Brace yourselves: Brexit winter is coming. In more flexible employment sectors, ‘Brexodus’ is picking up speed: according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS), 130,000 EU27 citizens emigrated between September 2016-17, the highest number since the 2008 financial crisis. In considering the Brexit effect on EU27 academics, three words come to mind: uncertainty, hostility, and community.
Nearly two years after the referendum, EU27 are still waiting for their post-Brexit rights to be secured. I have relentlessly campaigned against the government’s ‘bargaining chips’ approach and for unilateral guarantees. The draft Withdrawal Agreement hardly puts EU27 citizens’ anxieties to rest: it requires over 3 million EU27 citizens to apply for settled status, and important rights may be lost: for instance, the Oxford European Association, which I chair, has written to Oxfordshire MPs imploring them to pressure the government to guarantee the retention of electoral rights post-Brexit. Moreover, ‘nothing is agreed until everything is agreed’, and as The Sunday Times revealed last weekend a ‘no deal’ scenario is still very much a possibility.
While guaranteeing the rights of EU27 citizens who are already in the UK is morally, practically, and legally required, it does not address post-transition arrivals. If, as the Labour manifesto for the 2017 elections proposed, ‘freedom of movement will end’ (p28), EU27 academics will increasingly prefer posts in EU member states where they, and their family members, can exercise treaty rights. This applies to students too. At a postgraduate programme fair in the Hague last month, nearly every prospective EU27 student asked me about their post-study rights. Can you blame them? They read stories about the Durham university professors who were ordered to leave the UK, having conducted EHRC-funded research abroad (the Home Office backed down after a public outcry); about EU27 citizens receiving deportation letters ‘in error’; and about the NHS levy (paid by citizens of non-EU countries on top of your income tax and national insurance).
EU27 citizens have not forgotten the polarising and emotive campaign that preceded the referendum, where they were constantly portrayed as Schrödinger’s immigrants. I am aware of numerous instances, post-referendum, where friends and colleagues were verbally abused or stared at when they spoke with their friends, spouses, or children in a foreign language in a public space. Many EU27 citizens feel that they are no longer welcome in the country they call home. Their lived experiences may deter others from coming; unfortunately, a Prime Minister who pejoratively labelled ‘citizens of the world’ as ‘citizens of nowhere’ is hardly well-placed to mend the bridges.
Research thrives in borderless spaces, where visas are not required for academic visitors, where funding bodies are not constrained by nationalist considerations, and where academics can feel at home wherever in the world they happen to be. By erecting barriers, Brexit is retrogressive.
The uncertainty about the UK’s position post-Brexit is seriously harming career prospects of staff involved in EU-funded projects and is therefore potentially making UK academia less attractive than its competitors. This is not just a question of eligibility for participation in, for example, Erasmus student and staff exchange, which the government’s brinkmanship is putting in doubt. Academics in EU27 countries may become increasingly wary of bidding jointly with academics in UK-based institutions. There is already a reported sharp drop in successful bids by UK-based academics, with reports suggesting that “millions of pounds [have been] lost as a result of a fall overall in Britain’s share of the flagship Horizon 2020 project”.
UK academia, not least in Oxford, is currently punching above its international weight; but competition is fierce, both across the channel and further afield. Brexiting, especially if the UK leaves the internal (‘Single’) market, will make it harder to attract international talent and funding. Brexit is detrimental to UK academia, and needs to be stopped. The Liberal Democrats are calling for a referendum on the Brexit deal with the option to remain. We will march in London on 23rd June, demanding a #PeoplesVote. Join us!
Dr Ruvi Ziegler is an Associate Professor in International Refugee Law at the University of Reading, and Research Associate at the Refugee Studies Centre, Oxford.
I’m in a room full of people, of friends even, music is blasting out of a speaker; Lukas Graham’s ‘7 Years’ starts playing. Tom, our self-proclaimed DJ for the night, changes the song almost instantly. No one bats an eyelid, everyone, I suppose, is too drunk to notice. But, it hits me, those lyrics: ‘mamma told me go make yourself some friends or you’ll be lonely’. I had made friends. I’m at a house party. I go out regularly, I do plenty of exciting things with these friends. “Park End anyone?” I’m going on holiday with some of them in the summer. Tenerife, probably. Somewhere more exotic if we’re lucky.
I am having the time of my life. University – the golden years. The time I’ll supposedly relish when I’m old and grey and sitting by the fireplace with the grandchildren. But, who says I want grandchildren, and who says I’m having the time of my life. No, in that moment, the words of Lukas Graham sat with me, and for some reason wouldn’t leave me. An unwanted guest, in a room, I guess, full of friends.
University is the time of your life. But, why then, do I feel so alone. I had always maintained a work ethic at school, and without too much work, I would get the grades I needed. Now, I struggle to maintain focus in tutorials, which are only an hour long. My initial interest in my subject has wavered, I no longer care about those things I thought interesting. As my tutor gets impassioned about some esoteric detail about some esoteric event in the depths of history, I’m left unamazed, unfazed by this somehow revolutionary fact. These details no longer interest me, and even in tutorials, I feel alone – feigning interest in some irrelevant fact. As I speak to my friends from home, they tell me of the brilliant time they’re having at university. “We went clubbing, we got high, and watched the sun rise on Clifton Bridge”. Good for you, I whisper, under my breath. I spent the night, trying to find the motivation to write an essay. And the night before, I went clubbing, and woke up in someone else’s bed. Despite, the raw, physical contact, I was still, in my head, alone. I suppose, what I’m trying to say is, loneliness affects us all.
What I’ve learnt is the hedonistic lifestyle of Freshers week is not the reality of Oxford. Or of life more generally. It isn’t always the case that you’re going to be having a good time, that you’re going to want to go out, and that’s okay. Spending some time alone. Resting, recuperating, doing whatever it is that you want to do, is healthy. The expectation to be posting exciting stories on Snapchat, to have pictures in interesting places on Instagram, to get hundreds of likes on our Facebook posts has led to an unrealistic expectation of what university is.
University cannot be going out at least five times a week. It’s okay to take a step back. To realise what it is that you’re here for, to focus on yourself, and what it is that you really want, rather than trying to fit some distorted, contorted image of what the life of a university student should be. I have found that doing those things that I want to do, with the people that I really want to do them with, has made me feel more complete. I may not be the most popular, my Snapchat content is abysmally dull (if we’re friends, I’m sorry). But, what I do know, is that I’m happier living my university life in a way that I’ve defined it. And that means accepting that I don’t need hundreds of friends to be happy
NHS staff and their supporters marched down Cowley Road into the city today, calling on the government to introduce an ‘Oxford weighting’ for pay.
The march, organised by public service union Unison, culminated in a rally on Broad Street, with hundreds assembled to register their support for Oxford NHS staff.
Last week, administrators at Oxford Health Trust and Oxford University Hospitals called for the government to review areas where pay weighting is applied after vacancy rates soared.
March organiser and a nurse at the Warneford Hospital in Littlemore, Ian McKendrick, said: “There is a national staffing crisis but it’s particularly sharp in Oxford.
“In other parts of the country it is older people leaving the NHS but here it is young workers leaving, which means we are struggling now and won’t have a workforce in the future.”
He added that the issue is the high cost of living in Oxford, noting that staff in London get “an extra £6,500” to reflect their situation.
Kathy Pitson, a support secretary at the John Radcliffe’s cardiology department for the past 19 years, said the Oxford weighting was urgently needed.
“We are having a real problem retaining staff because of the cost of living in Oxford.
“I couldn’t even tell you how many vacancies we have in the department.
“Young doctors and nurses train here for maybe a year or two but then they get confident in themselves and realise the money is better elsewhere.
“We are losing good people because the money isn’t there to keep them and it’s having an impact on everyone else at the hospital.”
Green party councillor David Williams, whose son is an NHS doctor in the north of the country, played on the need for national defence of the NHS in a speech before the march began.
He said: “We are also celebrating the 70 years of the NHS – its founder Aneurin Bevan said the NHS would last as long as there are people to defend it.
“Well we are here to defend it and we will do that until the very end.”
SERVICE UPDATES. Delays to our services using Cowley Road in Oxford due to an unexpected march taking place. Please expect delays until the march is over.
The vacancy rate in Oxfordshire hospitals is twice the national average. Both MPs and employers have acknowledged that the high cost of housing is deterring people from taking up jobs in local hospitals.
In a parliamentary debate earlier this year, Oxford MP Layla Moran cited the “prohibitive cost of housing” as being the key factor motivating Oxford NHS staff from leaving.
She said: “The government can and must take a role collaboratively with stake holders to recognise the unique situation and challenges we face in Oxfordshire.
“If we do nothing I believe we risk seeing the rationing of care and treatment and a backlash, quite rightly, from our constituents.”
The debate was secured after a leaked memo revealed Oxford University Hospitals Foundation Trust was considering ‘rationing’ chemotherapy treatment owing to a lack of qualified nursing staff.
On the eve of Saturday’s march, health secretary Jeremy Hunt promised a “well deserved pay rise” of 6.5% for NHS staff.
It would be the first above inflation pay rise for health workers in eight years.
Squidink Theatre’s interpretation of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet is the kind of production that makes reviewers nervous. Promotional materials, including the terse, polemical director’s message in the programme screams that this is a piece of self-conscious théâtre engagé: it is inspired by the charity Acción Interna, whose admirable work in Colombian prisons makes the production worth supporting in its own right. Predictably, there are plenty of bold directorial decisions for the audience to murmur about: the cast is all-female, the action takes place within, amusingly, “HM Prison Verona”, with the central dalliance taking the form of an inter-gang lesbian relationship, and there a feeling that the play functions as a sort of critique of austerity. Pleasingly though, the black turtlenecks have been rolled down just far enough to reveal some genuinely brilliant acting, and a remarkable turn from Lucy McIlgorm as Mercutio will go a long way to silence anyone who still treats all-female Shakespeare productions as a passing fad.
The pioneer of modern gender experimentation with Romeo and Juliet was the American actress Charlotte Cushman, whose 19th century tour of the United States as Romeo to her sister Susan’s Juliet was facilitated by her gruff contralto register. Lorelei Piper, however, is a different kind of female Romeo: she does not seek to ape an absent masculinity, but rather reimagines Romeo as wholly female, a decision aided by some sensitive pronominal tweaks from Director Conky Kampfner and Assistant Director Cesca Echlin. This means that the romance is lesbian, and this choice is immensely effective. If I have one criticism in this regard, it is that this aspect of the production could have been even more boldly expressed: the lambent tension of the balcony exchange is never quite realised in the sleepoverish post-coital scene.
Piper’s physicality elsewhere, however, is a delight: as the callow Romeo mopes over Rosaline, in love with the idea of being in love, she drapes herself languidly over a set of stairs as she laments that Juliet will “not be hit / With Cupid’s arrow; she hath Dian’s wit”. Though Romeo is somewhat swamped by her noisy coterie in the first two acts, Mercutio’s death in Act III makes room for a convincing maturation deftly rendered by Piper, whose quivering soliloquies give way to a moment of choking pathos as Piper’s voice cracks on the line “Then I defy you, stars!” One or two slips are likely to rankle only the most exacting bardolater, such as the pronunciation of “doth” to rhyme with ‘moth’. Less pardonably, however, some unfortunate sound design in the form of twitchy electronic muzak rather overshadowed some of Romeo’s most poignant soliloquies, so that during the death pangs of Act V, I found myself scribbling in my margin: “next week on Prison Break…”
In Juliet, Emelye Moulton is faced with an arguably harder task than Piper. Shakespeare’s adaptation of Arthur Brooke’s didactic poem still bears signs of contrivance, as the spirited wisdom of Juliet’s lines fights to reconcile itself with her tragic arc. For the most part, Moulton exploits this tension admirably: her understated, metrical delivery of the blank verse suggests naivety, while exposing the lucidity of many of her lines, as well as a hint of defiance as she resolves to “try” and love Paris. The conceit of prison life works well for Juliet too: Moulton’s trenchant pronouncement on “old folks”, for example, is aided by the implication that she might be some kind of young offender or new inmate.
Perhaps it is worth considering how successful this conceit is overall. The rather obvious substitution of a women’s prison for the oppressive norms of Veronese society is forgivable not just for its worthy charitable tie-in, but for the immense scope the setting affords for dramatic experimentation. The balcony scene is a masterstroke: rather than cooing to Juliet from below, Romeo stares down and across at her from a high gallery at stage right, with the stark iron railings of the Keble O’Reilly theatre redolent of an American-style multi-level prison. The gallery extends round to the circle, and as a result the audience is conscripted into the scene, forced into voyeuristic concert with Romeo as he gazes at his spotlit muse.
Matilda Granger’s set is a triumph of grey and white parsimony, perhaps as a kind of post-Luhrmann expiation, and can be credited as the source of many of the production’s most haunting images. Nowhere is this more apparent than during Romeo’s first encounter with Juliet in Act I: despite the conspicuous absence of tropical fish, the scene is poignant and visually arresting, with the actors lit in purple behind a diaphanous gauze screen and framed by banks of serried bars. Despite being at the geographical heart of the set, this intimate space is rarely used (with the jarring exception of a few extraneous pole dancers) and its reprisal in Act V as the prison morgue invites a moving comparison with Act I. Once again, however, a soundtrack is on hand to drag the exchange down to the level of bathos: having already forgiven an accidental salvo of laptop-derived bleeps, I was grateful when the Prison Break music mercifully gave way to silence; but this was soon replaced by a swelling piano number, which, rather like Romeo’s kiss, seems a little too “by the book.”
The other slight limitation of the patriarchy-as-prison conceit is that it collides awkwardly with certain subplots, notably that concerning Paris’ proposed union with Juliet. Kampfner and Echlin have made the interesting decision to reimagine Paris as a male prison guard, a choice which does pay some dividends: the Nurse’s exclamation that Paris is “A man, young lady!” is transfigured, while Capulet’s obliviousness to Juliet’s blossoming sexuality reinforces how Juliet’s forced marriage is a contravention of her very nature. However, there remains the question of why Capulet is seeking to “wed” the young inmate Juliet with the prison guard Paris. Still, this complaint is minor: if Kampfner and Echlin have sacrificed verisimilitude in favour of preserving Shakespeare’s coruscating language, they have made the right choice.
Piper, Moulton, Kampfner, Echlin and Granger all deserve individual praise, but Lucy McIlgorm’s Mercutio was the jewel of this production. McIlgorm manages speak the verse better than anyone else on the stage, with a buoyant clarity that carries the audience along through her brisk badinage with Romeo and Benvolio. The alacrity is infectious, and Libby Taylor’s sometimes staid Benvolio is most fun when playing off her boisterous pal. The switch to an all-female cast has done nothing to diminish the jocularity of the relationship, and this is largely thanks to McIlgorm, who delights in the bawdiness of Shakespeare’s dialogue. Ribald mimes abound – the famous line about “pricking” is accompanied by a gesture that brings a whole new meaning to the phrase “tongue-in-cheek” – and the surprising plausibility of this kind of humour in an all-female environment is a rich vein for any would-be gender theorist.
Does McIlgorm’s turn overshadow the rest of the troupe? Perhaps, in the first three acts. But this is as it should be: Mercutio is so compelling precisely because she is the arch humanist, who threatens to deflate the other characters’ grandiloquence. Her existence jeopardises the very ideas about fate upon which the tragedy depends, and this is the reason for Shakespeare’s perhaps apocryphal remark, prized by Stephen Greenblatt: “I had to kill Mercutio before Mercutio killed the play.” In any case, Director Conky Kampfner could not have hoped for a more captivating iconoclast than McIlgorm.
It is worth singling out a few other performances. Gaby Kaza is entertaining as the Nurse. The manic energy she brings to the role of go-between is refreshing, and her porcine snores from the bottom bunk interrupting Romeo’s passionate serenade are just one example of a collection of ingenious and genuinely funny responses to tricky stage directions. At times, Kaza’s exuberance, coupled with her perhaps unconscious impersonation of Nursie from Blackadder, undermines the pathos of certain scenes, but her unravelling at the death of Juliet is a devastating climax to a dramatic irony expertly cultivated throughout the scene. Imogen Edwards-Lawrence brings a turbulent physicality to the role of Capulet – pitched somewhere between Bernarda Alba and a sadistic PE teacher – that spawns some of the most convincing choreography of the production. Nancy Case understands the laconic humour of the Friar’s early lines, and exudes a kind of professorial equanimity until the play’s tragic conclusion. Other performances were slightly less polished: Jeevan Ravindran’s Montague and Dan O’Driscoll’s Prince occasionally had lines swallowed up by the imposing space, but this is the kind of hitch that can easily be remedied as their voices settle into the venue.
Squidink Theatre has not put on a perfect production. The sound design is perennially distracting, and there are a few inconsistencies in the Paris subplot. But what they have done is assemble a remarkable young cast, who, despite varying levels of experience, are all absolutely compelling in their enthusiasm for Shakespeare’s verse. They have more than vindicated the idea of an all-female production, and devastated the notion that Shakespeare’s verse rings true only for straight relationships. If there is one overriding message in this interpretation, it is simply that when we love someone, we do so regardless of their name, regardless of their crimes. And as I walked out of Romeo and Juliet into the warm evening, I realised that despite of all this production’s imperfections, I had loved it.
Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House was a play phenomenally ahead of its time when it first opened in 1879. It tells the story of Nora (Ceidra Murphy), housewife and most treasured possession of her husband, Torvald (James Akka). Whilst on the surface, the Helmer household is the perfect picture of domestic bliss, the façade is tainted when it is revealed that Nora borrowed money behind her husband’s back, and committed forgery in the process. As one crack appears, the entire artifice breaks down, and Nora is forced to ask serious questions about her seemingly flawless life.
Sour Peach Productions brings Ibsen’s play to the 1960s. The resulting glorified domesticity is characteristic of the post-war period. The sleek and somewhat kitch aesthetic connotes pop culture classics such as Mad Men and The Stepford Wives. This production should certainly be commended for its aesthetic attention to detail. From its beautiful trailer (which apparently was made using film sent especially to Berlin for developing), to the costume (Connie Furneaux), I, and indeed other audience members from what I could gather, found this production very visually pleasing.
The characters navigate the cramped space with an amplified self-consciousness, both heightening the tension between characters and illustrating the performative nature of domesticity. The claustrophobia owes a lot to the thrust staging – as an audience member on the front row I couldn’t help but feel exposed, even voyeuristic, as the narrative unravelled in front of me. Consequently, Nora’s experience of entrapment within the walls of her home is ever-present because, for the audience, it is visceral.
With her playfulness, secrecy and tendency to tantrum, Ceidra Murphy brings to Nora a childishness that is alarmingly believable. Highlighting Nora’s infantile disposition works particularly well, as the character begins to reflect on the parallels between her paternal relationship and her marital one – to her father, and subsequently her husband, she is a “doll” to be decorated and brandished as an accessory. I was impressed by Murphy’s sophistication in the role and hope to see more of her on the Oxford stage. Townsend came into her own with real gravitas as Christine, Nora’s perceptive school friend. The most compelling scene came from Christine’s reconnection with former flame Krogstad (Flinn Andreae), in which weighty silences were beautifully balanced with truly heart-wrenching moments of emotional vulnerability.
Whilst it is true that Sour Peach Productions delivered the tense atmosphere wholly appropriate for Ibsen’s narrative, I ended up feeling dissatisfied by the adaptation of the script. The play is normally around two and a half hours long, and this version was around an hour and half. I can sympathise with a desire to cut such a long script for the sake of a student production. Equally, I can see that changes needed to be made for the adjustment in period. However, I felt that the loss of a significant amount of the original script meant that the pace of the narrative was stunted. By the end, Nora’s decision to leave the family home seemed to come out of nowhere. I have always experienced Nora’s resolution as a dramatic eruption of the subconscious – the result of a slow, but constant, build-up of resentment and repression. In my view, Sour Peach Productions’ script did not succeed in communicating the incredible power of Nora’s eventual realisation or, perhaps more significantly, did not signpost the route to such a realisation convincingly.
Whilst Ibsen’s landmark script has not entirely been done justice in this case, this production of A Doll’s House has some emotionally compelling performances. Most significantly, Sour Peach Productions should be congratulated for their visually stunning production – it is rare that other student plays put so much thought into creating such a cohesive aesthetic experience.
‘Progress’ candidate Dan Wilkinson has won the Union presidency for Hilary term 2019, with his slate winning all four officer positions.
Wilkinson won 567 first preference votes to ‘Refresh’ rival Julian Kirk’s 502.
For the treasurer-elect position, Amy Gregg beat Musty Kamal by 629 votes to 407. In a close election for secretary, Nick Brown beat Charlie Coverman by 523 votes to 502.
Finally, Cecilia Zhao lost out to Brendan McGrath for librarian, with only a 24 vote gap between the two. McGrath received 565 first preferences to Zhao’s 541.
President-elect Dan Wilkinson told Cherwell: “We are extremely pleased with that all Progress officers have been elected, and are truly heartened that a clean and ideas-based campaign was rewarded by the members.
“It is a great regret that many of our candidates for Standing and Secretary’s Committee were not elected, despite their incredible effort for the team.
“We take this result as a strong mandate to carry out our agenda over the summer and beyond, and will endeavour to fulfil our promise to the members.”
Defeated presidential candidate for ‘Refresh’, Julian Kirk, told Cherwell: “Although we didn’t get the result we hoped for this morning, I’m immensely proud to have run with a team of such talented and dedicated people, from whom I’ve had the immense privilege to learn a great deal, and I know that those who were successful in being elected will do the ‘Refresh’ team justice in their contributions to the Union.”
Elected to Standing Committee were: Becky Collins, Sara Singh Dube, Gemma Timmons, Harry Webster, Anisha Faruk, Mahi Joshi and Maxim Parr-Reid. In total, 13 candidates ran for Standing.
Members of the Oxford Union voted to abolish slates last night, though a failure to reach quorum means the ruling is not yet binding.
After the main debate, a motion was heard urging the abolition of electoral slates from Union elections. It passed with 49 votes to 40.
However, the total figure did not reach the 150 members required to reach quorum, meaning the ruling can be overturned if the pro-slate side gets 50 signatures within the next five days.
However, if 150 signatures are accrued by the anti-slate side this weekend the motion will go to a poll of all union members.
Anti-slate campaigner and president-elect of Christ Church JCR, Joseph Grehan-Bradley, told Cherwell: “The Union establishment are lazily embracing the status quo, defending slates on the paradoxical grounds that nothing will change if change is made. Contrary to this mentality, I strongly believe that abolishing slates will foster a fairer, more decent election culture.
“A culture in which would be candidates are not dehumanised, “binned,” because they do not fit a certain mould of popularity or social background; a culture in which individuals will be forced to campaign on their own merits, their own ideas, rather than being able to hide behind the uninspiring “pledges” of a monolithic “team”; and a culture in which elected candidates will be more easily held accountable to the promises they made when running.
“At no point has any supporter of the motion to abolish slates suggested that to do so would provide an all-encompassing panacea to the deeply embedded corruptions that fester within the Union. Yet, undoubtedly, doing so will act as a highly valuable and symbolic starting point for a more comprehensive reform programme in the future.”
Slate advocate and president of the Oxford Union for Trinity 2016, Robert Harris, told Cherwell: “I think slates are good for three reasons. Firstly, it is a good thing for candidates to be able to run for election together, based on shared goals, aims, and beliefs; that should be encouraged, not banned.
“Secondly, slates are empowering; they make elections not just about how many friends you have (popularity contests where those with the biggest public-school networks will always win), but enable those from other backgrounds to gather a large base of support based on their vision, competence, and what they stand for.
“Thirdly, slates were banned between 1998 and 2015, but were nonetheless present in every single election; whether legal or illegal, they will always continue to exist. By making them illegal, all you do is incentivise the nonsense we used to see, like candidates hacking into computers and bugging rooms in an attempt to find evidence that other candidates are running as part of a slate. The Union was a really toxic place when slates were banned, and I would hate to see it return to that for the sake of some flawed ideology.”
Oxford MCCU coach Graham Charlesworth has called for clarity over the future of university cricket, after the ECB announced that it would resume its funding in 2020.
The existing scheme, taken over by the MCC in 2004, sees first-class cricket played by six ‘centres of excellence’, based at Cambridge, Cardiff, Durham, Leeds, Loughborough, and Oxford.
Details of the new scheme are yet to be announced, but Cherwell understands that white-ball cricket is likely to be at the top of the agenda.
“The MCC has been supporting university cricket for more than 10 years, so my main response is that I’m very grateful to the MCC for their extended support for us over a period of time,” Charlesworth told Cherwell.
“It’s potentially good news, but we’re not quite sure what the detail looks like. We’re not quite sure how the model’s going to change in the future, so the ECB might be talking about more extended coverage across more universities.
“But the financial side of things is still reasonably unclear – at the moment the scheme is fairly well-funded, and the ECB needs to decide what the detail is going to be, what the coverage is going to be across university cricket, and what financial investment is going to be.
“Essentially, it’s good news that the governing body is looking after this pathway for cricketers.”
Charlesworth also anticipates that the change will involve more white-ball cricket at the university level.
At the time of the change’s announcement, the ECB’s national performance manager, David Graveney, said: “With the help and advice [of universities and counties], we will be aiming to develop a new programme which continues to develop white-ball cricket as well as the red-ball game and provides greater opportunities for our most talented young women’s cricketers too.”
Charlesworth said: “The game is changing. There’s a lot more 20-over cricket these days, so the cricket landscape is much orientated towards the shorter format at the moment.
“The first-class game is still very important, but [the ECB] might want to put in more short-form cricket into the pathway. It’s another entry point for them into the game.
“They might keep a [red-ball] county game or two, but they’ll be putting much more white-ball cricket into the programme.”
“The ECB is trying to get really good plans in place for 2020, the sooner we get that information, the better.
“Hopefully towards the end of this year, things will become a lot clearer.”
The current university cricket scheme was initially set up as the University Centres of Cricketing Excellence (UCCE) by the ECB in 2000, before the MCC took over funding and administration in 2004.
The MCC has invested over £7.5million in the six MCCUs in the past 14 years, and during that time, eighteen MCCU cricketers have been selected to represent their country.
Recent England internationals to have benefitted from the system include Sam Billings, Jack Leach, Toby Roland-Jones, Tom Westley, and Monty Panesar.
The MCC’s assistant secretary, John Stephenson, said: “While it is sad that MCC’s investment will be coming to an end, the scheme is in very good shape and I hope that university cricket continues to thrive under the ECB.
The scheme’s future was cast into doubt earlier this year, after one of its major sponsors, Deloitte, withdrew its funding.
Sathnam Sanghera was born to Punjabi parents. He was brought up in Wolverhampton, and was raised as a Sikh. On his first day at school, he couldn’t speak English. Thirty years on, after graduating from Christ’s College, Cambridge with a first in English, he is one of The Times’ leading columnists, where he has worked for past ten years. Sanghera’s is a story of social mobility at its best – he was born into a poor family, and worked at a burger chain, a sewing factory, and a hospital laundry before he made his break with the Financial Times. He is, he says, “among the exceptions that prove the rule”.
It is hardly a surprise then that in the light of Oxbridge’s admissions reports in the past two weeks, Sanghera is angry. “It’s bullshit”, he tells me. “It’s ludicrous. My anger is based on the fact that there aren’t more people like me, of my kind of social background at Oxbridge.”
He is right that ‘people like him’ are up against it. According to Oxford’s admissions report, UK-domiciled Asian students made up just 4.3% of the total students admitted to study English in the years 2015-17; before even thinking about the fact he grew up on free school meals, it is clear that the system he faced in 1995 is still weighted against those from backgrounds like Sanghera’s more than twenty years later.
In its response to the report, Oxford stressed that it intended to throw money at access programmes, while vice chancellor Louise Richardson claimed: “it is a picture of progress on a great many fronts.” As much as the numbers themselves, the response has drawn immense backlash, and Sanghera tells me that the entrenched resistance to change should be a major cause for concern.
“The most worrying thing about all of it is their instinctive defensiveness. It would make a huge difference if, when confronted with the plain facts of the situation, [Oxford and Cambridge] didn’t try to point score, defend themselves, and freak out when actually they could just say: ‘we’ve got a problem’. I don’t think we’ve even got to the stage where Oxbridge say: ‘yes, we have a problem’. Most of this data has been dragged out of them reluctantly. There’s lots of really sincere people at Oxbridge trying to change things, but the fact is that this tone reveals that there’s a lot of resistance as well – and that’s a bit depressing.”
Sanghera has been a vocal critic of Oxbridge’s diversity problem
But the solution cannot just be money, he says. “They’re spending a decent amount now! You can always spend more, but what’s the point of outreach and PR, when actually, there are more fundamental problems, like the lack of centralisation of an applications system. I think that is the main thing: if they centralised access, had one body orchestrating things, and took it out of the hands of the fellows and the colleges, then that would revolutionise things. It’s not really about money – it’s about attitude, and it’s about taking one or two really big moves.”
It is clear that Sanghera has genuine concerns about many colleges’ approaches to access. Many, he claims, do not see it as a problem that the University has a moral right to address, but something that they need to be seen to be addressing. It is all about appearance. “I’ve been talking to people,” he says. “Oxbridge colleges are very good at calling up alumni and asking for donations. I was talking to a friend of mine, who went back to his old Oxford college recently. The speech at the fundraising thing was: ‘give us money, because then, we don’t have to listen to the government’ with the subtext of that being ‘and then, we don’t have to listen to all this crap about access’.”
The focus on PR is something that has come to the fore in recent years especially. On the day of the admissions report’s release, David Lammy MP criticised the University’s use of its official Twitter account, which retweeted all of those defending the University. The account responded by retweeting an alumna who called Lammy ‘bitter’. While some laughed off the ‘bittergate’ scandal, it demonstrates Oxford’s obsession with its own image, an obsession that Sanghera thinks is the only think that will stop a larger change in Oxbridge’s structure.
“If I’m honest”, he says, “I think we’re more likely to see Oxbridge go private than taking power out of colleges’ hands. The colleges, and the relationships they have with the establishment, are so deep-seated – it would go against the way the British establishment has worked for centuries. I just can’t see [centralised admissions] happening.” But it is this PR obsession that Sanghera thinks will prevent the pair going private. “It would just be terrible PR,” he tells me. “I think the people who run them know what the right thing to do is. They’ll be kicking and screaming, but ultimately, when it comes down to it, they know, and I don’t think that will happen.
“Equally, they are so tied to the college system, I cannot see them break that. People in the establishment have so many personal connections to these colleges, so…they’re not going to give up their power without a fight. And what we’re having now is the fight, basically.”
Sanghera is keen to avoid too much focus on his own experience at Cambridge as we chat – he speaks out about the “autobiographical” nature of the discourse about admissions – but he clearly struggles to get his head around three bizarre years of his life. Students at this university often claim that their degrees have flown by, or that a term has gone too quickly, but it is not only this sense of haste that bookmarked Sanghera’s time at Christ’s, but his social confusion.
Sanghera read English at Christ’s College, Cambridge
“It’s taken me twenty years to work out what happened to me when I went [to Cambridge]”, he tells me. “I couldn’t really make sense of why I felt so weird – I’d integrated so well into my independent grammar school [which he attended on a fully-assisted place], and I was fine afterwards, too. Now I realise that the weirdness was that I arrived and everyone already seemed to know each other. And I was like: ‘oh, that’s because they all went to the same bunch of schools’. They literally knew each other – it took me 20 years to realise that.
“It was just socially weird, and that was basically because lots of people around me went to very posh schools, and were from a very upper-middle-class background. And it felt even weirder than Fleet Street, which is probably, in some ways, even posher. It was a properly strange environment if you weren’t from there.”
And Sanghera’s experience wasn’t just strange on account of public schoolboys hanging out together. I ask him about his time in Cambridge’s student media, and he tells me the story of his bizarre rejection when he applied for the editorship of Varsity, this newspaper’s Cambridge equivalent. “I don’t want to make out I was the victim of discrimination or anything. But it was typical of my experience of Cambridge in that it was just weird! I didn’t understand what had happened.
“I applied with my friend [Dan Roan], who’s now sports editor of the BBC, and we were told by the people interviewing us that they didn’t believe a word we had said. It was just odd. It ended up being a great thing, because we just spent all our time doing work experience elsewhere, and we ended up in journalism, straight away. I just didn’t understand! At my school, I was head boy, and I was quite socially active. At Cambridge, I just couldn’t get my head around anything socially at all. I think the culture is that of a few very dominant private schools that control things – and if you don’t know the code or the way of speaking, forget it. Real life isn’t like that – it just doesn’t work like that.”
A few weeks after the release of the access data, plenty of students at this university appear to be fed up with the discussion about it. There are four major responses, as far as I can tell, that try to claim this is a problem we shouldn’t be talking about: that discussion only reinforces the idea that Oxford is not for people of certain backgrounds; that the University’s access problem is symptomatic of wider issues with Britain’s education system; that there is an irony that those whose lives have benefitted from ‘the system’ – like Sanghera and Lammy, who attended Harvard – are the ones leading the fight; and that focusing on two top universities misses the point that things are just as bad at other leading UK universities. They are all intriguing responses in their own right, but it is clear that the key campaigners see them as distractions, as excuses made by those wishing to ignore the problem.
“It’s going to be a really slow cultural change,” Sanghera says. “It’s small, really basic things like put up some pictures of like, some working-class, or black and Asian alumni! You walk around Oxbridge, and all the pictures are white. Why are they so reluctant? It’s because history is the point of Oxbridge – the point is that it’s unchanging, and it goes back hundreds of years. But you can keep that, and recognise that in the last two decades, there’s been a different kind of person going. If you reflect that, you might help dispel the image.
“But the image is a real problem. It’s true: the more people like me bang on about it, the more you put people off. But I think we need to go through this. There’s no choice, is there? We can’t say: I’m not going to say anything negative about Oxbridge because then I’ll put people off. There’s some people who argue that – they’re like, ‘why do you keep going on about this: you’re putting people off!’ But, like, what’s the alternative? Just ignore it, and put up with it? I think we’ve got to go through this painful process, but it’s going to take decades, if not longer. If it ever happens!”
Similarly, Sanghera is critical of the fact that any discourse about admissions has to go back to the individual. It should not, he says, detract from an argument that the person who is making it went to a particular university. “I’ve heard a lot of: ‘oh, David Lammy didn’t get into Oxbridge, so he’s just bitter’. He went to Harvard, man! I feel really grateful for it – I want more people to have this experience. Everyone should have equal chance, and to focus on the individual biographies of campaigners is insane. It’s not the point; it’s not my point. It’s not that I’m ungrateful, we just have to rise beyond this insane biographical thing and look at the data. And the plain fact is, if you’re working-class, or if you’re from the north, or if you’re of colour, you’re going to struggle to get in.”
The discourse of an elite clinging onto their status is one that Sanghera uses throughout my time speaking to him. He believes there is an entrenched resistance to change, and that ‘people like him’ will always be disadvantaged by an unequal and unfair admissions system. It is hard for me to disagree: the University’s response has been pitiful, but more than that, the excuses made by fellow students are disheartening.
“This focus on lowering grades is ludicrous,” Sanghera says. “People use that as saying: ‘oh, you want us to lower standards!’ The moment you say ‘let’s have ABB rather than AAA’, people will freak out and say you’re lowering standards. It’s just a way for the elite to hold onto power,” he says.
Sanghera is one of many voices fighting this battle. But it is a battle of tedium and attrition: every time his side starts to make progress, their words are spun into something negative, and somehow turning against him. He is determined to ensure that there is a turning point, but I can sense a resignation in his voice. This is a problem that cannot be solved overnight, but more than that – it is a problem that he feels may never be addressed. Unless Oxbridge comes to accept that it has a myriad of deep-rooted issues with its admissions processes, then people like Sathnam Sanghera will continue to feel that for ‘people like them’, it will never really feel anything like home.
Director Rosa Garland describes No Man Ever as a play about a “messy love square”. Landing Light Production’s upcoming play concerns entangled relationships between four people in the lead up and aftermath of a wedding.
After having seen a preview, I think it only fair to say the play concerns four people, rather than four characters: the naturalism of both the acting and the text is superbly nuanced, lending the production a very human feel. This is no doubt facilitated by Jonny Wiles’ mature script which specifies the roles as only “A”, “B”, “C”, and “D”. Creating a web of complex relationships which leaves deliberate spaces (such as names, ages, genders), allows both the actors and the audience to project themselves into the drama with startling ease. As I watched the scenes I could not help but feel like I was watching something already quite familiar. This may be explained by Wiles’s process which involved recording one-liners overheard in Pret or on the train; the text is unerringly believable to the point of feeling like reportage. The result promises to be honest, intimate, and incredibly beautiful.
Actor Marcus Knight-Adams, who plays “C”, explains how Garland encouraged all the cast to find ways to access emotions in the play with reference to their own experiences and past relationships. From the scenes that I saw, the result is incredibly promising: balancing specificity against universality. I was especially impressed with “A”, played by Callum Coghlan, whose understated resignation at a failing relationship was heartbreaking. Moreover, the result is a show that is quietly radical: the cast were selected based on characteristics and personality above all else, and as such the gender expression and sexual identities of the characters emerged naturally as a result of the plot and the selected actors. Queer relationships appear respectfully on stage, normalising the representation of non-heterosexual relationships.
Wiles’ script apparently specifies: “there need be no set, props, or mimes”, a challenge which Garland has embraced. The production is stripped of many stagecraft conventions (the actors wear their own clothes as costumes, there are no lighting changes etc.) to create work that is wholly and intensely focused on human interaction and language. Garland and her cast have set themselves a difficult challenge with this sparseness. This suits Garland’s directing style which draws from her own experience as an actor. Any tendency towards overacting has the potential to compromise this delicate effect, but the scenes I witnessed gave me confidence in Garland and her team. This is a production which boldly embraces limitations and is unafraid to tackle the difficult, small, and vital moments which make us human.
No Man Everis on at the Old Fire Station on Tuesday 12th June at 7.30pm.
