Sunday 14th September 2025
Blog Page 68

Unfortunately, the Union Matters

Alex Prvulovich
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Unfortunately, the Union Matters

Within a decade of being founded, the Oxford Union was already doing its best to tear itself apart – complete with a faux-epic of the conflict written under the name Habbakukius Dunderheadius – and it’s not grown much calmer in its old age. With all the recent convulsions (never mind the constant elections), Union drama sprawls over student papers, Oxfesses, and your Instagram DMs alike. All this for, it must be said, a student society well past its glory days. No one can be blamed for throwing their hands up and complaining that the Union doesn’t matter.

Unfortunately, it does. Not nearly as much as hacks think it does, but it does. On a basic level, it’s a company with employees, a balance sheet, and, as some on Committee have recently learnt, trustees. It’s also snagged more than £300 from thousands of students, so it’s probably worth paying attention to how that’s being spent.

The Union’s most valuable assets, though, are its prestige and history. This already gives us more reason to take notice – I care about what happens to the place that hosted the King and Country debate, that witnessed Malcolm X declare the line that we are not human beings unless we band together. But that legacy gives the current Union power, power to draw big names, and power to broadcast and legitimise others. The Union did not single-handedly make Tommy Robinson or George Galloway famous, but if it had no effect you wouldn’t see so many people protest speakers like Kathleen Stock.

If that doesn’t convince you, think selfishly. The Union is so widely known and has such cultural capital that it affects Oxford as a whole. When articles are written about it being bigoted, or posh, or full of wannabe politicians, that affects how people think of Oxford students in general. The finer details of the Union’s fiercely-guarded independence get lost – sometimes it even gets reported as the Student Union – and, given its members are almost exclusively from the University, the conflation isn’t wholly unfair. Rightly or wrongly, it affects how prospective students see the University, and how you’ll be seen by people you meet in your life, just as stories of the Bullingdon Club did and do. 

Union drama might not be as cataclysmically important as hacks make it out to be, but we can’t ignore it.

Home, and how to find it

Amy Seal
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Home, and how to find it

How do you define the undefinable? How do you even begin to think about the meaning of those words whose meaning can only be encapsulated by the word itself? Those words that have powerful associations, that can conjure powerful images, but we cannot draw meaning out of without repeating the word over and over. For me, one such word is “home”.

Now, anyone with an internet access, a dictionary at hand, or a mind of their own will immediately contest this – a home is a definable, tangible thing – and Merriam Webster, Cambridge, Collins and more all contend it is “the place where one lives”. But I have never found it that simple, and it is exactly in that contradiction – the fact that the tangibility so strongly associated with a “home” for me does not begin to describe it – perhaps can attest to that.

My family can never quite seem to sit still – figuratively, not literally of course, and in my 20 years I’ve lived in different 6 places (Oxford being the 7th), and my parents even more. Perhaps it’s a deep rooted wanderlust, or a fear of stagnation, or the realisation that the best thing to do when you are unhappy is to drop everything, pack it up, and move away – and so we did, again and again.

It’s not that I’m complaining, don’t get me wrong, and please do put away your tiny violin. I have been lucky, luckier than most to explore all these different parts of the country, and the world – and that my parents work in a field that allows them to get up and go whenever and wherever they feel like it. What I am really describing, in the grand scheme of things, is a non-issue, it is, in fact, the absence of a problem. But I still think that there is a valuable point in here somewhere, in that the issue of home affects us all, and will come to affect us more profoundly as the years go on. In being at university, we have quite literally stepped out of the comfort of our homes, our past lives, and everything we knew (in one way or another), and have had to reorient ourselves entirely. And for us finalists, that question of “where is home” is becoming all the more pressing. Don’t get me wrong, reader, this is not an article about the housing market. It is about how to conceive of belonging and “home” when it is no longer linked to something tangible – it is about the places where home might be found, the places where it is not found, and it is, fundamentally, about the indescribable feeling of being in a crisis, thinking “I want to go home” and not knowing what that means.

The first indication that my concept of home was perhaps a little abnormal was, when a natural disaster extended a family holiday, I burst into tears. This was a surprise to my bewildered parents for a multitude of reasons. The disruption was such that we would miss the first few weeks of school, I was six, and we were at Disneyland. But still, I cried and I cried and I cried. And, as one does when their child is distraught for no discernable reason, my parents asked “what’s wrong”, and, as has been an ongoing theme in our relationship, I knew I had no idea why I was in such immense anguish – so, I would have to make something up. And so I landed on, “I miss my teddy bears”. And though I still can’t verbalise that feeling, I think, there is some wisdom to be pulled from the echoes of my six year old tantrums. What I am sure many of us have experienced at University, in not feeling “at home” until all our posters, fake plants and fairy lights have been put up in our dorms – perhaps I was onto something in that home can be found in the teddy bear that sits on your bed at university.

But this is not everything. Posters and plants might trick the eye, and perhaps the brain into some superficial degree of comfort, but they can never fully bring about that feeling of “home”. Perhaps I wanted my teddy bear not because he was a visual reminder of comfort and a sense of continuity in the otherwise (apparently) turbulent world of a six year old – but rather, because when you hug a teddy bear, they hug you back.

Perhaps, then, home can be found in the company of others. Perhaps then, the reason a home is a home, is not because we particularly enjoy the four walls and the decorations inside it, but because the love we share with the people inside it. Perhaps, then, a home can be found anywhere. And to some degree I think it can. Because have you not felt that sense of warmth and joy deep inside when you’re crying with laughter with friends, have you not looked around and felt that full-body relaxation, that indescribable sense of comfort? Did you not feel at home at that moment?

Perhaps there is something to be said about keeping bad company, about the virtues of keeping a home and a people separate, and about fostering a sense of internal comfort and self-reliance. Or perhaps that is a topic for another article, for a wiser and older “me”, who, I hope is at “home”, wherever and whatever that means. My point, I suppose, is that, for the finalists among us, it deserves thinking about. What and where is your home, and how this can change. If you have the answer, I would love to hear it.

It seems like life after university is a journey to find our way home, whatever that means.

Divestment will take more than a review board

Archie Johnston
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Divestment will take more than a review board

As reported by Cherwell last week, the Ethical Investment Representations Review Subcommittee (EIRRS) is conducting a review of the University’s current investment policy. The University, in its newsletter Gazette, notes that this review follows ‘concerns raised by members of the community’. While this may feel like a ludicrous understatement for over a year of students, staff, and Oxford residents demanding an overhaul of investment policy, the review is welcome. In fact, it is urgently necessary in order to move away from the current policy, which is woefully unfit for the times. 

EIRRS is part of the University’s Investment Committee, which sets guidance for Oxford University Endowment Management (OUem), a subsidiary company of the University responsible for managing the University’s investments. Its purpose is to ensure that OUem stays consistent with ethical standards as raised by the University community. If the conclusion of the present review does not result in a drastic change of policy, it will have failed to do so.

So, what so badly needs an overhaul? Simply put, the most crucial step is to close loopholes. The ethical investment rules as they currently stand are carefully worded to allow the University to continue drawing revenue from investment in arms. The University cannot make ‘direct investments’ in companies which manufacture arms that are illegal in the UK. The issue here should be pretty clear: investments in illegal arms are still very much possible. Plenty of investment funds offered by large investment companies independently hold shares in weapons manufacturers. An asset manager like OUem can have its money invested in arms companies not constrained by UK law, without such investments being ‘direct’.

Additionally, there are many weapons legal under UK law which are currently being deployed against civilian populations. To give one example, quadcopter drones, which are used in the UK by the arms company Raytheon to promote ‘aerospace’ careers to children, have been observed by a British surgeon in Gaza deliberately targeting children injured by Israeli bombings. Using UK law as the gold standard for ethical investment in this context is nothing less than an abdication of responsibility.

The University has largely stood behind this clearly lacking policy, even in the face of concerted action by groups like Oxford Action for Palestine (OA4P), which set up two encampments within the University last Trinity Term. In a statement in May responding to protest action by OA4P, the University did not address concerns with investment policy, instead highlighting efforts to set up a scholarship scheme for Palestinian students, and strengthening relationships with Gazan universities. Given that Israeli forces had destroyed all twelve universities in Gaza by May, the statement rang a little hollow. The University has also increased its subscription to the Council for At-Risk Academics (CARA) and made online educational resources available for Palestinians. These measures are welcome, and might bring some benefit to students in the West Bank or East Jerusalem, but they fail to address the root issue: the University is financially contributing to, and drawing revenue from, Israeli genocide in Palestine. Scholarship programs will not stop the Israeli government from bulldozing villages in the West Bank. A student in Gaza with no home, no university, and no internet connection is hardly going to be reassured by having a login for SOLO.

The issue of arms investment is bigger than Palestine, though. Armed conflict around the globe is on the rise. This week, British-made missiles were fired into Russia. Vladimir Putin has lowered the threshold for the Russian deployment of nuclear weapons. The onslaught on Palestine has turned into a regional war. Tightening the University’s opportunities for investment in the technologies that will continue to be used to wreak havoc on civilian populations is an urgent need – not just for Palestine, but for Congo, Sudan, or any other part of the world experiencing or at risk of armed conflict.

The ethical arguments for divestment from arms are very easy to lay out. However, it is not just ethics the University should consider. The legal and publicity implications are also significant, which is why these conversations must also extend beyond investment policy. The International Criminal Court last week issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defence minister Yoav Gallant. If Israeli leaders are found liable for war crimes, then private entities who enabled their actions might face legal ramifications. 

This has precedent. French cement conglomerate Lafarge, which paid protection money to Islamic State (IS) to be able to continue its operations in Syria, has been subject to a fine and a civil lawsuit in America, as well as a criminal case in France which alleges the company’s complicity in crimes against humanity. Similar accusations might be levelled at Israeli universities, which are deeply enmeshed in the country’s arms industry. Now, of course, Oxford University is far enough removed not to be directly liable in the same way. However, if Israeli politicians are held responsible for war crimes, an Oxford which continues to invest in arms and retain its ties to Israeli universities will face severe reputational damage – even if the University avoids legal trouble. For all of these reasons, the EIRRS review has to end in a root-and-branch restructuring of the University’s approach to investment.

This will affect not only the University’s investments, but also those of individual colleges. Many colleges manage their investments wholly or partially through OUem. Given that the sum of college endowments is a little over four times the size of the University’s, this is arguably even more important. While the review is a crucial first step, much more work needs to be done. Those investments that fall outside the remit of EIRRS will not be changed by this review regardless of its conclusions. Meanwhile, as the University and its colleges continue to direct money towards the deaths of hundreds of thousands around the world, and draw revenue from this violence, it is the responsibility of every member of the University community to keep up the pressure.

The gaps in Oxford’s political societies

Felix Smithson
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The gaps in Oxford’s political societies

The alignments of our nation are changing, and the failure of student politics at Oxford to keep up is nothing less than a dereliction of our duty. Of the 58 prime ministers of the United Kingdom to date, 31 were educated at the University of Oxford. This includes Starmer, Sunak, Truss, Johnson, May, and Cameron – all of the last six. This is a legacy which, with a few exceptions, we are right to be proud of. But so long as the Oxford political scene remains stuck in the past, this legacy is destined to fade away in our hands. It is no longer sustainable for our student societies to be overwhelmingly split down a simplistic Labour-Conservative divide, especially one based on farcically outdated conceptions of these parties themselves. 

The Policy Institute at KCL concluded in 2019 that, in Britain, “our long-standing party-political structures are struggling to capture the diversity in the electorate, and new parties are emerging as a result.” According to the Policy Institute, the political challenge of our time is to resolve this wide variety of positions among the public. Health, education, immigration, the environment, and the economy are all key battlegrounds where this new explosion of varied viewpoints is playing out. Britain is increasingly characterised by a kaleidoscope of priorities; the days of simple left-right party lines are over. 

After all, in Britain we are not seeing the same kind of issue polarisation along strong partisan lines that has dominated so much of recent US politics. ‘Republican’ and ‘Democrat’ are labels indicative of far more than mere voting intention in the US; they designate groups set apart by clearly defined ideological differences. The Pew Research Center’s basket of 10 political attitude measures showed in 2017 that the median Republican was now more conservative than 97 per cent of Democrats, and the median Democrat more liberal than 95 per cent of Republicans. 

Though once upon a time it might have been so, British voters cannot be grouped in an analogous way. The decline in party membership is one of many indicators of changing affiliations within the British electorate over the last few decades. At its peak in the early 1950s, membership stood at 2.8 million for the Conservative Party and 1 million for the Labour Party. Flash forward to today and the Conservatives boast a measly 130,000 members, with Labour ahead at only 360,000. Let us not ignore the fact that in the

recent general election, 42.6% of the vote went to neither the Conservative Party nor Labour.

Yet, as Oxford students, we are not responding to this. The 18 ‘political’ societies listed on the Student Union website denote a picture of politics which fails to resemble the changing alignments of our nation. A large part of the problem is that Oxford University Conservative Association (OUCA) and Oxford University Labour Club (OULC) continue to utterly dominate student discussion of politics, despite other alternatives. With the former fixated on their bizarre fetishisation of Sir Jacob Rees Mogg and the latter oft addressing its members as ‘comrades’, a US-style pseudo-partisan polarisation pervades the Oxford political scene.

I admire the political conviction of the committee members on each side, but the stark contrast of Port and Policy against Beer and Bickering is not helpful if Oxford wishes to nurture the next generation of our nation’s leaders. Caught up on dated conceptions of the major British parties, these societies have become caricatures of themselves, and yet students continue to feel that they must align with one or the other. These societies simply fail to cater for the breadth of student, let alone national, opinion.

Nature abhors a vacuum, yet here there exists a void which is yet to be filled. As students, we are bound by an inclination to possess strong political convictions. but it is no longer enough for these convictions to be drunkenly bellowed within the opposing, homogenous blocks of a ‘Divided Oxford’. If we wish to build upon the prime-ministerial legacy of our university, we must shoulder the responsibility of engaging in more careful thinking in order to go on to produce the responses that our nation desires so badly. 

The forums which facilitate our political discussion must adapt and multiply in line with the changing alignments of our nation and, indeed, the changing alignments of Oxford. We must no longer feel restricted by the boundaries set by two historical societies which paint a picture of politics now decades behind the state of our nation. We must be willing to do more than drunkenly agree with those whom we are bound to agree with from the offset, and confront the issues our nation faces with nuance. To continue on our current path is to sound the death knell of Oxford’s prime ministerial legacy. It is a desertion of our duty.

Screw the Scrooges, students deserve to have fun

Arun Lewis
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Screw the Scrooges, students deserve to have fun

Having survived 5th week Blues (didn’t hear any Louis Armstrong), students can now look toward the end of Michaelmas. The days get shorter, the weather gets colder, and the quality of our work degrades precipitously. It’s when the coughs and sneezes return; the glorious and heady period of decipherable lectures ends. Students desperately need something to keep the flame of academic interest alive in the bitter winter weeks. Oxmas is the beacon of light for students in these dark days, offering joviality and early Christmas cheer when clocking in library hours is particularly unappealing. 

Some say that it is an assertion of Oxford’s history as a Christian institution, or an unnecessary burden. Oxford should promote diversity: every step the colleges and central body make towards a pluralist body in all characteristics should be lauded. But in an era when Christmas is characterised by eating, drinking, and gift-giving in pleasurable excess, fears that Oxmas enforces Christian morals don’t carry weight. One term’s debauchery alone should be enough to get your average humanities student excommunicated. 

To those who say it’s a burden, I quote Dicken’s’ seminal work, The Muppet Christmas Carol: “Your chains are forged by what you say and do.” Have fun. Uni’s short, and Oxmas is part of the absurdist experience that is Oxford social life.

Mulled wine, knitted jumpers, roast dinners, brawls over formal halls – could anything encapsulate the alcoholism, poor fashion sense, gluttony, and self-aggrandisement that every Oxford student regularly and proudly displays?

Enjoy Oxmas. Don’t let yourself be harangued by latter-day Scrooges into curling up into a ball and letting seasonal depression ruin what should be a wonderful time. 

In short, drink, and be merry.

College heads scrap the Norrington Table

Ekam Hothi
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College heads scrap the Norrington Table

The Norrington Table, which ranked undergraduate colleges by their students’ degree results, has been discontinued by the Conference of Colleges on the grounds that it is not fit for purpose.

A spokesperson for the Conference of Colleges told Cherwell: “It was judged that the Norrington Table does not encapsulate the added value given by college teaching. Nor does it relate to differences at the level of specific degree courses.”

Senior tutors made the decision in Hilary Term 2024 in consultation with all colleges. Student representatives were also present at relevant meetings of the Senior Tutors’ Committee.

The Norrington score was developed by former President of Trinity College Sir Arthur Norrington in the 1960s, as a way of measuring the performance of the students at each college in their finals. The Student Union’s College Disparities Report, published earlier this year, finds a direct correlation between college wealth and high positions in the Norrington Table.

Expressed as a percentage, it was calculated by attaching scores to each classification of undergraduate degree (5 for a first, 3 for an upper second, 2 for a lower second, 1 for a third, and 0 for a pass), and then dividing the total college score by the highest possible college score.

The last Norrington Table to be published was for the 2021/22 academic year. The top three colleges were Merton College (80.9%), Lincoln College (80.7%), and Harris Manchester College (77.7%). The bottom three were Lady Margaret Hall (69.7%), Jesus College (68.5%), and Exeter College (68.0%).

However, the vast majority of colleges occupied a different position in the table when the results from the 2019/20 and 2021/22 academic years were collated – for example, Balliol, Brasenose, and Christ Church came first, second, and third respectively.

Regarding the system which will replace the Norrington Table, Conference of Colleges spokesperson told Cherwell: Discussions on future examination data are still ongoing. It is intended that the raw data on examination performance by college will still be made available.”

The Oxford University webpage for the Norrington Table draws attention to the drawbacks of the system: “The score represents absolute performance not adjusted for any variations in student background or prior academic achievement, and so does not necessarily represent progress made while on course.

“The score is based on students who are members of a College, not on students receiving their teaching from that college. Students are typically taught by tutors from several colleges, as well as receiving teaching from their department or faculty.”

Men still outperform women in Oxford and Cambridge exams

Natasha Drake
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Men still outperform women in Oxford and Cambridge exams

A recent report by the Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI) has found that female Oxbridge students are statistically less likely to achieve a first in almost all subjects except just two at Oxford and four at Cambridge. Oxford’s English faculty is taking steps to address the report’s findings.

This sits in stark contrast with the UK higher education sector as a whole, in which there was a significant 4.5% overall percentage gap favouring women in the 2022/2023 cycle. The national trend is a consistent trend across all four parts of the UK and applicable to upper second-class honours too.

In the 2021/2022 cycle, all four schools of Oxford finalists – Humanities, Mathematical, Physical and Life Sciences, Medical Sciences and Social Sciences – had a first-class gap favouring men.

At Oxford, the subject with the largest percentage gap points favouring men was Classics at 29 percentage points. One Classics student told Cherwell that they believe private school teaching has a large influence on this as private schools for boys are more likely to teach and encourage students to pursue Classics than all-girls schools.

The English faculty at Oxford discussed the report at a meeting, specifically on how it is addressing the issues through Athena Swan, an assessment system operating across the UK Universities which seeks to enable equality in gender with due attention to intersectionality. 

Professor Diane Purkiss, an English Tutor and spokesperson for Athena Swan, told Cherwell: “It’s worth noting that in all of the past three years, women have achieved a higher percentage of the top firsts given, the top 50. I am therefore pushing back at what I thought was the rather unhelpful stereotyping language in the report.

“The last thing I would like to see is a lot of demotivating reportage about how women students are a failure. We are not perfect, but we are working towards improvement all the time.”

The report identifies that one of the largest percentage gaps favouring men at Oxford is in English (13.8) despite the large population of women on the course. 

PPE also has a reputation for being heavily male dominated, with a first-class gender gap of 19 percentage points in favour of men. A 2020 Cherwell article found that “fewer women than men named Greg are speaking at Oxford PPE Society events this term”.

A first-year PPEist at Pembroke College, Oxford, said: “It’s already the end of week six and I’ve only had one female lecturer. All of my lecturers are male, and so are all my tutors.” 

But the lack of female representation within faculties is not unique to PPE. The percentage of women making up the overall body of academic staff in 2023 for both Oxford and Cambridge was more than 10% below the national average of 48%. 

Theology at Cambridge was the degree with the most significant percentage point gap in favour of men in the last academic year at 43%. Specifically, 83.3% of male students received first-class honours compared to just 40.0% of women.

William Hague elected Oxford Chancellor

Cherwell News
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William Hague elected Oxford Chancellor

The Convocation voted Lord William Hague as Oxford University’s next Chancellor after two rounds of voting, concluding their multi-month campaigns.

Hague received 12,609 votes in the final round, second-place was Lady Elish Angiolini at 11,006.

Hague was the Leader of the Conservative Party and Leader of the Opposition from 1997 to 2001. He also held the position of Foreign Secretary from 2010 to 2014 during the coalition government.

In his interview with Cherwell, Hague said he is prepared for a “decade of change”. He discussed coming to Oxford from a comprehensive school and having his life “transformed”. He also hopes to help grow the University’s endowment through his links to the US so that it doesn’t rely too much on international students’ funding. 

Hague was elected from a pool of 38 candidates, which were narrowed down to five – Lady Elish Angiolini, Rt Hon Dominic Grieve, Lord William Hague, Lord Peter Mandelson and Baroness Jan Royall. This came after 23,000 members of the Convocation, which comprises alumni and staff, cast votes in the first round.

With a history of 800 years, the Chancellor is the ceremonial head whose role today includes fundraising work and representing the University internationally. Predecessor Lord Patten served from 2003 to this year, but the new Chancellor will hold the post for no more than ten years following an amendment to the University statutes.

Campaigns have seized national media attention these past few months. Mandelson recently drew criticism from rivals for using University mailing lists to distribute campaign materials, which he said is publicly available and registered with the Information Commissioner’s Office. 

Candidates have also put money into their campaigns, with Royall spending £10,000 on consultants, Grieve spending £120 on a website, and Lady Angiolini spending £100 on a social media post plus some food, according to Financial Times. Hague and Mandelson did not provide figures.

The Chancellor-elect, Lord Hague said: “Thank you to my fellow Oxonians for placing such confidence in me. I regard being elected as the Chancellor of our university as the greatest honour of my life. I pay tribute to the other candidates, in particular for their commitment to the future of Oxford. What happens at Oxford in the next decade is critical to the success of the UK. I look forward to working closely with the Vice-Chancellor and her team, along with students and alumni, to build on their excellent work. My heart and soul are in Oxford and I will dedicate myself in the coming years to serving the university I love.”

Vice-Chancellor of the University of Oxford, Professor Irene Tracey said: “I am delighted to welcome Lord Hague back to Oxford as its 160th Chancellor. On behalf of the entire University community, I heartily congratulate him on being elected. I would like to extend my gratitude to the four unsuccessful candidates for their dedication and willingness to serve. William is a great friend to Oxford and is someone who I know will serve and represent this magnificent institution with dignity and vigour. I am personally looking forward to working with him during the remainder of my tenure, and to also engaging with his wife, Ffion, another loyal alum to the University of Oxford. Congratulations once again.”

Skills, Thrills, and the X20

Sebastian Page
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Skills, Thrills, and the X20

Never have I ever woken up more wired than to that 8am alarm on a Saturday morning. In kit just a few minutes later, I’m facing the prospect of the mighty Thame 2s (away). Headphones on, grab the bike and I’m down at Iffley picking up my goalkeeping kit. On the way, the illuminating red-light of the Tesco sign speaks to me, beckoning me in for a breakfast meal deal. With a main-sized portion of mango and a tiny almond croissant in my bag, I hit the road once more to lug the mountain of protective foam over to the high street.

Typically, we either take rental cars or cars owned by teammates to away fixtures (the furthest ones are up to an hour from Oxford), but the X20 bus awaits us for a more local fixture than usual. With one car sent ahead with our hockey balls, and protective masks, the rest of the squad neatly file in, and up the stairs to spread ourselves out of the series of seats at the back. Thankfully, with no one upstairs with us, we can get the speaker out and get into the mood for it.

A win would see us go 4th (out of 12) from 9th, and today’s opposition were promoted into our league from the one below last year. Finally getting to the venue, we somehow have made it earlier than our oppo, so we assert some serious authority and start warming up in their absence. Gates are opened and closed with military efficiency, and enough chickens have been shooed to restart the KFC on Cornmarket Street, so they don’t resort to rats anymore.

They finally turn up, and it’s the usual mix of 14 and 40 year olds that you find in this league. Older blokes who are out of their prime now, and can’t hack the pace at the top level, and younger players that make you question whether you really enjoy playing this sport as they continually rinse you over and over again. The game comes and goes, and is all in all pretty even. Both teams have some very good chances, but great last-minute defending from Oxford means both teams walk out with a point each at 0-0 (we’re gonna ruin them in the home leg, trust). Filing into the showers after the game, the chatter continues as we debrief post-game, and get changed into the customary ‘ones,’ shirt and tie, with smart trousers and shoes. Apparently, other teams’ clubhouses used to have dress codes, and so being as smart as possible guarantees we won’t get turned away anywhere (and I suppose it just stuck).

Some of said chatter includes newly-created fantasy hockey chat. With one of our teammates having spent some time coding over the summer, he’s managed to replicate fantasy football (commonly known as FPL), and so debate ensues about how many points each player will have accrued over the course of the day. Stupidly, I transfer myself out the night before the game, and immediately get our first clean sheet of the season, which would have provided some seriously nice points. Oh well. Teas provided by the oppo round off the day while we nominate ‘Man of the Match’ and ‘Dick of the Day,’ the former going to Stan Doel for some excellent work at the back, and Ben Cole runs away with the latter for [REDACTED].

We trudge back onto the X20 home, and return mildly disappointed in our inability to come away with the win, but spirits still high with Vinnie’s on the cards for the night. Traditionally a members-only club, the Vincent’s Club (or Vinnie’s/Vin’s) is a club wide hangout spot for hockey on Saturday nights, where players from various teams unwind and catch up on the days events over a few Pinkies and some games that have been passed down since well before you or I were born. Mid-Vin’s trip, I stop to log the game’s result on the online database, just to realise I forgot to upload the team sheet the night before the game (oops) and so sneakily log it before the league notices (oops again) and we potentially get fined (sorry FJ) – at the time of writing I don’t think we did so I may be in the clear…

Between getting home and going to Vin’s, I contemplate doing some work for the essay due on Monday at noon, and haven’t started. Having decided that sporting mediocrity will always triumph over academic success, I quickly bin that off and pore over the events of the game, and what to work on in training in the upcoming week, provided a decent number from the squad turn up for once. Invariably, they won’t, but what can I do if not try.

After stumbling all the way back home to Summertown, it’s finally time to get some rest after a busy day, and I slowly cry myself to sleep as a result of leaving two points on the table (just love the game so much). At approximately 3am, I give up on sleeping and start scheming for the next week’s game away at Marlow, cooking up tactics that Pep Guardiola would call crazy but Sean Dyche may describe as ‘sound’. I’m telling all the boys that injured players can’t defend and certainly can’t score.

If you want to see some of the finest hockey known to grace the Fletcher Field astro at Iffley, come down on Sunday at 2pm to see us take on Marlow 5s, and get the full experience.

Shashi Tharoor, UN diplomat, novelist, politician, and historian, speaks to Cherwell about his work and career

Hassan Akram
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Shashi Tharoor, UN diplomat, novelist, politician, and historian, speaks to Cherwell about his work and career

Dr Shashi Tharoor is an Indian politician, writer, and former diplomat. He has written twenty-six books spanning history, politics, biography, religion, literary criticism, fiction, and more. He was a UN diplomat for twenty-nine years from 1978 and ran as Secretary-General in 2006. As a Congress Party MP in India since 2009, he has been very critical of the exclusionary-populist BJP regime. In 2015 he made a viral speech at the Oxford Union, arguing that Britain owed reparations to former colonies. His subsequent book, Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India, earned widespread praise and became a Sunday Times Top 10 bestseller. 

Cherwell: You were born in London in 1956, and do you think there’s anything in your early life which foreshadowed your later career. 

Tharoor: The globalism I suppose goes back to the fact that at a very young age I had to travel from the UK to India on a ship with my parents, and relocate into a different environment to what I’d known the first two years of my life. That would be the thing that set the tone for my future life of frequent travel, jetting around the world, working for the United Nations and subsequently in public life. Over a hundred flights a year is the state of my life these days. That’s one thing from my infancy that foreshadowed what I’ve been living with since. 

Cherwell: You were a diplomat at the UN between 1978 and 2007. What are your proudest moments from your diplomatic career? 

Tharoor: I was privileged to have some extremely exciting things to do during my career. The first stint was eleven years with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, during which I ran the programme for Vietnamese boat people rescued at sea and brought into the port at Singapore. While that was successful, I also found myself dealing with thorny and unexpected refugee problems in Singapore, which I was not there to resolve but which I had to by virtue of my mandate as the UN’s representative there. The first Polish refugees, after the crackdown on Solidarity in 1981, were seamen who jumped ship in Singapore and came to me, and the first Achinese refugees to make it into Singapore. I’m proud to have resolved both of those, as well as one particular crisis when a Polish seaman swam to a US destroyer and the Singaporean government was desperate that I solve the problem without any publicity. Forty years later I probably can talk about it publicly, but I was able to solve all of it with no diplomatic mess, public scandal, or media exposure. It was an educating and maturing experience. 

Then I worked at UN peacekeeping at the end of the Cold War, when I joined the department of five civilian professionals and four military people, which then grew to a department of eight hundred. I left seven years later and was present at the creation of this huge UN peacekeeping enterprise. I was the one person both handling peacekeeping – I was in charge of the operations in the former Yugoslavia – and interpreting it for the world, speaking at Sandhurst, the Royal College of Defence Studies, the American Naval College, and writing for academic publications on peacekeeping when there was no peace to keep. That kept me in the frontlines of the UN’s work at headquarters and went to the making of my career as a prominent UN official.  

Another highlight was working in Kofi Annan’s office. He was an outstanding secretary-general, one of the greatest, and being by his side as one of his right fingers – I won’t say right hand because there were so many of us – I managed to learn a lot, help him a lot, and help run his office at a very challenging and inspiring time. Finally, I headed my own department, dealt with various management challenges, and ran to succeed him, but lost a fairly tight race to Ban Ki-moon.  

I look back without the slightest regret to a very memorable time in the UN, never a dull moment. 

Cherwell: After the UN, you entered the Indian Parliament in 2009. What are your proudest achievements as an MP? 

Tharoor: My fundamental successes have been to do with development initiatives in my constituency, Thiruvananthapuram. That’s ultimately what an MP is elected to do. My frustrations have been with having been relegated to Opposition for the last ten years, with a government not entirely appreciative of the role of an Opposition in a democracy, which hasn’t recognised the useful contributions we can make.  

Cherwell: You’ve been critical of the populist BJP regime in India, especially in your book The Paradoxical Prime Minister. Could you outline your main criticisms of it?    

Tharoor: The government’s problem is its fundamental bigotry, which vitiates many of the good things it does in advancing technology and infrastructure in India and so on, all of which I’m prepared to acknowledge, as well as acknowledging the energy the prime minister has put into his personal diplomacy around the world, to uphold India and Indian foreign policy. What I truly deplore is that it’s accompanied by the pettiest and basest kinds of Islamophobia and minority-bashing, which has done a great deal of damage to social harmony in a gloriously pluralist land. It’s unworthy of any government that seeks to represent the vast, diverse democracy that India is. 

Cherwell: Do you foresee an end to the BJP hegemony? 

Tharoor: Well, we thought we were coming close in this year’s election. We didn’t quite make it. We’ll have to wait for the next opportunity five years down the road. That’s five more years of this kind of divisive politics which I am here to resist on behalf of the Opposition. 

Cherwell: On your literary career, what’s your favourite of the many books you’ve written, and why? 

Tharoor: First of all, you can’t ask an author that, because it’s like asking a parent to name a favourite child. You put everything of yourself into the book you’re writing when you’re writing it. Like with a child, you can’t go on saying, “I wish he had a bigger nose” or “I wish he had different colour eyes”, and you can’t do that with a book either. It was true to what you felt at the time you wrote it. I stand by all of my books. There’s none I’m really embarrassed I wrote, they all reflected what I thought, felt, and cared about at the time I wrote them. 

Cherwell: Your first work of fiction was The Great Indian Novel in 1989. What drove you to write that one, and how do you situate yourself in the tradition of postcolonial literature? 

Tharoor: Amusingly enough, I had reviewed Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children in 1981 and called it “the Great Indian Novel”, and that title inspired me when I was writing my own. I was reading a very lively translation – or, as a translator would call it, transcreation –of the Mahabharata, the ancient Indian epic, by Professor P. Lal, and I was struck by the immediacy of the stories and the universality of the concerns. Here we have an epic that was told throughout India for 800 years, roughly 400BC to 400AD, and became so much the repository of all the wisdom of the times that it was even referred to as the Great Indian Library. And then I wondered, Why did we stop retelling it?  

So, the conceit that occurred to me was, What if we retold it in the twentieth century? The great events of the twentieth century were very clearly the freedom struggle against the British and the early years of independence, so that would be the obvious theme for the tale-tellers of that time. From there I got the idea of replacing the fabled narrator of the epic with a cantankerous old politician in his anecdotage, recounting the story of the independence movement in which he was both a participant and an observer.  

I tried to transmute the epic as well as the great events of the freedom struggle into one seamless story, to cast the light of an ancient legend on the contemporary legends of the twentieth century, and at the same time the light of a modern sensibility on an ancient legend that most Indians are very familiar with. I thought the best way to do that was in the satirical vein, not least because there had been no tradition of modern satirical writing in India in English, and I thought about initiating one.  

I was very proud of the book. Somewhat to my surprise, it was hailed by critics as the first Indian postmodern novel. At that time I didn’t even know what postmodernism was! It also won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for the Asian region and had its heyday. But it’s even more gratifying when today, thirty-five years later, I have young people who weren’t even born when the book came out, coming up to me clutching copies for my signature. That’s been my vindication of why it was worthwhile to write. 

Cherwell: Which author has been your biggest literary influence? PG Wodehouse? 

Tharoor: I love Wodehouse to read for pleasure – I’ve read every word he ever wrote, and I’ve written a couple of essays about him and his work – but whether he’s been an influence, beyond a very limited extent, it’s difficult to say. In my collection The Five Dollar Smile there’s a story I wrote deliberately in the style of Wodehouse, but set in Calcutta instead of in London. I suppose in The Great Indian Novel there is one scene vaguely echoing the kind of humour that Wodehouse would have enjoyed, but it’s a little more ribald than anything he wrote. But otherwise, I couldn’t call him an influence, because I’ve done only four works of fiction and the remaining twenty-two books in my oeuvre are non-fiction.  

Many of the writers who gave me the greatest pleasure gave me pleasure precisely because I could never imagine myself writing anything similar. My wife and I discovered Gabriel García Márquez and just loved his writing, the translations were extremely readable, and we’d read everything he’d written before he then won the Nobel Prize. 

My writing is nothing like any of those. I’d like to think my writing is distinctively me. But whether it is or isn’t, reading gives you a sense of what is good writing, and of the various possibilities of good writing. It is not necessarily for you to imitate in a directly instructional way.

Cherwell: Your most famous book is Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India, which was a result of your Oxford Union speech. In the decade since you spoke, the debate about Britain’s colonial past has intensified. On the one hand there has been more honest and multicultural history, and surveys increasingly find that pride in imperial history is declining. On the other hand, there is a fierce backlash from the Right, with Conservative MP Robert Jenrick saying last month, for instance, that former colonies “owe us a debt of gratitude.” What do you make of this intensifying debate in Britain? 

Tharoor: I am gratified that I seem to have opened a door. When the book came out there really was nothing on that side of the ledger in contemporary publishing. There’d been several books arguing the case for the British Empire, by Lawrence James, Niall Ferguson, Andrew Roberts, and others. When mine came out against the Empire it was taken with a sharp intake of breath and some, I hope, shock of recognition, but there was also an awful amount of very welcome writing about it. For example, Lord Ridley devoted his entire column in The Times to the book, and said that he was amazed that Indians were even willing to speak to the English after what had happened. I met him later and expressed my surprise that a Tory peer, that too one of Norman descent, would actually say that. He replied: “I’m a true Conservative and I believe that we should have traded with you, not conquered you,” which in a sense is an appropriate traditional Conservative response.  

But having said all that, the truth is that I was unprepared for the flood of material and books that came out about this whole business about colonialism. Some backlash is inevitable. I gather there is a project in Oxford, headed by a theologian called Biggar, trying to make the moral case for colonialism, which to my mind is impossible to make. But more power to him, let him have a try. At least people are now acknowledging that there is a great deal to reckon with. My book acknowledges that many good things may have happened but they happened in the service of a fundamentally immoral and iniquitous system, the colonial system. 

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