Saturday 11th April 2026
Blog Page 998

Preventing PREVENT in Oxford is an imperative

Alex Stoffel, Aliya Yule and Martyn Rush
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Preventing PREVENT in Oxford is an imperative

In 2015, the Counter Terrorism and Security Act created a legal obligation for public institutions to comply with PREVENT, which essentially attempts to ‘prevent’ people from being drawn into ‘terrorism’ and/or ‘extremism’. Teachers, doctors and university staff, among others, have since become foot soldiers in the government’s war against ‘extremist ideology’ and ‘radicalisation’.

Since its introduction, there has been a national campaign calling for the government to retract PREVENT, coming from countless sectors of society, including academics, teachers, students, doctors and senior politicians. But in November, the Guardian reported that a secret review urged the government instead to ramp up the PREVENT strategy, and just last week announced that King’s College London has warned students that their emails may be retained and monitored by the university.

PREVENT has been creating an atmosphere of fear on campuses that disregards students’ most basic rights, contradicts colleges’ responsibility to uphold the Equalities Act, the Education Act, and the Human Rights Act, and disengages students from political activity. In a frighteningly cynical and pernicious way, it is being rolled out under the guise of ‘student welfare’. As more and more members of staff and senior members of colleges—even, in some cases, fellow students— are being trained in PREVENT, we are witnessing the increased securitisation of student welfare.

In Oxford alone over the past few months, there have been numerous reports indicating the over-reach of PREVENT. Two weeks ago, a student had their room searched without their knowledge after scouts heard them reading prayers in Punjabi, and then was asked if they had been ‘radicalised’ by their college tutor.

When booking rooms for discussion events, students have been interrogated about the kind of ‘Islam’ they intended to ‘promote’, and other room-bookings made by a number of different religious and cultural societies have been blocked.

More and more students across the university are coming forward to report incidences where colleges and departments have obstructed students’ freedom of discussion and impinged on their right to privacy under the guise of this legislation. Countless other incidences are currently going unreported and unacknowledged because of the lack of transparency about what official college policies are: students have rarely been consulted in the creation of PREVENT policies, despite promises made to do otherwise.

What is particularly chilling under PREVENT is that university officials and college staff have effectively been given a carte blanche by the government to surveil students and obstruct their everyday activities. Tutors, welfare staff, deans and porters are now authorised to act on their own suspicions with impunity, possibly without even realising that in doing so they are creating an atmosphere of suspicion and fear. The incidences coming to light illustrate that PREVENT is doing exactly this: students are becoming reluctant to practise their culture and religion freely, they are reluctant to organise events that they fear will be shut down, and are increasingly weary of being visibly involved in contentious issues. These individual cases mask the larger point, the structural nature of the legislation.

Make no mistake—in a time of austerity and rampant Islamophobia at home and renewed British imperialism abroad, this legislation is designed to depoliticise and disengage the Muslim community from politics. It is aimed at the surveilling of an entire community, and the policing of the boundaries of what is considered acceptable discourse from them. It evolves out of the conception of an entire religious group as a security threat to be managed, rather than citizens with rights to be upheld.

PREVENT is therefore not particularly new or original—it fits into a wider strategy in at least three ways. First, it draws on a familiar racial discourse that forms a dichotomy between ‘us’ and ‘them’: entire groups are shrouded within a context of threat and insecurity.

Second, PREVENT must be understood within the broader context of surveillance and counterterrorism strategies in the post-9/11 era. These practices draw lines around particular groups, separating ‘the normal’ and ‘at risk’ from ‘the suspicious’ and ‘risky’. For these strategies to work, the state requires citizens to take individual moral responsibility for ensuring their own safety; we are told to ‘remain vigilant’, to be ready for a terrorist to strike at any minute, to monitor for ‘suspicion’ during everyday activities. This entails, essentially, reporting anything that deviates from what we deem ‘normal’—the way someone dresses, their political views, their religious beliefs or the colour of their skin. Under PREVENT, identifying features range from ‘appearing angry about UK foreign policy’ to ‘seeming isolated or withdrawn’.

Finally, PREVENT embodies a politics of pre-emptive identification of ‘future terrorists’, and it is this logic that erodes our rights and liberties in the name of ‘security’ and ‘protection’. At its most extreme, the logic of PREVENT dissolves our very notions of innocence and guilt. Suspects are no longer innocent until proven guilty, but rather guilty until proven innocent. And guilt is determined not based on someone’s actions, but on whether or not they conform to vague notions of ‘British values’. Recognising the structural nature of PREVENT makes clear: counteracting PREVENT is part of a larger struggle for global justice and the protection of our freedoms.

At the university, PREVENT stifles intellectual debate, endangers student welfare, cracks down on political dissent, and creates an atmosphere of fear and suspicion. Anyone who takes seriously the university’s position as a bastion of freedom of speech, as the protector and guarantor of all of our academic freedoms, must vehemently oppose this legislation and fight back against it.

If you have been affected in any way by PREVENT, please email [email protected]. The email is run by a group of students who will keep incidents completely anonymous if so wished. Get involved with Preventing PREVENT Oxford on Facebook to stay up to date with resistance to PREVENT

For more information on PREVENT itself, please visit http://www.ltai.info/what-is-prevent/

Quantum physics is invading biology

Henry Grub
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Quantum physics is invading biology

Traditionally, quantum physics is a bit like that friend: we know deep down that they’re probably right, but we’ll continue to ignore them for as long as possible, keeping our deluded ideas because they’ve worked so far. We can live with this until, inevitably, something goes wrong and there they are, taunting, “I told you so”. Unfortunately for biologists, that moment may have arrived.

In photosynthesis, the process that provides all the energy for life, sunlight splits up water into hydrogen and oxygen and excites some electrons. The electrons jump up and then fall back down, releasing excess energy. That energy is stored in chemical bonds and, in a roundabout way, is used by the plant to live.

Classical physics says the electron should take much longer to jump around than is observed and that it should lose much more energy to the surroundings than it actually does. In short, photosynthesis is smoother, quicker and more efficient than physics says it should be.

Now we can’t ignore the issue any longer. Physicists have observed the signs of quantum activity, namely quantum superposition, in photosynthesising cells. This would mean that an excited electron can explore lots of different ways to jump around simultaneously, thus finding the best way, losing less energy and saving time. For biologists, this was the pretty shocking—quantum activity is usually only seen in highly controlled laboratory test conditions, not in the noisy mess of a living cell.

While this new quantum theory comes with the usual scientific disclaimer that the activity observed may not actually be helping with photosynthesis in any way, it does seem to ‘fit’ neatly with everything else we know about photosynthesis, even if more evidence is needed for confirmation.

And there’s more. Not content with hacking fundamental biological processes, quantum scientists are also claiming to be able to solve other problems for biologists, what it is that gives each chemical its characteristic smell, for example.

The traditional theory is that different shaped molecules attach to receptors in the nose and produce different smells, but some molecules are very similar in shape, yet smell very different, whilst some molecules that are really different smell the same. Some scientists are saying this could be down to the quantum properties.

They say smelly molecules start a process called ‘quantum tunnelling’. Certain bonds in molecules provide a vibration that moves receptor electrons from one point to another via a quantum tunnel, meaning they don’t travel through the space in between. This would mean molecules have a tunnelling signature, as so to speak, for identification by the brain.

Annoyingly for biologists, there is some solid evidence for this, including the fact that sulphur and boranes have no molecular similarities, but they do have similar bond vibrations, and they smell the same. While, this is not proof, but physicists reckon soon they’ll have cracked the smell problem once and for all.

We are now ushering in a new era of complex quantum biology. Quantum mechanics has upgraded itself from the obscure branch of mind-bending science to something much closer to home. Gone are the days when biologists could be blissfully ignorant of this strange world, which may turn out to underpin many processes of life. Are we all really quantum machines?

The profound need for an Australian republic

John Mainland
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The profound need for an Australian republic

The 26 January marks the 229th Anniversary of the landing of the British First Fleet at Sydney Harbour—now a national holiday down under, known as Australia Day. Australia Day is typically celebrated by the immoderate consumption of cheap beer, with any Australian in possession of a pool under a quasilegal obligation to have people around for a BBQ and a swim. Even in Oxford, on Thursday there were full-blown gatherings at Green Templeton College and the Turf Tavern where Australians (and others) can catch up and reminisce about our sunburnt country on the other side of the world.

Over recent decades though, the day has become considerably more divisive. Many refuse to recognise 26 January as a day to be commemorated—associating it instead with the beginning of a brutal campaign of colonisation that dispossessed the indigenous people of Australia of their traditional lands and way of life.

Increasingly, there are calls for a national day that represents a conscious and constructive act by the Australian people, and not merely by a British convict fleet. Lurking behind the Australia day question is a much more profound debate of who we are as a nation, and whether or not Australia should cut ties with the Commonwealth and the British Monarchy in order to become a republic.

The republican debate divides Australia into old and new; those who see our position in the world as an outpost of the Anglosphere, a derivative society whose political and cultural legitimacy rely upon Britain; and those who see Australia as a multicultural, cosmopolitan participant in the Asian century, for whom the old colonial ties with Britain have become an irrelevance. For the former, removing Queen Elizabeth as Head of State would signify an attack on our history and cultural heritage; for the latter, it would signify the final step in our transition to full nationhood and a clear signposting that both the oldest, original inhabitants of the land, as well as the newest arrivals from any and every part of the world, have a place in modern Australia.

Australia today is an immensely confused place. If you ask its citizens (and certainly if you ask Brits) to describe to you the quintessential Australian, the image that will be painted is inevitably the Crocodile Dundee type—usually a beer loving, parochial white larrikin who lives somewhere in the bush.

What’s bizarre is that this hasn’t been the reality of Australian life for quite some time. Today 90 per cent of Australians live in cities. We also have, per capita, more immigrants and more skyscrapers than any other major economy, and our GDP is the 12th largest (coming in above Russia and Spain). The days of a monocultural, internationally insignificant, rural Australia are categorically over.

The problem is that Australians continue to look at themselves from a 19th Century British perspective, a fact which stifles our ability to progress as a nation. Central to this is our status as a constitutional monarchy; as long as we have a colonial Head of State, and a colonial flag, the battle against a colonial self-image will be an uphill one.

The push to become a Republic doesn’t simply revolve around a desire for higher cultural self-esteem. The genesis of the modern nation state of Australia is irreversibly tainted by the original sin of colonisation—over decades of slow advancement the country we now call home was forcibly wrested from the indigenous population by European Australians.

We ended some 40,000 years of aboriginal history, committed a genocide in the state of Tasmania and stole a generation of mixed-race children from their mothers. The deep and lasting wounds sustained by the indigenous community in Australia are unlikely to ever fully heal, and the deep-seated sense of mistrust will take generations of hard work by committed indigenous and non-indigenous citizens to erode.

We, as a nation, are grappling with a healing process that at times can seem almost impossibly difficult, one that is continually frustrated by enduring racism and revisionism. We quite simply cannot embark on such a process while our highest source of political authority is a representative of colonialism and while our flag is the same as the one under which indigenous Australians were at one point classified as fauna. The movement towards a Republic would recognise an Australia which has thousands of years of history instead of two hundred.

To be clear, the calls to become a republic are not, and never have been, connected with hostility towards the United Kingdom, or even specifically towards the House of Windsor.

The republican debate within Britain itself is one that Australia has stayed well clear of, and ultimately one that deals with quite a separate set of issues. Unlike in Britain, the Monarchy is not an institution that holds a great deal of cultural significance to the Australian people, nor is it an institution we can really participate in. Nobody looks at Queen Elizabeth as a personification of the Australian State, nor as a symbol of Australian-ness. Removing the royal family as the final source of nominal authority in the Australian political system would not, therefore, signify any ill will towards the Monarchy, it would simply signify that the Monarchy doesn’t make continued sense in the context of the modern Australian political landscape.

Referendums on the issue have failed before, and the Australian republican movement needs to agree on a common vision of what exactly their goal is before any serious progress can be made. However, with the Prime Minister, the Opposition Leader, and every state Premier supporting making the leap, the future is looking brighter for the prospect of an independent, inclusive and culturally distinct Australia.

A fusion of movement, light, and sound

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A fusion of movement, light, and sound

Illuminated, the latest production from Quicksandance, is an innovative fusion of light, sound and dance. Currently running at the Keble O’Reilly, it is a captivating spectacle which manages to excite and surprise throughout its all too brief runtime. The show—consisting of ten distinct but interlinked dances—impresses with its variety, pivoting from one style to the next in its exploration of the idea of light. It begins with a solo dance, a slower piece which seems to be contained in a circle of darkness before expanding outwards.

From there, the dances segue into one another. In one, the dancers are mimicked by shadows behind a gauze, forms which reveals themselves to be other dancers. The dancers struggle with their shadowy doubles, before slamming their hands upon the gauze and dissipating the shadows. In another dance, three performers are separated into different circles of darkness, each moving within their own prison. Each routine is invested with a sense of drama, of intrigue.

The drama could not be achieved without the interplay of sound and light. The show soars when taken as a whole, each part of its design merging with every other, each constituent element bolstering and elevating the next.

The minimal set—some white cloth draped across the back of the stage and along the floor, and some spheres dangling from the ceiling—seems plain, almost bland, at first glance. Yet this allows the show’s wonderful lighting to transform the performance space, the bright, block colours evoking multiple different atmospheres.

The show swings from bright pinks and blues, to alluring greens, to stark whites, each shift allowing the dancers to dive into the next routine with vigour. The globes, meanwhile, are suggestive: bubbles of shadow one instant, celestial orbs the next. Furthermore, the sound design is more than a mere backdrop against which the dances can play out, instead, it is an integral part of the experience, a complex array of aural sensations which is synchronised with the lighting.

The slow thud of a heartbeat signals the beginning of the production, the music flares when a male and female dancer collide with one another, when circles of darkness break up the light, distortion ripples across the soundscape. The use of surround sound enables the production to envelop the audience, seeming to swallow them up in the proceedings. The whole show is seamless, each piece of it flowing into the next until it becomes impossible to separate one specific element from another.

Only when taken in its entirety can Illuminated truly be appreciated. Every element is impressive on its own, but they interanimate one another in unexpected ways, creating an experience which arrests the senses. The feeling of danger which dominates one dance between a male and female dancer is enriched by the sudden flashes of light, the immersion of the throbbing music. This interweaving of parts is vital to its success.

Playful when it wishes to be, disconcerting when it chooses, Illuminated is adept at leading its audience through its world of intertwined light and sound. More than anything, it demonstrates a cohesiveness of vision across the entirety of its construction. The dances could not exist without the light, the light without the sound, the show without any of them. This cogency—and the sense of completeness that follows from it—makes Illuminated a triumph.

Matt Ridley on ice ages, bird watching and cultural evolution

Calum Stephenson
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Matt Ridley on ice ages, bird watching and cultural evolution

What made you decide to study zoology at Oxford?

I was a passionate naturalist from the age of about ten, having been introduced to birdwatching by my father. Birdwatching got me into natural history and natural history got me into the biological sciences. A zoology degree represented the chance to study animals and animal behaviour—I just saw it as a way of studying my hobby I suppose. But I had done enough biology to realise by then that the concepts of evolution and genetics were absolutely huge ideas, and why would one not want to spend one’s time looking at huge ideas?

You’ve been actively involved in science communication for several decades now. Has the general public’s perception of science changed since your time at Oxford?

I think these things do change, but possibly they don’t change as much as we think they do. There was a little bit of a revolution going on when I joined science journalism in terms of saying, “Hang on a minute, genetic engineering is happening, microchips are happening, we’ve got to explain these things to our readers”.

When I joined The Economist, a man named Richard Casement had gone to the editor and said “Look, it’s absurd that we don’t have a section of this magazine devoted to science and technology, will you let me start one?”. He started out by doing some fantastic basic explanatory things: what a silicon chip was, what genetic engineering was. He’d get right into the nuts and bolts of scientific ideas.

For me, getting really deep into what causes ice ages and so on has always been the fascination. This allows you to have a debate with your reader about something that is both esoteric and complicated, but explainable if you use good metaphors. You don’t want to patronise so instead you simplify. That’s what I’ve always wanted to do, whereas an awful lot of what passes for science journalism just very quickly scoots straight over the science part, then goes straight to the politics of this specific scientific issue. There is a market out there for curiosity about the world and not everything has to have a political angle.

In the opening of your TED talk, ‘When Ideas have sex’, you talk about how often scientifi c concerns are blown out of proportion. Whose fault is this?

I’ve seen this happen again and again, whether it’s on GM foods, fracking, climate change, the ozone layer… Often there is a real problem, but also a degree of exaggeration and indeed hysteria. I think the blame lies partially with the media which will always report sensationalist, exaggerated versions of the truth.

But there is another group called pressure groups, the NGOs, who often play a very large role in hotting these things up. We’ve seen it with Friends of the Earth being rebuked by the Advertising Standards Authority this month for mistaking the risks of fracking. There is quite a big industry of that going on, more than there was 30 years ago.

Those are the two main culprits in my view, but scientists have to take some of the blame themselves, because the temptation to exaggerate the problem and therefore increase your own funding is definitely real, to the extent that if you publish a paper saying that “Actually this problem is not as bad as people think”, then you are at some [level] threatening the budget for your own work. But I don’t think it is quite as cynical as that in the minds of most scientists.

Science at its best consists of Professor A saying “This is a problem” and Professor B saying “Nonsense, you’ve put a decimal point in the wrong place”. For me, science works when everyone is pushing their own agenda, with their agendas often in different directions.

In your TED talk you go on to discuss the evolution of human culture, emphasising the importance of exchange between cultures. What makes exchange so important?

I’m convinced that the invention of exchange—me giving you a fishhook and you giving me a fish—may have played a very large part in the development of modern human society and in the sudden explosion of prosperity that we have seen in the last 200,000 years. The argument comes from a lot of fields: psychology, anthropology, biology, economics and the understanding of the non-zero sum nature through which both sides benefit. The more you specialise then the more exchange you can do, the more you can exchange, the more you can specialise.

You can look at more recent archaeology to see what’s happening on islands like Tasmania where people were isolated for 10,000 years: culture went ‘backwards’, became ‘simpler’. So for me the blindingly obvious elephant in the room that a lot of anthropologist have neglected is the role of exchange in driving culture.

What particularly intrigues me is that when you look in the animal kingdom this kind of exchange of diff erent things at the same time, rather than the same things at different times, is virtually unique to human beings, with some very minor exceptions. It’s also apparently unique to modern human beings, with quite good evidence beginning to accumulate that Neanderthals didn’t do this. They only ever used local materials for their tools, implying there was no exchange over long distances. I think that exchange is the key to understanding the modern revolution of 200,000 years ago. It’s all about how intelligence became collective and cumulative.

Do you have any advice to young students looking to get into writing and journalism?

It’s not as easy as it used to be because the revenues of the media have dried up almost completely, thanks to Google. There is much less opportunity for professional careers in journalism than there used to be. That’s, I’m afraid, a rather depressing thought. It means that a lot more journalism is amateur. Through mediums such as social media people can contribute in all sorts of ways, so it’s a much more open profession in that sense, but I would be wary of making it a whole career rather do it alongside something else.

Margo Price live at the Bullingdon

Emily Beswick
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Margo Price live at the Bullingdon

A few minutes before Margo Price comes on stage, I find myself talking to a friendly man from Birmingham. He tells me that the last time he saw Price—with her previous band, Buffalo Clover—the audience consisted of four people, “including the support”. What a difference a critically-acclaimed debut album makes: tonight, the country singer packs out the Bullingdon on one stage of a 2017 solo tour that will take her across the UK and America.

Price’s voice has been compared by many to Loretta Lynn in her heyday, and it sounds even more striking live. After the obligatory opening beer, she launches into a slow intro to ‘Tennessee Song’, the long, held notes showcasing a compelling blend of raspiness and crystal-clear expression. The versatility of her voice is underlined in a new song, ‘Taught Me With Your Eyes’, which sees her convey vulnerability over a steady waltz beat.

The four-strong band gives her songs a richer sound than on the record, with the pedal steel and her husband Jeremy Ivey’s harmonica adding a quintessential country twang. Declaring “I’m never going back to Florida unless it’s to see Mickey Mouse”, Price dives into ‘Desperate and Depressed’, a rant about a disastrous time on the road. The walking bass and pounding drum beat give an angry edge to the repeated cry “I’m desperate and depressed/Ain’t it a mess”.

You’d forgive Price for playing a set list full of her celebrated 2016 album Hands of Time, but she defies that expectation. “Who wants to hear some shitkicking country music?” she shouts at the start of ‘Paper Cowboy’, an old-school honkytonk tune reminiscent of Hank Williams. At one point, she even leaves the stage, allowing the band to play a completely instrumental number alone, as if we were in a Nashville country bar.

Homages to classic country and rock artists abound. In the night’s most intimate moment, she duets with her husband’s guitar accompaniment on Dolly Parton’s ‘Jolene’. Then, with just a tambourine and her voice, Price leads the audience in a stirring rendition of Janis Joplin’s bluesy ‘Mercedes Benz’.

Previously, Price has criticised lazy and stereotypical media comparisons to female country singers: she told Rolling Stone, “I feel kind of like one of the men. I’m like David Allan Coe. I’ve been to prison, man!” Her song ‘Weekender’— based on a weekend stint in jail— is one of the most popular songs of the night, a masterpiece of catchy hooks and tragicomic observations. To cheers she recounts writing the song in her cell, on a piece of crossword puzzle paper and a smuggled pencil.

In a similar spirit, she dynamically covers Merle Haggard’s ‘Red Bandana’ and Johnny Cash’s ‘Big River’ with the kind of gusto reserved for true devotees.

The gig is at times unpolished—the transitions are occasionally awkward, as Price does not quite have the technique of filling in gaps with conversation perfectly practised. The flipside of this is extraordinarily raw moments such as in the climax of ‘Hurtin’ on the Bottle’, when Price dashes off the stage and into the audience. Forming a circle, she dances enthusiastically with the crowd in one of the most astonishing crowd interactions I’ve ever seen.

Price continues to surprise with her encore. She covers Kris Kristofferson’s classic ‘Me and Bobby McGee’ with a piece of beautiful staging: she starts the song alone with a guitar, before her band gradually join her on stage and together build the song to a thrilling culmination. After ‘Four Years of Chances’, a blues-influenced original song with an alluring bass line, she concludes with Rodney Crowell’s ‘I Ain’t Living Long Like This’. While the band pounds out rocky rhythms, Price bounds across the stage with her tambourine, completely absorbed in the moment.

There is a final thunderous chord, a beat, and rapturous applause. The audience, and I, are left in no doubt that Margo Price is much, much more than her bestselling album.

Profile: Michael Gove

Fred Dimbleby
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Profile: Michael Gove

The British people “have had enough of experts”. It was the defining moment of a referendum campaign that was not exactly limited in defining moments. It has come to signify the success of the Brexit vote, the success of Donald Trump and the rise of populist, mostly right wing, leaders around the world. Comically, it was a mistake.

Michael Gove never meant that the people had had enough of experts but rather that they had had enough of experts with “acronyms” who get it “consistently wrong”. Gove managed to cause not only a day of news, but also a legacy of many months, because he was cut off before he explained fully what he meant.

When I talk to Gove he seems to have forgotten about his lack of belief in experts. He believes that government education policy, in relation to Grammar Schools, was “driven by the evidence about what works” and that it would be more preferable to be “guided by the data rather than ideology”. Regardless of issues of misquoting, this certainly resembles a shift from his words on the Sky sofa during the referendum debate.

Indeed, a lot has changed since the end of the referendum campaign. David Cameron has resigned, Theresa May has replaced him, Boris Johnson has got a job at the Foreign Office and Gove has moved from a prominent place in the cabinet to the back benches, after his botched attempt to win the leadership of the Tory party.

Publicly, he seems to have decided that that part of his political, and personal, life is no longer one that should be discussed in interviews such as this. When I ask him about his long relationship with Boris Johnson, which spans all the way back to their presidencies of the Oxford Union, Johnson in 1986 and Gove in 1988, he says that he has “taken a vow of silence” on that particular subject.

Gove is an optimist at heart. It seems that he can see some sort of light in every situation. Despite having supported Hillary Clinton during the campaign, he says he has adapted and now sees promise in the presidency of Donald Trump. He suspects that “President Trump will be a different proposition from candidate Trump” and that, despite understanding popular concerns with the president, it is Trump’s aim for people to “look clear sightedly at what he is doing in the presidency rather than necessarily taken as read the assumptions that were generated from the campaign trail.”

We are yet to see whether Gove will be right, and initial actions by the new administration may call into question his optimism. But, in Gove’s mind, political adaptation is the key to this new relationship in order to secure the best deal for Britain as possible. For him, there needs to be no “romance to the relationship” but rather a more pragmatic “strong and businesslike” manner in its proceedings.

Pragmatism may be a defining aspect of Gove’s political ideology. When I raise concerns about whether, in order to gain a trade deal, the British Government should dismiss political decency he replies that political gains can be secured, whilst keeping to the standards of moral decency, through a policy that can only be described as non-embarressment.

In other words, keeping concerns about another government quiet and pressuring that government in private, rather than in public. He cites an example of dealings that he had with Saudi Arabia, when he held the justice brief. He said that he “wanted to ensure that the British Government, and my ministerial colleagues agreed with me, adhered to certain standards but in ensuring that those standards were adhered to, quite a lot of time, we had to exert private pressure rather than public pressure.” He made a calculated decision to limit public criticism of Saudi Arabia, and instead influence from the inside, and believes that that is how Theresa May should, and indeed will, handle the ‘special relationship’ during Trump’s presidency.

Pleasingly, Gove will take a joke at his own expense. When I ask him about whether we are in greater political turmoil now than ever before, he alludes to the “rage of party during the time of Queen Anne” and “the way in which the Victorian house of commons operated”. When I quote John Crace who said that Gove’s chat with Trump was “the interview of the century” he laughs and remarks immediately that he thinks it may have been a bit “tongue-in-cheek”. Similarly, he jokes that “many people might be very relieved” that he “has never been a minister charged with foreign relations”. You will not find any of the egocentrism of many of his political contemporaries in Gove.

However, he seems to have developed a knack for convincing himself of the purity of his side of the debate. For him, people should not be more afraid of Theresa May’s perceived shift to the right in her period as Prime Minister as she is in fact “more left-wing than some of her conservative predecessors”. Similarly, when I ask about Trump’s interpretation of Brexit’s cause as the idea that “people don’t want to have other people coming in and destroying their country”, Gove dismisses it immediately. “I think that his analysis of the reasons behind Brexit is incorrect,” he says. “Migration is a factor…but certainly not the driver that he thinks it was.”  Indeed, he sees the arguments for Brexit as being “solid and robust” and dismisses any recent attempts to discredit them.

I ask about his recent use of the word ‘snowflake’ on Twitter when responding to concerns about Boris Johnson’s recent speech linking Francois Hollande to World War Two. Gove dismisses the linkage of the word to the alt-right and to a modern type of hate politics. He says that he “came across the term in a marvellous book by my friend Claire Fox” and that he “wasn’t aware that this phrase…had that particular genealogy”. Although Fox’s book certainly brought the word into wider usage, it has mostly been used as a pejorative term, especially during the presidential campaign.

It reduces the very serious concerns of many students and members of our generation to simple wimpiness or an unwillingness to engage. Yet Gove seems to have removed the context from the word believing that it is appropriate to use that sort of language online and yet still presenting himself as the epitome of politeness in public debate.

We finish the interview by discussing the future of his political and journalistic career. He does not view a return to mainstream, front bench, politics as a likely possibility in the upcoming months. He says he’s “very happy being a back bench MP” and thinks he will be “spending a good few years on the back benches yet”.

Review: John Hodge’s ‘Collaborators’

Bessie Yuill
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Review: John Hodge’s ‘Collaborators’

Oxford Innovative Theatre’s new version of John Hodge’s Soviet satire at the Pilch provided a fascinating balance of dark humour and surreal tragedy. Based on the real-life association between the writer Mikhail Bulgakov and Stalin, this play reimagines the dictator’s admiration for the often subversive artist as a Faustian bargain between the two, and portrays Bulgakov’s descent into the moral complications of associating with the Kremlin as Stalin increasingly occupies his art.

The scenes I previewed showcased Miranda Collins as Bulgakov’s concerned wife Yelena, Callum Coghlan’s comically sympathetic officer Vladimir, Sophie Badman as the officer’s wife, Alex Rugman as morally astute friend Vassily and Rupert Stonehill as fellow subversive artist Grigory. They interacted with a playful humour which was undercut by a sense of the paranoia surrounding the Kremlin and those artists that questioned it. The contrast of the setting—Bulgakov’s flat in Moscow—with the mentioned tragedies of Russian peasants also demonstrated the creeping darkness surrounding the artist’s dilemmas. The supporting cast appears to be excellent at conjuring this precarious, nightmarish version of a society comedy, while unaware of the precise danger that Bulgakov is in. The main draw, however, must of course be the two leads.

The balance of opposites in Rory Fraser and Joe Peden, playing Bulgakov and Stalin respectively, brings the central premise to enthralling, darkly comic life. The initially pleasant and relaxed demeanour of Peden’s Stalin threatens to break through to brutal aggression at any moment, creating a tense unease for the audience which would not exist if they were merely shown the cliched statesman figure that the name ‘Stalin’ conjures.

Fraser as Bulgakov captures a nervous intellectual perfectly: originally preoccupied with his artistry but increasingly haunted by the mounting moral conundrums. The scene between the two characters in Act 2 that I was shown played their conversation as cat-and-mouse manipulation, as the power shifted between them until Bulgakov caved. The casting serves this dynamic absolutely and charges their dynamic with a compelling contrast.

The tensions underlying the fast-paced wit are created equally by the script and the cast, and the chilling joviality of the play’s humorous moments are sure to amuse and disturb an audience. This play of paranoia and double-meanings delivers the promise of its ambiguous title, and makes you consider loyalties both artistic and political—but don’t be put off if you don’t know much about Russian history, as you’re guaranteed an incredible time with this surreal interpretation anyway.

Collaborators showed at the Pilch Studio from Wednesday 25 – Saturday 28 January.

1st Week News Summary

Cherwell Broadcasting
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1st Week News Summary

CherwellTV takes you through the headlines from First Week.

Do not limit the aims of the Women’s March

Susannah Goldsbrough
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Do not limit the aims of the Women’s March

Last Saturday, on the first full day of Donald Trump’s presidency, women’s Marches took place across the globe, from the city at the heart of it all, Washington DC, to countries as diverse as Thailand and the Bahamas.The mood in London was upbeat, optimistic even. Mothers pushed toddlers in prams, fathers strolled along, hand in hand with their daughters, and people of all ages and genders belted out pop songs, blasted over the crowd on loud speakers. It was a reassuring assertion of liberal ideas and feminist solidarity on a very disturbing day.

Yet strangely, over the last few days, liberals, feminists and people I generally consider rational have erupted in scandalised condemnation of the marchers as opponents of democracy. Janice Turner wrote in the Times that “this rally feels anti-democratic” because “Trump won”, while Rod Liddle, in a particularly nasty piece for the same news- paper, accused marchers of “approv[ing] of democracy only when the people [they] like are elected.”

Liddle is certainly qualified to critique the legitimacy of a feminist movement. His credentials include a 2009 piece for the Spectator, which began: “So—Harriet Harman, then. Would you? I mean after a few beers obviously, not while you were sober” and for which he would later have to apologise. Thank you for airing your views, Rod. Feminists worldwide are always fascinated to hear what you have to say.

While obviously few of the detractors are as unpalatable as Liddle, their arguments are nonetheless flawed. The marchers had plenty to say, none of which was antidemocratic. Their protest was not, as Turner claimed, “against the election result itself” or even specifically against Donald Trump. What these men and women were standing up against was an America whose priorities have become so skewed that 46 per cent of the electorate voted to make a man, who pointed at GOP rival Carly Fiorina and said “Look at that face! Would anyone vote for that?”, their president.

One media outfit that made the radical journalistic decision to actually ask protestors what they were protesting about—the much maligned BBC—identified calls for “racial and gender equality, affordable healthcare, abortion rights and voting rights” as key issues under threat from the Trump presidency. British marchers identified a wide range of issues on the table, including “anti-immigration feeling, the refugee crisis and Irish and Northern Irish women being denied access to abortion”.

One marcher, Erica Wald, summed it up well. She said that she was protesting against “the normalisation of Donald Trump” and by that, I think she means, the normalisation of his terrifying views. Not against Trump himself – that would be fruitless – and not against his assumption of office – that would be antidemocratic. Against a culture that produced 59.4 million voters who accept what he stands for as normal, or as necessary, or even as desirable.

The website for The Women’s March on London describes itself as “a grassroots movement of women to assert the positive values that the politics of fear denies”. Trump’s victory proved a “catalyst” for a conversation about all kinds of issues; it is not the issue itself. More than that, these marches were not entirely issue-based, they were symbolic.

Because on Friday, I sat down to dinner in college and everyone around me was just, well, sad. But on Saturday, people lined the streets and cheered each other, for being feminist, open-minded and undefeated. We needed some hope for democracy last weekend and that’s what the women’s marches provided. Please don’t do them down.

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