Ben Lebus is a busy man. When I sit down for a coffee with him on a rainy Wednesday afternoon, he’s just come out of a meeting with his literary agent, and is set to meet with Miguel Barclay from One Pound Meals for a drink later this evening. He’s also going on a date.
Lebus is the man behind the multi-talented hands of Mob Kitchen, a top down cooking channel which has been creating and posting video content primarily on Facebook for little over a year. In that time, the following has reached nearly 90,000, has had multiple tie-ins with brands such as Tofoo, the Tab and Bumble, and has even started sponsorship deals – most recently with Oriel Rugby. It’s full on, and the growth has been pretty steady, but when I meet Lebus he admits that he’s currently “in a bit of a trough.” Having recently returned from a holiday, and run out of video content, he’s gearing up for a big weekend of filming at his parents’ house in Oxford. All this being said, Lebus is cheerful and clearly loves his work.
He has always been drawn to “easy, simple home cooking using nice fresh ingredients”, with an ability to pair flavours together that he attributes to watching Jamie Oliver’s cooking videos. These cooking skills grew from an obsession with watching cooking shows from his teens, but really blossomed at university in Edinbugh when moving into a house with some friends. Here, he notes that some of his housemates “couldn’t cook for shit”, and longing to get away from endless pesto pasta, Lebus became a frequent home cook. In fact, Mob Kitchen’s entire USP, the ability to feed four people for £10 or less, came from his writing for a student magazine and based around the idea of providing a cheap meal for his housemates.
As a student, Lebus was frustrated with both student cookery books that patronised their readers, and approaches to budget cooking that presume one has herbs and spices already in the cupboard, not accounting for the fact that students and people on a tight budget may have to purchase a jar of cumin for a recipe that only needs a teaspoon. This may put students who don’t want “to end up spending 16 quid on a dish that’s meant to have cost four.” So, Lebus’ recipes take a “much more real approach to budget cooking”, presuming that a cook will only have salt, pepper and olive oil in their kitchen.
While writing his dissertation, there was a huge explosion of top-down cooking videos, and Lebus was immediately enamoured, but wasn’t so much a fan of the “cheese pulls”, or deep fried things covered in ice cream that popped up each day. So, he decided to make a channel for “food people would actually cook”, hired out a production crew to film 20 videos, then edited them for release in October last year.
“And the rest is history”, he says.
Lebus is a one-man operation, which makes it hard to find a position for himself against the likes of Buzzfeed’s Tasty, and Tastemade. This doesn’t daunt him at all, though; “the internet is crying out for interesting video content”, he argues, and while he doesn’t love the natural comparison to ‘Tasty’ videos when explaining his concept to people, Lebus sees the industry as having plenty of room to grow.
Mob Kitchen videos certainly meet the “interesting content” criteria. The food is enticing, skilfully cooked, but not daunting to the novice chef. My personal favourites are the sticky tofu, and the recent mushy pea linguine.
One unique aspect of Lebus’ videos is the heavy integration of music in them, acknowledging the bands behind the songs and encouraging viewers to check out the Spotify Playlists that Lebus keeps updated. This part of his videos almost didn’t happen, Lebus says, and had planned to put up recipes with a kind of “stock, elevator music”, to let the food become centre stage. But, after running out of money during production, a couple of lesser-known bands were drafted in to provide backing tracks, and people loved it. Lebus recalls playing a couple of tracks with the videos and thinking, “Oh my god, this is a vibe!”. Since then, a big part of Lebus’ job has been sorting music.
The songs featured are usually upbeat, pumping tunes that perfectly match Lebus’ buoyant personality and laddish charm. He says that rock and heavy guitar music motivate him in the kitchen, and get him really pumped up to cook. In the future, Lebus envisions Mob Kitchen videos as moving beyond the top-down model and opening up somewhat, inviting bands into the kitchen to play while he cooks, and “make it more of a production.” In fact, this is where he sees the industry in general to be going, as cooks incorporate more personality into the videos posted online. For now, though, he considers the top-down model to be robust enough to keep growing.
But where to next for Lebus and Mob Kitchen?
Ideally, he would like to hire out his own production team full time, and move away from filming in his parent’s kitchen – a move that would relieve some pressure off of the intense weekends of filming that currently take place. He would also like to publish a book, which he describes as being “the ultimate student bible”, something like that Delia Smith book that finds its way into every parent’s kitchen. In the immediate future, aside from the usual cooking videos, Lebus plans on continuing to work with brands on sponsored content, and creating branded videos as part of Mob Productions. This is a route he didn’t envisage initially. But great returns have enabled him to continue funding production.
Lebus is preparing for a big weekend of filming, and encourages me to watch Mob Kitchen’s Instagram story to see behind the magic. Here, one can see Lebus relaxed, joshing around in the kitchen cooking and cracking jokes with his cameraman. The food looks excellent too. Starting a food content channel is tough work, but clearly a labour of love.
It’s no secret the UK is a deeply unequal society. The richest 1% own as much as the combined wealth of the bottom 55%. This year we learned that the UK is home to more billionaires than ever before and has record numbers of working people living in poverty.
It’s not a coincidence that things have been getting better for the super rich while getting worse for the rest of us. Since the 1980s, government policy has taken a decisive shift in the interests of the super rich. Under Margaret Thatcher’s premiership, their taxes were cut, they were sold industries at knock-off prices, and house ownership was redistributed in their favour: the power of their workforce was severely diminished.
It’s against the background of a deeply unequal society that we learn of the Paradise Papers, in which our own university played no small part. These papers, like the Panama Papers before them, show that the super rich engage in tax avoidance on an industrial scale. They use their privileged economic position to employ lawyers and accountants – whose services are inaccessible to the rest of us – to identify and exploit tax loopholes.
They register their businesses, shares, and savings beyond the reach of UK tax authorities, further enriching themselves and depriving the UK public purse of much needed tax revenue, tax revenue that could be used to help fund our hospitals, schools, and other vital services. Much of this is legal – it’s tax avoidance, not tax evasion.
Defenders of the super rich are quick to come to their aid, and there are two arguments they tend to deploy. The first says that because tax avoidance is legal, it is beyond criticism: people are acting within the law and therefore no one can reasonably complain.
This is a clearly flawed defence: the case against tax avoidance is not that it is illegal, but that tax avoidance is morally wrong and ought to be prevented. After all, simply because something is legal does not mean that it is moral.
Furthermore, there are plenty of acts whose moral impermissibility are good grounds for legal impermissibility – murder, for example, is and ought to be illegal because it’s immoral. This shows that the legality of tax avoidance does not establish the moral permissibility of it and the case for the moral impermissibility of tax avoidance is straightforward.
The super rich use their economic privilege to sidestep the rules that apply to everyone else in order to further benefit themselves, and they thereby disadvantage everyone else. This appears patently unfair, and it sounds like strong grounds to prevent tax avoidance.
The second common defence of the super rich is that given the opportunity, everyone would engage in tax avoidance. After all, people tend to act in their own interests – that’s just what people are like. Hence, it’s mere moralising – perhaps even an expression of envy – to condemn those who avoid tax.
This is false, but it does hint at an important truth. It’s false because it’s not true that everyone who can exploit others for their own benefit will do so, and to say otherwise is a straightforward self-serving alienation of agency: the super rich can refrain from engaging in tax avoidance, it’s just most of them choose not to.
However, the important truth this defence hints at is that, waved on by the cheerleaders of greed, the super rich tend to exploit circumstances for their own benefit. This truth isn’t important primarily because of what it says about the moral character of the super rich, but because it needs to be remembered when we’re thinking about our social institutions.
It helps to explain precisely why the opportunities to avoid tax exist in the first place. The super rich, in virtue of their wealth, have massive political power – they fund political parties, lobby parliament, sponsor think tanks, dominate influential professions, control media outlets.
How do they wield this power? As many on the right are so keen to argue, like many people they tend to act in their own interests. It’s just that when the super rich act in their interests, they exert massive political influence. They use it to create and maintain offshore tax havens, protect the non-dom tax status, and find loopholes in tax law.
But the political power of the super rich doesn’t just explain tax avoidance, it explains how society functions more generally. From legislation regarding media ownership to the funding of political parties, trade union legislation and the operations of the arms industry – none of this is left untouched by the political power of the super rich.
In all these instances, the super rich tend to use their power to advance their own interests. The revelations in the Paradise Papers are a symptom of extreme inequality. To end tax avoidance we need to do more than tinker with tax regulations. Instead, to prevent the super rich from wielding their power to rig the economy to serve their own interests, we need to deprive them of that power. As it stands the country’s power and wealth is concentrated within a select few. We shouldn’t merely accept this state of affairs, but instead criticise it with increased fervour.
Valtteri Bottas’ Formula One career has not always been plain sailing. After two seasons as a test driver, he struggled in his 19 races in 2013, winning just four points and finishing 17th. It was a tough introduction to the sport, but one that helped to shape both his career and his character.
Four years on, and Bottas is third in the drivers’ championship with one race left in the season. 2017 has seen him win a race for the first time in his career, and alongside Lewis Hamilton, he has helped Mercedes win a fourth consecutive constructors’ championship. For a man still making his name in the sport, it has been a fantastically successful season.
Indeed you can see from Bottas’ demeanour that he is thrilled to be in the position he is. Now 28, and with 22 years of racing experience under his belt, Bottas still has a childlike excitement about racing. While he has tailed off somewhat in the second half of the season, after impressive victories in Russia and Austria, the Finn remains upbeat about his year in an interview with Cherwell.
“It was a big step,” he says of the transition from his old constructor Williams to racing alongside Hamilton at Mercedes, “but in the way that moving between teams always is.” The Finn has taken the move in his stride, and was full of praise for his new teammate.
However, while Bottas remains successful, there is an idea floating around that Formula One is struggling. Whilst viewing figures are increasing, races are becoming more and more predictable and there is a temptation to reminisce with nostalgia about the days of
Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost, when crashes were commonplace and each grand prix promised a weekend filled with excitement.
But Bottas disputes this claim. “Time goldens the memory,” he told Cherwell, before praising the sport’s administrators for the recent safety measured they have proposed.
“The crash tests have been made tougher and tougher,” he says. Unlike Ferrari’s Sebastian Vettel, Bottas has been quick to praise the decision to implement the ‘halo’ cockpit protection system, which will come into place from 2018: “If it can save any injury at all, it is definitely a good thing.”
He is quick to underline the fact that every time drivers jump into the car, they are risking their lives, and yet “we still give it our all” – while Formula One racing has been Bottas’ dream from a young age, he is still acutely aware of the safety implications that his career has.
Bottas follows in a rich tradition of drivers from his country, but his lively sense of humour could hardly contrast more sharply with his compatriot Kimi Raikkonen’s notoriously deadpan approach.
In essence, the Finn loves the thrill of racing, and criticises modern tracks – which he describes as “massive carparks with painted lines” – in comparison to old-style tracks like Suzuka in Japan.
Bottas’ tenacity, ambition and fearlessness are clear for all to see. If he can continue making the progress that he has managed over the past few years, it would not be surprising to see him consistently at the front of the grid in the years to come.
“I am unconscious of intentional error, I am nevertheless too sensible of my defects not to think it probable that I may have committed many errors.”
So spoke the forefather of American government, George Washington. Worlds away on a talk show sofa, when asked if he has lied to the American people, Sean Spicer responds, “I don’t know”. Apparently, he is also unconscious of intentional error.
Washington and Spicer, President and Press Secretary, truth and lies. Of course, as any patriotic American will tell you, Washington’s statement is one of modesty and humility, an admission of the limits imposed on all of us by human frailty. In contrast, Spicer’s comment is a linguistic contortion, an “I did not have sexual relations with that woman” move, intended to use language to wriggle out of constraints. But as far apart as these men are, I wonder: how alien would Sean Spicer be to Washington? Would the term ‘fake news’ shock presidents, reporters, and editors of the past, or would it instead simply be putting a name to a face they know well?
The Oxford Dictionary’s word of the year, post truth – denoting “circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief” – implies that there was a time before our current degenerate era, a golden age, where truth was king. However, despite the current zeitgeist that news has only recently become untrustworthy, news has a long and frequently sordid history of misleading its subscribers.
In 1695, the Licensing Act, which had previously restricted freedom of the press in Britain, expired. One of the new freedoms of the English press was their ability to print transcripts of parliamentary speeches. The gates to the government were to be thrown open, and for the first time the British people had the freedom to read and analyse the political decision-making process.
However, when we look at transcripts and opinions from the time we can see that newspapers, politicians’ own diaries and popular elite opinion are littered with complaints about inaccuracies. In 1780 the famous politician William Pitt the Younger wrote that the printed version of fellow politician Edmund Burke’s speech had been altered and was, in his opinion, “much the worse for revision.”
The Morning Chronicle scathingly noted of the transcript of a speech by Lord Mahon that “not twenty words of the rhapsody which has appeared in the papers” were said. Fake news is not as new as we might have believed. Lies and misrepresentation existed when we turned pages instead of scrolling down news feeds, and they will exist long after the creations of Zuckerberg have become obsolete.
If anything, the media moguls of today tell us that news has been democratised, offering greater freedom that ever before. In the past what counted as news was determined by a small cabal of elite editors. Groups that threatened the status quo had little hope of a fair hearing in mainstream media, and frequently had to start their own internal newspapers at great cost. For example, The Black Panther newspaper, published in 1969, included summaries of discriminatory trials, progress in the black liberation struggle, and records of visits to the UN. These were stories dismissed by conventional newspapers.
Today, the narrative is no longer monopolised by the elite. It is no longer the case that news must conform to the sensibilities of a few editors to be heard. The rise of the internet has meant that the average citizen has the freedom to read information from different sources, and even write it themselves, democratising information.
Or at least that’s what we’re told. But the new pathways the internet has provided can only democratise news if the average citizen uses them and has power within them. In the modern media industry, attention is currency. As a recent report by CNN highlighted, this new currency, much like the old, is finite. The survey, carried out by Ipsos OTX MediaCT on behalf of CNN, studied 2,300 individuals and their online news consumption over a two-month period. The survey reveals that the market on attention has been cornered by a minority of highly active individual users. Far from being democratised, 27 per cent of sharers are responsible for 87 per cent of news content shared on social media. The source of power may have shifted, but the information we receive is still shaped by a minority.
Furthermore, the ability to draw attention frequently rests on brand recognition, so old strongholds of media power are likely to be part of this narrative moulding minority. The survey further reveals that users are more likely to engage with “recommended” news and embedded advertising. Online attention can be bought by the highest bidder and as a result, news is frequently controlled by the same elites that have monopolised information since 1695. Google and Facebook attract one-fifth of overall global advertising spending, nearly double what it brought in in 2012. Admittedly, much of this advertising is for products not news stories, but it does reveal that the price tag on buying attention continues to rise. We should therefore be weary of blindly believing that the internet has allowed us to access a wider variety of news. We are just as affected by a narrow elite as we always were, we’re just less aware of it.
But if nothing has really changed and news is as imperfect as it always was, then why does it feel like everything is shifting under our feet? Why do people feel that the news apocalypse is happening now? Certainly some ‘fake news’ claims have become more outlandish, with stories such as “Pope Francis Shakes World, Endorses Trump” getting 960,000 engagements on Facebook in the final months of the 2016 presidential election. Similarly, the ability for anyone to write news and be heard, if they have the resources to garner attention, has further weakened trust in news.
Trust in journalists isn’t just blind faith in authority figures. Journalists are both known and paid, unlike their citizen counterparts. Being employed means they can be held to account, and, if found guilty of lying, have something to lose. During the Brexit referendum a domain called YourBrexit.co.uk falsely claimed that Corbyn had confirmed that the Labour Party would pay £92bn in a Brexit bill. The article was written by “Walter White”, the pseudonym of an anonymous student in Southend. Much like his namesake, Walter’s anonymity and lack of association to a reputable source insulated him from being held to account.
Furthermore, journalists can be relied upon to comply with standards of journalistic practice. It is no coincidence that despite the rise of clickbait internet journalism, big investigative stories such as the Panama Papers, the Harvey Weinstein scandal, and now the Paradise Papers, have all been broken by established journalists in some form or another. This is partly because journalists have the time and capital to go out looking for stories, instead of just reporting what they see.
But, it is more than that. Sources choose to go to professional journalists, because they believe they will protect their anonymity and will know what to do with the information they provide. This second consideration is increasingly important, given that we now live in a world where data is so easy to send that leaks frequently include amounts of data so vast that they are inaccessible to the majority of the population.
The Panama Papers, the leak of 11.5 million files from the law firm Mossack Fonesca, included so much data it was almost unusable. It included 2.1 million PDFs, 3 million database files and 4.8 million emails, some of which were useless and some of which contained the biggest story in the last ten years. So how did journalists find the story amongst all the red herrings? Suddeutsche Zeitung, the first paper to receive this data, called in help from the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, who sorted through the data and created a search engine for it. Unsurprisingly, we relied on professional journalists to search through the data and turn it into a format accessible for everyone. When it comes to the big stories, one where the safety of sources lies in the hands of the press, journalists are still the ones we turn to.
I think there’s another problem though, more significant than the lack of accountability in the current world of news. We have stopped being outraged at lies, and we have stopped treating truth as salient political currency. But more than that, we have stopped believing that truth exists at all. We are constantly presented with a choice. We must either choose partisan press, which intentionally interpret all facts one way no matter what they imply. Or we can choose ‘neutral news’ which presents all opinions as equal even if one is clearly not borne out by facts. Press neutrality has been conflated with presenting both sides of the argument, irrespective of their factual support. This in and of itself distorts news.
Yes, people are entitled to their opinion. They are not, however, entitled to have everyone act as if their opinion is equal to all others purely because they believe it to be so. We can acknowledge that there are scientific opinions that deny the existence of climate change, whilst also acknowledging that these scientists are outweighed both in number and prestige by the scientists whose research suggest that climate change is a problem. Neutrality is not the same as equal weighting, and presenting it as such distorts debate. Furthermore, calling something a lie has become an act of partisanship and therefore truth is informed by opinion as opposed to vice versa. As Obama stated in his farewell address, “we start accepting only information, whether it’s true or not, that fits our opinions.” Fake news is not new. What is new is that we no longer believe news exists and as such, we are no longer outraged by lies.
But why did we stop believing in truth in the first place? Part of it is undoubtedly the sheer number of different ‘facts’ modern-day news consumers have to wade through. But I would argue it has also been a result of politicians making claims to ‘facts’ which don’t reflect the experiences of constituents. For those who have lost out from globalisation, the repeated claims of politicians that free market trade deals are economically beneficial for everyone destroys trust, not just in politicians but in facts themselves. Unlike claims to principles, facts rely on their ability to be proven to be actually true. Disjuncture between what we claim to be ‘universal facts’ and what people experience, disintegrates the power of ‘fact’. Therefore, as more and more politicians use ‘facts’ purely as rhetorical devices, ‘truth’ becomes an increasingly empty concept.
Is there any future then for news as we know it? Certainly, news has attempted to change its game to keep up with the changing face of news consumption. Vast amounts of capital are being invested in new journalism projects, funded by a variety of backers, including Pierre Omidyar, the billionaire founder of Ebay and Jimmy Wales, the co- founder of Wikipedia. For example, Wikitribune, Wales’ project, seeks to pair journalists with a community of volunteers who edit, and fact-check articles. This is an attempt to combine the wisdom of crowds with journalists who can be held accountable for content.
It’s not just individual donors, projects that seek to combat fake news are increasingly becoming a part of our electoral process. The most recent UK election was monitored by the Full Fact and First Draft initiatives, which brought together 25 fact checkers and statisticians to verify the facts behind viral news stories.
Similarly, the EU has developed its East Stratcom team which has discredited 2,500 stories over the last 16 months in an attempt to address disinformation campaigns in European elections, specifically those believed to be organised by the Russian government. However, possibly the most significant development is the production of tools that allow users to determine the accuracy of content for themselves. For example, the Google plugin developed by the EU and backed by inVID provides users with the ability to verify the location and times videos were recorded, as well as check more detailed information about the source. Giving individual users this power means they can discredit for themselves content that was photoshopped or staged. Similarly, Project PHEME, so named after the goddess of rumours and fame in Greek mythology, produced an algorithm able to classify the accuracy of tweets, classing tweets on a scale from one to ten, with one being ‘rumour’. If distrust in the existence of ‘truth’ is the primary problem in news, creating tools that allow consumers to rely on their own ability to verify information should go a significant way to fixing the problem.
Trust in news is not gone altogether, revealed by our trust in the ability of journalists to reveal societies largest problems, to the large increase in subscriptions to the New York Times. It is important to remember at this point that despite the current trend amongst commentators to characterise the world as constantly getting worse, the press has always had problems. Our doubt over truth is new, but the propensity to lie is not. Some concerns that used to plague news are gone altogether. For example, the ability of governments to control the news is becoming increasingly impossible in today’s interconnected Britain.
News and journalism have always faced problems and indeed always will. But as anyone who has ever submitted a tutorial essay will know, something does not have to perfect to make expending effort worthwhile.
Finding truth may be an impossible task and human history is filled with those who have made errors on this path. Neither Spicer nor Washington was perfectly truthful; the difference is Washington sought not to exploit loopholes in news and truth, but to serve it to the best of his abilities.
This may seem like an irrelevant distinction, but we can never get all the facts correct. What matters is not one hundred percent accuracy, but rather that we care when things are shown to be wrong.
When we cease to care we leave power in the hands of those with the loudest voice, those with the platform to decide what counts. In today’s world we must try and remember that whilst perfect news may never exist, it is more important than ever to try.
Students and mental health campaigners have condemned Oxford’s stressful academic environment and lack of mental health training for staff.
Calls for reform follow comments made by the mother of Andrew Kirkman, a 20-year-old Balliol undergraduate who took his own life in 2013.
Wendy Kirkman said she believes that the services currently in place are seriously flawed, and would like to see mental health care professionals accessible 24 hours a day across UK university campuses. She called for the expansion of university drop-in services with mental health specialists in order that students can receive immediate assessment, and additionally for further training for university staff to improve awareness of signs of suicidal intent.
Kirkman told The Telegraph she also wants university staff to be trained in how to spot the signs of suicidal intent: “I want them to be better trained to spot how at risk a student is and when it’s appropriate to pass it up to a specialist.”
Andrew Kirkman was found dead in Port Meadow in December 2013, after being told the previous day to take medical leave when he informed his GP that he was struggling with academic demands and was thinking of self-harming.
In a BBC Three documentary, Kirkman’s ex-girlfriend Clarissa revealed that he had told her he “felt like a fake” who was “falling short of the image that people had of him. He didn’t want to tell anyone else about his depression because he felt really ashamed”.
Three months after Kirkman’s death, another Balliol undergraduate, Jennifer Xu, also took her own life. In 2007, Andrew Mason, a 20-year-old Physics and Philosophy (PhysPhil) student and JCR president of Balliol was found dead in his bedroom.
In the PhysPhil handbook, there is a section titled “When things go wrong”, that includes guides for “changing your course” and dealing with “problems with your tutor”. The Physics handbook contains no such sections.
A second-year PhysPhil student told Cherwell that the poor organisation, isolation and intensity of the Oxford course could contribute to the high rate of students suspending their studies, changing their course, or experiencing mental health difficulties. They said: “PhysPhil is really poorly organised – meaning you could do 70% of your work in one term and 10-20 in the other two terms.
“There’s no conversation between Physics and Philosophy so they don’t have an understanding of how much work the other is giving you and when – and limited choice in philosophy compared to PPE or Philosophy and Theology mean people are forced to do badly taught courses they aren’t interested in.
“And in most colleges there’s only one PhysPhil student which means people are really isolated and lonely.
“They wanted to make it so that you have at least two students per college but it didn’t happen.”
Another second-year student, who switched from Physics and Philosophy to Music in their first year, told Cherwell: “One of the major things was that I found that not all, but a lot of my tutors were not supportive and made me feel really stupid.
“One of my tutors told me to ‘treat problem sheets as if it was a life or death situation’.
“On top of that, simply fitting in both problem sheets and essays with the amount of contact hours and classes was extremely difficult. They said I couldn’t row – they basically expected our whole life to be completely devoted to our degree.”
According to research this year by the IPPR thinktank, in 2015/16, over 15,000 UK first-year students disclosed a mental health condition – almost five times the number in 2006/07. In England, 19% of 16–24-year-olds experienced a mental health condition, up from 15 per cent in 2003. In this age group, 28% of women experience mental health problems, compared to 10% of men.
The study also found that a record number of students took their own lives in 2015. Between 2007 and 2015, the number of student suicides increased by 79%. In 2014/15, 1,180 students who experienced mental health issues dropped out of university, according to the study, an increase of 210% from 2009/10.
Tj Jordan, mental health campaigner and co-chair of the Oxford Mental Health Support Network, agreed with Kirkman’s claims, telling Cherwell: “Oxford University is known for its pressurising academic and social environment, but this tends to be a trigger, rather than a cause, for mental illness.
“The problem arises from the lack of mental health training given to both support and academic staff. They are not fully equipped to deal with – or even recognise the signs of – cases of severe mental illness.”
Kate Cole, President of Oxford SU told Cherwell: “Oxford SU calls for improvements to professional mental healthcare provision, at a university-level and a national scale, and resoundingly supports sustained access to these services.
“Ensuring that mental health support for students is of the highest quality is a core part of Oxford SU’s long-term strategic priorities.
“Our ambition of better provision of services for our student members is inherently tied to lobbying for more funding for national services and parity of esteem between mental and physical health.”
Speaking on the current state of mental health care provision, a University spokesperson told Cherwell: “Many students find the University’s college system a source of strength, offering an intimate environment where any mental difficulties are quickly noticed.
“Every college offers medical support and a welfare team, clearly identified on their websites, giving students a choice of individuals to turn to.
“The University’s professional Counselling Service provides training to the welfare teams on how to support students with mental health difficulties.
“We also provide 30 hours of training to students selected to act as peer supporters and this initiative has been welcome by many other students facing personal challenges.”
The Daily Mail is incredibly adept at manufacturing rage. Many groups and individuals have been the victim of their scathing words or vitriol, but last week’s paper concerning the Church of England’s revised approach to the treatment of transgender children harboured a distinct air of desperation.
If you missed the news, the Church of England issued a statement saying that it’s fine for little boys to wear tiaras. And while we’re at it girls can be fire-fighters or members of the police (if this wasn’t already known). To most this was simply assumed. Tutus and tiaras are merely an outward manifestation of a child’s imagination. But for the Church of England this marks a turning point. They have accepted that there is social progress to be made, but certain periodicals are reluctant to do the same.
To the Daily Mail, so many have fallen by the wayside. They have lost the public, politicians, and now, low and behold, the church. They are the last still fighting ‘the good fight’. To them, such change is ‘political correctness gone mad’ and outrage is the only valid response.
In reality, this is bigotry and panic. The front page blares that the church has endorsed ‘boys as young as five’ to wear traditionally female attire. It is reporting which is designed to stoke the fires of all those who feel we have slipped into a dangerous new era of enablence.
The report itself is encouraging, sensible, and long overdue. In short, the updated guidance for the church’s 4,700 schools, titled ‘Valuing All God’s Children’ follows advice issued three years ago that covered homophobic bullying, and has now been expanded to include transphobic and biphobic bullying.
Yet The Sun shouts ‘TRANSGENDER TOTS.’ Reporting that ‘children as young as two’ are being taught by drag queens. What’s truly worrying about such reporting is how commonplace it has become for children to be used as a bastion for bigotry.
It’s true that children are some of the most vulnerable in our society, and there are serious conversations to be had about their welfare and protection. Moreover, there are important discussions to be had about the healthcare and legal protection of transgender children. But this is not the motivation behind such pieces. This is about anger, and children are being used to protect a regressive ideology.
The outrage and scepticism which various newspapers displayed last week comes from the same shrouded corner of the brain which believes that gay parents will raise gay children, and sex education for children will result in a new wave of teenage pregnancies. It’s reductive and illogical thinking, and we should all require more from our media.
For a short while, Oxfeud was gone. Good riddance you might say. You might even go as far as to say it was an awful platform that allowed bigots and racists and sexists and generally angry people to be rude about anyone and anything with the protection of anonymity. As someone who used it regularly (mainly about cyclists), I must respectfully disagree.
I am not normally an angry person but if one more cyclist does not stop at a zebra crossing when I am about to cross, or – even worse – actually crossing, I may explode with fury. Oxfeud gave me the opportunity to express that rage at the inconsiderate behaviour of a cyclist without getting annoyed in the real world. And you know what? That’s important.
I am not saying I was ever going to punch a wall because I cannot vent my fury at nearly being run over by a cyclist anonymously online, but just that we all get angry. Things irk us, things annoy us, things frustrate us. Sometimes trivial, sometimes not, sometimes somewhere in-between. Whatever those things are, we like to know people agree with us without worrying about, for example, being judged for hating cyclists and their complete disregard for my safety. Oxfeud gives us that outlet. We can post pretty much anything and see how many reacts the post received. People could respond by tagging their friends in agreement or disagreement of varying degrees. People could call us out on our absurd anger. The response, or lack thereof, is a vital part of posting on Oxfeud. It is not enough that I become angry, I want to see how people respond to my anger and my post. Short of going up to people in the street, Oxfeud was the best way for this to happen.
You may say that my example is trivial and misses the point of the problem. Oxfeud allows people to post horrible things with anonymity and this, for whatever reason, is objectively wrong.
But I just do not see the link between posting horrible things and anonymity. Oxfeud is just like any other social media platform. Some of the things posted were especially awful and the admins of such a page have a role to play in altering the things that are posted, of course they do, but our concern cannot be with the posting of horrible things. The difference in the eyes of the world seems to be anonymity. But why does that make a difference? You can change your name on Facebook, make it effectively anonymous and do exactly the same thing. Let’s not pretend that anger is not a normal part of life or that seeing horrible things online is not part of life. If you do not want to see things being posted, then delete your social media accounts.
The journalist Robin Esser died last week. I admit that his name has only floated into my orbit in recent months. He was one of many British writers and editors who cut their teeth in student journalism before moving on to national careers.
But the more I think of Esser, the more prescient his story seems. Whilst studying at Oxford in the fifties, Esser stumbled upon a relatively niche publication called ‘The Cherwell’. Back then, it was a high falutin literary magazine founded a few decades earlier in 1920. This posh rag’s main claim to fame was publishing the juvenilia of one Wystan Hugh Auden, alumnus of Christ Church College.
Esser was a little dissatisfied with this, having come to Oxford with his childhood ambition a career in hard journalism still intact. Along with some friends, he re-founded the old magazine as a new student newspaper, Cherwell.
The new print would be based on the small local paper that young Robin had set up and run out of his school bag at a boys grammar in Dewsbury, West Yorkshire.
His first post at Oxford’s modish new paper was as Cherwell’s first real News Editor. In that role he set the precedent of long hours and high standards that still demands near total dedication from our news team today.
Esser’s journalistic philosophy, which he carried with him through his eventful life, was relatively simple. Any newspaper under his editorship would primarily fulfil its obligation to entertain the reading public, whilst also keeping a check on “the hypocrisy of those in power.”
After his graduation, from both Oxford and Cherwell, Esser went on to become a fixture of Britain’s tabloid papers, and eventually became editor-in-chief of the Sunday Express during the dying days of the Thatcher ministry.
Embarking on such a career, he no doubt attracted acrimony and sneers from many of his Wadhamite university friends. Never mind that Esser founded the DailyMail’s first dedicated weekly arts supplement, the fact he pursued his belief in popular journalism through tabloid news was crime enough for his confrères, with their broadsheet pretences.
Of course, in the story of Robin Esser’s career we see parallels with current attitudes to journalism at Oxford. The modern successors of Esser’s uppity peers now mock Cherwell as the new Daily Mail.
Our affront to their sensibilities seems to have been merely reporting on events that they wanted kept quiet, whether that be in regards to college football or University Challenge. More broadly, this term we have broken exclusive stories week upon week, about the biggest societies in Oxford, and the potential misdeeds of the University itself.
Yet in some fit of cognitive dissonance, Oxfeud contributors have insisted on calling the Cherwell staff ‘careerist snakes’ and the like. If it were the case that we were simply trying to flesh out our CVs, why does so much effort go into exclusive reporting? Why don’t we simply take a leaf out of the comparatively thinner archive books of other student newspapers, and rewrite the news reporting of other journalists? It’s because we follow the example set by the modern founder of Cherwell, Robin Esser.
He dared to think that student journalism could be more than an outlet for cliché ridden teenage fiction and soft reviews of rubbish plays (or club nights). He thought that Cherwell could be a popular breaking news source, rather than a barely mentioned magazine. Thanks to Robin Esser’s example, more people are reading this newspaper than ever before.
Having already met Martha, I knew this date was going to be great. The time flew by and I can’t really remember what we even talked about, because I was having such a lovely time. I will say that I did not handle the restaurant not knowing we had been booked in very well and I definitely got vibes that she was not impressed by my blind panic at being in a vaguely adult situation. It was another lovely date, and the walk back into town was a very sweet (if cold) end to the evening, even if she wasn’t impressed by my college library, which did cause some tension. The weirdest part of the whole thing did not occur during the date, but later in the Park End queue where her friends tried to take a picture of me to send to Martha. Queuing for Park End is already horrifying enough…
What was your first impression? Better equipped for cold than me
Any awkward moments? The waiters staring at us
Third date? We’re going to the same screening of Moonlight, does that count?
Martha Raymer
First Year, History
Worcester
To get our free tapas, we had to fully expose the fact that we were there on a date. I would be mad at Cherwell for making us suffer through the knowing looks given by the waiters, but we soon decided that free food meant we were obliged to order the most expensive things on the menu. Thanks Cherwell. My date with Lucy, however, was thoroughly lovely – aside from Lucy’s bike not surviving the night. I’m also glad my aesthetic “Jane Austen vibe” is finally being appreciated. I only began to experience Lucy’s self-confessed murder-y vibes the moment I didn’t provide a shining review of Lincoln College library: it just can’t compete with Worcester’s lake! However, I’m keeping her abandonment of any morals unpublished: what happens at Kazbar stays at Kazbar.
What was your first impression? Outrageously beautiful bicycle
Influential positions across Oxford University’s public life are still held disproportionately by students educated at private schools, a Cherwell investigation has revealed.
According to the most recent data made available by Oxford, 59% of all offers made to students studying in the UK went to state school applicants. Yet at Oxford, under half of the significant elected roles within student politics examined were held by students educated in the state sector.
The disparity is most obvious at the Oxford Union, where 76% of elected officials – from the President down to Secretary’s Committee – were privately educated. Of the 14 most senior roles (Standing Committee and above) just one was held by a former state comprehensive pupil – President Chris Zabilowicz.
Within college politics the gap was less pronounced, with 52% of JCR Presidents having attended a fee paying school. Similarly, there was a 50/50 split between state and private across the senior editorial teams of Cherwell and The Oxford Student.
Student party politics, by contrast, appears to show a remarkable lack of of private school alumni when the two largest political societies are examined. Oxford University Labour Club’s elected positions were dominated by state comprehensive and grammar school educated students.
Oxford University Conservative Association was the only body for which too little data could be found to draw any meaningful conclusions, with most elected members choosing not to reveal their former school on social media.
Of the 69 significant figures selected, Cherwell was able to gather data on the school attended by 67. In virtually all cases claims made on Facebook and LinkedIn, or statements made by the school, were used to identify where they had previously studied.
The data does represent a marked improvement from 2010, the last time an investigation into Oxford’s privately educated elite was conducted. Cherwell found then that almost 60% of JCR Presidents, 70% of University-wide society Presidents, and 80% of elected Union members were privately educated. At the time 55% of those admitted to the University came from state schools, with under 45% from independent schools.
The figures will likely not be happy reading for University bosses seeking to change Oxford’s public image in the wake of David Lammy MP’s criticism of Oxbridge colleges as “fiefdoms of entrenched privilege”.
Data obtained by Lammy through Freedom of Information requests established that in 2015 Oxford made 82% of its offers to children from the two top social backgrounds. More offers were made to students from Eton than to students on free meals from across the entire country.
Class Act, an Oxford SU campaign set up to represent the interests of students of working class, low income, first generation, and state comprehensive backgrounds at Oxford, told Cherwell: “Representation of Class Act students within student organisations at the university is vital.
“The dominance of students with privileged educational or income backgrounds in many of these organisations can be seen both as a reflection of the isolation Class Act students face at the university and as a reason why this isolation continues to exist.”
