Saturday 11th April 2026
Blog Page 952

Fashion in Paris is moving in the right direction

Chloe Dootson-Graube
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Fashion in Paris is moving in the right direction

One would be hard pressed to find anything in fashion journalism as sacrosanct as the concept of ‘The Parisian’. The recent elapse of fashion weeks across the globe saw fashion publications taking to the streets in an attempt to document the street-style turn out and I defy you to find a look more widely aspired to or applauded than the ‘Parisian’.

But what is meant by the term in its sartorial use? To channel Bardot and Birkin, or to don a starched shirt, neat trousers and sensible shoes, has become the ubiquitous ‘Parisian’ trend. But many would argue that it is more a state of mind than a particular type of attire. Vogue identi es it as an “overall air of gamine insouciance”, and one of the movement’s foremost IT girls, Caroline de Maigret, attributes it to the personality of the wearer, and the “effortless” air they possess.

Others suggest that the de ning feature of Parisian style is largely the cultivation of a personal image. Ines de la Fressange and Carine Roitield’s nurture of this plays a big role in their esteemed fashion credits and Vogue supports this notion: “No deliberate statement-making, no peacocking of designer freebies […] it’s not about fitting the clothes, see: it’s about the clothes fitting you.” The integrity of the cut, the strength of the silhouette and the shape of the fabric seem to be what is valued.

One of the many benefits of this is that by embracing the individuality of the wearer, many of the stigmas that plague the fashion industry have been ostensibly removed. For example, many of the movement’s IT girls are significantly older than is typical in the fashion industry: well respected figures like Caroline de Maigret, 42, de la Fressange, 59, and Roitfeld, 62, are all far older than the teens and twenties of the Kendall Jenners and Gigi Hadids of New York.

There do however remain certain gaping holes in the movement’s liberal inclusivity. After all, “the overall air of gamine insouciance” comes part and parcel with a certain waifish slender-ness. One would encounter some difficulty in attempting to identify any plus-size figures at the forefront, or indeed, even in the background of the movement.

Moreover, it ought to be noted that the scene remains disproportionately white for a city with a population that is 10-15 % Muslim and 18 % black. With a city with such a substantial non-white population, is it not somewhat suspect that this diversity finds no representation? Why is it the neat black garb of impressionists that finds itself highlighted, rather than the hijab?

Furthermore, this notion of an individual personal style only seems to go so far. It is perhaps somewhat melodramatic to describe Parisian fashion as a policy of ‘uniformization’, but De Maigret herself concedes in a Refinery 29 interview that she believes “sometimes French women are so scared of the faux pas that they’re not adventurous. I think sometimes maybe it’s a bit dull”. The Gucci Gang, a Parisian style collective who have turned the heads of fashion publications such as I-D and Vogue, make the claim that in France, “everything is taboo”.

Yet it must be said that minimalism and uniform dressing are not universal facets of the day-to-day Parisian dress. My grandmother is a born and bred Parisian and her approach to fashion is buying clothing with a price below double digits. While I’m certainly not naming my own ageing relatives as the epicentre of innovative fashion, this sort of the out-the-box thinking is beginning to proliferate. Take the Gucci Gang, for example, who have been making waves with their Parisian fashion is ‘mort’ attitude. Thaïs, one of their members, said in an interview that “there is a great energy in the new generation of Parisian designers”.

Moreover, Rihanna’s Fenty Puma line —which debuted at Paris Fashion Week last year—makes the case for both decadence and ‘trashy-dressing’, combining the indulgent ruffles and baby pinks of the classic ‘Marie Antoinette style’, with standard sportswear staples. There is still a long way to go, but Parisian fashion is proving itself to be a diverse medium, not limited to the stark standards set by its forebears.

A day in the life of… an assistant director

Rebekah King
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A day in the life of… an assistant director

Adjusting the bosom of another woman, as you pull closed the clasps on her corset, is an intimacy best reserved for the more advanced months of a friendship. Unless, of course, you are Assistant Director for a period-costume play, in which case you may find yourself fondling others and making introductions at once:

“Hello, I’m Rebekah; I’ll be helping Sarah out.”

“Hi, I’m playing Charlotte Brontë. Should I take my bra off first?”

To be an Assistant Director is to multitask. One has, therefore, a truly unique perspective: a hands-on closeness to all aspects of production.

As first mate, I have watched the captain of our ship bring Brontë safely into port. Sarah Pyper (a development officer at St Peter’s) is one of those directors whom actors and production folk alike adore. She is intelligent, practical, and calm, and has done wonders with a difficult but rewarding script.

Here’s the problem: Polly Teale (our author) wants to write for television. Many’s the time when Sarah has cursed her for a stage direction such as ‘Lights change: it is 1835’ (“Ah!” thinks the lighting designer, “I’ll fetch my 1835 bulbs”) or ‘Emily releases the hawk’ (“How expensive is it to hire a bird of prey for a fortnight?”). But once the tidying up was done, Brontë started to look like a touching and, at times, truly poetic script: a fitting cousin for the BBC’s recent To Walk Invisible.

If you know and love the Brontës, this is a play for you. If you can’t quite remember who wrote Wuthering Heights, and had forgotten that the third sister was called Anne, the play will invite you to discover a world of purple moors and wild imaginations.

Being Assistant Director is a much more important role when things go wrong. It’s a bit like being the younger brother of king: if he’s loved you’ll never get to feel the inner contours of the throne. But open rebellion on a play-set is an excitement I have witnessed before and will happily do without.

Thistledown Theatre is not a student company, and everything feels rather more relaxed. Sarah and the rest don’t need my guidance, and for once I can enjoy the ‘assistant’ half of my job-description.

Rewind: “Our greatest work may be found in our escape”

Carmen Martinez
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Rewind: “Our greatest work may be found in our escape”

In 1925, Theodor Seuss Geisel—more commonly known by his pen name, Dr. Seuss—started a postgraduate degree in English literature at Lincoln College, but he never completed it. His lecture notes on Shakespeare quickly became scribblings of strange beasts, as he found life at Oxford stifling. Seuss himself later imagined his tutor thinking he was “the only man he’d ever seen who never ever should have come to Oxford”. This tutor advised him to leave Oxford, to broaden what he knew about the world, to travel Europe with schoolboy guides to meet the world in real life.

The scenes in the colourful pages of his storybooks can seem an escape from real life, and indeed it was cartoons that offered Seuss an escape from the course at Oxford which he felt he was gaining nothing from. His time at our university is summed up well on Lincoln’s website: “While finding a course in the punctuation of Shakespeare dull, he began to draw pictures and doodles during his lectures.”

When Seuss took a couple of example cartoons he had drawn to illustrate ‘Paradise Lost’ to a certain famous Broad Street bookshop, cheekily hoping he might be commissioned to do many more, he was turned away, having been told: “This isn’t quite the Blackwell type of humour.” Forty years later his books were the main event in the shopfront window.

In looking back over Dr. Seuss’s works, I see what these doodles eventually amounted to. I am drawn into the mundane quibbles of furry, odd but also strangely majestic creatures with names like ‘Sneetches’ and ‘Zax’. The characters find themselves in trouble against a backdrop of improbably colourful trees and hills, but tend to work out their differences, in dialogue with the rhythm and rhyme that made their author so important to helping children learn to read.

However, the tales of Dr. Seuss’s wacky beasts don’t lack a didactic angle, and criticism of the sources of hate in our world. In ‘The Zax’, a North-Going Zax and a South-Going Zax meet in the middle of a desert and in refusing to budge come to resemble a political deadlock:

“Never budge. That’s my rule. Never budge in the least! Not an inch to the west! Not an inch to the east! / I’ll stay here not budging! I can and I will / If it makes you and me and the whole world stand still!”

While the books’ settings are a zany escape from real life, there is value to be gained from mocking this kind of behaviour. Dr. Seuss artfully fused his skill for creating doodles with stances on morality. He helped children around the world to love reading and it started with drawings which seemed a product of distraction and not the ‘right thing’ to be doing in his time at Oxford.

Perhaps our greatest ‘work’, like that of Dr. Seuss, can be found in the marginal scribbles of our essay notes. Our greatest work or product, found in our ‘escape’.

College Insider – Worcester

Cherwell Life
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College Insider – Worcester

Everywhere you turn in Worcester, you see Chanel. And no, I’m not talking about thousand pound skirt suits, but the Provost’s West Highland Terrier.

It’s a strange Sunday morning when I don’t run into Coco Chanel, out for her morning stroll round the lake, on my way to brunch. There’s nothing like a tiny white bundle of enthusiastic yelping and friendly tail wagging for a hangover cure. And the anticipation of the meal ahead isn’t bad either. Sunday brunch at Worcester comes to about £1.40 for a plate heaped with a fry-up and pastries and, if you’re suave and subtle like me, you can usually nick a couple of bowls of cereal as a bonus. If the bursar is reading this, may I amicably suggest that you consider installing CCTV at the self-service bar?

Worcester isn’t generally considered one of the superlative colleges—it isn’t the richest, or the smallest, or even the sportiest. Occasionally it gets called the prettiest, and I wouldn’t disagree. But the label I really think Worcester deserves is the keenest. I cannot imagine another college where a girl’s Cupper’s football match, at 10am on a freezing cold Sunday morning in January, would gather a crowd of ten to fifteen people, from across year groups. Sure, we may have pitches on-site, but last term’s building works meant that getting to them involved a bit of a trek—it wasn’t just a matter of rolling out of bed. We take it pretty seriously, and it’s something I would sacrifice a lot to remain part of.

But let’s be clear, Worcester isn’t some kind of pastry-filled paradise, peopled only by fluffy dogs and supportive friends. It’s a college like any other, and of course, it has its problems. For example, my first year room inhabits a concrete block about half a mile away from main quad. A tactical befriending of someone living on main quad is the answer: many a night I have crashed on a certain friend’s beanbag for a box of Brannos’ finest and a quick power nap, before heading back to my room.

With Trinity beginning, the inevitable approach of the post-prelim lake swim is beginning to cost me sleep. The prospect of emerging from a grueling set of essays, only to be doused in whipped cream and bubbles, and then forcibly dunked in ice-cold, swan shit strewn waters is not exactly the stuff of daydreams. But, a Worcester challenge is a Worcester challenge, and who I am to fight tradition?

Tolkien and ‘the problems of another place’

Sandy Elliot
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Tolkien and ‘the problems of another place’

I do not know precisely, or even approximately, how many hours of my life have been passed watching The Lord of the Rings. Just watching each of the three films once in their theatrical cut amounts to about twelve hours of screen time. In the extended editions (arguably the only correct way to watch them) it’s even more. Time spent watching those well-loved DVDs stacks up effortlessly, in part because very few films have been made that are so profoundly watchable.

But watching The Lord of the Rings, while a source of great happiness to me and whoever my viewing companions may be, is not, for lack of a better word, very productive. For all the immense effort and expense that went into making the films (Sir Ian McKellen once told me personally that about one third of the entire process for the actors consisted of hiking around New Zealand) watching them seems to be an innocuous, but not a useful pastime.

Who says art should be useful? What does ‘useful’ even mean? Thinking about it for long enough (as with most things) our consumption of media is just another surreal aspect of a surreal existence: we like to stare at the marks on a page or the pixels on a screen, and one way or another this brings us great delight. No need to drag in Jean-Paul Sartre or Oscar Wilde to realise that The Lord of the Rings is not deep social critique. It does not have, nor does it pretend to have, a function as an instrument for political or social change.

If anything, it plays into and even invents the archetype of a fantasy film with an all-white cast, with only three prominent female characters, all of whom are in completely different parts of Middle Earth being ruled over by different men. This is despite the fact that the role of Arwen Evenstar was considerably expanded in the process of book-to-film adaptation.

Indeed, in Tolkien’s world, the Elves, “wisest and fairest of all beings”, are also emblematic of absolute sexual orthodoxy. In defence of the novel (and to some extent, the films) there are very worthy environmental messages to be found in the plight of the Ents. But The Lord of the Rings nevertheless does not seem a particularly useful instrument for getting out of the current mess. Indeed, some would argue that such escapist works are part of the human instinct to run away from our problems rather than addressing them. Our attraction to them based on the ‘escape’ that they offer is, in this view, almost irresponsible.

I believe that this is a preposterous argument, for the simple reason that paradoxically, escapism is an inalienable part of who we are as humans. The true reason for this is that even at its most privileged, life itself is so very limiting. We feel confined to this insignificant rock named Earth like Prometheus in his chains, and on a deeper level, we can even feel lonely in our own bodies, entrapped by the cast-iron borders of our souls—the ones we erected to keep barbarians out.

That is why on the night of Trump’s election, Obama said that the sun would rise in the morning whatever the outcome, and also why that statement could be of no comfort whatsoever, for it was a reminder that we are so alone here.

Our world is endlessly spinning, and when our fellow humans commit such a senseless act as elevating a mindlessly destructive and bigoted creature to the purple, we cannot filter à l’anglaise—take the French leave—and close the door quietly behind us. We cannot hand in a letter of resignation from humanity when we see children gunned down in the school playground. Perhaps we, like the astronauts in 2001: A Space Odyssey hope at each stage in the history of our evolution for some new level of transcendence, to find new and even more ‘final’ frontiers.

Or perhaps, like Job, we feel that the meanderings of our lives are a joke played by the Almighty—that we cannot even hope to understand why it is that we live in such a senseless, cruel world, that we wouldn’t even be capable of understanding. It seems that all we can do is find new and ever more creative ways to escape. If, say, the Bible and Mad Men have one thing in common, it is that they are both works of escapist art. Even works which deal in grit and realism have the escapist quality of being something else: a problem other than our very own, no matter how familiar it may be.

As I place my DVD of The Return of the King in the disc drive for the umpteenth time, I am enjoying a truly majestic, life-affirming work of art, but fundamentally I am escaping to a world that is not my own and problems that are none of ours.

Watching The Lord of the Rings on a rainy day may not do the world too much good, but it does wonders for the soul.

Can the Liberal Democrats capture Oxford East from Labour?

Alex Yeandle
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Can the Liberal Democrats capture Oxford East from Labour?

With the announcement that Andrew Smith, Oxford East’s MP since 1987, is not standing for re-election to the next parliament, all eyes have turned to what could be a thrillingly close race between Labour and the Lib Dems for one of the most pro-remain seats in the country.

On the face of it, it would not appear that Labour should be too concerned. In 2015 Oxford East was won with a whopping majority of 30 per cent, just over 15,000 votes. The seat has been won by Labour for the past section successive general elections, spanning the eras of Thatcherism and Blairism right through to Milifandom. Young people, of which Oxford has many, are well known to be disproportionately left of centre as a demographic. It is arguably young people who Jeremy Corbyn is most well supported by, young people who voted so heavily for Britain to remain in the EU, and young people who wish to replace the current Conservative government. Upon closer analysis, however, Oxford East has a turbulent electoral history and is far from being a safe Labour seat.

The Oxford East constituency was created in the 1983 general election, as Margaret Thatcher defeated Michael Foot. The seat was won by Conservative Steven Norris. Norris lost the seat to current MP Andrew Smith in 1987. The interesting thing to notice here is the comparatively small size of the Labour majority in Oxford East. In 1987 the seat was won by just 1,288, before considerably increasing in the 1992 and 1997 elections.

Sitting on a huge majority in Blair’s two landslide election wins, the 2005 election gave a spectacularly diff erent result. A 12.5 per cent swing away from Labour and 11 per cent swing to the Lib Dems transformed a Labour majority of 10,334 to just 963. The context of this election is incredibly important, given the backdrop of the Iraq War. Once more in 2010, in light of Clegg-mania, the Lib Dems were only 4,500 votes behind Labour.

It appears, therefore, that only on three unique occasions has Oxford East been a landslide win for the Labour Party. The first two elections under Tony Blair, arguably Labour’s peak popularity for generations, and the 2015 election which delivered a historic meltdown in the Lib Dem vote. Looking at 2017, it is quite obvious that none of these conditions really hold that strongly. The days of Blairite third-way politics are long gone in the UK, and the Lib Dems, whilst not at pre-coalition levels, are gaining support rapidly amongst europhillic voters. The importance of Europe has never been such a splitting line in UK elections before, but the referendum results show clearly where Oxford stands on this divide.

If the opinion polling is vaguely correct, we can expect the Labour party vote share to fall and both Lib Dem and Conservative support rise, even if not under uniform swing. It is entirely plausible that the internationalist, liberal population of Oxford votes against Jeremy Corbyn’s Brexit plans, and crosses the box for Tim Farron’s clear eurocentric message.

The data show that Oxford East is far from a safe seat. With John McDonnell immediately coming to door-knock here last week it is clear that Labour are not taking anything for granted. However winning this seat still remains, in my view, a long shot for the Lib Dems. Not only did they come in fourth place last time out, behind the Conservatives and Greens, they face the classic problem of first past the post voting—that left of centre parties split each other’s votes. With Labour, Lib Dems and Greens all popular in Oxford, coupled with a massive 22 per cent vote share to recover from 2010, winning Oxford East would require big changes in support for parties. A strong Conservative showing and a large swing against Labour could nick the seat for Tim Farron, but this seems unlikely on uniform swing. The Lib Dems would be better off campaigning heavily in Oxford West and Abingdon, a Conservative-Liberal Democrat marginal, which is probably much easier pickings for them.

Le Pen won’t win, but the Front National will not disappear

Jorge Lopez Llorente
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Le Pen won’t win, but the Front National will not disappear

Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen have entered the second round of the 2017 French elections: it is the expected clash, the final decision that must be made after months of uncertainty. The first round results were tight: Macron won this round but only gathered slightly more support than Le Pen—securing 2 per cent more than her at the final tally.

Everything now seems to indicate however that the second round will not be such a close call, instead delivering a clear victory for Macron. This seems logical and I trust the polls, which so far have been fairly accurate. Macron’s additional two per cent of first round voters plus the so-called ‘optimistic’ approach and reform suggestions of his En Marche! platform will not be enough by themselves to tilt the election to his side.

Ironically, Macron will rely on Marine Le Pen to win. Rather than gaining more support because of his own ideas, Macron will surely gain a majority, thanks to voters of other parties now eliminated in the first round who loathe the Front National and will be prepared make a sacrifice to stop Le Pen. Macron will simply absorb other voters in this way, and he knows Le Pen will do all the fighting and scaremongering, hoping he can take advantage with a calm face, as he has been doing. Fillon? Mélenchon? Hamon? They have all been swiped away. Most of their supporters in the first round will now turn to Macron.

This trend has been marked early by the eliminated candidates themselves. Fillon has encouraged his voters to vote for Macron explicitly as a vote against Le Pen. The socialist Benoît Hamon has also endorsed Macron, but reluctantly so, again for the sake of lashing against the Front National’s extremist threat. Le Pen will find it hard to match, limited to her own direct supporters and perhaps small bunches of angry radicals from both extremes of the spectrum who initially backed Fillon or Mélenchon. Whose election is it then?

Macron himself has acted cleverly, using the system’s rules to his advantage by positioning himself in the centre, claiming to neither the left nor the right, despite coming from the Socialist Party, and acting as an all-embracing negotiator. Some passion must drive people to vote for Le Pen: radical right-wing beliefs, fear, frustration with mainstream politicians. But you could vote for Macron, reluctantly opting for the lesser evil with resignation. Maybe in a one-round election Le Pen could have snatched a direct victory, but the French system has clearly got too many obstacles for her at the moment.

We tend to compare the Brexit vote and the 2017 Dutch elections to these French elections, tracing the rise of alt (read: far) right candidates. Nevertheless, we should start realising that fear works both ways. In the Dutch elections Mark Rutte won, not Le Pen’s extremist peer Geert Wilders, because Dutch voters feared Wilders more than Islam. So if extremist right-wingers are on the rise, so are those who despise them, probably even more so.

The fear that populist politicians like Le Pen manipulate so well in their favour can, in fact, turn against them. Still, it troubles me that fear, division, and a basis of hate against rivals rather than a defence of one’s own ideas have become this election’s modus operandi. These are all Le Pen’s own terms. We can’t ignore that this election has always been Le Pen’s election, whichever way it turns out, because her Front National has set the undeclared deeper rules of the game.

Yes, in the end Macron will surely win this time. The relief will not last though. He will have to face a divided France in which most of the French will be less than delighted with him from day one, to say the least. Le Pen will not just disappear—she will be a burden for the next few years. I am already worried about what might happen in the next election. The Front National will undoubtedly bark and snarl at President Macron at every opportunity, spitting out that he has been propped up by a rotten establishment and perhaps even turning to violence. Macron’s additional support may even backfire in the future. Le Pen’s latest maneuver of pretending to scale down her leading role shows how devious she can be, camouflaging herself in plain sight. It is too soon, but the ammunition is there, and Le Pen must be drooling over it already, ready to pounce.

The FN will not die anytime soon. Le Pen will lose this battle, but she is set to be the victor in the political war that will shake France in the next few years, because this is all a war of her own creation, on her own terms. Despite percentages or predictions, in conceding her the chance to set up this scenario, all Europeans and the French in particular have already lost, but Le Pen has just begun winning.

‘Despot’s Got Talent’: Semi-final round-up

Stephen Hawes
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‘Despot’s Got Talent’: Semi-final round-up

It was a tough week for the Despots through to the semi-final of this year’s DGT, with judges fighting over which acts should make it to the final showdown at the beginning of May.

Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump’s early-season alliance has been marred by controversial act Bashar al-Assad, whose throwback chemical weapons attack on his own people to the tune of ‘Singing in the Rain’ was described as “unprecedented” by the Trump team, but only given a three out of ten rating by the longstanding Russian judge. “I hoped to see something better after all the work I did with him during the judges’ houses stage of the competition,” Putin said, prompting boos from a notably hostile UN crowd. “He may be in trouble this week. Hopefully the television audience will vote him through, but we’ll be expecting something much better in the final. Perhaps a burlesque-dancer dog eating an Isreali flag whilst juggling fireworks?”

Meanwhile, Kim Jong-un has stepped forward as a potential winner with an expanded performance of his first audition act, missile testing that threatens South Korea and Japan with a rendition that almost brought newest judge Donald Trump to tears. “I love Jong-un’s work. The man has big, big, talent. A really bad dude.” Xi Jinping, normally the most reticent of the three judges, has also come out in favour of the North Korean tenor. “If there’s one thing we’re looking for on this show, it’s the threat of nuclear war. Today, you delivered. After years of encouragement, I am so proud of what you have done. Whatever happens in the competition, your future is sure to be glowing.”

The show’s creator, Simon Cowell, was asked in an interview with The Guardian about whether he thought that the show was encouraging false aspirations amongst its teenage viewers and threatening to throw the world into apocalyptic darkness.

“Frankly,” he said, “I think that anyone who doesn’t realise that it’s all entertainment needs a reality check. And speaking of cheques, as long as the show makes enough for me to be frozen in a vat of champagne and hookers until the whole thing blows over, why would I really care?”

Omar al-Bashir, the Sudanese break-dancer, has revealed that he believes that age has affected his ability to perform. His disappointing semi-final act was not well received by the judges and it is unlikely that he will progress to the next stage of the competition. Trump, who is appearing as a judge for the first time, has been an instant hit with viewers.

“His experience in other talent shows has been crucial,” said Elizabeth Smugridge, a TV critic for The Daily Telegraph, “As soon as the producers persuaded him to stop saying ‘You’re fired’ to the dictators, he was good to go. The man has all the charisma of a TV critic for The Daily Telegraph. A triumph!” His onscreen banter with established judge Vladimir Putin has become the stuff of legend.

Putin, a winner from the twelfth season of the show, famously used Crimean democracy to beat a live bear to death on stage as his final performance. Meanwhile, British prime minister Theresa May has announced that she is working on an appearing in next year’s series. “All the application form says I need to do is develop an isolationist, apathetic, cynical one-party state that doesn’t care about the lives of its ordinary citizens. Frankly, I would have expected getting on to the show to be a bit more difficult.”

Becoming a metropolitan through life in slow motion

Maddison Sumner
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Becoming a metropolitan through life in slow motion

Cities represent, for me, the other end of a spectrum I hadn’t realised I was on until I came to university. I come from a small northern town that had fifteen minutes of fame in a Tinie Tempah song, but is otherwise lost in a saturated map of British place names.

If I wanted to, I could walk to the nearest grocery shop, but if I wanted to go to a shopping centre with any substance, I would have to take a bus to the next town, and then a train to the next city, and so on. It’s isolation, but in a way that makes you unaware that you’re isolated, because you have lived like this for 18 years and you don’t know any different.

Coming to a city made me realise that I’d been living in slow motion; simple things like food delivery and my proximity to a Waterstones were suddenly forced under a magnifying glass. The world was shifted into an entirely different focus for me—everything was bigger and closer. And the people were different. You don’t want to admit it, but when you come from a small town, the diversity of a city throws you off at the start. I’d never met anyone my age who hadn’t attended a state school, and most of my friends had been born at the hospital fifteen minutes from my house.

Oxford isn’t exactly a metropolis in its geography and architecture, which is probably why I feel more comfortable living in it, since there’s this sort of shelter that the historical buildings provide as you walk down the streets that is not as suffocating as the churches in North Lincolnshire can be. However, what it lacks in physical size, it makes up for in the sheer amount of people who walk the streets. Oxford is pulsing every day, in a way I had never seen before, and which made me very uncomfortable in the beginning, but which now makes home feel eerily quiet.

So, this is how cities affect me. I’m at both ends of this spectrum, but I don’t feel like the ends will ever meet. It’s as if I am split into two halves, hopping from one state of being to another when I move from north to south. For the first week or so, I feel like the middle of a Venn diagram: slightly out of place and yet, at the same time, as though I belong to something plural. Marcel Proust talks in his novel Combray (or Swann’s Way) about memory: how the very essence of a memory is its ability to propel us into a state of recollection, back to the ghost of a situation we seem to remember but cannot quite grasp. “What an abyss of uncertainty, whenever the mind feels overtaken by itself” (“Grave incertitude, toutes les fois que l’esprit se sent dépassé par lui-même”).

This in some way reflects how I feel about the polarity that living in between a city and my little northern town causes: when I feel something that I have only ever felt before in the city or my home in a new environment, it feels strange, uncomfortable, and misplaced.

At home, it might be a sudden jolt of liberation that I feel walking down the street to catch that bus into town which reminds me of walking down the street to a lecture, where I will be right next door to a city centre with which I needed nothing more than my legs to reach. In the city, it is when I am walking by myself at night and I remember the panic of walking home from a friend’s house as a pre-teen, but with the shattered armour of realising that I am in one of the cities my mum warned me about walking home alone in.

I have only lived in a city for sixteen weeks, in this city, and the others are foreign to me: friends’ university homes that I would struggle to recollect because they bring to me with their towering buildings some sense of non-identity, so that I adopt the faux-hedonism of a character like Nick Carraway in a Gatsby-esque burst of energy that leaves me just as alienated from the city as before. And so, it is as if it might be possible that my city—Oxford—is becoming a middle ground which has the recognisable buzz, but lacks the dizzying height of the bigger, more concrete-skyscraper cities. As I take a journey academically at university, it also feels like I’m on a journey of which I’m unsure about the destination: is it me? Am I changing? Is it the motorway I took to get here that is triggering this change?

Perhaps I was wrong about the line of my spectrum being totally unmalleable. Maybe the middle of the Venn diagram won’t seem so alien in a distant future.

The untold story of an austerity town

Fred Dimbleby
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The untold story of an austerity town

Life for many of Britain’s local councils is not easy at the moment. Cuts to local government funding have frustrated and limited their important work and, almost without exception, they are feeling the impact of under-specified and seemingly gratuitous government cuts.

My hometown of Eastbourne is just one example, of many, feeling the impact of austerity. If you have ever watched Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging, you will be familiar with the setting of the movie: Eastbourne. The town lives a pretty existence on the south coast and has every attribute of a British seaside resort. Unfortunately, like most towns in Britain, Eastbourne is feeling the pressure of cutbacks to services and local councils.

For now, the hotels stretched along the coastline and ice cream shops dotted throughout the town remain open for business. However, after seven years of austerity, cracks are beginning to form on the face of this idyllic town.

Eastbourne is an area that is developing and modernising. Its permanent residents are growing in number, and lowering in age, as young professionals are pushed out of Brighton and London by increasing house prices. It is presently going through a £44 million redevelopment to several of its major buildings, including its theatres and its tennis courts where every year thousands travel to watch prestigious tennis stars in their preparation for Wimbledon.

As David Tutt, the Liberal Democrat head of the local council (who is affectionately known as ‘Tutty’ by his colleagues), puts it: “initially it is probably fair to say that that [the government cut] wasn’t too painful,” and that “the community in Eastbourne hasn’t suffered as much as many parts of the country”.

Village Street, by Eric Ravilious, 1936

He is right about this. Eastbourne’s Liberal Democrat run Borough Council—unlike many others around the country—was prepared for the initial levels of government cuts. They downsized their council operations moving to what Tutt calls an “agile” workplace. Four floors of offices became one, and that one was later shared with the local council from Lewes. This was an inconvenience to the council but, like so many others around Britain, they had to quickly adapt to a life of local government limitation.

They also invested greatly in areas that could bring them capital reserves to survive the harsh reality that is austerity. They pumped funding into a housing company, putting solar panels on their council houses, and an emergency call-out service that provided the council with a steady funding stream.

These preparations meant that, as Tutt proudly points out to me, despite a 60 per cent cut in government funding, Eastbourne council is one of few in Britain not to have cut front- line services. This is not to say that Eastbourne has not already suffered. The County Council, which looks after areas such as social care, has already delivered huge financial cuts to Eastbourne. Many of these have been focussed on adult social care leading to a story that has been seen all around Britain—the vulnerable bearing the brunt of government cuts.

However, there is a widening consensus that cuts are going to have to be made in order to accommodate the tightening demands of central government. Stephen Lloyd, the dedicated ex-MP, and now electoral candidate, who describes himself as a “business-wing liberal”, tells me that “next year the council is going to have to find ways…to cope with the quite savage cuts”. Stephen is incredibly passionate about Eastbourne to the point of swearing through our interview about various cuts, which he sees as being shameful.

Midnight Sun 1940 Eric Ravilious 1903-1942 Presented by the War Artists Advisory Committee 1946 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/work/N05723

Even after careful planning, investment and deliberation, Eastbourne is now almost certain to suffer from cuts to frontline services. Such is the intensity of government cuts to local councils. Those who work in Eastbourne council have not been given the chance to maintain their record. From what I have heard, these cuts are so large and continuous that there is no opportunity to adapt to them, meaning many councils face possible extinction. These cutbacks almost seem to be a punishment rather than a method of gaining greater efficiency.

This is not an situation that the council has settled upon lightly. They attempted to limit the scale of cuts to services through the sale of some assets. The idea was to sell to 3,000 acres of council owned farmland—which just happens to be some of the most beautiful stretches of downs surrounding Beachy Head. This land is presently let to local farmers and brings in a small profit. Tutt says that he thought the sale would bring around £20 million into the council capital account. But, as even Stephen Lloyd admits, this plan turned into a “fiasco”.

Local residents, outraged at the idea and fearing that this Downland would be developed and spoilt, rose up against the concept. The council suddenly found itself on the end of a local campaign to ‘Keep Our Downs Public’. There were marches and a petition was produced which was signed by over 10,000 people. Eastbourne has a population of around 100,000 meaning that ten per cent of the populous signed it.

To put this into perspective, the post-Brexit petition, which has the greatest number of signatories nationally, had a level of support of around six per cent. If you remember the passion, anger and dedication which that petition created, then you can imagine the impact of the Eastbourne petition. The local council, often bemoaning the lack of interest in local politics, was suddenly faced with real popular opposition. Unlike the Brexit petition, the signatories were victorious.

One of those who participated in the campaign was Green MEP Keith Taylor who, despite now being based in Brussels, has a great loyalty to Sussex. This land is made up of “beautiful areas…they should be for the use of the community,” he said. “Just to sell it off is disgraceful”. The Downlands near Eastbourne are, as Taylor says, a special part of the countryside. Rudyard Kipling once described these rolling hills as “our blunt, bow-headed whale-backed Downs”.

We cannot be sure if this was a positive or negative description but they clearly made an impact upon the author, as they do with everyone who walks along them. There is such a sense of common ownership—that is unique to this area—that the council’s plan to sell them seems almost naive. We must remember, however, that desperation can lead to poor decision making.

This issue went so far that Tutt almost considered a local referendum but, having weighed costs, elected to send out a voting slip in an issue of the council magazine. He made it clear on the ballot, and makes it clear to me in our interview, that this was a choice between selling the land or facing cuts to local services.

It is not clear how great the impact of the sale would have been upon services, with some reporting that this money was instead intended to fund the town’s new development projects. Whether there was a Project Fear element to Tutt’s argument or not, the vote came in convincingly to stop the Downlands sale and the council backed down.

The Brickyard, by Eric Ravilious, 1936

This was the council’s first major dice with unpopular opinion and, when services do begin to be cut, it will not be the last. As government funding decreases even more, as David Tutt expects it will, the council is going to be faced with even tougher decisions. They cannot please everyone, despite their evident best efforts, and will be forced to withdraw money. When the government makes a cut, they may not be personally familiar with its impact. When David Tutt and the rest of the council make a cut, they know the individuals that it will impact upon.

They know that passionate, committed people will have vital funding removed and that others will suffer—this personal knowledge makes such decisions so much harder. The Downland sale sets a nerve-wracking precedent for future controversies.

One Eastbourne establishment that is going to face considerable cuts is the Towner Art Gallery, a cultural highlight of Eastbourne. The Gallery houses a number of prominent artists—especially a large collection of works by Eric Ravilious, whose work can be seen throughout this article— and runs a number of outreach programs to educate locals and tourists about art. I have personal ties to this gallery and this is an issue close to my heart. The impact of austerity should not be reduced to mere figures.

Tutt says that when he set up a trust for Towner he “made a promise that we would keep the funding level at the same level for four years”, and he has kept to that promise. This is true, but it still seems that this move will cause a similar type of controversy that the council previously experienced during the Downland campaign.

The council has set out a possible plan for the next budget, which would cut Towner’s £600,000 council funding by 50 per cent. This is about a one third cut in its overall funding and would have a major impact on Towner’s ability both to operate its exhibitions and the educational services that it provides.

The loss of Towner’s work would leave a serious artistic and cultural deficit in Eastbourne. Few want this to happen, least of all the team at Towner who see the importance of the gallery on a daily basis, but with more cuts comes a greater existential threat to those institutions that draw people to Eastbourne. Some may question why the council is looking to cut frontline services rather than raising council taxes. I ask Tutt about this, but he is clear that this is not a viable alternative.

“For every one per cent we put up council tax, we only get £80,000 in terms of revenue” he tells me. He says that there is a misconception about local council wealth. Many other organisations, such as the County Council and the Police and Crime Commissioner, draw money down from council tax yet local residents still think that the local council is, in Tutt’s words, “rolling in money”.

Caravans, by Eric Ravilious, 1936

He told one of the local newspapers that, after the Downland debate, “only one person has so far suggested any other alternative”. The criticism of local councils is seen all over the country, but the general population seem not to understand that these councils have been forced into the most difficult of situations with little chance for a positive outcome.

There are legitimate complaints that can be raised against the council, especially their plan to carry out a mass redevelopment at a time of economic insecurity, but it seems that they have managed to handle these cuts well so far. Especially when compared to the County Council, Eastbourne has been saved from the worst ravages of austerity because of sensible planning and decision making.

Tutt says that, at a recent District Council Networks Conference, the leader of Ashfield council said to the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, Sajid Javid, “before you leave here I want you to know that because of the money you’ve just taken away from us […] I don’t know that our council is going to be able to continue to exist”.

You can hear the desperation in the council leader’s voice when she talks about the possible extinction of her council. Councils are frustrated that those in power are not listening to them. Their story is not one that is in the national conversation.

Whilst hours are, rightly, spent discussing school cuts, David Tutt and his local and national colleagues are rarely called upon to explain why this austerity is so fundamentally damaging. The government has been able to make huge cuts without genuine scrutiny because the relationship between local and central government is either too complicated, or too individualised, to be covered in the media.

But Eastbourne Borough Council, like its County Council neighbour, is going to be hit if Government cuts stay at this level. Most people who I talked to, despite mentioning various complaints about the council, said that they do not envy Tutt’s job. Stephen Lloyd tells me that he “takes his hat off to David”, and Keith Taylor says that, although he opposes some of the actions the council has taken, he feels sympathy for them because of the impact of funding cuts.

All the people that I have talked to care deeply about Eastbourne. They are passionate about the town and its people. They work assiduously to ensure that Eastbourne is on the right track. But they are being gravely limited by the scale and severity of cuts that are being inflicted by the central government.

As is the case with many councils, there was some fat on council budgets, which may have been useful to cut. Tutt even admits to me that he was in favour of the original cuts. However, that fat has now been skimmed off. Councils have increased in efficiency, but now the government is demanding more. One has the impression that the Conservative administration no longer cares about practical efficiency but the ideological limitation of local government.

Eastbourne is just one chapter in the story of government cuts to local funding. For this council, the service cuts may just be beginning, but other councils around Britain are now questioning their very ability to exist.

There seems to be no sense that these cuts to local government will end. David Tutt, and his many colleagues around the nation, are preparing for yet another difficult year.

We cannot let local government die in the shadows. If local government matters, it cannot suffer the humiliation of being treated like a poor relation. Eastbourne’s future may still be bright but, with every additional funding cut, darkness draws a little closer.

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