Monday 6th October 2025
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Repealing the 8th: a movement for all generations

Flora Pery-Knox-Gore
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Repealing the 8th: a movement for all generations

This May, a referendum will be held in Ireland asking whether the 8th Amendment to the constitution should be repealed. The amendment equates the right to life of the unborn child with that of its mother, effectively prohibiting people from terminating pregnancies unless in extraordinary circumstances. As a result, between January 1980 and December 2016, at least 170,216 women and girls have travelled from Ireland to access abortion services abroad. The Pro-Choice movement has become a significant political force in lobbying the government to hold the referendum. However, it has come under fire for its intolerance of more moderate opinions. What’s really fascinating, regardless of your stance on abortion, is to see how impactful a movement led by young people can be.

Most British politicians seem resistant to changing abortion legislation, or even engaging in a dialogue about the current system. In America, Republicans are seeking to limit access to abortions. It may be surprising to those outside of Ireland that the referendum is happening in this political climate. But in 2013, Ireland became the first country to legalise same-sex marriage via referendum. The ‘Yes Equality’ campaign was vibrant. It was a campaign run on positivity, about a topic that is undeniably more palatable than abortion, so the similarities can be overestimated. Importantly, the result of the marriage equality referendum showed the Catholic Church’s influence had significantly weakened. 

The Repeal Campaign is the most active, passionate movement I’ve ever seen. This vigour is thanks, in part, to the student activists who are vital to the progression of the campaign. You can’t walk down a street in Dublin without seeing at least one young person wearing a sweatshirt with the word ‘Repeal’ emblazoned across it. Pundits believe that, generally, the vote will be split along the lines of age. As of yet, the precise wording of the referendum hasn’t been revealed, which is a source of concern.

The Pro-Choice movement may risk alienating some of the voters who have reservations about the legalisation of free abortions on demand. The campaign is particularly active on social media, with campaigns like the ‘Stories of the 8th’ Facebook page, on which women describe their experiences of travelling to the UK to access abortions. This fails to reach voters who don’t have access to social media, especially older voters, who may also be put off by the tone of the Repeal campaign. Some campaigners have posed provocatively in front of religious monuments, or used social media to tweet abusive content at Pro-Life campaigners and students. The media’s liberal bias has also aggravated some voters who believe that government-funded media outlets should present a more balanced view on the issue.

The Pro-Life campaign receives funding from the Iona Institute, a Catholic group with wealthy benefactors. Their larger budget allows them to erect billboards featuring potentially upsetting CGI images of foetuses, designed to arouse the viewer’s sympathy for the unborn. The tactics of the Pro-Life campaign have been compared to the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Money has been pumped into video campaigns designed to make young people look uneducated on the issue, and paid pushes cause these videos to gain thousands of viewers, though nobody can figure out where the funding is coming from.

Students are at the forefront of the campaign, on both sides. The most important thing that they must be aware of, however, is that the student vote won’t decide the referendum, and that those put off by the tone of the campaigns are probably more likely to stick with the status quo. It is very difficult to moderate our tone when speaking about the issue, when, no matter how you look at it, people are dying because of the 8th Amendment. However, appealing to a broad range of viewpoints will be critical in winning the referendum.

The tradition of ignorance in English travel writing

Aine Kennedy
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The tradition of ignorance in English travel writing

Since earlier incarnations in the works of Petrarch and Captain Cook, travel writing has changed from the preserve of a privileged elite to a hobby for anyone with internet access and the ability to tolerate Ryanair. However, the authorial prejudice it reveals has survived throughout the ages. English travel writing can rarely be objective, given the level of tolerance and accommodation for its voyaging speakers.

The spirit of adventure lives on in every person who sets out to explore another culture. While they may not be ‘discovering’ anything, travel provides valuable opportunities for discovery on an individual scale, and, of course, the infamous opportunity to ‘find yourself’.

But the simultaneous experiences of the visitor and the visited – one on a life-changing journey that may produce a sincere love for another country, and the other catering to thousands of these self-styled ‘explorers’ every year – have diverged since the birth of the tourist industry.

Well-intentioned, would-be ‘global citizens’ can forget that to their hosts, they are one of many such visitors upon whom the economy relies, and from whom much linguistic and cultural ineptitude will be tolerated, thanks to their open wallets. This merry, romantic oblivion can be charming, but calls into question the ability of such travellers to accurately portray another country.

Preconceptions exist about every nation, and strongest are those which have been around long enough to ingrain themselves in literature. Perhaps one of the finest examples is provided by Italy, whose national associations have been spawned by the writings of everyone from Twain, James, and Hemingway, to Mario Puzo, and Elizabeth Gilbert.

A tempting comparison with the modern day is A Room With A View, E.M Forster’s self-consciously silly yet charming account of the British in Florence. Set before the war, Forster writes from the self-described perspective of the “fag-end of Victorian liberalism”.

The spirit of the Victorian pensione is alive and well in the modern phenomenon of the language school. The language school, like the pensione, is populated mostly by middle-class and middle-aged Europeans, and a few young people drifting around on their parents’ buck.

The average lesson at an institution I attended could easily have been mistaken for a Forster live-action roleplay group, perhaps with inflections of Alan Bennett. After a week of ‘intensive’ courses, no one in the class could form more than 3 phrases in Italian, and no one was bothered by this. However, much like their counterparts in Forster, they were very much bothered by the Italian spirit embodied by the teachers.

Take Colin, for example, an affable fellow from the Home Counties with Superdry glasses, a silvery pate and a rotating selection of M&S merino jumpers. He spent the whole week dropping feeble dad jokes and complaining about the cheesiness of Italian pop music.  When the teacher tried to hug him after his last lesson, he physically scooted his chair away and said ‘sorry, I’m British’.

Or Bruce, a retired Australian who appeared in class daily on a pair of massive, orthopaedic-looking Asics, and nodded his way through every three-hour session with the tranquil disengagement of a dashboard bobblehead. Forsterian women were tragically absent, as both men had been sent to the class by wives already fluent in Italian.

By contrast, the teacher, Claudia, was cartoon-like in her animation. Like apparently every Italian woman, she was never seen without Cleopatra-esque eyeliner, brick-red or fuchsia lipstick, and impractically large heels that elevated her to the average student’s eye level.

Her mimes of new vocabulary paled in contrast to those of the other teacher, an older lady with a soft chin but a steely gaze, who seemed to be teaching to fulfil a frustrated passion for the dramatic arts. Drooping theatrically over the table to perform pantomime, she licked an imaginary ice-cream with an enthusiasm disturbing of a woman in her sixties. Everything she did terrified and discomforted the British students, who consequently spoke even less Italian than when they started.

Forster’s tug-of-war between “the real and pretended” lives on today in the stereotypical British reserve and Australian nonchalance, which ultimately filter travel experience through existing national attitudes.

Travel has increasingly come to be seen as a mission of self-discovery for the individual. Valid as this individualism be, its representation shapes perceptions of the countries visited.

Accounts of self-help through travel can make for excellent reading, but it’s a shame to let them eclipse the reality of the people and culture itself. When every holiday post can be uploaded into the public consciousness, shallow perceptions can be confused with, or replace, objective and informed travel writing.

 

It is time for Corbyn to go

Jordan Bernstein
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It is time for Corbyn to go

Jeremy Corbyn. Those two words are enough to set hearts racing across university campuses, not least in Oxford. Students love him, lifelong Labour voters love him, ordinary people love him. In short, very smart people can’t get enough of him.

And I’m sorry if this sounds tried, or if you’ve heard it all before. I’m sorry if you think I’m picking isolated incidents and construing a narrative. Most of all, I’m sorry if you think I’m overreacting. Because it means you don’t get it.  

If you proudly announce to me that you voted Labour in the last election, you don’t get it. If you wear a Jeremy Corbyn T-shirt, you don’t get it. If your only analytical engagement with the man is sharing articles detailing how ‘the media simply isn’t giving Jezza a fair shake’, you don’t get it.

I’m a Jew, and the idea of Jeremy Corbyn as Prime Minister worries me. And if you can’t join with me in that worry, then I’m afraid that’s a problem. You don’t get it.

News has just broken that several years ago Corbyn commented his support on Facebook to an artist who had had a mural of his removed. The mural depicted old Jewish men playing monopoly on the backs of slaves with the illuminati image in the background. It’s a problem because it depicts Jews as obsessed with money. It’s a problem because it depicts Jewish financiers as controlling the world. Most of all, it’s a problem because it’s not the first time Corbyn has been caught out for saying or doing something that can reasonably be construed as anti-Semitic.

Watch the Andrew Marr interview with Tom Watson which details the mural episode. Write down on a piece of paper how appalled you are on a scale of 1 to 10. Then imagine that a politician had given the same message of support to an artist who had painted something clearly racist, or homophobic. Write down how appalled you would be in that situation on the same scale. If there’s a difference between those two numbers, then I can tell you something: you are part of the problem.

During the last election, people I really respect told me that they were voting Labour. Without prompting, many of them followed this with something along the lines of ‘I can understand why you as a Jew might have a problem with that, but I think he’s exactly what this country needs’. But imagine a man saying something similar to a woman who was worried about a politician who had said and done decidedly misogynistic and sexist things. Why is there this double standard?

Aside from mural-gate, it recently emerged that Corbyn was a member of a Facebook group called the ‘Palestine live’ forum, which was regularly home to horrifically anti-Semitic posts. Since this emerged, Labour has suspended several members who were associated with the group, but of course not Corbyn. If that doesn’t concern you, perhaps try contemplating the fact that Corbyn has referred to his ‘friends’ from Hamas and Hezbollah, terrorist organisations who have the stated aim of killing Jews.

Still not convinced? Maybe look to what has happened in the wider party since Corbyn became leader. Ken Livingstone has still not been expelled from the party, despite incurring anger from across the Jewish community for repeating his ‘Hitler was a Zionist’ line. Also not expelled is Jackie Walker, who criticised Holocaust Memorial Day and questioned the need for Jewish schools to have extra security as a safeguard against attacks. Large groups within the party have called for the expulsion of the Jewish Labour Movement for ‘crying wolf’ to the newspapers every time another incident emerges. Fringe speakers at the most recent conference urged the party to open up debate on such questions as whether the Holocaust actually happened. There are more examples than I can count of rife antisemitism within the party.

It is now time for woke Corbyn supporting students and voters to be honest with themselves. If you’re voting for Jeremy Corbyn, if you want him to be the next Prime Minister, if you’re willing to overlook facts because you believe in his policies, then know this: you are actively ignoring the concerns of the Jewish community. You are remaining wilfully ignorant of the concerns of Jewish students. You are treating antisemitism as fundamentally less important than other forms of prejudice.

And that’s not okay.

‘Sehnsucht’ and life’s insatiable longing

Moritz Schnorpfeil
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‘Sehnsucht’ and life’s insatiable longing

Plato presented it as the origin of our desire for partnership and love. The romantics put it at the forefront of an individualistic and idealistic worldview. Christians derived from it the existence of heaven and god. And for Buddhists it forms part of the solution to universal suffering. The German word ‘sehnsucht’ describes an emotion that is difficult to explain and even more challenging to understand.

The dictionary will tell you that ‘sehnsucht’ is an “intense, mostly bittersweet longing for something remote or unattainable that would make life more complete”. But this description is not worthy of the emotion that moved Goethe and Schiller and C. S. Lewis, Schubert and Wagner and Strauss.

‘Sehnsucht’ is yearning and craving, inconsolable longing, infinite dreaming, gazing at the stars. It is sensitive, creative, sad and optimistic, confusing. It is vastness and loneliness, dawn and dusk, an invitation of consolation. It is untranslatable.

Aristophanes, discussing the nature of Eros in Plato’s ‘Symposium’, offers a striking interpretation of love revolving around ‘sehnsucht’. He recounts the old days, when humans still had two heads, four arms and four legs. Zeus, full of fury, cut them into two parts, subjecting them to an endless longing for their other half. Thus, the human desire for a life-long companion was created. But this desire was merely a superficial reaction to a new, dim sense of something beyond our reach. A restless search for completeness had begun. ‘Sehnsucht’ was born.

Eichendorff’s homo viator went on and made ‘sehnsucht’ the centrepiece of a whole artistic, cultural, and intellectual epoch – Romanticism in Germany. With political earthquakes at the horizon, machines invading the workplace, and science infringing on the sanctity of nature, Romantics found refuge in melancholic fantasising. ‘Sehnsucht’ was the emotion for those dreaming more elegantly.

It gave rise to the most beautiful delusions, which lie at the core of what makes us human. It is impossible to stare at Caspar David Friedrich’s ‘Monk by the Sea’ without being struck by an endless vastness, both stabbed with despair and lit up by hope. It is impossible to read Brentano’s ‘Abendständchen’ without being overwhelmed by the confusing intermingling of desire, excitement, and futility. Lost in the world searching for everlasting home, ‘sehnsucht’ captured the space between tragedy and promise.

It may well be the case that ‘sehnsucht’ is excellent material for melancholic poetry and ancient fables. But, inevitably, dreaming for the impossible leads to disappointment and sorrow.

Either, we forever linger in nostalgic despair with our actual life or, if, against all likelihood, we do obtain the object of our ‘sehnsucht’, a disappointing realisation comes upon us. The thing we believed to be the missing part of ourselves, once achieved, turns out to be nothing but an empty idol which cannot match the colourful paradise painted by our desires.

Something will always be missing for our happiness to be complete, for our life to seem full. But learning to accept such imperfection and longing is the very first and most important step in our struggle for a happy life.

Only after accepting that life is just as valuable without the perfect relationship, today’s mood will no longer depend on yesterday’s Tinder date. Only once we stop longing for intellectual supremacy, will we realise that 58 is no longer a shameful defeat, but an invitation to approach the next essay differently.

Like most emotional states, ‘sehnsucht’ is not inherently positive or negative. It deserves to be faced as a lifelong companion inviting us to reflect on our lives and grow in character. And once we stop fighting and start listening to ‘sehnsucht’, it holds useful lessons for us.

To the utilitarian, it points out the richness of the human soul. Our emotions, fortunately, are much more multi-faceted than the hedonistic calculus suggests. To the scientist, it teaches the value of uncertainty and ambiguity. About the best poetry, there speaks an atmosphere of infinite suggestion.

To the materialist, it creates an uncomfortable suspicion that the period preceding possession carries an excitement and anticipation no fullness can compare with. To the realist, it emphasises the power of imagination.

To all of us, ‘sehnsucht’ conveys meaning in a way that no other thing can. It is a comforting reminder that the stars are always out there. They may be out of reach and at times even out of sight. But at every moment they hold the promise of a different world, full of colour, sparkle, and depth.

Eat Sleep Rep Repeat

Lou Lou Curry
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Eat Sleep Rep Repeat

Picture this: I’m lounging on the red velvet sofas of Park End, gazing at the club-goers dancing energetically below me, Drake’s ‘God’s Plan’ is blaring over the speakers. I reach over and take out the litre of Smirnoff from the ice bucket and drink some straight; it’s free and somehow this makes it taste a thousand times better, bearable even. A group try to smuggle their way into our VIP area, but the bouncer blocks their path. I feel smug. I laugh a little even. But then I remember that I had to sell my soul to be here.

So let’s talk about being a club rep. To be specific: the woes of being a club rep. I was recruited by a third year, who spun me a tale of outrageous partying, ludicrous funding and instant BNOC status. The bright-eyed fresher that I was accepted this offer of instant glory. After all, at a university where you’re prohibited from having a job, the proposition of easy money and low commitment is tantalisingly tempting. I didn’t know it at the time, but this would come at the small cost of my integrity and pride.

Normally, there’s around three reps per college for Encore Events (they promote some of your favourite nights at Atik, Fever and JT’s), and one or two for Varsity Events (who host the legendary Bridge Thursday and Fridays at Emporium).

Unfortunately I’m a lone rep. This means I’m everybody’s port of call from morning to midnight. I alone get to experience the joys of organising tickets for events like Matriculation, Torpids, alongside crewdates and other sports socials, all on top of the standard weekly student nights. As you can imagine, my degree has become somewhat neglected.

If you are lucky enough to be in a group of reps, you can share the work. The downside of this however is being subjected to an intense rivalry between reps for sales, and the humiliating revelation of who people from your college would rather give their money to.

Sounds fun, right? Well, here’s what the typical shame-fuelled night out as a rep looks like:

It’s 9pm on a Wednesday and you still have over half your Fuzzy Ducks tickets left. You dash from the bar to pres and back to the bar again, envelope and cash in hand as you cajole and coax anyone you can into buying a ticket. “Yes, it includes queue jump! Yes, it’s completely valid after eleven o’ clock!” You sell one. They hand you a fiver. You realise you’ve babbled humiliatingly and hysterically for ten minutes, all for a commission of fifty pence.

At 10pm, your phone buzzes, you glance at the screen and your heart drops: Hey, do you mind doing a post on your JCR Noticeboard for tonight’s event? :). You ponder what you value more, the potential of a free bottle of vodka, or your integrity and public image? Vodka usually wins.

It’s now midnight. You’ve already sauntered past the streaming queues, before being guided to your VIP booth for the night and given your litre of vodka. This is only if you are fortunate to have such good relations with your employers. The truth is that the majority of reps will never experience this.

It’s 1am and you’re now dancing vigorously in your small and exclusive circle. Yet you still envy all the regular club goers, on the regular dance floor, who are able to enjoy a regular night out without feeling haunted by the actions that have led them there. You try to ignore this feeling – Jägerbombs are pretty good at helping with this.

You dance until closing. On the way back, as the other reps are passing around a joint, you decide it’s a good idea to jump into the canal. You get your Hassans, freezing to death in your sopping wet clothes. Hassan knows you by name now, you’re a loyal regular. A minimum of four nights out a week kind of regular. Four nights all resembling the above in some way.

But it’s hard to stop when you have an entire college depending on you.

The rise of the dystopia in a pessimistic world

Amber Sidney-Woollett
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The rise of the dystopia in a pessimistic world

“It was a pleasure to burn” opens Ray Bradbury’s dystopian novel ‘Fahrenheit 451’ which, as any good English student can tell you, is the temperature at which books burn. Our pleasure at burning is reflected in our attraction to imagined places more fiery and hellish than our own. Dystopias have become almost more popular than realist fiction in recent years, especially among teenagers.

However, our fascination with imagined places is by no means a contemporary phenomenon. Christopher Marlowe’s pastoral poem ‘The Passionate Shephard to His Love’ describes a utopia where the speaker can exist with his lover in harmony. A hundred years’ later a similar desire for such a paradise emanates from the work of Andrew Marvell: “Had we but world enough and time, this coyness, lady, were no crime.” Whilst being a poem about trying to get into his lady-friend’s pants, it achieves something more – it imagines a place in which time was infinite so that there was no hurry to copulate. Marvell explains that in this infinite, imagined place they would “sit down, and think which way/To walk, and pass our long love’s day”.

This poem might objectively be quite funny to the contemporary reader but it also enhances our understanding of human desire for, and projection of, such imagined places. They provide a place of escape, whether worse or better than our realities. Imagined places exist in many forms, from the bizarre to the scarily similar. But those we return to are frequently the extremes, worlds heavenly or hellish.

Perhaps then we ought to question why it is that during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries we seemed to stop searching for utopias and instead resort to dystopias. With the rise of novels like ‘Brave New World’, 1984 and more recently ‘Cloud Atlas’, it is almost as if we need to make ourselves feel better about our current ‘reality’ by setting it against an imagined, though often gruesomely realistic, ‘living-hell.’

One of the most important facets of a ‘dystopia’ is its ‘otherness’ as exemplified by Andy Warhol in his auto-biography and self-acclaimed “philosophy”:

“I wake up and call B.
B is anybody who helps me kill time.
B is anybody and I’m nobody. B and I.
I need B because I can’t be alone. Except when I sleep. Then I can’t be with anybody.”

Warhol’s fear of ‘being alone,’ and by extension being ‘other,’ indicates the need for something physical (or at least made manifest imaginatively) in order to liberate oneself from solitude. He creates ‘B’ who becomes ‘the other’ – a displacement of the self and human anxieties onto an external being.

Ironically, Warhol also reduces himself to ‘A’, ‘A’ specimen, ‘an’ example. Conversely B is female (and by implication then not just ‘other’ but also ‘lesser’). Warhol’s ‘B’ functions like a dystopian novel: being worse so he looks better.

Perhaps our new obsession with dystopia as the most popular of imagined worlds can be related to our current age of pessimism. In an age of Donald Trump and Brexit, it might sometimes feel like we’re living in a dystopia – waiting for the right moment to pinch ourselves and wake up from the nightmare of it all.

Dante descends into Hell so that when he returns to Earth, it appears a paradise. To see what we have, we must lose it all – but just with words, just with a tricky game of language. We can bet everything upon a metaphor or imagined world only to vanquish it when it serves us no longer. We can do as Wendy in Peter Pan – we can “grow up”.

Open letter demands undergraduate climate change education

Jeremiah O'Mahony
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Open letter demands undergraduate climate change education

The Oxford Climate Society (OCS) have published an open letter demanding the University introduce climate change to the undergraduate curriculum.

The letter points out that despite the importance of an understanding of climate change, undergraduate courses “largely neglect” the topic.

It goes on to claim that the University has a responsibility to “futureproof its curricula” by including climate change, even to students whose courses are otherwise unrelated.

“Understanding and taking action to minimize the impacts of climate change is of the utmost importance and requires highly skilled and knowledgeable politicians, scientists, teachers, engineers and professionals.

“Yet current students may study politics, economics, law or natural sciences with limited engagement with climate change, the defining issue of our time.”

Harry Holmes, second year law student at St Catz and OCS committee member, told Cherwell: “Climate change is such a varied problem that it is likely no matter what industry graduates work in they will interact with it, as such they will need to understand the problem and even more importantly how they can contribute to fixing it.”

The letter offers no suggestions regarding how this education would be offered, whether in modules, lectures, or another format.

However, according to OCS President Felix Heilmann, climate change is already studied from so many angles at Oxford that the new education could be introduced without “significant structural changes” to existing curricula.

“In some courses it may be easy to integrate this into existing modules whereas in some it might fit better as a new lecture series,” he told Cherwell.

“It’s hard to see a reason why this crucial topic shouldn’t be part of these courses’ core curricula.”

Additionally, the letter mentions the broad interest in the subject of climate change among students. According to the letter, an OCS seminar series held in Hilary of 2018 received four times as many applicants as it has places available.

Professor Myles Allen, who teaches Geosystem Science at the Oxford Environmental Change Institute (ECI), told Cherwell: “This is a really impressive initiative, and there are plenty of faculty — in Geography/ECI, Physics, Earth Sciences & Economics, to name just a few of the relevant departments — who would be delighted to support it.

“Oxford is arguably one of the largest centres of climate research in the world, in terms of the numbers of faculty working on it, but it isn’t known as such because we are spread across so many departments.

“Climate change is clearly one of the key issues that our current generation of undergraduates is going to have to contend with, whatever their subject or career, so the idea of a cross-department course is a really interesting one: a bit of a challenge to the traditional model of teaching in the university, but one we should step up to.”

Anna Pathak, a second year medicine student at St Hugh’s told Cherwell: “It’s important to send students out into the world with an understanding of that world. Climate change will shape it for us and our descendants. We are also one of the last generations able to do something about it.”

The University did not reply to a request for comment.

Cricket Australia’s punishments are ludicrously harsh

Susannah Goldsbrough
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Cricket Australia’s punishments are ludicrously harsh

When the first grainy television stills of Cameron Bancroft emerged, first fiddling with a piece of unidentified yellow material against the ball, and then elegantly stuffing down it his trousers, public outrage rang out loud and clear.

‘Ball-tampering’ is just about the dirtiest phrase in cricket, and as Australian captain Steve Smith sat calmly before the cameras and admitted that he wasn’t ‘proud’ of using an illegal tactic, cricket fans worldwide bayed for blood. Ball-tampering, the argument went, is in contravention of both the laws and of that mythical beast, the Spirit, of the game. The crime is wicked, the guilt proven, the penalty should be harsh. When Cricket Australia announced that Smith and vice-captain David Warner have both received year-long bans from the game, with a nine-month ban awarded to Bancroft, no-one seemed to think the punishment unfair. In fact, any outrage expressed was directed towards the fact that only three players had been punished. Justice, for the good upstanding citizens of cricketing morality, had been done.

Or had it? When it comes to the dirty world of ‘ball-tampering’, the laws of cricket are an absolute mess. According to law 41.3.2, ‘It is an offence for any player to take any action which changes the condition of the ball.’ So far, so good.

But scroll down to subsection 41.3.2.1 (oh so numeric, such precision), and we find that ‘A fielder may, however, polish the ball on his/her clothing provided that no artificial substance is used and that such polishing wastes no time.’ How many times have you seen a fast bowler spit on vigorously onto the shiny side and polish it against his trousers? Thousands, right? And what is his intention in doing so? To produce reverse swing by, *deep breaths please everyone*, changing the condition of the ball! It is a perfectly legal tactic according to the 41.3.2.1 – saliva is about as inartificial a substance as you get – but it clearly contravenes 41.3.2.

So if the James Andersons and the Stuart Broads of this world are breaking one pretty fundamental law of the game every time they approach the wicket and facing zero consequences for it, why should Smith and Warner get a 12-month ban for breaking two?

But say we choose to ignore the silliness of trying to impose any kind of punishments on the breaking of self-contradictory laws, and admit that since the Australians clearly disregarded two rules here, they should face the appropriate punishment. Well, then the laws specify exactly what that punishment is – five penalty runs. Five whole good ones. The kind of five you can earn in the space of, say, one ball. Oooh, how severe.

Admittedly, the laws do go on to say that ‘the umpires together shall report the occurrence… to any Governing Body responsible for the match, who shall take such action as is considered appropriate’ and it is within that spacious vagueness that Cricket Australia can justify its actions.

But we are talking about an ‘appropriate’ response to an offence that the on-field umpire would punish with the equivalent of letting the batting side run between the wickets five times. In the context of a Test match, five runs is effectively meaningless. And yet banning the Australian captain for an entire year is considered appropriate.

Some have argued that the premeditated nature of Bancroft’s rule breach make his, and the team’s, offence far more serious. It is the difference, if you like, between a first degree and second degree ball-tampering. But that is a ludicrous argument, because the nature of ball-tampering means it is always premeditated. When a fielder decides to mess with the ball, it is conscious and deliberate, whether he has decided to do it two minutes ago, or in the dressing room at the lunch interval. No one sees red and ball tampers – it is just not a crime of passion.

A more powerful argument is that harsh penalties for ball tampering follow a long precedent. In 1994 Mike Atherton was infamously fined £2,000 for using dirt – artificial substance? – in his pockets to keep sweat off the ball during a Lord’s Test against South Africa. Most recently, Faf Du Plessis was found guilty of applying minty saliva to the ball – artificial substance? – and was fined his full match fee.

But large fines are no equivalent to 12-month bans for wealthy Test cricketers with time-limited career spans. And some cases have not proved as clear-cut as they initially appeared: in 2006 Pakistan were forced to forfeit a Test against England after umpire Darrell Hair ruled they had been doctoring ball, but only because they refused to return to the field in protest against the decision. The team was subsequently cleared of all wrongdoing by an ICC tribunal, and Hair was banned from officiating international matches.

So why has this latest saga produced such a flagrantly disproportionate set of punishments? Perhaps because it directly involves the captains, who should bear the responsibility of ensuring their team stick to the rules. But then again, Atherton was captain back in 1994, and £2,000 is suddenly starting to look like a fairly small price to pay.

I think it is at least in part due to the fact that it was caught on camera. There is something fundamentally offensive about watching Bancroft clumsily but utterly shamelessly mess about the with the Kookaburra. The players and the pundits may have long been aware of the level of ball tampering that goes on in quiet corners of cricket pitches worldwide, but not until now have the fans had to confront it with their own eyes.

But while getting caught makes Bancroft more stupid, it doesn’t make him any more guilty. Of course, you could have predicted a ludicrous punishment from the moment the Australian Prime Minister decided it was in his job description to make a statement about a couple of young men breaking some rules in a game played with a ball and a few oddly shaped sticks. Grow up Cricket Australia – these are cricketers, not criminals.

Fighting art with art in Bolzano

Emma Leech
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Fighting art with art in Bolzano

“No one has the right to obey”, declare Hannah Arendt’s luminous words. Hanging in a mostly deserted square in the small northern Italian town of Bolzano, they partially obscure the façade behind. Seemingly paradoxical, the German political thinker’s words, taken from a radio interview in 1964, are written here in all three official languages of the region – Italian, German and Ladin (one of Europe’s rarest languages).

They force the passing observer to reflect on the 36-meter-long Fascist carving before which they hang. A mounted Mussolini is partially obscured and the words on the original carving, a Fascist motto, “believe, obey, fight” pale into the ageing sandy façade. No one has the right, Arendt seems to say, to use obeying orders as an excuse for atrocity.

The original bas-relief, which covers the length of the former fascist headquarters in Piazza Tribunale, is one of the standing reminders of totalitarian control in this area. Once a part of Austria, the region was taken over at the end of the First World War and ‘italianised’ with the purposeful immigration of Italian speakers and active prejudices against the German-speaking population.

Nowadays, following years of violence and upset, day-to-day tensions seem minimal and the two communities live amicably side by side, rubbing shoulders with little friction. However, monuments to the past remain and, understandably, cause distress. This carving, which depicts a history of Italian fascist reign, is one such example. As the world considers how to deal with pieces of art or architecture which act as reminders of a bleak or shameful past, Bolzano has begun to fight art with art and history with history.

Trying to decide how best to represent and appease the people to whom this city is home, in 2011, the council held a competition, asking local artists to suggest ways to alter the façade in order to condemn its message but to keep intact what some consider to be an important piece of historical artwork. Finally, this year, the new piece was revealed, a monument perhaps to unity or maybe to compromise.

Standing in the square, it is striking just how imposing this new installation is on the passing pedestrian, mostly businessmen on their lunch break. The square features a great deal of interesting architecture and other pieces of art, but Arendt’s words quite literally shine out amongst them. The square also holds written information about the contents of the original façade and the new piece of artwork. These informative bollards are placed so awkwardly in the middle of the square that you almost trip over them walking backwards to take a better look. They really don’t want you to miss this.

In a global social climate where debate about what to do with controversial historical statues is rife, Bolzano seems to be placing themselves firmly and defiantly in the middle. Recently, students at Liverpool University struck up debate over the use of Gladstone’s name in the university which they say, in perpetuating his legacy, turns a blind eye to his links with slavery.

Last year, our own University’s long-standing feud over the statue of colonialist Cecil Rhodes ended in a kind of inaction which spoke volumes. Across the pond, confederate statues have become the epicentre of violent clashes. Globally, it seems, people are facing up to history and its effect on the present. Here in Bolzano, there is no doubting their intentions. Those who say that such pieces need to remain as a monument to the past, rather than taken down in an attempt to hide it, are appeased while at least some stance against the atrocities of the past is still taken.

Of course there are objections to this approach. Some locals consider the act a cowardly sidestep away from decisive action. The regional representative of Forza Italia went even further and is quoted in a newspaper as calling this one of the “constant, small steps […] towards the erasure of history and Italian identity” in the region. However, there is certainly something to say for the province’s work. Not only have they taken action here in Piazza Tribunale, they also built a museum directly below the Victory Monument which had been constructed as a reminder of Italian control of the region, which many felt was a direct insult to the German-speaking population. Now, one is forced to consume, not only its impressive grandeur, but also its divisive history.

Standing before the bas-relief, as when you stand under the Victory Arch, you face what was once a lifeless façade, a kind of ingrained propaganda. Now, it exudes educative history, a glowing monument to history’s instructional value.

Oxford SU criticised by government freedom of speech inquiry

Isabel Morris
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Oxford SU criticised by government freedom of speech inquiry

Oxford Student Union has been criticised for their support of a WomCam protest which shut down a pro-life event in November 2017, in a report released by parliament’s Joint Commission on Human Rights.

The report, which focuses on freedom of speech at universities, condemns protests that “become so disruptive that they prevent the speakers from speaking or intimidate those attending.”

The report specifies an event called ‘Abortion in Ireland’, organised by the Oxford Students for Life (OSFL) society last year, that was disrupted by a protest organised by the Oxford Student Union Women’s Campaign, or WomCam.

The protest prevented the pro-life speakers from being heard for about 40 minutes of the event. Police were called, and the event organisers had to change rooms twice before the event could proceed.

Despite the disruptive nature of the protest, the Student Union published two statements in support of the protest the next day. One statement was subsequently removed from the SU website, while the other is only accessible through their archives.

An Oxford SU spokesperson told Cherwell: “Oxford SU believes that peaceful protest has played a major role in bringing about important social and political changes. Student groups should have the right to peacefully protest.

“Over the past two terms, we have been working on creating a framework around free speech, with training and support for campaign groups around protests.

“It was decided to remove one web post around the event due to the nature of the content. The other post naturally expired from our website as all posts do eventually.”

The SU’s archived statement, called ‘Right to Protest, Right to Choose’, asserts: “We do not believe that the speakers invited should be hosted without challenge. We were not protesting Oxford Students for Life or their speakers’ right to free speech.

“Rather, we were demonstrating that the speakers’ views deny millions of people bodily autonomy, that subject them to forced pregnancy, resulting in cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment, and sometimes death.”

However, they went on to stress that “bodily autonomy is not up for debate”.

An OSFL spokesperson told Cherwell: “Oxford Students for Life welcomes the report by the Joint Committee on Human Rights about Freedom of Speech in Universities.

“The report recognises that there have been incidents, such as the protest at our ‘Abortion in Ireland’ event, that do inhibit free speech.

“In our press release at the time, we noted that ‘WomCam of course have a right to freedom to expression. But a right to freedom of speech does not mean the right to prevent other people from speaking’.

“We are encouraged that in such instances, the report recommends that both the university and the police take appropriate action.”

The report contrasts Oxford SU’s response to that of King’s College London SU’s at a KCL Libertarian Society event in March 2018.

The report states: “It is commendable that both the Student Union and University issued a statement the next day condemning the behaviour of protestors.

“We are pleased to hear that KCL has committed to taking measures in accordance with the student disciplinary process if KCL students are found to be involved in violent protest.”

The report also mentions the Charity Commission’s role in regulating student unions and its impact on freedom of speech of student union officers, suggesting the Commission could significantly expand regulations as a result of the inquiry.

The report states that, in response to this suggestion, Jacob Rees Mogg MP, a trustee of the Oxford Union, said he was more concerned about the Charity Commission “saying that it is against the charitable objectives to invite somebody with controversial views’ than students objecting to controversial speakers.”

He continued: “It is a matter of routine law that, if we invite people who break the law, we should certainly get into trouble, but if we invite people, whatever their views, who do not break the law, I have never really thought that it was the business of the Charity Commission.”

Last term, Oxford’s LGBTQ+ Society condemned spiked magazine’s Free Speech University Rankings, after the Oxford received a ‘red’ ranking for a fourth year in a row.

Oxford and Newcastle were named the most “ban-happy” universities in the rankings.

The LGBTQ+ Society told Cherwell: “The term ‘free speech’ is frequently misused by the privileged to protect their right to spread hatred.”

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