-standing prestige and distinctive practices give rise to additional problems.

“Oxford’s structure is more likely to allow members of staff to keep their positions, like we’ve heard a lot about this in the news,” Maddie points out. “And it’s very hard to get fired as a fellow. And you’re someone who’s interacting often one-on-one with your students, whereas you wouldn’t be at another uni. So I think the employment structure of Oxford is something that is problematic.” The status of Oxford’s colleges as individual legal entities often works to fragment accountability. Many academics have employment contracts with both their college and their faculty, adding a further layer of complication to the handling of allegations. 

Isobel notes the atypical dynamics engendered by the relationships between students and tutors at Oxford: “You have drinks with your tutors, your tutors will buy you alcohol, you’ll have dinner with them, you’ll maybe be in these like one-on-one situations with them a lot more, which is a bit weird.”

A spokesperson for the University told Cherwell: “Sexual misconduct, violence and harassment have no place at Oxford. We strive to ensure that Oxford is always a safe space for all students and staff and take concerns seriously, applying clear, robust procedures. Support for those affected is a priority, and we take precautionary and/or disciplinary action where justified.”

A survey published in 2023 by the ongoing project OUR SPACE found that half of Oxford students report having experienced sexual harassment. Within the University support system, the 2024-25 academic year saw an increase in student referrals to the Sexual Harassment and Violence Support Service. It is easy to resort to despondency in the face of such a seemingly unassailable challenge. When the personal is reduced to the numerical, tangible impact becomes difficult to discern. But Aparna notes that the metric of their success has different aspects: “I think a lot of it can be quite individual sometimes, in terms of individual people reaching out to kind of tell you, hey, this, this helped, you know?

“It’s hard to see the long-term impact of what you’re doing when you’re doing it. But it’s reminders like these of people, because if there are a few people who are being vocal about it, chances are the vast majority of the rest of them think it, but don’t say it.” To live as a survivor of sexual violence, especially when faced with an impression of institutional inaction, is “an isolating thing, but to have a campaign in Oxford and people that care about this very deeply, so that they give up their own time. It’s a validating connection.”

As the presidents begin the new term, they are not overwhelmed into inaction, but focused on the tangible next steps they can take. “Right now, we want to get our name out. We want people to know that we exist. If you’re a survivor of sexual violence, it’s an isolating feeling, because you don’t feel like the world is on your side. It feels like you’re the only person that’s going through this. So to have a network available to you, to have other people that are willing to go to events and make time to support you – it’s a feeling that’s unmatched for a survivor.”

“A lot of it’s so slow going in policy work, and we’d rather have a campaign that is very useful and well thought-out,” Isobel adds, “but I do really love the idea that it’ll be having an impact on each generation of students. It’s a slow-moving process, and we’d rather do it right.”

Protecting students against all forms of sexual violence, and providing support for those who have survived it, is a duty that falls not only on the University as an institution, but on the individuals who make up its body, both staff and students. “This is an ongoing issue that requires everyone to pitch in”, Aparna emphasises. “It’s everyone’s problem. It affects everyone in your life.”

“I always like the phrase, it happens here, and it’s our responsibility to stop it. Because it is the responsibility of each and every one of us.”

It Happens Here: https://www.ithappenshere.co.uk 

It Happens Here is not a support service, but a student-led campaign.

University Sexual Harassment and Violence Support Service (SHVSS): https://www.ox.ac.uk/students/welfare/supportservice 

University Independent Sexual Violence Advisor (ISVA): https://www.ox.ac.uk/students/welfare/supportservice/university-independent-sexual-violence-advisor-isva 

Harassment Advisor Network: https://edu.admin.ox.ac.uk/harassment-advisor-network-0 

‘What we need is action’: Dr Lakasing on maternity care, misinformation, and the NHS crisis

Hattie Simpson
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‘What we need is action’: Dr Lakasing on maternity care, misinformation, and the NHS crisis

Maternity care in the NHS has become a site of crisis. A series of high-profile reviews into unsafe care, rising maternal mortality rates, and persistent staff shortages has exposed a system under strain, one that disproportionately harms women from minority ethnic backgrounds and deprived areas. Most recently, the government has commissioned a national investigation into maternity care to be led by Oxford’s own Baroness Amos, Master of University College. Reports accumulate, inquiries are launched, failures are identified, recommendations follow – and yet the pattern repeats. The question is no longer whether there is a problem, but why it has proven so resistant to change. 

For Dr Lorin Lakasing, a consultant obstetrician who has spent more than three decades working in NHS maternity care, the answer is not especially mysterious. “This is not a system that’s working for anyone at the moment”, she says, describing a service that is failing both patients and the staff tasked with caring for them. Speaking to me from her clinic whilst still in her scrubs, it is clear that Lakasing’s life revolves around her profession. What is equally clear, however, is that she finds the job she loves increasingly untenable. 

What is striking, when speaking to Lakasing, is the sheer difference between the current system and the one she entered. Obstetrics was not a long-held ambition: she had initially been drawn to renal medicine, working with young patients on a dialysis unit, but found herself pulled in a different direction during a placement on a labour ward. It was, she recalls, “pandemonium”, with every room full – but also energising. “I just like this buzz. I like the adrenaline. I like all of this.” The appeal wasn’t just in the pace, but also the immediacy of the work – that decisions had to be made quickly but that their consequences were visible. It was possible, as she puts it, to “shift the dial”. The work was hard, but it was also clear in its purpose and grounded in shared responsibility.

That clarity, Lakasing argues, has eroded over time, not through a single reform but what she describes as a “perfect storm” of smaller changes. These shifts have accumulated slowly, reshaping both the structure of care and the experience for patients. “The minute-to-minute care [has become] less rewarding”, she reflects, describing a system that has become “less human, more process driven”. Care delivered by a team from a wide range of specialities, now central to how maternity services are organised, often manifests as a fragmented model in practice, with decisions made in meetings or on screens by clinicians who may never actually meet the patient. At the same time, the demands placed on doctors’ time have also changed significantly. Junior staff, she notes, are increasingly preoccupied with documentation and compliance, to the point that “they’re not actually interacting with the woman and explaining to her what’s going on”. What was once a patient-focused environment has become layered with bureaucracy.

The consequences of this shift have been profound for clinicians. Where Lakasing once remembers camaraderie and a shared sense of purpose, she now describes “a culture of fear and worry and blame”. The pressures of the job haven’t diminished but they have been redirected, demanding a  “constant sort of firefighting… just being able to survive to the next shift.” In this context, rising levels of burnout are understandably inevitable. This is compounded by the changes to the broader experience of  those entering the profession: “I think now you guys are all qualifying with debt, with all sorts of uncertainties about job prospects… I see how the mentality changes.” The result is a workforce navigating not only the demands of clinical care, but also a far more precarious professional landscape.

For patients, these changes have made a significant difference in terms of how they experience maternity care and care across the NHS. Consultations become shorter and interactions more impersonal. It is in this context that Lakasing understands the growing turn towards online sources of information: “If you get some five minutes of very bland midwifery interaction where they’re looking at the screen more than they are at you and you have a list of questions and you don’t feel like they’re answered, then you will look elsewhere.” 

What concerns her isn’t this instinct to seek the information, but the nature of what is found. She describes the rise of “harmful birthing narratives” – belief systems that present particular approaches to pregnancy and childbirth as inherently superior, often tied to moralised ideas of what it means to be a “good” mother. These narratives can often be difficult to challenge, particularly since they resonate with patients who already feel unheard or ignored by the system.

In extreme cases, the consequences can be devastating. Lakasing points to a recent case involving the deaths of both mother and baby, shaped in part by decisions influenced by online advice following a traumatic first birth. But her emphasis isn’t on the advice itself, but what preceded it: a failure of care that left the patient unwilling to return to the system. The problem, in other words, isn’t simply the misinformation available online, but the absence of relationships within healthcare that feel trustworthy enough to counter it. “The biggest victims are of course the patients”, she says, though she is equally clear that staff are also caught within the same failing structures.

A significant part of the issue, in Lakasing’s view, lies in how success is defined and measured within the NHS. Targets and regulatory frameworks have come to dominate the assessment of maternity services, often in ways that distort rather than support good care. “They are the crux of the problem.” The emphasis on measuring the service, she argues, has led to a system in which “we’re so process driven that we’re pretty much treating patient outcomes as an incidental byproduct of a great process we have”. 

The problem is not inherently the metrics, but that they frequently fail to capture what actually matters. The widely cited case of the Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust clearly illustrates this. The trust was praised for its low caesarean rate yet, just months later, became the focus of an inquiry that exposed significant failures in care, which may have led to the deaths of more than 200 infants and 9 mothers, and left other babies with life-changing injuries. “When we have metrics that don’t make sense, we get really bad behaviours”, she notes.

Attempts to address these problems through public inquiries have consistently fallen short. “They’ve all failed”, she says, arguing that earlier investigations have been too shaped by management perspectives that fail to reflect the realities of delivering care “on the shop floor”. More recent inquiries, focused on amplifying the voices of ‘harmed patients’, risk creating a different kind of distortion by implying that all adverse outcomes are preventable. “That’s clearly not true”, she says, explaining how “there are people who have very good outcomes whose care has been pretty ropey”, just as there have equally been “people where all the right things were done, but unfortunately, things didn’t work out as we had hoped”. The danger she suggests is that these approaches also feed a culture of blame without offering meaningful solutions. “What we need is action… proper, sensible, focused action.”

Digital reform, often framed as a solution to many of these challenges, sits uneasily within this picture. Lakasing acknowledges it as an “inevitable consequence of the modern age” but questions its implementation and impact. NHS systems remain inconsistent and under-resourced, with different trusts using incompatible software and “trying to run those ever more sophisticated software programs on pretty archaic hardware”. More fundamentally, digital tools don’t always translate into better care. She describes the example of patients accessing blood test results online, only to have them flagged on the NHS App as abnormal despite being perfectly typical in pregnancy. At the same time, digital innovation also risks exacerbating existing inequalities. “We do have refugees, asylum seekers… women who are homeless, women who are trafficked… I just worry that anything that might add to that would be a problem.” Access to digital healthcare assumes resources and confidence that just aren’t as evenly distributed as the policies imagine.

None of this, Lakasing is clear, lends itself to quick fixes. “This is my problem with politicians”, she says, “they’re always looking for a quick fix”. But the issues she describes are cumulative, and so too must be the solutions. “If you’re playing the long game, you need long-term strategies”. What she returns to, therefore, is something more fundamental: the need for a “unified set of aims” centred on safe outcomes rather than the processes used to demonstrate them. Without that maternity units become “very good at ticking the boxes that we’re being assessed on… that doesn’t mean that our outcomes are good”.

For those entering the profession, her assessment is both candid and cautiously hopeful. “Truthfully, we are in a particularly bad place at the moment, but it’s got to get better. It can’t not get better.” There is, in that, a sense of inevitability: “People are always going to want to have babies”. The future of maternity care, she suggests, will depend less on top-down reform and more on those moving through the system: the next generation of doctors – the medical students that will one day be our obstetricians and gynaecologists – who may be more willing to question its assumptions and reshape its priorities. “I tell the world to be hopeful and to come and see the wards and get stuck in”, she says, emphasising the enduring appeal of the work itself.

Lakasing, for her part, remains deeply committed to that work. And despite everything, her final reflection is unequivocal: “I have not regretted being an obstetrician, not for a singular minute of any day of my life.” It is a striking statement – a reminder that, even within a system under strain, the value of the work itself remains clear.

Student societies condemn reports of Oxford Union invite to Tommy Robinson

Ned Remington and Hattie Simpson
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Student societies condemn reports of Oxford Union invite to Tommy Robinson

Several student societies have condemned reports that Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, also known as Tommy Robinson, has been invited to speak at the Oxford Union. Yaxley-Lennon is alleged to have been invited to speak at the Week 5 debate on the motion “This House believes the West is right to be suspicious of Islam”.

In a joint statement posted on Instagram by Oxford Students Against Discrimination and Stand Up To Racism UK, they condemned the invitation “in the strongest possible terms”. They also called on Oxford Union President Arwa Elrayess to confirm that the invitation has been rescinded; “issue a public statement apologising for extending the invitation and promising full transparency with speakers’ events”; and “acknowledge the harm” caused to students by the decision. 

It Happens Here (IHH) raised concerns about the rhetoric used by Yaxley-Lennon, which they described as racialising sexual violence. IHH told Cherwell: “When cases of sexual violence are used to advance anti-Muslim sentiment, the focus is shifted from survivors onto a political agenda…. His presence signals to survivors that their experiences are being instrumentalised, instead of taken seriously.”

In a statement published on Instagram, IHH also joined Oxford Feminist Society, Cuntry Living Zine, Intersectional Uprising Oxford, and Oxford University Women of Colour Society in calling for an immediate withdrawal of the invitation of Yaxley-Lennon. They have demanded “a formal apology and accountable action through new published policy”, and called for “the Union to be transparent about all future speakers”.

A spokesperson for the Oxford African and Caribbean Society (ACS) also criticised the reported invitation. They told Cherwell: “We reject the notion that ‘debate’ requires the inclusion of [such] viewpoints…. Granting Robinson an academic stage at a time of increased far-right activity confers a degree of respectability to ideologies that have historically marginalised our communities.”

In addition, a spokesperson for Oxford Students Amnesty International told Cherwell: “Amnesty International believes in supporting all democratic rights, including freedom of speech and expression. However, Yaxley-Lennon’s history of [criticism] towards Muslims, immigrants and other groups has endangered, and continues to endanger, students at the University of Oxford and Oxford Brookes University…His presence at the Oxford Union infringes upon the [opportunity] of all students to live and study in an atmosphere of safety and respect.”

The reported invitation comes within the context of longstanding accusations against Yaxley-Lennon of Islamophobia and intimidation. He was a co-founder of the English Defence League in 2009, whose supporters have repeatedly targeted Muslim communities and mosques across the UK. He has also been convicted on multiple occasions, including for contempt of court in 2018 after livestreaming defendants accused of sexual exploitation outside a trial in Leeds, in breach of reporting restrictions. He was jailed for 18 months after admitting to the charge.

Yaxley-Lennon has faced further convictions for assault and harassment, and has been widely criticised for his rhetoric, accused of fuelling anti-Muslim sentiment. His public statements have included describing Muslim refugees to the UK as “fake refugees”, a 2011 threat to “every single Muslim watching….the Islamic community would feel the full force of the English Defence League” if another Islamist terror attack were to take place, and a 2018 admission that he “doesn’t care” if he “incites fear” of the UK’s Muslim community. 

He previously warned members of the press: “If you’re a journalist and you think your office or your home is a safe space…it’s not”, and referred to a female BBC journalist as a “slag” after Yaxley-Lennon was questioned by police over an alleged assault of a man at London St Pancras Station in 2025. Yaxley-Lennon was not charged over the incident.

The Oxford Student Greens told Cherwell that while “a diversity of opinion can be conducive to intellectual debate, there is no space for the kind of inflammatory, hateful rhetoric that these figures promote”. They added that “fearmongering through the persecution of minority groups is a coward’s tactic used by people like Stephen Yaxley-Lennon… to push a political agenda”.

In a statement published on Instagram, the Oxford Labour Club also criticised the invitation, saying it was “disgusted” by the decision, writing that while “free speech is important… that does not mean that Tommy Robinson, a far-right extremist convicted of assault and harassment, should be platformed by the Union”. The statement further accused the Union of choosing publicity instead of taking a stand against the far-right, adding that Yaxley-Lennon “has stirred up racism, xenophobia, and hate”.

Turning Point Oxford defended the Union’s decision on free speech grounds. The President of Turning Point Oxford told Cherwell: “The Oxford Union is well within its right to platform whomever it wants… this would be the perfect opportunity for those who vehemently disagree with Tommy Robinson to put his ideas to the test”. They added that Yaxley-Lennon is “a culturally relevant figure in British politics” and that “the debate is of incredible importance”.

When approached, the Union did not confirm whether Stephen Yaxley-Lennon had been invited. A spokesperson told Cherwell that the committee “works tirelessly to curate a termly programme…[giving] members the opportunity to challenge…a broad range of speakers”, adding that “speakers for this term are still being confirmed”. They added that the Union “only host[s] speakers who agree to be challenged”, and that details of high-profile events are often released later “to mitigate any potential security risks…[which] is not a departure from normal practice”.

The response from across the spectrum of student societies represents extraordinary action, and the spokesperson from Amnesty told Cherwell that they were in touch with other student societies to discuss further action. Oxford Stand Up To Racism have organised a protest to take place outside the Oxford Union on Thursday, 28th May, which has been promoted online by multiple other student societies.

Greening the Met Gala through Oxford fashion

Cerys Bennison
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Greening the Met Gala through Oxford fashion

With Anna Wintour trotting around New York and cosying up with Lauren Sanchez Bezos, it is no surprise that the 2026 Met Gala is hitting highly controversial seas. The gala itself needs no introduction: as the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s fundraiser, it is undoubtedly the world’s highest profile fashion event, with the red (or pink, or blue) carpet rolled out every first Monday in May to a galaxy of camera flashbulbs. Instantly dubbed the party of the year, it was founded in 1948 by publicist Eleanor Lambert to establish the self-funded Costume Institute. High-flying dictators of fashion – like Diana Vreeland and Anna Wintour today – have turned the Met Gala from a New York high-society dinner into a global phenomenon pumped with star power.

Wintour has co-chaired almost every gala since 1995, icily manning high fashion’s gates. Even the Kardashians – having become a fixture at the Met – were barred until they had seemingly ‘proved’ their fashion force in 2013. However, Wintour’s endorsement of Sanchez Bezos as co-chair and lead sponsor has led many to question the Met Gala’s stance on Trump’s tech-tycoon administration, enabling the purchasing of cultural capital alongside political power. Their combination of sunglasses and cinched Galliano is a poor formulation for this year’s glamour. The price of a ticket is $75,000; a table, $350,000. Seeming increasingly in the pockets of America’s billionaires, the Met Gala is no longer the escapism it used to be.

All that said, this year’s theme of Costume Art posits an interesting stance on fashion. The newly released catalogue cover speaks volumes about the complicated stance of the body as an artistic and biological symbol: Jacques Fabien Gautier Dagoty’s flayed image of a woman’s back (with her coyly – and very oddly – looking over her shoulder at the viewer) draws on corsetry fashions rather than actual anatomy, evoking fashion’s aestheticising power on art – even in the slightly gory case of a woman’s ribs. Robert Wun and Thomas Browne Couture have since offered their own interpretations, with muscular, dressed embodiment implied through sequins and tissue-thin leaves of fabric.

However, bodily shapes also resurface in art, with Niki de Saint Phalle’s exuberantly coloured, full-figured woman in her sculpture Nana and Serpent, adversely conjuring the extraordinary corsetry of Michaela Stark. Stark’s garments redefine beauty ideals through reshaping the body in an unconventional way, maintaining a respect for the individual wearer’s physique by emphasising curves in a technique combining custom-made lingerie and references to the Shibari rope-tying method. The theme essentially conveys a deeply embodied artistic and sensual relationship with the body, at a time when getting back in touch with our own humanity is no bad thing.

Of course, such themes often get lost in the Met Gala’s media whirlwind. Craftsmanship falls secondary to the celebrity, completing the paradox that the stars provide an unmissable platform for a brand’s garments, often footing the bill for celebrity attendance. Yet costume art (when taken more literally) also implies the painstaking haute couture process used to create the gowns: a slow, personally tailored technique antithetical to fast fashion’s constant churn. Unfortunately, not the paradigm of sustainability either, the slower ethos of high fashion is nonetheless applicable to student wardrobes. Elevating her second-hand shopping to Gucci for the 2022 Met Gala, Billie Eilish’s pale green and peach gown used deadstock fabric to create an ensemble from entirely pre-existing elements. This evokes recent online trends for garment embellishment, using simple and quick sewing techniques to upgrade an item that owners had fallen out of love with. It proves a cheaper way of updating personal style, as well as a welcome revision break. Following a viral recreation of a cardigan worn by Harry Styles in lockdown, JW Anderson released the original crochet pattern with a tutorial. Sustainability in fashion is collaborative, as healthy for our wellbeing as for our wardrobes.

The prime example of sustainable, collaborative costume art in Oxford comes from an unexpected tradition. Oxford’s month of May is heralded by an altogether different celebration than the Met Gala, marking the start of summer through pagan and Celtic origins. For many students, the early morning at Magdalen Tower is addled with hangovers and sleep deprivation, but it is still often possible to spot the Green Man in the crowds and various Morris dancing troupes. With feathers, flowers, and leaves in hair, the materials used to indicate summer’s return are naturally tied to the season. Furthermore, the costumes worn by such celebratory groups are often collaboratively handmade or embellished, passed down and adjusted through generations.

Social media slow fashion trends reflect what has long been embedded in folk and May Day traditions. This is most evident with the Jack in the Green figure, a more modern spectacle in Oxford tradition that involves someone donning a huge wicker frame, which is covered in greenery and ribbons. Of course, this is linked to a more spiritual vision of costume art, posing a locally-grounded perspective on clothing sustainability. The Met’s own take on the theme will inevitably come outfitted with billionaires and celebrities vying for coverage at an event that feels notably detached from the current economically divided world. Yet, as Oxford students, we can take a theme already embedded in city traditions and use it as a sustainable fashion impetus for rewearing.

‘I’m not campaigning for any particular point of view’: Sam Freedman on government, the Conservatives, and writing with his father

Melissa Eddon
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‘I’m not campaigning for any particular point of view’: Sam Freedman on government, the Conservatives, and writing with his father

Sam Freedman is one of Britain’s foremost political analysts. I spoke with him after his appearance on a panel at St Antony’s College, Oxford, where he discussed the flaws of contemporary British politics. As co-author of Britain’s most popular political Substack ‘Comment is Freed’, Senior Fellow at the Institute for Government, and a contributor to a number of respected British publications, Freedman has the opinions of a journalist and the knowledge of a policy maker. 

In our discussion, Freedman’s answers are measured and carry a certain nuance, a habit from a life “half in that world” of Westminster and Whitehall, but stabilised by one foot firmly planted in academia and research.

His passion for politics was clear even from childhood. Freedman was twelve at the time of Norman Lamont’s resignation as Chancellor in 1993: “I remember running through my school trying to tell everyone in excitement, and everyone was like ‘what the hell are you doing’”. He laughs fondly at his childhood enthusiasm, reflecting: “I was an unusual child, always very obsessed with politics.”

Freedman is an Oxford alumnus, having completed an undergraduate degree and a subsequent MPhil in History at Magdalen College. He looks back at his time in Oxford with great fondness: “Probably like quite a few students, I look back and think: why did I wake up at one o’clock in the afternoon every day, and not take the opportunity to have the time to think and read in the way you never get when you’re actually working.” For Freedman, university was packed with amateur dramatics – directing and producing – as well as meeting his wife. 

His transition from academia to employment was driven by a desire for change. After a stint at the Independent Schools Council, he continued to focus on education and moved to a research role at Policy Exchange in 2007. He describes it as “luck” that this coincided with Michael Gove, one of the think tank’s founding chairmen, being promoted to Shadow Secretary of State for Education. “I was in a very odd position, being a policy person in a political world”, Freedman says. “Gove knew that, and hired me anyway.” 

Though much of his time was spent developing ideas that would find themselves in the Conservative Party’s 2010 manifesto, he takes care to distance himself from a particular affiliation. “I was never actually a Conservative, and I was never a member of the Conservative Party”, Freedman explains. “I had been a member of the Labour Party, and I liked what New Labour had done on education policy.” For Freedman, his work with the Conservative Party was an attempt to “create some continuity between what I thought New Labour would have wanted to continue doing on education policy, and what a new government would do”. 

I try to pin him down somewhere on the political spectrum, but he seems disillusioned with the very act of political categorisation. “Lots of people would describe me as a centrist dad”, he says, but this label doesn’t sit right: “It doesn’t mean anything.” Socially, Freedman describes himself as “very liberal…more liberal than the average person in the country by quite a distance on subjects like immigration”. In terms of economics? “I’m never quite sure what I think”, he says. “Sometimes I feel very left-wing, and sometimes I feel quite liberal.” 

Upon the Conservative victory in 2010, Freedman became a policy advisor, spending three years working on the new Conservative Government’s policy agenda. His colleagues from this time have become well-known, and highly controversial characters in British politics, but Freedman’s insight cuts through their facades. “Some people present in public exactly as they are in person”, he notes. Here he points to former Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who in Freedman’s eyes is “performing constantly, even in private”. 

He sees more nuance in the character of those like Dominic Cummings, former chief adviser to Johnson, whose “cunning genius” facade falls in private. Often getting into fights with people online, Cummings would “have these manic episodes, where he would…get very hysterical”. 

Freedman’s time in Westminster taught him that politics is less about the individuals and more about the institutions. “A lot of them were designed in the 19th century for a completely different kind of politics.” Freedman jokingly adds that wanting to be a politician in this system makes one “slightly crazy…a sociopath”. From what he’s seen, the job is exceedingly tough: it is not particularly well paid in comparison to other jobs based in London, one must endure an “astonishing” level of abuse, and the entry-level position as a backbencher is “pretty thankless”. “Either you have to be obsessed with attention and status…or you have to really, really care about changing the world in a positive way.” 

I ask him how the deep-seated public hatred of Keir Starmer sits with him in this context. “I don’t quite know where it comes from… but I don’t think he’s been a particularly effective prime minister.” He attributes part of the uproar to a hostile media set-up. The “clickbait” culture has drawn on our more pessimistic instincts. “It’s shifted everything towards a much more aggressive and negative posture, which then makes politicians more defensive”. Ultimately, it’s a vicious cycle, and one he tries to avoid with his Substack. “I just try to be accurate…I’m not campaigning for any particular point of view.”

In terms of his go-tos for news consumption, he lists The Economist, the Financial Times, Bloomberg, and the New York Times. If you’re looking for a trustworthy news source, Freedman recommends “ones that are read by people in finance, because they want accurate information…money doesn’t lie to money”. Reading news sources from both ends of the spectrum seems to be a key way for Freedman to get a feel of the political climate: “I have subscriptions to basically everything”. 

His own role in the UK media ecosystem is shared with his father, co-writer at ‘Comment is Freed’. So how does that dynamic work? “We read each other’s pieces, but we cover quite different areas, and we have quite different styles.” Any reader of ‘Comment is Freed’ will know that Sam Freedman focuses on domestic politics, whereas his father takes an international focus. “Dad is a military historian…and he has a proper historian’s way of writing about these conflicts…whereas I’m more of a kind of journalist, so I tend to be more opinionated in my pieces.” 

I ask him what Substack offers in journalism in comparison to the average newspaper column. Not only is there more freedom when choosing what to write about, but Freedman finds he can write “at a length that no newspaper would ever allow”, with most of his pieces averaging around 3,000 words. “I prefer the freedom and the space to go into depth.” 

In the world of 24/7 media, public memory is much weaker than it once was, and scandals quickly recede from memory. For Freedman, a key example of this is the 2008 Financial Crash. “We have this way of talking about economic policy, as if Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves should just be fixing the economy, without ever really talking about the underlying structural problems…that the financial crisis threw up. Since it happened, we have just gone back to a fairly similar financial system to what we had before, which feels very vulnerable…We had the crisis, it passed, and now we are sort of pretending it didn’t happen.” This wilful ignorance, on the part of both politicians and the public, is the root of many political problems. 

I point to one of the changes often lauded as the solution to the plague of short-termism and political polarisation in Westminster: a change in the electoral system. Whilst Freedman is in favour, he argues it has been misjudged by left-wingers. “A lot of people overestimate the value of changing the electoral system in terms of how it would fit their politics.” He points to the progressive left, some of whom hold the belief that the change would see them dominate come election time. Yet, as Freedman makes clear, European countries with more proportional electoral systems still see right-wing parties flourish. For Freedman, a desire to change the electoral system should not be rooted in the perceived benefit to one’s personal political leanings, but rather “because of the underlying unfairness of the system”. 

Freedman argues that the peak of First Past the Post’s effectiveness has come and gone. With the recent insurgence of Reform and the Green Party into core Conservative and Labour Party territory, the two-party system seems increasingly obsolete. “It’s become impossible to justify, because you have five parties within 10-15 points of each other.” Freedman believes it will be a long, drawn-out and uncomfortable journey to change. “Right now, a lot of Labour MPs would acknowledge in private that the system doesn’t work, but they are not going to change it because it would hurt them. It might be that you need to have one or two elections with a very messy hung parliament before things change.” 

Whilst Freedman predicts change within his lifetime, by the end of the conversation, I’m left with the feeling that the flaws of contemporary British politics won’t be “fixed” anytime soon. Freedman, however, seems to be the kind of voice we need in the current political climate: one of nuance, pragmatism, and integrity. 

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