Tag: comment

Image credit: Facebook Weidel’s cancellation is a missed opportunity – Kit O’Loughlin Harold Macmillan once called the Oxford Union “the last bastion of free speech in the Western world”. If you think that’s a compliment, as I do, you may find yourself in the minority. Recently, more than two-thirds of our representatives at the SU voted to […]

Image Credit: Wikimedia The Oxford Union announced on Friday that Alice Weidel, parliamentary party leader of the AfD, will not speak on the 7th of November due to security concerns. This article is a contribution from members of the German community in Oxford and is intended to serve as an explanation of our reactions to […]

Image Credit: PxHere Warning: this article contains explicit discussion of rape, abuse and gaslighting.  I want to start by saying that Nice Guy is a great play. The characters are compelling, the score is fantastic, the acting is phenomenal. But as someone who has experienced abuse in the past, it disappointed me. Nice Guy, the new musical […]

Image Credit: David Illif (CC-BY-4.0) Since at least the 2008 Financial Crash, the world’s major left-wing parties have been in crisis. Often bereft of ideas and lacking charismatic leadership, these parties have been haemorrhaging votes both right and left, seriously curtailing their ability to act as effective oppositions, let alone maintain hopes of being restored […]

Image Credit: AMISOM Public Information Earlier this month, the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva passed a resolution to prolong the mandate of a UN inquiry into the worsening political, economic, and social crisis in Burundi. The message is clear: The Burundian government cannot go on denying that its security apparatus tolerates and indirectly sanctions […]

Image Credit: David Holt Let us presume that Brexit will be disastrous for the country. Whether true or false, it is impossible to discuss the issue of a ‘People’s Vote’ unless starting from this premise. No consensus will ever be reached so long as the merits of leaving are in dispute – two years have […]

Image Credit: Ninian Reid/APTOPIX On October 6th, almost a year after the #MeToo hashtag first started trending on Twitter, Brett Kavanaugh became an official justice of the US Supreme Court. Protests ensued. Angry Americans stormed the steps of the US Supreme Court in Washington D.C. Some women cried, then wrote long Facebook posts urging their friends […]

Nancy Pelosi is, to borrow one of President Trump’s phrases, the definition of ‘high energy’. A seasoned fund-raiser and congressional veteran, the House Minority Leader knows just how much she has done for the Democratic Party. Even deep in the enemy territory of a recent Fox news interview, Pelosi was coolly assured of her own […]

Image credit: Voice of America Imagine a world in which the British government monitored your life, controlling whether you could purchase the home you desired, judging your behaviour and rewarding and punishing you as they saw fit. This goes far beyond the dystopian world created by Black Mirror, in which tyranny of the crowd created […]

The result of the Republic of Ireland’s referendum signalled a historic shift in the rights of women. After weeks of a hard-fought campaign, and years of activism by others, Ireland has finally allowed women to make their own decisions. Whilst we should rightly celebrate this momentous victory, the tragic fact remains that, in the North, […]

It has been over 13 years since the Hunting Act came into force in England and Wales, but the debate still continues to provoke strong reactions on both sides. However, few topics are so governed by emotion and hyperbole and not by reasoned, sensible debate on the facts. When the Conservatives included a free vote […]

The media today is in a state of flux. The word media itself covers a broad spectrum – from social media to print journalism, television broadcasting to blog posts – and there is much uncertainty as to how we process information and data in a complex technological world. Underpinning every platform or device, however, is […]

In 1984, the telecoms giant AT&T (or “The Bell Corporation”) was broken up for violating US anti-trust laws. If you have been following this topic, this is a fact that you will no doubt have read about in a dozen other opinion pieces in the last fortnight. The pioneering antitrust suit which broke the company […]

This piece is not part of some wider conspiracy to unfairly discredit Jeremy Corbyn – nor is it some macabre plot, instigated by demonic forces known more commonly as Blairites and the mainstream media, to oust him as leader of the Labour Party. Jeremy Corbyn is not an anti-semite. He does, though, have a worldview […]

As we approach Easter, Christians across the world prepare to celebrate the day which marks the resurrection of Jesus, as documented by the Gospels. 2.3 billion people worship the first-century Galilean-Jewish man, venerated as God the Son, the Messiah prophesied by the Old Testament, and the second person of the Trinity as per the Chalcedonian […]

On the third day of the third Test yesterday between South Africa and Australia in Cape Town, a Test series already dogged by controversy became even more contentious. Australia took to the field with Steven Smith as their captain, David Warner as their vice-captain, and Cameron Bancroft as a promising but relatively untried Test match […]

Ethnicized, nationalist agendas and discourse have long dominated the politics of the nations of the former Yugoslavia. The nation states that emerged from the devastation of war were independent, but by no means homogenous: ethnic divisions did, and continue, to transcend the boundaries of nation states in the Balkan region. The process of state building, […]

What are the benefits of arts in education? What are the obstacles to teaching arts subjects? How can we, as a society, change the trajectory of increasingly narrow schooling? These are some of the questions that a panel of Mr Naveed Idrees, Dr Richard Jolley, Dr David Whitley and Dr Paulette Luff answered for Schools […]

As someone tasked with reviewing the BRIT award I watched last Wednesday night with both trepidation and excitement: trepidation that something horrendous might be about to unfold, excitement about being able to write about it. Such is the cultural moment we live in that anyone with Twitter may fear awards ceremonies for the fierce backlashes […]