Thursday, May 15, 2025
Blog Page 61

Long vowels or short shrift: Oxford’s shocking accent hierarchy

Angharad Thorp
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Long vowels or short shrift: Oxford’s shocking accent hierarchy

Every sun demands a shadow, and Oxford is not exempt: a darkness lies beneath the University’s glittering magnetism. Engrained classism is found in all corners under the dreaming spires. One manifestation of this is accent prejudice, which awards a Southern drawl the gold medal. 

I encountered this bias immediately in my first term. A disclaimer: despite growing up in Birmingham, I do not have a Brummie accent, something I attribute to having a Welsh mother and a Londoner as a dad. Coming to Oxford was the first time this lack of accent, a notable absence of “bab!” in my vernacular, was complimented: Freshers week had been a series of congratulations, “You don’t sound like you are from there, well done!”. I was once accused of lying: “You must be from London, go on, just admit it!”. 

However, rather than taking offence, I took solace in these remarks. Riddled with imposter syndrome, it was hard not to smile when asked what part of London or Surrey I was from. They think I am one of them, I would excitedly mutter: I belong. This quiet thrill spoke to my anxiety about fitting in, driven by the idea that the “true” Oxford student fitted a narrow, privileged mould.

To the joy of my insecure self, my accent helped me to blend into the sea of majority Southern students. In 2021-2023, 28.7% of admitted undergraduates were from London, and a further 29.5% came from the South East or South West. This geographical dominance helped me fit in, but my experience was also riddled with classist prejudice. For example, after a string of wrong guesses about my background, someone pleaded, “Oh God forbid, don’t tell me you’re from the North?!”. When someone found out I lived in Birmingham, they half-jokingly offered me a place to stay at their family’s country estate during the holidays – because, apparently, “a girl like you shouldn’t live there.” 

What girl had they mistaken me for? All I knew was that my accent had played its part in making me palatable for the most affluent students. Yet sounding the part only works up to a point: accent isn’t enough. When asked, “Where do you summer?”, I was confused, not realising “summer” could be a verb. When asked which school I went to, the expectation was that I would name one of a handful of elite institutions. Accents might change, but backgrounds don’t. A different vowel pronunciation couldn’t suddenly place a silver spoon in my mouth.

Looking back at my insecure fresher self, I feel a sense of shame, even sadness, about how I navigated my first few months in Oxford. Like a magpie attracted to shiny things, I consciously and unconsciously mimicked the accents around me, adopting new pronunciations and vowel sounds. When I returned home, my family would comment that I sounded “posher,”; however, instead of feeling proud, I felt like a traitor, a sell-out. The “compliments” that once reassured me at Oxford now seemed hollow. I realised that I had severed myself from my roots, and destroyed the footsteps which had got me to Oxford in the first place. I hated myself for it. 

The self-hatred also came with a fractured sense of identity. My accent shifted between Southern intonations and full Welsh vowels, leaving me unsure which, if any, was my “true” voice. I could not properly recall how I used to speak and when home friends commented on how much my accent had changed, I often wondered how authentically myself I was. I ultimately was left not knowing who my “true” self was. My sense of identity had been utterly distorted. 

The pivotal moment of change came when my tutor said he could tell I was part Welsh by the “lyrical” and “musical” way I wrote. With excitement, I immediately spoke of my favourite childhood memories by the Welsh coast and explained that my house had never known silence as classical music had always filled its walls. Through my words and how I wrote, he had seen my story. His observation was neither moralistic nor loaded with an expectation I should change myself to conform. In fact, he didn’t want me to. 

I had felt such relief – it was like coming up for air. With time, Oxford began to feel like a space for me, in my entirety, rather than a select manufactured appearance. Paired with the love-filled acceptance of my friends and most peers, who continue to help me feel more authentically myself by the day, I am forever grateful for my tutors’ kindness and genuine care for students of all backgrounds. When I did not feel like enough, they always reminded me that I was. 

However, I recognise that my story is seemingly in the minority, and it is due in part to the fact that my sense of disconnect at Oxford was not from being marginalised or excluded, but rather from the perception of assimilation greater than I felt. For students who have accents which do face social marginalisation, their experiences greatly differ; the pressure to change can often be far stronger, and the consequences of not doing so are more cuttingly felt. 

A Scottish undergraduate spoke to me of how she consciously altered her voice during tutorials and moots, where she would “tone down” the broadness of her accent. She found that when she did, she was treated with more respect, taken more seriously, and viewed as more intelligent. It helped protect her from having the experiences of a Mancunian undergraduate, who shared that a tutor repeatedly claimed to be unable to understand her. She was forced to repeat herself sentence after sentence in tutorials and classes, ostensibly in the name of “clarity.” Listening to her recount this, I could understand every word she said without difficulty. Her accent was perfectly comprehensible: the issue is the tutor’s prejudice. Her experience underscores the bias that exists within academic and professional settings toward Southern English accents, a bias that unfairly equates certain ways of speaking with intellectual worth.

A sense of worth is what this all comes back to: the desire to be treated with dignity and respect, where your right to belong is not measured by your accent or background. Yet the uncomfortable truth is that accents do act as a form of social currency. They can shield people from discrimination and open doors more easily. Amelia Taylor, Regions Officer at Class Act, told Cherwell, “[mocking accents] reinforces the sense of otherness at Oxford that is caused by regional disparities in deprivation and opportunity – so students from less well-represented regional backgrounds may not only have a harder time reaching Oxford, but have to battle with discrimination when they’re here”. 

This reality forces us to ask: how much of yourself do you change to fit in? My decision to embrace self-authenticity and reject the belief that an Oxford student must look, act, or speak a certain way was liberating. But I recognise that others adjust their accent as a form of self-protection. It helps them blend in and access social and academic spaces that, in an unfair world, are more easily available to some than others. It is a cruel system with the weight of a long history behind it, but it is a ladder that can feel easier to climb than to dismantle. I know it is easy to preach authenticity when less is at stake. 

I can only hope that Oxford is full of more love than judgement, with a bigger desire to embrace others rather than hurt them. Words and comments that stayed with me carried weight because of their sharpness, not their frequency, and I want to believe that Oxford’s classism persists more because of the loudness of voices that proclaim it than the number who share those beliefs. This University is for everyone, always. Therefore, in both small and large actions, the accent bias, and all forms of classism and prejudice, must be continually confronted and challenged. 

War crimes, rent climbs, and bad wines: A very short history of protest at Oxford

Subhan Aslam
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War crimes, rent climbs, and bad wines: A very short history of protest at Oxford

It’s Trinity term, and you’re heading back to college after spending a sunny evening unwinding in University Parks. You get halfway down Parks Road and look to your left. In front of the Pitt Rivers lies the Palestine encampment. You look to your right and see fading on the walls of Keble College the message “Hands off Vietnam”. There’s a history of student protest at Oxford and you’re walking through it. Who were these student protestors? What did they protest for? How successful were they?

We start all the way back in February 1355 with perhaps the most pretentious cause for protest possible. At the Swindlestock Tavern, now the Santander at the top of Queen Street, a group of students were enjoying a drink to celebrate St Scholastica Day. Spryngeheuse and Chesterfield are two of these students, and they complained that the wine they were served was unsatisfactory. When the landlord of the tavern refused to serve them anything else, snobby Chesterfield threw a drink in his face and bedlam ensued. The pub brawl turned into mass rioting that lasted for three days with 30 townspeople and 63 students killed. All these deaths because a posh Oxford boy didn’t get his way. Not a great start to the legacy of student activism at this University. 

In 1603, things got more political as Oxford University became a constituency with two Members of Parliament in the House of Commons. This leads us to our next incident of student protest in 1829 with Christ Church’s famous ‘No Peel’ door. The message, hammered into a door at the foot of the steps of the dining hall, was a response to Oxford MP Sir Robert Peel’s sudden support for Catholic Emancipation despite being elected on a platform of opposition to it. The upshot of the graffiti was that Peel lost his seat in a by-election held in February 1829. Oxford students holding their member of parliament to account — a much more principled protest than the drunken disagreement of just a few centuries prior. It’s a shame that the principle they were fighting for was religious oppression, but then again Christ Church does have a history of trying to vote away religious representation. This alternation between political protests and grouchy grievances defines student action at Oxford. Whilst global and political issues may change, the entitled student remains the same. 

‘Free Speech’ is the cause of many protests at Oxford to this day, thanks to the ever problematic Union, but the first of these did not involve those at the self-declared “world’s most prestigious debating society” at all. In March 1926, the Vice-Chancellor of the University pushed two communist undergraduates to sign a paper pledging that they would not propagate their political views. This was met with great outrage not only within Oxford but also nationally. It was the main point of discussion at the Congress of the National Union of Students, at which Mr D. Barber from Cambridge said that “students of this country are not going to countenance any sort of intolerance of that nature”. Oxford is often accused of being rather insular, isolated, and self-interested, but here Oxford students began to find their feet on a wider national platform of student activism. 

Nevertheless, insular, pretentious, out of touch Oxford remained and on the 7th March 1936, Pembroke students refused to eat in the hall for the first time in the college’s 300-year history. You’d be forgiven for assuming that the students took issue with the cost of the meals. However, the then JCR President Mr. Cartmell made it very clear that the problem was not the price, but the quality of dishes served. It seems Oxford students are historically fussy banqueters with very high standards. As a response to the protest, a new menu featuring potage dubarry and filet halibut marguerite was implemented for the following dinner, which satisfied the pompous Pembroke students. Hall saw a record attendance. 

Student Activism in the UK at large ramped up in the 1960s, and Oxford did not stand on the sidelines. In June 1961, there was a protest by Oxford students against the actions of Portugal in Angola. The Portuguese had recently forced the cultivation of cotton as the only commodity crop, and this sparked massive civil unrest and widespread violence. The protestors secured an audience with the parliamentary private secretary to the Minister of State at the Foreign Office who told them they were right, and that Britain could not support the present policies of Portugal in Angola. This success ensured there was revolutionary energy through the decade which ended with some of the largest student demonstrations this country has ever seen. In March 1968, over 15,000 people marched in opposition to the Vietnam War from Oxford Street down towards Grosvenor Square, where 246 protestors were arrested. One of those arrested was then Wadham student and famous children’s author, Michael Rosen, who later wrote a poem for the Isis about the demonstration where he described being arrested and attacked by police. He and his flatmate Donald Macintyre, a Christ Church student, then attended the October protest alongside over 100,000 demonstrators. This decade saw the birth of mass student activism, and Oxford played its part. Indeed, until the 1990s student activism was hopeful and far-reaching. Students with Campaign Atom rallying against the US bombing of Libya in 1986 declared that they “fully expected to be arrested”. There was a real tenacity, drive, and willingness for self-sacrifice that is no longer seen today.

The turn of the century was dominated by protests about living costs and tuition fees as focus pivoted to domestic issues. Things began to escalate in October 1987 when students at Mansfield went on rent strike over rising costs as their daily rate was going up from £2.91 to an eye-watering £3.12. The most significant of the financial demonstrations was that of five students who refused to pay the £1,000 tuition fee in December 1998. The Stop the Fees Campaign organised rallies outside the Bod and over 2,000 students came out in support. Whilst Campaign Atom saw people willing to go to jail, one of the Oxford protestors famously said, “we don’t want to endanger ourselves to the point where we are simply becoming martyrs”. The move to introduce fees ploughed on and there was a growing sense that student campaigns didn’t really achieve much anymore. Even though more than 100 students occupied the Bod in February 2001, they were largely ignored and no policy changes were forthcoming. The failings of the Iraq protests compounded this feeling of powerlessness. Cherwell’s 2005 article entitled ‘A bleak future for student protest’ summed up the mood of the time. The successes of the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign seemed a distant reality given the ineffectiveness of recent movements. The potency of campaigning was coming into question and students’ commitment to it was wavering. Student protest at Oxford had lost its intensity and determination. 

When everything seems a little flat and hopeless you can always count on the Union to do what it does best –  invite disgraced bigots to give speeches. And in November 2007 that is exactly what they did. The Holocaust denier David Irving and chairman of the BNP Nick Griffin were the two chosen on this particular occasion. Naturally this sparked huge opposition from students, and alongside protests outside of the Union, many demonstrators made their way inside and orchestrated a sit-in protest from within the chamber. Student protest had some energy again. This was an Oxford-centric protest however, and all it did was create a media frenzy. Whilst it used to be the case that Parliament would listen to student protesters, now it seemed that only tabloids were interested in our thoughts. Take the 2010 austerity protests for example. On 10th November 2010, roughly 50,000 demonstrators marched through Central London in opposition to planned spending cuts to higher education and the increase of the cap on tuition fees. The then president of the OUSU David Barclay was quoted in the BBC article on the protests, but only 400 students from Oxford attended. Oxford University occupies a prominent space within the public debate, especially on student issues. There is a media privilege afforded to the Oxford student. But with such a small number attending the protest, it seems that no-one is willing to make use of it. Has the Oxford Student given up?

November 2017 saw a return to the spoiled, bratty protests that plague Oxford as Christ Church students were outraged that their bop was shut down almost an hour early. A college that once led the drive to oust a Member of Parliament was now throwing a tantrum over their special little party ending early. Was this what Oxford student protest had really come to?  A Cherwell article published the same year urged people not to “indulge in protests” as “[t]hey have become a young adult fad with little, if no, effect”. Decades of having demands ignored by successive governments, as well as University and college administrators, led to such political indolence that bops were the only issue we could muster any anger about.

2020 brought an end to the idleness. There was a climate protest with students occupying the front quad of St John’s for five days. This was an important factor in the University agreeing to divest from fossil fuels and commit to a net-zero investment strategy. Moreover, the Rhodes Must Fall movement reached Oxford as protestors demanded to take down the statue of the imperialist Cecil Rhodes from the front of Oriel College. The story gained massive media coverage as it ticked two boxes. One, it was a story about Oxbridge, which news outlets seem never to get bored of. Two, it was a ‘culture war’ issue, which is a lazy journalist’s bread and butter. There was now vocal unrest within the university with activists using the spotlight afforded to them as Oxford students to campaign for issues and causes that matter. 

Despite Covid-19 and its aftermath, student activism ramped up and in April 2022 a protest took place on Bonn Square against the exclusion of trans people from the ban on conversion therapy. Just a year after this protest was held in support of trans people, the ever out of touch Union decided to invite the transphobic Kathleen Stock to give a talk. As expected, this was hugely unpopular and the University’s LGBTQ+ Society organised a protest to vocalise this discontent. This generated a huge media storm, and everyone seemed to have an opinion on the matter, including the then Prime Minister. Oxford students were protesting loudly, and their slogans were being heard. 

“From the River to the Sea…” is one of these slogans that has become very familiar. The first week of November 2023 saw two demonstrations in support of Palestine. On the 1st November, 1,500 protesters marched through Oxford towards Bonn Square, and on the 4th, there was a large gathering outside the Weston Library. Fast forward six months and the Pitt Rivers encampment is set up. Upon the establishment of the ‘liberated zone’, OA4P released a statement which speaks to the unique position of Oxford student protestors. It acknowledges the hand Oxford played in empire-building and how we continue to benefit from it. As students of this university, we walk through the same corridors as those who led us into Iraq, read in the same libraries as those who implemented economic policies of austerity, and dine in the same halls as those who wrote the Balfour Declaration. That is the history we are writing the next chapter of. The OA4P statement asks, “What is the cost of your silence?”. Refusing to speak out, campaign, and protest is allying yourself with the crop of Oxford students that have made the world we now inherit, and given the last Conservative government’s anti-protest legislation it seems they would like us to stay silent. 

Ordinarily it is wealth that gives you influence over the establishment. Money gives you power, privilege, and status. But Oxford is the Establishment. Whilst it positions itself as a beacon of intellectual progression and freedom, its past mostly displays begrudging acceptance or outright suppression of protest. It’s churned out countless politicians, cabinet ministers, and Prime Ministers. It is the breeding ground for society’s elites. As members of the University, we benefit from this reputation. We as a student body are granted media attention, political capital, and societal respect. We’re given a platform not many get a chance to speak from. A poll conducted by Cherwell last year revealed that nine in ten respondents were open to attending a demonstration in the future. The opportunity for action is there. There are students who want to speak out, and platforms on which they can.

In 60 years time, when someone is walking down Parks Road and they look at the wall of Keble. Will they see the fading message “Hands Off Vietnam” and think, as we do, that was the last time a student protest actually achieved something? Or will there be a new legacy for them to inherit?

On Leadership by Tony Blair, Precipice by Robert Harris, and Oxford crime – Books of the Month

Hassan Akram
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On Leadership by Tony Blair, Precipice by Robert Harris, and Oxford crime – Books of the Month

On Leadership by Tony Blair 

A French novelist, on receiving a letter from a person of title, remarked that the “style was that of a shopping list.” He might have been talking about Sir Tony Blair. Blair may have been one of the most gifted politicians and notorious war criminals of his generation, but unlike, say, Henry Kissinger (an obvious influence here), he can barely write a paragraph which is not staccato and telegrammatic. Here is his first attempt: “No Leader [his capitals] I ever met, who succeeded, did so just by being a leader. They did it by hard work… And by curiosity. By a willingness to learn. By a relentless pursuit of the right answer.”  

In this new textbook of inside tips on the mechanics of being a leader, Blair posits that there are three stages of leadership through which all Leaders must pass. In the first, Leaders know nothing about the art of governing and lap up all the advice they can find. In the second stage, Leaders think they have gained enough experience to know everything when, in fact, they know nothing. In the third, Leaders accept the smallness of their range of experience and once more become willing to listen and learn.  

Certainly, there are insights to be gained from a man who ran the country for ten years and has been on first-name terms with the most powerful people on the planet. Blair’s observations are pithy, intelligent, memorable, and universally applicable to the study of leadership. On the other hand, he is disturbingly enthusiastic about Elon Musk, technocracy, and AI. On the subject of big business his advice is candidly to cut taxes and deregulate. When reflecting on his own legacy, he mentions “understandable disagreement and anger” about the bloody cataclysm of the Iraq War, but is keen to pad out the rest of the page with a list of his achievements in domestic policy. 

Don’t purchase this book – otherwise Blair will receive the royalties, and he makes more than enough from his advice sessions with foreign dictators and his £35 million property empire – but if you can find a copy in a library, it is a unique and valuable read. 

Precipice by Robert Harris 

H.G. Wells’s Mr Brittling Sees It Through – at one time the most popular novel in the world – contains the first great fictional account of Britain in the summer of 1914, when the sunny complacencies of nineteenth-century civilisation were engulfed by total war. Robert Harris’s Precipice contains the latest. A historical novel, it is the true story of then-prime minister H.H. Asquith and his affair with Venetia Stanley, a twenty-six-year-old aristocrat. 

The character of Asquith is compelling if slightly incomplete. He would write to Venetia several times a day, and by regular post would send her some of the most dangerous state secrets. In his letters (which are real) obsessive rhapsodies are melted in with the official secrets of a Whitehall on the cusp of war. Admittedly, Harris’s reliance on these primary documents for Asquith leaves some questions unanswered; the prime minister’s motivations are underdeveloped, because the author is not concerned with explaining so much as with depicting his passion. Venetia is more impressively realised. In her case, there are no letters to draw on (in real life, Asquith destroyed all her epistles), and so there is more effort to unpack her motivations. “I feel it’s almost my patriotic duty to keep him happy,” she says of Asquith. She emerges as a dynamic, burning, tragic heroine – possibly the greatest character of Harris’s corpus.  

Harris never neglects the plot, which is rapid, engrossing, and marvellously constructed. The book is a page-turner with real literary craft behind it, clearly and economically written. Atmosphere and setting are vividly evoked from the very first paragraph onwards: “Late one Thursday morning at the beginning of July 1915, a young woman with dark wet hair strode long-legged from the serpentine in Hyde Park along Oxford Street towards Marylebone. In one hand she carried a cream linen sun hat, in the other a damp bathing costume and a pair of silk stockings rolled up inside a navy-blue towel.” If you only read one historical novel this year, make it this one. 

Lessons in Crime: Academic Mysteries edited by Martin Edwards 

The British Library Crime Classics series, now well past its hundredth book, derives a part of its appeal from the fact that the forgotten writings of an era give a much more vivid insight into it than those which survive for posterity. All the books in the series are immersive in their period charm. Lessons in Crime is an anthology of short, well-plotted, and superbly entertaining mystery stories, mostly from the Golden Age of Detective Fiction, all set in the world of academia.  

The best of them are set in Oxford. In “The Missing Undergraduate” an Oxonian policeman investigates the disappearance from St Peter’s of the son of a Tory MP. In the snappily suspenseful “The Gilded Pupil”, an Oxford graduate gets a post as a millionaire’s governess and becomes embroiled in a dangerous kidnapping plot. In “Murder at Pentecost”, a travelling salesman (ill-fatedly named Mr Montague Egg) visits Oxford and is able, by virtue of being the only outsider, to solve the murder of a Master; this story is by Dorothy L. Sayers, who was the daughter of the chaplain of Christ Church, and who would go on to write possibly the best Oxford crime novel, Gaudy Night. An original Sherlock Holmes adventure is included, as well as a story about A.J. Raffles, the once-famous cricketer and gentleman thief, although it is not Raffles’s best outing.  

There are fifteen stories in all, making the book good value for money, and, as ever, there is an engaging and informative introduction by series consultant Martin Edwards.  

Exclusive: Lord Peter Mandelson, Imane Khelif, Humza Yousaf, and Vera Wang to speak at Oxford Union

Ila Banerji
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Exclusive: Lord Peter Mandelson, Imane Khelif, Humza Yousaf, and Vera Wang to speak at Oxford Union

Cherwell can exclusively report that chancellor candidate Lord Peter Mandelson, Algerian boxer Imane Khelif, former Scottish First Minister Humza Yousaf, and fashion designer Vera Wang are among those to speak at the Oxford Union this term. Noteworthy debate topics include Israel-Palestine, Kashmir independence, rejoining the EU, and abortion rights.

Other speakers include Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, Trump aide-turned-critic Anthony Scaramucci, streamer Hasan Piker, rapper-actor Jaden Smith, and Citadel CEO Kenneth Griffin.

Lord Peter Mandelson, former Director of Communications for the Labour Party and current hopeful for the role of Oxford University Chancellor, will also be appearing at the Union this term. Mandelson is considered to have been a key player in the branding of Tony Blair’s Labour Party as ‘New Labour’, and is still reported to have an ‘influence’ on Keir Starmer and the current government.

Imane Khelif, an Algerian boxer, won a gold medal at the Paris Olympics this summer amid misinformation surrounding her gender. The International Boxing Association (IBA) previously disqualified her for failing a chromosome test, while the International Olympic Committee ruled her eligible and discredited the IBA. Public figures such as JK Rowling and Elon Musk, who called her gender into question, were recently named in Khelif’s criminal complaint over “aggravated cyber harassment.” 

In addition, Humza Yousaf, the youngest and first ever British-Asian Scottish First Minister will be speaking. Yousaf won the Scottish National Party leadership election in 2023 following Nicola Sturgeon’s resignation. Whilst in power, he made headlines for his outspoken support of Palestine. In 2024, he ended a coalition agreement with the Scottish Greens, leading to a vote of no confidence in him, before which he resigned.

Vera Wang, an influential American fashion designer known for her wedding dresses, is another speaker. Wang started her career working at Vogue and Ralph Lauren before starting her own fashion line. She rose to prominence in the 1990s, going on to make wedding dresses for public figures such as Victoria Beckham. She is also known for her evening wear which has been worn by the likes of Michelle Obama and Sofia Vergara. 

One of the debate topics is “This House Believes Israel is an apartheid State responsible for genocide”, which will see speakers including political scientist Norman Finkelstein, Palestinian poet Mohammed El-Kurd, and Director of UK Lawyers for Israel Natasha Hausdorff. Israeli professor Gerald Steinberg, who was invited, publicly declined the invitation in a letter that accuses the Union of “poisonous hatred”.

On the wording of this motion, the Union stated: “More than 76 years on, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict remains unresolved. Critics accuse Israel of employing military tactics that target civilians and infrastructure, amounting to ethnic cleansing, while others defend these actions as legitimate self-defence against terrorism. Israeli military operations in Gaza, attacks on Lebanon, and continued settlement expansion have exacerbated tensions.

“The debate over whether Israel’s actions, in light of UN reports and International Court of Justice (ICJ) rulings, amount to apartheid or genocide continues. Recently, the UK’s Labour party banned terms like ‘genocide’ and ‘apartheid’ at its conference, raising concerns about free speech and the ability to criticise Israel’s treatment of Palestinians.”

Another controversial debate motion is “This House Believes in an independent state of Kashmir”, which will feature speakers including current Defence Minister of Pakistan Khawaja Asif, Labour MP Naz Shah, and former advisor to the Prime Minister of India Prem Shankar Jha. Indian film director Vikek Agnihotri, who was invited, publicly turned down the invitation, calling the topic “offensive”.

Other debates include “This House Would Rejoin the European Union” with former Deputy Prime Minister Lord Heseltine and journalist Rachel Johnson, as well as “This House Regrets the Repeal of Roe v. Wade” with Reproductive Freedom for All president Mini Timmaraju and lawyer Erin Hawley. The Union will be hosting a 60th Anniversary Debate of the visit of Malcom X, with chancellor candidate Margaret-Casely Hayford and Labour MP Bell Ribeiro-Addy. 

On the social side, the Union will be hosting its termly ball – themed The Sands of Time – on 2nd November, a US Election Night Watch Party on 5th November, and President’s Welcome for freshers on 11th October. Union president Ebrahim Osman Mowafy said that access pricing will be offered at all social events.

Osman Mowafy told Cherwell: “This term, we have curated a lineup of debates and speakers that reflect our commitment to free speech and open debate. From global political leaders to renowned cultural icons, this term promises a unique blend of thought-provoking discussions and diverse perspectives.” 

Government planning rise in tuition fees to £10,500

Bryn Mollet and Ila Banerji
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Government planning rise in tuition fees to £10,500

Government officials drafted plans that would see tuition fees rise to £10,500 – or 13.5% – over the next five years, a Whitehall source told The Times, and that maintenance grants would be restored for lower income students to shield them from the impact. These plans are still under discussion, not yet approved by the chancellor. 

The advocacy group Universities UK, of which Oxford University is a member, had called for increasing home students’ tuition fees this September, citing inflation as a major cause for the need for such a rise. Home student fees have been capped at £9,250 since 2017 and have not kept up with inflation. A 2024 Office for Students (OfS) report suggests that the real-term value of income for teaching students has decreased by approximately 25% since 2015-16.

Multiple students told Cherwell that it’s important to know whether the loan repayment scheme, which was altered in 2022, will change, but that is unclear as of now. The government forecasts that 65% of full-time graduates who started in 2023 will repay their student loan in full, and the average debt for students who started their course in 2022 is currently £45,600. The Institute for Fiscal Studies speculates that if tuition fees were to be raised, over 60% of loanees would not even be able to make higher repayments until their 40s. 

An Oxford University student told Cherwell: “A fee increase would be more of a deterrent to working class households.” They added that tuition fee is “essentially a graduate tax” so as long as the loan repayment scheme remains the same, “it doesn’t really matter how much the tuition fee increases, it just means less people will pay it off in full”.

Many institutions rely heavily upon international student fees to cover their operating costs. This comes amid falling numbers of international students coming to the UK for higher education which has exacerbated financial difficulties. The OfS report found 40% of UK universities ran a deficit in the past academic year.

Oxford’s tutorial system makes it one of the most expensive universities to run per student. One tutor has estimated a humanities student costs around £18,000 a year to educate, nearly double the home tuition fee. 

Oxford is less reliant on international fees despite international students making up 47% of the total student body. Only 8.1% of the University’s income was from international fees compared to the nationwide average of 24% in 2021-22. Oxford is also less reliant on tuition fees in general, receiving more from research grants, publishing services, donations, and investment income.

Immigration policy and Brexit have been cited as causes for the decline in international students. New student visa rules put in place early this year means that many international students are now unable to bring family with them to the UK. Brexit halved the amount of EU student applicants in 2021, who can no longer pay home student rates or receive funding. This reflects a broader trend where EU students have halved from 2019 to 2023. 

Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson said in July that the Labour government had “no plans” to increase university fees, but in a more recent interview she had refused to rule it out. She said she would not “want” to do it, but that the government was “looking at all the options”, and she recognised that the current “value of the fee has eroded”.

Vice President of the National Union of Students, Alex Stanley had previously criticised a similar proposed increase in fees, saying that students should not be made to “foot the bill for the university funding crisis” and that this move would “further punish students who are investing in their future.” 

North Korea and the Global Nuclear Order review – “An excellent account”

Hassan Akram
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North Korea and the Global Nuclear Order review – “An excellent account”

Dr Edward Howell, whose columns in the Spectator and the Telegraph are among the few intelligent and readable things left in those outlets, has produced an excellent account of North Korea and its place in the global nuclear order. Here is a book which the University Press would do well to issue in an affordable edition. It throws light on the foreign policy of a horrific but little-understood regime, and does so with a blend of exposition, theory, and analysis.

At the start of the Second World War, Churchill said that the key to understanding Russia was to understand Russian national interests, and today the same statement may be applied to North Korea. Dr Howell understands this, and in order to explain the nuclear ambitions of the Kim regime in Pyongyang, he begins by outlining the history and self-perception of the Korean peninsula. Three successive dynasties ruled Korea between 57 BC and 1912 AD. It was annexed by Imperial Japan in 1910. There followed a period of enforced Japanification. Cultural artefacts were destroyed, newspapers were censored, and Korean institutions were replaced by Japanese ones.  

Korean nationalism, which was bound to be anti-Japanese for the same reason that later Algerian nationalism was anti-French, took off after the Versailles Conference but never became a serious anticolonial force. After Japanese defeat in 1945, Korea, like Germany, was partitioned between American and Soviet spheres of influence, with US troops entering Seoul in the south and Soviet ones entering Pyongyang in the north. After independence in 1948, a formerly united peninsula remained divided between two nations, each of whom viewed the other as illegitimate. 

For the North Koreans, independence led not to democracy but to a change in masters. The Workers’ Party of Korea, a Stalinist movement led by Kim Il Sung, took power. Kim consolidated his rule and his dynasty by means of an extreme personality cult underpinned by fantasies of racial purity; in doing so, he was imitating Japanese colonial tactics of deifying the royal family in order to command the loyalty of the masses.  

In June 1950, with the backing of Stalin, he invaded the South, triggering the Korean War. (Pyongyang, in typically totalitarian fashion, later rewrote history to deny its act of aggression.) The war, which became a proxy conflict between the US and China, was a stalemate. It left North Korea with a dependence on the fellow Communist states of the USSR, China, and, later, Cuba, and an “elevated threat perception from the United States, South Korea, and wider international society”. This persecution mania, this victim mentality that the whole world is bent on its destruction, continues to define Pyongyang’s view of the world. 

The three tenets of North Korean policy are therefore as follows: anticolonialism inherited from the historical struggle with Japan; ideological expansionism in line with Communist Russia and China; and a “hostile policy” of anti-Americanism as the legacy of the Korean War. 

Kim Il Sung’s ultimate goal was always to reunify Korea and to bring the entire peninsula under his own rule. This fantasy, always improbable, took an initial blow when North Korea lost its economic ascendency over the South in the 1960s. A fatal blow followed in the 1980s and 90s, when an economically liberal China and a terminally ill Soviet Union officially recognised South Korea. The result was to reaffirm Pyongyang’s view of the whole world as being in a US-sponsored plot to undermine it. 

The first nuclear crisis of the 1990s exemplified what would become North Korea’s signature use of “strategic delinquency”. In 1993 Pyongyang violated all norms by threatening to withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, before, in 1994, signing a new agreement to halt its nuclear development in exchange for perceived rewards from the US. The episode showed that bad behaviour paid off, and that “strategic delinquency” was the best way for North Korea to achieve its aims. 

Kim Il Sung’s grandson, the incumbent Kim Jong Un, has done more than either of his forefathers to establish a nuclear North Korea. President Trump met Kim in 2018-19 but, despite hoping to frame himself as the American who restrained North Korea, he extracted no real concessions. Kim made vague pledges to adhere to international norms, in return for which he acquired a new diplomatic prestige and hopes of increased American aid. In further meetings, however, like the Hanoi Summit, talks stagnated. Trump failed to satisfy Kim’s demands; he did not withdraw US troops from South Korea; he did not end sanctions on North Korea; and so Rocket Man’s interest in diplomacy fizzled out. In 2020, COVID-19 hit North Korea harder than any sanctions could have done, but still no substantial diplomatic overtures were made. That is how things stand at present. 

The book is well-written in academic Oxbridge prose, although it is clear throughout that Dr Howell is very puritanical in his approach to grammar. Evidently he belongs to that sect of grammarians who hold that to deliberately split an infinitive is a contemptible practice. His views are worth quoting: “To the reader, true to my obsession with correct English grammar, this book does not contain a single split infinitive. Caveat lector, any errata therein are my own responsibility.” (I admit that when I first saw this passage, I had to frown and reread it several times in bafflement, before I remembered that “errata” is the Latin for “mistakes”, as opposed to the synonym for “pornography”.) 

North Korea and the Global Nuclear Order covers its field in great depth. It may have benefitted from more developed comparisons between North Korea and other countries – for example, by contrasting the nuclear effects of the division of Korea to those of similar partitions in India or Palestine, or by comparing the foreign policy of Pyongyang more explicitly to that of Communist China – but these are minor criticisms. In spite of his copious research and vivid understanding of international relations, Dr Howell concludes that North Korea remains a known unknown. At any rate until the Kim regime collapses, we can only see the tip of the missile silo; there must be a great deal of hidden information of which nobody is aware; and the country is “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma”. 

North Korea and the Global Nuclear Order: When Bad Behaviour Pays by Edward Howell is available now from Oxford University Press 

A Revolution Betrayed by Peter Hitchens review – In Defence of Grammar Schools

Hassan Akram
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A Revolution Betrayed by Peter Hitchens review – In Defence of Grammar Schools

Review – A Revolution Betrayed: How Egalitarians Wrecked the British Education System by Peter Hitchens. ISBN: 9781399400077 

Most people accept that the British education system is broken, and only those with a vested interest deny that it requires drastic and long-term reform. The goal is to have a system which is meritocratic and fair, although the defining principle of the current one is wealth. In this book, Peter Hitchens argues that we once had a meritocratic education system, which for a generation between 1944 and 1965 furthered social mobility and equality of opportunity, but that the revolution was betrayed – dismantled by successive Labour and Conservative governments. 

Under the provisions of the Education Act 1944 (the Butler Act), the 11+ exam sorted primary school children on the basis of ability into grammar schools and non-grammar schools. The non-grammar schools were subdivided into technical schools and secondary moderns. These have been attacked on various grounds, but undeniably they compensated for the lack of state secondary education prior to 1944, and taught technical and practical skills that were essential for the functioning of entire professional sectors. The grammar schools were high-standard, innovative, merit-based institutions which, given time to develop, would far have outstripped the public schools. By giving every child in every locality a chance to work their way into the most suitable school for their abilities, the 1944 system allowed countless pupils to advance and achieve to an extent that would have been impossible a generation earlier. (In the appendix to this book, there is a list of prominent beneficiaries of the system). It was the closest Britain ever came to a meritocracy. “If I were a High Tory…who really believes in privilege and keeping the lower orders down,” one peer declared, “one of the first things I should do would be to get rid of grammar schools.”  

Hitchens’s championing of grammar schools must be given its full context. After all, there is little to recommend them in their twenty-first-century form. The 160 or so such schools scattered round the country today are sparse and few in number, compared to the 1,300 of them before the start of abolition in 1965; they are out of range of vast swathes of the country; and the few which do exist are largely monopolised by middle-class parents who move into the area and block local working-class mobility. The system is only effective on a national scale. 

Of course, many objections have been raised against the grammar schools. Some are specific to the exact system of 1944. These are minor quibbles, on such issues as the age at which exams are taken, and Hitchens emphasises that to support a national meritocracy on grammar-school lines is not to support the exact system established by the Butler Act. It is not even to support the return of technical schools and secondary moderns. Many of the 1944 system’s flaws – such as the occasionally poor quality of the non-grammar schools – could be thought through and fixed if only politicians and experts would apply themselves to the task instead of dismissing the system out of hand.  

An altogether separate category of objection opposes the very idea of a grammar schools. A frequent complaint in this case is that the best school system is one which encourages free mixing and egalitarianism. If this could be put into practice, it would be fantastic. In reality, the comprehensive school system, which was designed on just these grounds, has failed disastrously. The worst comprehensives, such as the one I attended, are underfunded, depressing, chaotic cesspits which provide absolutely no prospect of social or economic advancement, even to the majority of pupils who want to succeed. They are the worst obstacles to social mobility or educational enrichment.

Then there is the complaint that selection by merit is inherently wrong and leads to segregation. The obvious rebuff to this is that, if universities and workplaces select by merit, why shouldn’t schools do the same? The qualm as to segregation may, I think, be solved by a mobile system which, rather than cementing children’s futures on the basis of an 11+ exam, would provide an annual if not a termly opportunity for everyone to work their way from one school type into another. In such a system, good behaviour and enthusiasm for learning should be rewarded just as highly as plain aptitude.  

In any case, whatever one thinks of selection by merit, there is no doubt that our current system of selection by wealth is worse. Private schools are “indefensible fortresses of money privilege.” Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s planned VAT raid on these schools will serve only to strengthen them, by pushing the cost of private education further into the stratosphere of the ultra-rich, and removing the charitable status which incentivises scholarships. Less obviously but just as perniciously as the private schools, catchment areas segregate state schoolchildren on the basis of income. The best comprehensives will generally be found in high-income areas, whereas the worst of them will be concentrated in low-income areas; and a 2017 report in the Independent found that more than 85% of the best-performing state schools took in disproportionately low numbers of disadvantaged pupils.  

Some of the more convincing arguments against the principle of grammar schools are not so easy to counter. It is said that by entering grammar schools some working-class pupils feel that they must abandon their roots; they may feel out of place or be ostracised by their peers; or in the end they may “go native” and become staunch defenders of a hierarchical status quo. A great deal also depends on home circumstances – bookless homes, distrust of education, and money pressures are listed here among others – so that full and perfect equality of opportunity remains elusive. But the grammar school system was not designed to abolish the class system or overhaul the structure of society. Its aim, in which it succeeded better than any British education system before or since, was simply to educate children well, regardless of their background or wealth. 

Allowing for the bizarre digressions about the inadvisability of universal suffrage or the influence of communism in the Labour Party, A Revolution Betrayed is the best thing that Peter Hitchens has written. The “cranky fogeyism” which makes it impossible to take most of his work seriously has, in this case, allowed him to produce a book which few others would been able to write. If the new government wants to leave behind it a positive and multigenerational impact, it must reform the education system; and this book, crisply and stylishly written, short enough to be read in a few hours, is a necessary one for understanding our current trouble and learning from the past to resolve it. 

Max Fosh on viral pranks, comedy tours, and the art of posh self-deprecation

Billy Jeffs
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Max Fosh on viral pranks, comedy tours, and the art of posh self-deprecation

Max Fosh is a YouTuber and stand-up comedian, who first garnered acclaim for his StreetSmart series of street interviews. Fosh then expanded towards more prank and challenge-style videos, before launching his first stand-up tour Zocial Butterfly in 2021. Cherwell interviewed him ahead of his Loophole tour across the UK, Europe, America and Australia in 2024 and 2025. He is performing in Oxford’s New Theatre on the 20th September, 2024. 

BILLY: 

Take me back to your beginnings. Did you think you were funny growing up? Were you funny growing up? 

MAX: 

That’s a very good question. I remember, I was in the car once on the way to school, and I was probably about eight, and we were listening to the classical music piece – as we did on the way to my private school, listen to Classic FM, classic me, eight year old, loved it – we were listening to Carmen by the composer Bizet. I said to my mum “Who composed this?” she said “This has been composed by Bizet” and I said “Well he must have been a very Biz-ey man” and my mum laughed, I remember my mum laughing, she found it really funny,  and as an eight year old, I thought “I really enjoy his feeling of making someone off and then I tried to like keep going, and obviously wasn’t funny, I mean the first joke wasn’t funny anyway but it was for an eight year old. And I think that was like, hold on. Like, I enjoy doing this. I enjoy making people laugh. I enjoy entertaining people. So I’ve always had a bit of a bug for it growing up.  

BILLY: 

When you started getting involved in comedy, you started in radio at university. Did you 

see stand up as the end goal of your career? Did you think that’s where you’d end up? 

MAX: 

No, and I still I still don’t see it as like, you know, the North Star, the golden goose. But it is something that I think that I’ve worked on in terms of like the qualities that you need in order to do a live show. And the … I would hesitate to call it stand up comedy because it is a bit more than that. It’s more storytelling. It’s kind of using a screen, it’s telling incidents and kind of divulging different bits and bobs that happened while filming videos. But I feel like I have done the requisite stage time in order to feel comfortable on stage. And I just think it’s a way that I can enhance the relationship in the community that I already have on YouTube by doing a live show. 

BILLY: 

You said enhanced the relationship – I know in your last tour, you incorporated storytelling about how you came to do your videos, and in a way reinterpreting the content you’d already made. Do you see that as all part of a Max Fosh ecosystem and persona? Is it the same audience for your stand up as it is for your YouTube videos? 

MAX: 

Yeah, absolutely. The biggest feedback I had from the last tour was people saying “Oh, it was like a video but live”; and that is something that we tried really hard, when I was writing the show, to make sure that was the case and also, I want the live show to be as accessible to anybody like the videos are. If you find a concept funny on YouTube, and you see the title and you click on it you’re hoping to enjoy the 10 minutes or 15 minutes or whatever that I’ve got in store for you. And that’s the same with the live show. A lot of people come with their friends, their family, their partners who’ve never seen a single one of my videos and we are very very conscious of trying to make sure that the show is as accessible to them as it is to the big fans so there’s no there’s no in jokes. There’s no things that are a wink wink nudge nudge that you’ll only get if you watch the vids but rather something that everyone can enjoy. 

BILLY: 

In terms of where stand up fits in your whole ecosystem – obviously, you’ve kind of had a progression of going slightly more long-form. You started with StreetSmart, and then your prank style videos and now stand up. I know you’ve spoken about trying to be authentic, do you feel you can flesh out your persona more as you get into the longer form things? 

MAX: 

I think I’ve just tried to make sure that I’m as as well rounded as a kind of entertainer as I can be. I understand how to entertain someone on YouTube over a 10-15 minute period. I understand how I can cut that down to 60 seconds for TikTok, but there is a lot of people who are always talking about “Is it sustainable, what’s going to happen in the future and how long are you really going to be able to make videos for”, and I agree that that’s a legitimate question and a legitimate concern. And so I have tried to make myself as malleable as possible, to provide as many skills as I can so I can walk into any room in 5 or 10 years down the line and kind of like a buffet say “Hey, I can offer you 4 million subscribers – no? Okay, I can offer you a live show at the Palladium or a tour or the Edinburgh Fringe.” So I’m just trying to make myself as employable as possible in the future. 

BILLY: 

And is that a thing that you feel like you have to do to be taken as a kind of serious comedian? Does stand up have to form part of that in 2024? 

MAX: 

Being regarded as a serious comedian – I think that is always going to be something out of one’s control. Especially with the new wave of the way that comedians are breaking through; previously it was like you go to Edinburgh Fringe, you then did Mock The Week and the panel shows, the producer gave you a slot on a on a bigger show and you’re able to sell a tour. Whereas now, you’ve got comedians, like legitimate comedians, let’s say Andrew Schultz or Luke Kidgell, they’re utilizing social media to do to grow their audiences. And then you’ve got creators who are developing what they’ve already got and making live shows about it. I would probably say I’m more in the latter camp than the former camp. But ultimately, the most important thing is once you’ve got the people in front of you, if you can get bums on seats, you’ve got to be able to provide an entertaining show. And that’s all that matters. And so that’s my responsibility, if you will kind of want to say “Oh, he’s not a serious comedian or he’s not a serious performer”, then that is absolutely fine. As long as I feel like I’ve provided a good show, then that’s all I care about really. 

BILLY:  

Speaking about authenticity, I think you obviously self-deprecate with being posh and that forms part of your rapport. When you talk about being authentic, is there a danger that authenticity can just become acknowledging that and not recognizing that you can be more than just that persona? 

MAX: 

Yeah, that’s a really good question. And it’s something that I recently have moved away from. In the last show there was a bit of bit of stuff about poshness and where I grew up and I agree that often you hear entertainers banging on about something that’s the same thing every single time and it gets quite boring. And I’ve made a concerted effort over the last few years to make the content less focused on posh, and less talking about my background or upbringing. And the same goes with the show; there’s nothing to do with poshness in the show whatsoever. Because ultimately, I think people look past that. Yeah, you can make a few gags about it and there’s fun self-deprecation opportunities there. But ultimately, it can be quite taxing and tiring from an audience to just constantly be fed that narrative. But also my upbringing, my background is not something that I want to hide or I can hide. And I think that that’s more disingenuous, because the audience wants you to be the most authentic self you can. But ultimately, there’s also there’s also an odd situation at play in the media and entertainment in general: the affable, lovable, posh person, there’s always one. There’s always one in the entertainment ecosystem. I mean, Jack Whitehall did it in the comedy world, Jamie Lang has very much been able to do that in the reality TV world and then gone into podcasting. So there is obviously a fascination from the wider populace about this version of poshness that people find interesting, I’m not a sociologist to be able to delve into that deeper but it’s something that I recognize. 

BILLY:  

I remember when I first came to your videos, it was in the StreetSmart phase and I know that at that time, you were younger and your content engaged a lot with university culture and people at university. Do you still think that informs your comedy now you’re more distanced from that part of your life? If you’re talking about making the show accessible to families, is that something that’s less important? 

MAX: 

Yeah, I’ve always tried to make the videos as things that I want to watch, like that is one of the biggest mantras that I have. And when I was at uni, like when I started in 2017, I was 22. I thought “Yeah, I’d love to see more of these” because you know, every university has that format going on, but they post them once every six months. I’d always think “These videos are so long, there’s much fluff and we can cut all of this out”. So I made my own because I wanted to watch that. And then ultimately I did that for two or three years, I left university, I grew up. You leave the ecosystem where it is your life when you’re there, as it should be. And then as I got older, I thought, well hold on, what do I want to see? And so that’s when I started doing a few sneak in videos and being a bit cheeky because I enjoyed watching that kind of format. And then subsequently from there, it’s moved and changed and shifted, and I’m 29, I’m nearly in my 30s. I’m sure that my content is gonna be different in three or four years time. What that’s going to be I don’t know, but I think it is important to shift with your audience as you get older. 

BILLY: 

So do you think you’ve retained that audience all along and added somebody else? Is that something that you think about? I know, obviously the creative mindset is making something for yourself, but how do you in your creative process understand what it might be to be a family show, rather than just your kind of experience? 

MAX: 

I try not to give that much agency to what the audience wants or thinks about, because I’ve seen it being quite a slippery slope when it comes to making content. Like you see creators who start to really look at data, and start to get analysis paralysis, and almost pander to a demographic that they see as watching the videos. And that is changing all the time. That’s very fluid as to who is watching the video. And now the way that the algorithm works, where it’s getting very, very good at being able to identify what you want to watch specifically. So the old subscription model of YouTube where ‘this is a channel that’s for these types of people’ has slightly moved away now. It’s more these are videos; who wants to watch this video? So I think that it means that YouTube has become more accessible for creators to create things for almost anyone. And ultimately though the most important part of my video of creation is title. You’ve got to be asking a question in that title that has some form of information gap that people want to watch the video to find out. And that is basically pretty universal. I think if you take my most recent videos for example, like ‘hot dog eating competition between a grizzly bear and a competitive eater’, you want to know who’s going to win that regardless of age demographic, wherever you come from. And so that’s kind of what we’re trying to do with this.  

BILLY: 

Beyond the title, in terms of the structure of the video, do you feel there’s space to be creative with trying to understand the algorithm? Once a viewer has clicked onto the video, is retention then predicated on having a certain structure, or is that the place where you can get creative? 

MAX: 

No, absolutely, it’s structure, structure, structure, and it’s about within the first 30 seconds, earning their click. They’ve clicked on something because they’re interested, so then you’ve got to deliver in that first 30 seconds and you’ve got to set up a reason why you’re doing this. And then from there, it can be slightly more fluid in terms of how it plays out. But that first 30 seconds is incredibly important and I look at a lot of storytelling structures that are used in TV and films to inform how the videos get made. Because ultimately, you sit down with a bunch of footage, and how do you try to form this into a coherent story? And that’s  where the editing is. It’s kind of the most important because it’s a lot of just working out how you’re going to tell the story in the most interesting way. 

BILLY: 

Just to go back to the idea of poshness. Do you think in terms of punching up and punching down in your comedy? That poshness is easily accessible for comedy because you’re never going to be punching down when somebody’s posh, especially now when those issues are more sensitive about punching up and punching down. Do you think things will trend more towards that way? 

MAX: 

Yeah, and that’s why I think that’s why initially in the in the StreetSmart days and the interview days, the posh videos did so well, because there was this feeling of it was a victim-less crime if you will, because people like to see posh people have the mick taken out of them. And also weirdly posh people also love this, in a weird Stockholm syndrome where, you know, the people themselves are like, “Oh, please take the mick out of me!”. It’s out of me. So that was that was quite interesting to see. And with the videos again, the video that is kind of my best performing video was the Welcome to Luton prank; I think it did well because again it was a victimless crime. It was just, you know, a sign in a field. And it was like a lot of the the media coverage that was used about it was talking all about “oh this is funny because nobody’s getting hurt”. And we have seen the 2014-ification of pranks and videos; it’s no longer the case where it used to be “Yeah, I’m happy to watch a member of the public have their day ruined because it’s cause it’s funny”, whereas now I don’t think consumers quite have the same appetite for that anymore and I’m glad they don’t because I don’t think it’s a particularly nice way of creating content. 

BILLY: 

Do you think that appetite changes because YouTube has drifted closer towards traditional 

media with production values and big creators? 

MAX: 

I don’t know whether it’s it’s a result of YouTube. I think it’s just a result of it becoming a tired format of being a nuisance to the general public. That expires after a while but I’m sure that will come back in 20-30 years time because these things are all cyclical and they do often repeat themselves. 

BILLY: 

Three quickfire questions before we go: biggest comedic influences? 

MAX: 

The Comedy Store Players which are an improvised group in the Comedy Store in central London, so people like Richard Vranch, Josie Lawrence. Cariad Lloyd, Paul Merton. Bill Bailey, Jack Dee and Bo Burnham. 

BILLY: 

I know you once said your volcanic video was your favourite that you’ve ever made, so what about your favourite since then? 

MAX: 

Let’s have a look. *Opens YouTube* I mean, you’re right – the volcano video purely because it just took so long to come together and was something that I was working on for genuinely years. A video that I’m really proud of … probably making a full Hollywood trailer to get my friend a date. We hired a Hollywood director, an explosions department, a stunt team, everything, the works to get my friend the best Hinge video that the dating app has ever seen. I think I think it worked. I think he got a few dates off the back of it, which is nice. That’s good. 

BILLY: 

Final question – your dad and granddad both went to Cambridge. If you had to choose would it be Oxford or the other place? Remember that you’re speaking to an Oxford student newspaper. 

MAX: 

The good news is that both of them rejected me. So luckily, I don’t have to make that decision. 

Veranilda by George Gissing review – The best historical novel never written

Hassan Akram
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Veranilda by George Gissing review – The best historical novel never written

George Gissing remains the most underrated novelist in the English language. He wrote twenty-three novels, although the average bookshop today only contains four of them. Two of these – New Grub Street, a harrowing story of London literary life, and The Odd Women, the most powerful feminist novel of its century – are acknowledged masterpieces; less so The Nether World and The Whirlpool. A few others are available to order from quality independent presses: these include my favourite, Demos, which concerns the gradual corruption of a working-class socialist who inherits a fortune, and the autobiographical debut Workers in the Dawn. The scope of his talent is exceptional. He is a Balzac, a Turgenev, and a Zola; he is also a Dickens, a Lawrence, and an Orwell. 

In recent years Grayswood Press has done more than any other publisher in bringing closer the far-off day when complete sets of him will be as widely available as sets of Dickens. This excellent new edition of Veranilda: A Story of Roman and Goth, the historical novel left unfinished at Gissing’s death, is edited and introduced by Markus Neacey, an independent scholar and editor of the quarterly Gissing Journal. Neacey is the best Gissing scholar since Pierre Coustillas. He not only provides a lucid and comprehensive discussion of Veranilda’s genesis, historical context, critical appraisal, and much else but, astonishingly, has copied out the entire text of the novel from the original manuscript as it was on Gissing’s death in 1903. Oxford World’s Classics would benefit from this level of dedication.  

Outwardly, Veranilda seems to be an atypical book for a man who made his name chronicling the London slums and the shabby-genteel middle classes. Under the surface, however, the entire package of Gissing’s motifs is here – inherited fortunes, literary men, noblewomen, love across social divides, the pressure of convention – the only difference being that it is wrapped up in a blazing historical epic instead of a piece of Victorian realism. Gissing, a classical scholar and devotee of Gibbon, succeeds in placing his story against the backdrop of sixth-century Italy, when the Romans were caught between Greek occupation and barbarian invasion. Anyone interested in the historical context can do no better than to read the illuminating introduction in this edition. To the non-historian the period detail remains remarkable for its immersiveness, its enduring picturesqueness and grandeur. As Neacey puts it: “In its elegiacal evocation of a decadent and decaying historical empire, it is a novel which is as relevant today as when it was first written.”  

The plot sweeps pacily through love scenes, duels, monasteries, royal courts, and medieval landscapes, and watching it unfold is like watching a Technicolor epic such as Ben-Hur or Cleopatra. As with all Gissing’s novels, there is not a wasted scene or filler chapter anywhere. There are several vividly drawn characters – including the brooding Maximas, the bold Heliodora, and the scheming Marcian – although the key players are Basil, a Roman noble, and Veranilda, a Gothic princess. Theirs is a case of love at first sight and, throughout the novel, various things contrive to keep them apart.  

First there is the stigma attached to their difference of religion – he is a Catholic and she a Goth – and Gissing is acute as ever here in describing the pressure of social convention on character. Then Veranilda is kidnapped – by whom, Basil gallops away to find out – and the process of suspicion, discovery, and elimination sustains the pace for a large chunk of the story. In the final instance they are separated by the character of Marcian; he is something of an Iago figure, jealous, lustful, and subtly sadistic, who initially helps in the search for Veranilda, but then, falling for her, turns her against Basil, only then to be confronted by him in a bloody chapter of enormous dramatic power. It is a credit to Gissing that he executes it without becoming melodramatic. Following the violence, Veranilda and Basil, distrustful of one another, exchange bitter words. A few chapters later they are reconciled. Some of the love scenes are not, admittedly, samples of Gissing’s most mature or realistic writing: 

‘My fairest! Let me but touch your hand. Lay it for a moment in mine—a pledge for ever!’ 

‘You do not fear to love me, O lord of my life?’ 

The whisper made him faint with joy. 

‘What has fear to do with love, O thou with heaven in thine eyes! what room is there for fear in the heart where thy beauty dwells?’ etc., etc. 

Fortunately, this Romeo and Juliet stuff is kept to a minimum. A more significant flaw than the occasional archaism is the fact that the novel was never completed; three weeks after writing Chapter 30 the author fell into an illness and died. Even this is not a huge problem. Gissing was a careful constructor of plots and his workmanlike style required very little finetuning, with the result that in spite of the slightly jarring ending the novel as a whole remains richly readable. Some of the descriptive work, especially of the Italian landscapes, reaches heights of beauty which he rarely achieved: 

Soon after sunrise, he was carried forth to his place of observation, a portico in semicircle, the marble honey-toned by time… Below him lay the little town, built on the cliffs above its landing-place; the hillsides on either hand were clad with vineyards, splendid in the purple of autumn, with olives. Sky and sea shone to each other in perfect calm; the softly breathing air mingled its morning freshness with a scent of fallen flower and leaf. A rosy vapour from Vesuvius floated gently inland…  

For all this, Veranilda is not the place to start for anyone looking to become familiar with Gissing. The book is not representative of his body of work and, if he had been solely a historical novelist, he is unlikely to have produced anything of the calibre of New Grub Street or Born in Exile. Fans of fantasy, epic, or historical fiction will find more to suit them here, and will appreciate it for what it is: a fantastic effort of the imagination, by turns thrilling and serene, with a watertight plot and powerfully observed characters.  

Veranilda is available now from Grayswood Press. ISBN: 978-1-7396203-1-8. 

Plush to host new student night, ‘Quackers Wednesdays’

Emily Henson
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Plush to host new student night, ‘Quackers Wednesdays’

Cherwell can exclusively report that Plush will begin a new Wednesday student night, Quackers. This comes after ATIK Oxford closed at the end of Trinity Term and coincides with the move of Park End, previously held at ATIK on Wednesdays, to Bridge.

The club aims to “refresh the scene”, with lower entry and drink prices compared to its competitors, in response to the rising cost of Oxford nightlife. This is set to include £1 shots and £5.50 doubles, alongside other drink deals, a Blues Events spokesperson told Cherwell.

Quackers will be exclusive to students, with a focus on those from Oxford University. It will feature a duck mascot and hopes to attract sports teams, including facilitating pre-drinks in various bars around the city. Plans are currently being made to enable sports socials between different teams. 

Plush plans to introduce various themes throughout the term because the team hopes to counter “stale” nightlife with events that are “more than just clubbing”. 

Bridge is set to host Park End, previously held at ATIK, also on Wednesdays. Before the closure of ATIK, Plush and Bridge were typically attended by students on Tuesdays and Thursdays respectively. 

Despite students telling Cherwell they find Oxford clubbing “astronomically expensive” compared to other cities, citing entry fees of over £10, venues have struggled to stay afloat.

The city has seen a number of clubs close over recent years, including Fever and Cirkus, largely due to the COVID-19 lockdowns. The Blues Events spokesperson told Cherwell that while they do not think new clubs will open, they hope to create contrast between Plush’s nights that counters the absence of other venues. 

The closure of ATIK at the end of Trinity Term, as the result of the landlord’s decision, has left Plush and Bridge as the only clubs in the city centre. Nationally, as many as five clubs a week have closed, with various factors being cited, including lowering levels of drinking among young people and the rising cost of living.  

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