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Month: February 2016

Review: Husbands & Sons

The Royal Exchange Theatre opened its doors to Marianne Elliott’s adaptation of Husbands & Sons. Having premièred at the National Theatre’s Dorfman Theatre on the 27th of October, and having theatre heavyweight Anne-Marie Duff fronting their poster campaign, the performance was heavy with expectations.

Going into the theatre I originally thought that the performance would follow Duff’s character as the protagonist. However, stepping into the actual theatre we were met with a dystopian type diner set up. Looking down from aerial, the stage was divided into three very greyscale and cramped houses belonging to our three families of focus: the Holroyds, the Lamberts and the Gascoignes.

Adapted by Ben Power, Husbands and Sons is an interweaving of three of DH Lawrence’s greatest dramas: The Daughter-In-Law, A Collier’s Friday Night and The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd. Although completely separate narratives the characters from each of the greats interweave as if they are neighbours.

The Holroyds consist of wife Lizzie (Duff) who is torn between her drunk husband (Martin Marquez) and a much younger electrician Blackmore (Philip McGinley) whilst trying to keep her family together for the sake of her son.

The next house along is home to the Gascoignes, which features newlyweds Luther and Minnie Gascoigne who are already encountering problems. Minnie, coming from money, craves more from life. While Luther’s brother Joe (Matthew Barker) and his mother (Susan Brown) are torn between breaking the news of Luther’s future child out of wedlock or paying off the expectant mother.

Finally we come to the Lamberts’ door, which houses miner’s wife Lydia (Julia Ford), her husband Walter (Lloyd Hutchinson) and their children Nellie (Tala Gouveia) and Ernest (Johnny Gibbon). The drama within these walls revolves around Lydia trying, though in vain, to keep her family together. The sight of exercise books slightly dusted dark with miner’s coal perfectly illustrates the social divides rivalling one another within the family home.

Marianne Elliott, who has directed theatrical giants such as War Horse and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, states, “This is a story about the uncomplicated identity of men clashing with the trapped, frustrated and aspiring souls of these women.” Although, ultimately, I believe the focus and narrative of the play is driven by the women who are left waiting.

My only criticism with the performance would be the varying array of dialects the cast had on offer. Although I’ve taken note of the work with dialect coaches, the amount of different accents the East Midlands supposedly had on offer did not go without note. However both Duff and especially Matthew Barker seemed to master the articulation.

Despite this, the performances were clearly of National Theatre level. It was the poster girl Anne-Marie who stole the show with the torment her character was clearly feeling etched across her face. She mastered the silent but incredibly powerful talent of non-verbal acting. It was certainly the second half which stole the show.

Lasting approximately three hours and 20 minutes, Husbands & Sons runs at the Royal Exchange Theatre until the 19th of March.

Over 3,500 students Reclaim the Night

Last night, 3,500 students and supporters from the Manchester community descended on the streets of Manchester to Reclaim the Night, to raise their “collective voices and say no to street harassment, sexual violence against women, and victim blaming”.

Reclaim the Night began in 1977 when women took to the streets after the police told women not to leave their houses after the attacks and murders of sex workers by the ‘The Yorkshire Ripper’, which many claimed to be placing blame upon the women rather the attacker.

39 years later, the marches continue to take place across the country in response to the police and media’s treatment of sexual violence against women. Last year 2,000 marched from Fallowfield to the University of Manchester’s student union, making it then the largest-ever Reclaim the Night event in the UK, but this year’s turnout, as hoped by organisers, has made it the event once again bigger than ever.

Jess Lishak, Women’s Officer for University of Manchester’s Students’ Union wrote in her blog after the event: “Just like in 1977, the harm and violence against women in our communities is insidious. There have been numerous high profile rapes in the media and many more behind closed doors that never made the news. Lives have been destroyed and fear is rife. The fear and violence that makes us feel so alone, so scared and so vulnerable is everywhere.”

Unfortunately, as Lishak highlights, “this fear isn’t there because we have been taught to be afraid of some mythical bogeyman. It’s there because one in five women aged between 16 and 59 have experienced sexual violence; because in England and Wales, two women a week are killed at the hands of a male partner or ex-Partner. Because one in seven women students have been sexually assaulted whilst at University.”

One of the terms campaigners have the biggest issue with is that these acts of sexual violence are ‘isolated incidents’. Caroline Criado-Perez, a feminist activist, argued in the New Statesman back in 2014 that “such words may comfort us, but they are dangerous, and our comfort comes at a cost of reckoning with a reality that we must face if we are serious about tackling the epidemic of domestic violence”.

Lishak echoed this sentiment after Reclaim the Night, imploring people to “join the dots to understand the structural causes if we are going to tackle them”. Lishak claimed such structural casues stem from the violence being “a gendered crime; a symptom of a society that belittles, degrades and disrespects women. A society that allows our government to cut budgets so they fall disproportionately on women’s services: Closing refuges, increasing already unacceptably long waiting lists for support, and privatising aspects of NHS sexual assault referral centres.”

This year Reclaim the Night organisers also ran sessions in local schools and youth groups as part of their Reclaim the Night Youth outreach project, teaching over 250 young people across the city about consent and healthy relationships, advising them on how to campaign to get these issues on the curriculum.

The march finished with an after party at the Students’ Union, boasting a line-up of women speakers including Kate Green, the Shadow Minister for Women and Equalities, poets, musicians, and DJs.

The campaign Time of the Month also launched alongside the event, a student-run project which aims to gather donations of much needed sanitary products for homeless women; raising well over £200 for Emmeline’s Pantry Parlour by selling vagina cupcakes and badges and tampon earrings.

Speaking at the after party, Lishak told the crowd: “It is through our collective power that we can create real change and Reclaim the Night is the perfect example. 3,500 people are too visible to ignore; it forces people to face the facts and listen.”

Concluding her blog post, Lishak says that “women should have the right to walk around our own city, on any day of the year, without being subjected to sexual harassment or abuse, or to feel like we have to modify our own behaviour due to the fear of the violence inflicted on us. We need to live in a society that teaches us to respect women and our right to choose what happens to our own bodies.”

Kent Tory students petition for 250ft statue of Margaret Thatcher

Tory students of the Kent University Conservative Association (KUCA) have issued a petition detailing their plans to erect a 250ft (76.2 metre) iron “colossus” of Margaret Thatcher. The statue would be raised opposite a university nightclub on the University of Kent campus.

The petition was approved by Kent Union and the Association is currently working towards collecting enough signatures in order for the petition to be negotiated further with the student body.

The students delineated their exact vision of the statue in their petition. They state that it would be inspired by the Colossus of Rhodes, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, and would be sculpted in a Greco-Roman style.

The statue is to be placed on a 50ft (15m) white marble pedestal and will consist entirely of iron at a 46:1 scale. “At this scale,” the petition reads, “the Iron Lady’s handbag would be approximately 30 foot tall. The plan is to construct the handbag of a highly polished Bronze.”

The motivation behind the “colossus” is to restore “good and sensible behaviour” on campus. This will be achieved by awarding the statue a strategic position which would “allow the sun to reflect off the handbag at certain times during the day.” This will highlight the statue’s aim to serve as a “shining testament to liberty”.

In a statement to The Tab, Emilio Kyprianou, chairman of KUCA, states that the campaign initially began in order to “highlight problems with the current petition system”. Nonetheless, the initiative will continue and “could be a real positive for Kent,” according to Kyprianou.

A previous attempt at erecting a statue of the former Prime Minister was overwhelmingly voted down by students. In 2013, Guy Snowden, former KUCA treasurer, outlined plans to mount a 200ft bronze statue of Thatcher on the Canterbury campus at Kent. Mr Snowden was later told that his petition “a complete waste of time”.

KUCA’s second attempt at the petition currently has the support of 90 out of a possible 150 signatures, and the deadline for collecting signatures is 7th March.

Review: Novel Experiments in Living

Rob Paterson’s second foray into writing and direction is a witty, fast-paced, meta-comedy that looks to sidestep all potential criticism by, well, critiquing itself.

It is a ploy that is very nearly pulled off without exception, the writing and performances being strong enough to carry off such pretension without the audience really minding but certainly not without them noticing.

Aatma is a fitting setting for the production. Claustrophobic to the extent that the first row becomes part of the scenery—and allowing for cast members to be easily placed amongst the audience—the space was utilized excellently.

Specifically, the alluded-to placement of The Critic within the audience took the audience by surprise and only served to draw the play off the stage and into the stalls. Tilly Woodhouse, as The Critic, was the standout performer, handling her role with consummate comedic ability and engaging with the audience leading some left feeling she truly had critiqued them.

In truth it is a play that it would be difficult to leave without feeling violated. The play’s themes smartly manoeuvre through what makes us us, and stresses more than once that we are, every day, playing a character.

More than once I found my mind pondering over the notion that I am in fact nothing more than a cliché of myself. It is a sentiment that was mirrored onstage by the character’s struggle to carve out anything resembling individuality, whilst questioning the notion of who was writing their story.

Calum Pearce, in the role of The Writer, delivered a strong performance as the character that had supposedly authored the events on stage. Opposite him Holly Willmott gave an enduring depiction of The Love Interest; a character heavy handedly, albeit deliberately, evoking Rabin’s Manic Pixie Dream Girl.

Herein lies the only critique that can be made of the play. By deliberately making blatant its shortcomings, it pre-empts but does not wholly negate its weaknesses.

While parts of the script were incredibly strong, there were passages that dragged, making pacing an issue. The characters declaring their horror at being found in a ‘student play’ does take the sting out of this complaint; drawing a laugh out of being self-aware about the rough theatrical aesthetic we have come to expect from abstract student productions. What this doesn’t however change is the fact that the largely intelligent script did have sections that felt less astute.

This is a small issue though, in what is predominantly a well-written piece of theatre honed to its venue with precision. Full of pop-culture references, and scattered with four-letter words, it is unlikely to be a hit with older audiences. For a generation who feel defined by the culture they consume though, this is a resonant, and aptly self-deprecating, piece of theatre.

Peter Hitchens: “This is a living, breathing corpse of a country”

Journalist and author Peter Hitchens, or—if you indulge his self-assigned prefix—“The Hated Peter Hitchens”, is one of the most recognisable voices of the British right. His views, in spite of, or perhaps due to, their divisiveness, continue to carry influence amongst his substantial readership.

In conversation he seems aware of this. He is precise with language, both that of the questions and his answers, suggesting a concern with how his answers are represented. As I wrap up the interview he offers to check the article, not for copy approval; rather, to check “for his sake and mine” that nothing is incorrect.

“I could see instantly if there were anything in there that I would not have said,” he tells me. This feels unlike the adversarial Peter Hitchens I expected—a Hitchens that his public appearances suggest.

Instead it is reminiscent of a figure who is aware of how easily manipulated his opinions can be. Hitchens presents himself as a man who wishes to be characterized by his words, with exacting detail.

While he puts across his safeguard against misrepresentation in a non-confrontational manner he speaks as his reputation would suggest throughout our conversation. Getting underway I ask him about his brief flirtation with the Left and what sparked his shift across the political spectrum.

“Brief? I don’t know why you call it brief,” he rejoins, before adding that his seismic shift came when he “grew up and had to make a living.

“I had to deal with the sort of people who my Marxist and Leninist class analysis would have told me were not worth dealing with. I learnt an important lesson about the unrealistic approach of Marxists and Leninists in society as it was.”

A sense of being influenced by environment pervades Hitchens’ answer, a suggestion made more apparent when he says that he learnt “that the things that were easy to believe in a university campus did not stand up to examination in real life”.

Hitchens attributes the shift to the inescapable impact of “having a bit more experience in life”. His shift to conservatism was a logical progression that came with age, he says, which raises an issue he feels requires more consideration: “The remarkable thing, and the question that people ought to be asking, is why is it that most people don’t have this experience, and retain the infantile left wing opinions into their 60s and 70s?”

He continues by extending the political metaphor to a cultural one: “And what is more, they continue to attend Rolling Stones concerts after they have begun collecting their pensions. Wearing jeans. What is wrong with these people? Why don’t they grow up? Why do we live in a country of Peter Pans?”

Rather than offering affirmative solutions, you cannot help but wonder if his rhetorical questions are the work of a provocateur.

A lot of our readership is fairly young, I start to say. He interjects: “Yes, but they will get old, with luck. The question is will they grow up?”

Drawing on this I raise with him the issue of no-platforming, a phenomenon I suggest is prevalent only among my generation.

“It’s not recent, I used to do it when I was a Trot. I think it is the most grotesquely wrong thing to do. It is one of the things that I did when I was a Trot about which I am most ashamed. What is new is the willingness of what you might call the mainstream of the student body to let it happen.”

Hitchens’ transparency about his left wing activities prompts me to ask what other elements of his history he is ashamed of.

“There are lots of things I am ashamed of, but I am not going to tell you what they are,” he shoots back. That is more the Hitchens I expected.

“Most people have never liked free speech. Most people claim to like free speech when in practice, they don’t. There used to be a fairly spirited group of people in our society who understood how important it was and were prepared to defend it. I think that, like many other fundamentally moral things, has died, so I think free speech is probably finished.”

Hitchens’ late brother, Christopher, is an example of a speaker who would probably have deemed Safe Space unsuitable. Shifting focus towards his brother, I ask whether he feels Christopher’s fans seek him out with more vitriol than his right wing contemporaries.

“No. Some of them are just very childish and I take some pleasure in telling them so. The thing that strikes me about a lot of them is that they aren’t very familiar with his work. They are fanboys rather than readers.”

Drawn on this distinction, he adds: “Some of what he wrote is quite tough. It requires a bit of application. I don’t think most people these days are particularly interested in that.”

Many of these “fanboys”, he says, were drawn to his brother’s work simply because “he was rude about religion”.

Prompted as to whether he feels any sense of pride towards his brother’s achievements, he is resolute: “No, I don’t see how I really could be, he is a different person from me. I disagree with him profoundly on almost everything he said and I take that seriously. I’m not his parent either so I can’t claim responsibility for his life.”

Religion—it is well documented—divided the brothers, so I raise the relationship between the left and Christianity.

“What happened to Christianity was Christianity undermined itself, most particularly by supporting the First World War. It never really recovered. The Left never had such a great stroke of luck as the assassination of Franz Ferdinand. It was the beginning of their most successful era, heaven help us all.”

With faith being the driving force behind his worldview, I wonder whether he would support a greater combination of religion and politics: “No, I think that every individual would benefit from a greater understanding of religious questions. Politics, especially modern politics, which is so often utopian, is actually atheistic in itself.

“Politics should be a lot more modest and would be a lot more modest if people took religion more seriously.”

Critics of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party oft quote the futility of utopianism to which Hitchens refers. I ask whether Corbyn is a product of a lack of hope in modern politics, rather than a saturation of idealism that Hitchens suggests exists.

“I think Jeremy Corbyn is a consequence of the Conservative adoption of Blairism, which means the Labour party doesn’t have any purpose anymore. There was a vacuum left by the collapse of Labour Blairism, and Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters thought: well, in that case, let’s take back control of our party.

“The Blairites have nothing to say, so they don’t. Why would anyone vote for the Blairite candidates in the Labour Party when they can vote for Blairite Tories? What is the point? What is the difference?”

Corbyn, for Hitchens, is leading the Labour Party in a non-revolutionary direction: “There was a very useful article by Peter Hyman in The Observer a few weeks ago in which he said, which I have known for some time to be true, that New Labour was actually far more radical and revolutionary than Jeremy Corbyn.

“Most people, I think—and it is quite pathetic watching them say it—think that New Labour is right wing. This double delusion gripped both the Kevins in the Working Men’s Clubs and the Nigels in the golf clubs. Both of them fell for it.”

While Hitchens’ depiction of the Labour Party seems wholly negative, he is equally unimpressed by the direction of the modern Conservative Party. Asked from where his disillusionment stems, he replies with characteristic linguistic precision: “I’m not disillusioned with it, I don’t think I have any illusions of it. I’ve just come to understand more fully that it is not a conservative party. I would have no objections to it at all if it called itself New Labour, because that is what it is.”

Perhaps the most complex issue facing the Conservative government is the increasingly large numbers of refugees arriving at Britain’s borders. “They are not refugees. They cease to be refugees when they left the country in which they were in danger. They are migrants as soon as they leave,” Hitchens clarifies.

“Once they move on from Turkey into the rest of Europe, they are economic migrants.”

In his writing he has described David Cameron as a having “guns, bombs, and a plane—and not one good idea,” a point he reasserts now: “By creating the disaster of the second Iraq war, and then by destabilising Libya and Syria, the Western powers have created a mess for which the people in those countries are now paying. I see no way out of it.”

Dwelling on his answer, he revises his written sentiment about David Cameron, but only to state that it was “probably paying him a compliment”.

“Britain’s foreign policy has been bought by Saudi Arabia. It is not so much that we are acting stupidly—although we are acting stupidly—it is that we are acting as somebody else’s agent in these ridiculous and disastrous wars.”

While war in the Middle East is an undeniably active force, Hitchens’ views on drugs are defiant and unequivocal: “There is no war on drugs. There is and has been no such thing. It is a myth and a fantasy.

“The law against possession is not enforced and hasn’t been for decades. There is no War on Drugs. Cannabis is a decriminalised drug. It is legal, except we can’t say that in public because we signed international treaties promising to keep it illegal. It is legal—it shouldn’t be—but it is.”

Those who point to Portugal’s successful decriminalisation of drugs are “whingers”, he says, and he attempts to explain away any correlation between this and Britain: “Portugal is tiny and recent by comparison with the vast experiment in drug liberalisation that this country has been going through since 1971.”

A question hitherto unanswered by Hitchens is why he is so dogmatic in his condemnation of drug use. “I think we have been given these tremendous senses with which to grasp the nature of the world, and any distortion of them is selfishly throwing back a gift in the face of God who gave it to you,” he states.

“I also think that most of these drugs have the effect of making people more passive and more easily governed and they therefore make tyranny more possible. They make it more possible for people to welcome and embrace their own serfdom with a smile.”

With our time coming to a close, I put to Hitchens one of his own statements: “You’ve said before that Britain is finished”, I ask. “Is that truly a definitive statement?”

“There are no levers to pull,” he says. “The country is so physically in debt; its inability to recover its economy so blatant. Its levels of education are pitiful; its school system is a disgrace to an advanced country. Its political system is bought and sold and it is almost impossible for any rational person to influence it. It’s a demoralised country in which the independent institutions have been eviscerated.

“Above all things, the family has been eviscerated. It is a country that doesn’t know its culture anymore; it doesn’t know its origins.”

Pausing for a second, he wraps up: “This is a living, breathing corpse of a country. I don’t see any way out of that.”

Stoke-on-Trent to pay off maths teachers’ tuition fees

Stoke-on-Trent has issued a project in the attempt to improve maths standards across the city. The idea behind the programme is to pay off maths teachers’ tuition fees to create more incentive for them to teach in the region on a more permanent basis. Most notably, the project aims to target young maths graduates, through monetary incentives, in an attempt to encourage prospective maths teachers to move into the area.

The project has been described as a form of ‘educational urban regeneration’, which attempts to reverse the decline of traditional industries such as pottery and coal mining and to improve the academic underachievement in the area.

The recruitment of maths teachers has seen a decline over recent years and it has been increasingly difficult for cities such as Stoke-on-Trent to recruit maths teachers when competing against larger cities such as Birmingham, Manchester and London.

In order to help potential maths teachers fund costly tuition fees, the project will offer payments of £2,000 each year over a period of three years plus a further £2,000 relocation payment. In addition to this, students will also receive a supplementary bursary from the government of up to £25,000, which was introduced to encourage them to pursue a career in maths teaching.

In today’s tough economic climate, the offer of monetary incentives can often encourage graduates to consider a career in teaching. Teachers who are currently working in the area will also benefit from the project by receiving further financial support to help fund more specialist teaching. The project has been estimated to cost the local council £334,000 per year over the course of three years.

Schools in Stoke-on-Trent and in the city’s immediate surroundings have received increased criticism after statistics showed that they possessed some of the lowest performing GCSE results in England.

The Maths Excellence Programme, which aims to encourage support from local organisations to improve the teaching of maths in schools, is coordinated by Stoke-on-Trent’s local MP and former shadow education secretary, Tristram Hunt. This programme intends to raise the number of pupils achieving high marks in GCSE maths from the current level of 59% to a 70% target level.

The project has been praised by local schools, council members and employers, and has received further support from the local online gambling company Bet365. Mr Hunt aims to encourage graduates to move into the city and to build upon their professional career.

This initiative will not only improve the livelihood of such young professionals, but it will consequently improve the quality of education for members of the younger generation in the city. Furthermore, improving the quality of education and increasing the number of maths teachers could help to put Stoke-on-Trent on the map as a hotspot for young professionals whilst helping to reverse the decline in the city’s traditional industries.

Colm, swipe right on the Students’ Union

I opened last week’s excellent Mancunion to find a piece by Colm Lock from the Conservative Future society criticising some aspects of the Students’ Union. It’s likely that as a result of his political leaning he will continue to be fundamentally displeased by the Union’s actions, but I would like to respond to some points. Despite highlighting the issue of free speech as a means to rubbish the Union, statistics from this year show students are more involved with the SU than ever before. It is not the disconnected hard-left organisation you have been presented in Lock’s piece.

I have seen the Union come a long way over the six years since I arrived in Manchester. When I started here, the building was entirely purple and claustrophobic. The only food on offer was a school dinner-style canteen on the first floor—it took me a year to return to the building after this experience.

The Union has been on an upward trajectory ever since, and now there’s more students engaged in what we do than ever before; in total, 11,567 students hold 29,048 society memberships (over 25 per cent of students), election turnout last year was double the year previously (setting a national record for highest ever Union election turnout) and election candidates standing this year are double last year.

These aren’t all “communist” students standing for election. Of the 18 standing for Activities & Development officer, none are people I would associate with traditional “student activism”. All have found their way to leading this organisation through different routes; be that through chairing societies, being in RAG, Access All Areas or Student Action, being involved in Pangaea, or simply having joined a society at the start of the year.

To continue to view the Union through a lens of right-wing critique of its very existence is nonsense. This Union is a broad church with hundreds of societies, hundreds of staff, thousands of reps and tens of thousands of students involved, working for the betterment of student life here in Manchester. This is not some administrative body that concerns itself daily with the only issues seen in the press. This is a place with infinite potential for people to grow and discover.

Whilst all criticism is welcome, I would rebut Lock’s suggestion that our organisation fails “to stand up for rights of students”. In fact, this really is our raison d’être. Presenting some of our recent key campaigns:

–          Supporting medical students campaigning against changes to Junior Doctors’ contracts, with over 1200 medical students annually standing to benefit from any ground that can be made in preventing dangerous contract changes.

–          Our Community Officer has been organising with residents around the standards and management of housing in the private rented sector. As a result the council will pilot three selective licencing schemes. If rolled out across the city the scheme would radically improve conditions for students and others.

–          Printing & binding dissertations will now be free as a result of the Education Officer’s work.

–          Last year we fought the university’s attempts to change discipline procedures for students in their homes off campus.

–          Our Women’s campaign has gone from strength to strength; the student support worker at Manchester Rape Crisis is perhaps the biggest success this year. (It’s ironic that Lock would highlight the campaign against cuts to women’s services whilst supporting a government implementing such horrific changes in this area. But I thank him nonetheless.)

–          A massive voter registration drive last year, which was totally non-partisan and focused on engaging students with citizenship and empowering them politically.

–          Successfully campaigning for postgrad education to be more inclusive by getting the proposed age cap for loans lifted.

–          Campaigning against the government’s Prevent strategy which seeks to divide BME communities and infringes upon the rights of students.

–          Campaigning by the Exec Team the year before last led to the university meeting the costs of the £1.1 million cut to the National Scholarship Programme that Lock’s party, the Conservatives, removed from the Higher Education budget—a £100 million cut nationally.

This is only a fraction of the amazing campaigning done by our societies and students with support from the Union.

It’s incredibly disingenuous to suggest that the cost of the Exec Team is large in the scale of the Union and could instead fund bursaries. We are the very people consistently standing up for bursaries and financial provision for students.

Specifically looking at the protest at the Conservative Party Conference, this was the first action in our democratically approved Grants Not Loans campaign seeking to save maintenance grants. Our officers met three different Members of Parliament before Christmas and urged them not to scrap maintenance grants. As a result of this government’s actions nearly a million of the UK’s poorest students will now leave Higher Education around £12,500 more debt than otherwise. This is clearly an issue the Students’ Union should campaign on. It will fundamentally affect university in the same way that tripling tuition fees did in 2010 and this campaign would happen no matter the political party advocating such a change.

Obviously Lock has chosen to disengage from our democracy and, without turning this comment into simply more literature for the free speech debate, in last week’s third ever Senate —which was not designed by the Exec Team as suggested—the first item for discussion was around changing the Free Speech policy. This motion passed with amendments and we now have a new collaborative process for visiting speakers that will allow more easy facilitation of difficult debates, with ‘banning’ of speakers now only possible with approval from the Senate.

This is just one issue that was discussed and the “Ideas” process is open to any student—meaning ANYONE can submit an idea for discussion. To Lock I would say, if you aren’t happy with what’s being discussed or what we’re campaigning on, why don’t you come along or submit your campaign idea on our website? There is already a good spectrum of political opinion at the Senate but if you really want your voice to be heard in the Union then why don’t you use it rather than positioning yourself at the outside and acting as just another keyboard warrior?

The Senate has led to increased interest in the work of the Officers, increased participation in our decision making processes, and above all, increased transparency about what the officers are working on and why. On top of this, officers are subject to scrutiny multiple times a year by an elected committee who are provided with a detailed report on the work of the officers, followed by interviewing the officers on what they’ve been doing. To wade into this debate without explaining this process is more than unhelpful, it’s deliberately misleading. Dismissing the Union as unrepresentative and disconnected whilst simultaneously attacking the procedures we’re putting in place to improve this is quite baffling.

Regarding the suggestion that “Winchester have got it right” with their three full-time and nine part-time sabbatical officers, I would hasten to point out that with 6,430 students, were we to have the same officer-to-student ratio here in Manchester, we would have 20 full-time officers instead of our current eight.

It was also argued that we shouldn’t have food at the Senate. Last year we had a system where 20 unelected, randomly selected students voted on all the issues and were paid £20 per event in order to participate. We now have over 50 students—including some randomly selected to represent a range of student views—and we give everyone food to say thank you for participating in the evening. This is at a lower cost and with higher engagement than last year’s system. The food is bought internally so all profit, as with all commercial activity in the Union, goes back into growing our support for students.

On holding the university to task over the new screen on the Ali G building: to be frank, the screen is bought, there’s little we could do to lobby against this now, it’s simply a case of picking our battles—there are far more important things negatively impacting students right now. Lock has suggested that we don’t lobby the university on issues which affect students. I hope I’ve made clear this is untrue.

On the specific point of improving the Union building, we have successfully lobbied for millions of pounds towards the £8 million Union expansion which is set to commence in November. This will see a transformation of the building, taking on board feedback from thousands of students to massively improve the services and support we provide to students. I can’t wait to see this next step forward.

In summary, I disagree with most of things Lock has said, but if he really feels like this organisation doesn’t represent him then he should get involved rather than just whining. It’s also worth highlighting the irony of using a fully Union-funded platform to make this case against us. I won’t pretend the Union doesn’t have work to do but if YOU want to improve it then get involved and make it happen. This really is your Union!

Vice-Chancellors band together to block Brexit

In a letter published published in The Sunday Times on the 21st of February 2016, a total of 103 university Vice-Chancellors have provided their signatures in order to highlight the negative impact of leaving the EU on British universities and their European alliances.

The letter presents the view that leaving the EU would cut our universities “off from established networks and would undermine the UK’s position as a global leader in science and the arts”.

This is a mission statement for the ‘Universities for Europe’ campaign. In conversation with The Mancunion, Universities UK, the conductors of the campaign, reported that the letters were extended to the Vice-Chancellors of all Britain’s universities. From the list of co-signers there is one notable exception: Professor Dame Nancy Rothwell from The University of Manchester.

A Media Relations Officer for the university commented that: “The University has not yet agreed on a position on EU membership as this would need to be considered by our Board of Governors.”

However, a spokesperson for Dame Julia Goodfellow, President of Universities UK and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Kent, said that getting “103 university leaders to sign—from a membership of 133” was “pleasing”, as this volume of response for a Universities UK action was unprecedented in “recent times”.

News of the letter follows recent developments in the referendum that have had a direct effect on young people’s voting rights. The House of Commons blocked a motion by the House of Lords in December, allowing 16 and 17-year-olds to have a say in the EU debate.

It is the unheard voice of the next generation of British students that will potentially feel the detrimental effects of the nation’s decision.

With record numbers of people enrolled in higher education, the student vote, with reference to the EU, will inevitably have a substantial impact. Therefore, the claim that “throughout the campaign, as university leaders we are committed to highlighting the value of EU membership to our universities”, indicates that the ‘Universities for Europe’ campaign is very conscious of its potential power.

Goodfellow’s statements and the ‘Universities for Europe’ campaign emphasise that in their eyes, Brexit would constrain the EU in having a “positive impact on our universities”. It will further inhibit helping “universities create employable graduates and make cutting-edge research discoveries”.

Rate of disadvantaged students entering Oxbridge falls

Over the past 10 years, the number of disadvantaged students accepted into the Oxbridge has fallen. In the academic year of 2004/2005, the percentage of disadvantaged students entering Oxford was 12.3 per cent, yet the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) has published data that show only 10% of  accepted students were from disadvantaged background in the year 2014/15. It is a similar story with Cambridge, which has seen a fall from 12.4 per cent to 10.2 per cent.

Unfortunately Oxford and Cambridge aren’t the only universities where this trend is appearing. There has also been a decline in Exeter, Durham, Imperial College, Glasgow and Queen’s University, Belfast.

Despite this, Samina Khan, head of Oxford admissions, claimed in January that if they are trying to choose between applicants with similar grades, if one of the students is from a disadvantaged background then “you are more likely to be looked at and shortlisted for an interview. All those indicators are giving us information about your academic journey in a particular context.”

Oxford has defended the statistics provided by HESA claiming that they categorise disadvantaged backgrounds based on postcode rather than parental occupation. With this criteria, Oxford claim to have seen a 34 per cent rise in students from poor socio-economic backgrounds.

However the data that HESA published has also revealed that Oxbridge takes a lot less students from state schools that the rest of the country. Of Cambridge entrants, only 61.8 per cent of students are from state schools. Similarly, Oxford isn’t any better with only 55 per cent .

The figures are put in perspective when compared to Manchester, another member of the Russell Group, which takes on 82.4 per cent of students from state schools and where students from disadvantages backgrounds make up 21.5 per cent of entrants.

Twitter fries Stephen

Whilst I don’t find Stephen Fry the easiest character to like, his latest departure from Twitter following criticism and backlash over comments made at this year’s BAFTA awards raises ever more potent questions about the nature of our society, the ongoing issue of the right to offend, and the role of social media in overseeing this.
Fry is notorious for leaving Twitter, having done it twice from 2014 to 2015 and threatening to quit in 2009. It is true, therefore, that he is no stranger to public controversy, and even following his latest leave-taking from the social networking site, he says he hasn’t “slammed the door” on his Twitter presence. His reasons for quitting the site this time were that Twitter had become “a stalking ground for the sanctimoniously self-righteous” and that those who had condemned his “bag lady” comment at this year’s BAFTAs were “tragic people”.

As is the norm when he presents the BAFTAs, witty comments and jokes here and there are said without anyone batting an eyelid, and have become as customary as Ricky Gervais’s jibes whilst presenting the Golden Globes. Following the award for costume design given to Jenny Beavan, he commented: “Only one of the great cinematic costume designers would come to an awards ceremony dressed as a bag lady,” in his usual comedic manner. Of course it was only a matter of time before the Twitter police surfaced, throwing criticism his way over his joke about Beavan, which seems unjustified given that Beavan has said “Yes we are friends, and I am absolutely not upset,” in light of the furore. In fact, she actively discouraged discussion over the matter, saying: “I don’t want to talk any further because if I talk about it it will just create more fuss.”

These criticisms would be somewhat more justified if Fry had been intentionally spiteful or misogynistic. It is evident, however, that people jumped to conclusions over his comments and tried to defend Beavan needlessly. A culture has grown of late whereby it seems people lie in wait to be offended by something. This is not to say there aren’t certain figures who are offensive, such as Donald Trump whose remarks on Muslims and Mexicans come very close to the highly prejudiced and offensive. Fry, however, was hounded off Twitter for making a light-hearted remark about a friend. Whilst I don’t condone what he said, because I think it was unnecessary to comment on Beavan’s appearance, the comment did not warrant such a torrent of anger.

It says a lot about society at the moment that people were offended on behalf of someone else. The question of whether freedom of speech should include the right to offend is a current debate, however it seems there is a consensus, at least in my knowledge, that people are often too readily offended, which taps into the wider debate about censorship and safe spaces. The commotion around Fry’s comments, however, led me to consider the role of Twitter and social media in the debate about freedom to offend.

A recent investigation from Breitbart, reported in an article by Milo Yiannopoulos, hinted at the high number of ‘shadowbanning’ cases on Twitter recently which is apparently “real and happening everyday”. Shadowbanning does not outright ban users, but it makes their content invisible, in other words stopping them having an online presence on Twitter. Breitbart spoke exclusively to a source inside the company, who said that Twitter has a ‘whitelist’ and a ‘blacklist’ of users, with the latter being considered unfavoured accounts. Posts from these accounts are placed further down the search results, and eventually could disappear. This is usually used for accounts who spam, however it has been reported that it is being used against “tweets from populist conservatives, members of the alternative right, cultural libertarians, and other anti-PC dissidents [who] have disappeared from their timelines”, including those who promote non-PC views.

This report is of particular concern given the current climate of banning speakers, and even banning practices such as yoga (suspended at the University of Ottawa in Canada) from university campuses, and it points to an increasing concern about the power of companies like Twitter, using their influence to reach out into the political sphere. A network like Twitter should not be able to pick and choose who has more prominence on their site, given that users of Twitter have a wide reach now that the site has 232 million active monthly users, according to a report in Business Insider. This report is also troubling because of the new Twitter Trust and Safety Council, which has been criticised for including only left-leaning individuals, what Jon Gabriel calls “leftist anti-speech activists”.

Of course, Twitter should have regulations in place to protect members of the public from those inciting violence, and they should monitor accounts of suspected terrorism given that there is an increasing online community for members of extremist groups to coordinate. It should not, however, use its power to silence those with views it deems unfavourable. What has our society become if a social media site is using its platform for bias political purposes? Twitter is a great way of getting in touch with people, for both personal and professional reasons, and should not merely become a puppeteer for a political agenda, and as Yiannopoulos draws attention to, behind a “veneer of opposition to online abuse”.

Bringing this back to the Fry issue, it highlights that Twitter has become a stomping ground for political and politically correct means, and this has extended beyond just its users to the organisation itself. It seems it is no longer a place to discuss ideas, or even make jokes about friends, without being at risk of complaint and having your tweets do a disappearing act. It comes to something when people are getting offended on someone else’s behalf, and taking this into a wider context, not be able to express more conservative right-wing views.

If the FBI wins against Apple we all lose

Tech companies being at loggerheads with government seems to be a recurring theme of the last year or so. However, this time it is not for the usual tax issues, it is down to Apple’s refusal to break into the phone belonging to one of the San Bernardino shooters, Syed Farook. Apple’s, and more generally, the technology sector’s reticence to be complicit in law enforcement’s intrusion of our privacy should be commended.

Firstly, however, some background: since September 2014 and the iOS 8 update, Apple has been uncooperative with law enforcement agencies because an iPhone’s data is encrypted and even Apple cannot decrypt it. This whole fiasco is happening whilst the government is trying to garner support for its Draft Investigatory Powers Bill (more commonly known as ‘The Snoopers’ Charter’) and the whole FBI vs. Apple debacle could have a direct impact on what the Home Secretary wants the power to be able to do. This is because if the FBI is successful, then Apple will be at a considerable disadvantage if it tries to fight against the Snoopers’ Charter; it cannot say that it does not have the means to encrypt the devices if it has already done it in the US. What the FBI is calling for is worrying for two further reasons: once a back door has been created, then who is to say it will not be used maliciously, and if Apple were to submit to the FBI’s demands they would set a legal precedent which could be abused.

With the development of a back door it would only be a matter of time before this back-door is forced open by hackers whether doing so for financial or political gain. The notion that Apple could make a one-off piece of software that could be used on Farook’s iPhone and then never used again is laughable. Once there are people who know how to break through an iPhone’s encryption it is extremely disconcerting because it takes hackers one step closer to having access to any one of the 700 million iPhones which have been sold. Indeed, Senator Ron Wyden wrote on Medium that “security experts have shown again and again that weakening encryption will make it easier for foreign hackers, criminals and spies to break into Americans’ bank accounts, health records and phones, without preventing terrorists from ‘going dark’.” This is not only a threat to Americans but to all iPhone users around the world.

Secondly, the somewhat more worrying thing is the legal precedent that will be set. Whilst the FBI can argue that it only applies to this particular iPhone 5C, it opens a door to the possibility that it could be used in the future to give law enforcement agencies the power to compel technology companies to not only dencrypt devices but create a way to do such a thing. I am not usually the sort to subscribe to the idea that something like this could ‘open the floodgates’ but there is a great possibility that it would. If Apple can be compelled for terrorism, who is to say it cannot be compelled in the future to decrypt a device in order to catch a murderer or a rapist and then you start on a downwards trajectory which could only lead to encryption being essentially pointless because law enforcement would have a wide ranging power to break it. Indeed, the Wall Street Journal have uncovered that the US Department of Justice are seeking court orders to extract data from 12 other iPhones. This just goes to show that it will not be one case, it will be the start of many.

I see some merit in the arguments for Apple creating a back door the FBI access to Farook’s iPhone. In situations involving terrorism, the privacy of a suspected terrorist is something that people rarely give thought to. After all, if the access to their smartphone will prevent another terrorist attack then surely law enforcement agencies should be able to do everything in their power to have this access. However, I submit that this is not the greatest concern. As already discussed above the legal precedent would be set, which could be diluted down until law enforcement, and by association the state, has easy access to your personal data. There is, however, definitely no merit to be found in the cynical claim that Apple is merely using this as a marketing stunt.

You may be wondering why all of this should be of concern to you; it is not like you have anything that the police would want on your phone. You are not a terrorist, murderer, or rapist. However, it is worrying when you consider the implications of such software being in the wrong hands. Personally, me and my iPhone are virtually inseparable. The amount of personal data I have stored on there is crazy to think of: my transaction details in Apple Pay, my bank account détails, and all of my passwords are saved on it. However, as I start to think deeper I think of the more personal things I have stored on it such as pictures and messages. In the wrong hands, these could enable a criminal to attempt to blackmail me into handing over money to avoid my secrets being plastered over the internet. I am not being a worrier here; if the 2014 iCloud leaks of celebrity photos proved anything, it proved that our personal pictures can be extremely damaging to our reputation if placed in the wrong hands.

In this day and age where people post virtually every aspect of their life online, privacy should be something we all demand. I am not the sort of person who would advocate that you ‘go dark’ to get rid of the risk of this happening in the first place. The main issue is that the state should not be given the tools to have unfettered access to our iPhones. Our privacy should be protected.

Cameron’s EU deal increases the possibility of Brexit

Prime Minister David Cameron’s whistle-stop tour of Europe has finally reached its end in Brussels, culminating in his announcement that the United Kingdom’s referendum on membership of the European Union will be held on the 23rd of June 2016, in a move which will ramp up pro and anti-Europe campaigning throughout the spring and into summer.

Having sought a special deal for the UK to remain a member state, Cameron was forced to renege on many of his proposals, such as the removal of child benefit for families with children at home in other EU member states, which drew staunch opposition from Eastern European countries. He did, however, manage to have words to the effect of “the United Kingdom is not committed to further integration in the European Union” included in the Agreement’s final draft, one of his primary aims. Overall, he has deemed the pact he managed to secure strong enough to mean that remaining in the EU can help to create an “even greater Britain”.

Yet, last week’s Question Time began with the question: “Has David Cameron really done enough to persuade the British public that we should remain in the European Union?” The fact of the matter is that he has not.

The bargain he returned with will do little to appease those on the right or left who were already Eurosceptic. For the former, he has not gone far enough in his demands. His manifesto’s promise of restrictions to access to social housing for migrants were nowhere to be seen, while he was also unable to restrict levels of EU migration, so often lambasted by the far-right in their fight to ‘take back the borders’. We will therefore most definitely be seeing Nigel Farage touring his “Australian points-based system” spiel around the TV stations for the umpteenth time.

The left, meanwhile, will question why the Prime Minister didn’t seek to negotiate over things like the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), which alarmingly lowers barriers in accords between the EU and US concerning things such as environmental law, food safety regulation, and banking practices.

The Prime Minister hasn’t even been able to find a consensus amongst his cabinet. Though Cameron and his major Conservative allies George Osborne and Theresa May will be campaigning for the UK to remain in the EU, many of his ministers are pro ‘Brexit’, including London Mayor and deviously cunning idiot-impersonator Boris Johnson, and Secretary of State for Work and Pensions Iain Duncan-Smith, who, last year, fist-pumped and hollered in the House of Commons during a speech where George Osborne announced savage cuts to tax credits. Such scission will cause deep ruptures within the party that will be difficult to heal.

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn argued that the negotiations were more about Tory party politics than genuine reform, calling them a “theatrical sideshow” in Parliament. With Cameron having already made clear that he will not stand for a third term, Johnson, Osborne and May have been made favourites to replace him and their actions are a demonstration of their posturing for the top job. Osborne and May are sticking to the central ground in the hope of having more widespread political appeal, while Johnson has gone renegade in actively campaigning against his own party-line, seemingly seeking popularity with the far-right of the party and those who have already defected to UKIP.

Cameron’s negotiation battlegrounds were deeply flawed from the outset—he raised none of the issues which are most pressing to the EU or the UK.  He sought no cooperation or discussion on the migrant crisis which has seen thousands die in desperation and will see so many more perish in the future. Nor did he enquire about the state of the UK and EU steel industry and its workforce in comparison with that of China. Furthermore, the European Union’s attempted bullying of Greece last summer following its peoples’ rejection of austerity, led by Angela Merkel, showed a hostility towards democracy that should be debated and combatted, but has not. The Prime Minister did not see fit to negotiate on any of this, instead seeking measures to further impose his own harsh austerity policies, and allowing himself to be bogged down in relatively meaningless semantics about sovereignty. What should have been a set of reforms which sought to put the UK at centre stage in the fight against such difficulties has amounted to little more than a regression in power that implies a desire to take a hands-off approach, which leaves humanitarian crises to be dealt with by others.

Whatever the outcome, Cameron will certainly struggle to hold on to power. In his New Year interview with the Andrew Marr Show, he declared that he would remain as Prime Minister even if he loses the referendum. But the prospect of losing one of the most significant votes in the country’s history would yield pressure difficult for any leader to handle, let alone one on shaky ground who has already stated that he won’t be around for the next General Election. And even if he wins, the in-fighting amongst his cabinet and backbench Tories will surely cause too much division for the man to retain every minister’s trust. The fallout will be dirty and Labour must be ready to capitalise as it seeks to reassert itself before 2020.

The reality is that Cameron’s deal has ensured that the possibility of the UK leaving the EU has vastly increased, an unbelievably poor piece of politicking and the exact opposite of what he initially set out to achieve. If his last major act as Prime Minister is to set in motion what he describes as the “leap into the dark” a departure from Europe would represent, it would be a fitting finale to a premiership which has offered no light and seen little other than pain and suffering for the most vulnerable.

St. Andrews appoints second female chancellor

Professor Sally Mapstone, Oxford University’s current Pro-Vice Chancellor of Education and Professor of Older Scots Literature, is to become the second-ever female Vice-Chancellor at St. Andrews University in Fife.

As one of the four ancient universities located in Scotland, St. Andrews has only once before had a female Vice-Chancellor, Professor Louise Richardson, who took up the role in 2009 before moving on to become the Vice-Chancellor at the University in Oxford in 2015.

Richardson was historically appointed only a year before the University of Manchester’s own first female Vice-Chancellor, Dame Nancy Rothwell, was employed.

As an English scholar with a focus on Scottish culture and a wide array of accomplishments within prestigious organisations in her research area, Professor Mapstone expresses delight about her new role at St. Andrews and the positive influence she can have. She is celebrated for having been responsible for policies and strategies for teaching and student support in her role at Oxford.

According to The Equality Challenge, despite there being a greater percentage of women as students in universities, only 20 per cent of professors are women.

The appointment of a second female Chancellor at the UK’s third oldest university could be seen as a representation of the future inclusion of women into higher positions within education and research.

55 miles for 55 years: Bogle 2016

On Friday 4th and Saturday 5th March, the North’s longest-running fundraising event, Bogle, will be unleashed in aid of their chosen charity The Booth Centre.

Organised by Manchester RAG and celebrating its 55th year, Bogle is a 24-hour sponsored walk around Manchester. Completely volunteer-led, the Bogle is produced at a very low cost in order to allow as many people as possible to take part and raise money for charity.

The story goes that 55 years ago a group of lecturers from the University of Manchester were attending a conference in Lancaster when they missed the last train home. Rather than booking a hotel and staying put for the night they decided to walk the 55 miles back to Manchester overnight. Completely drained and without proper food and water, the lecturers had hallucinations of seeing the dreaded Bogle monster. Luckily, our lecturers made it back in one piece, whilst the infamous folkloric creature returns year after year to encourage potential participants to take part in the 55-mile walk.

Both challenging and rewarding, Bogle is unique in regard to charity fundraising events. This year’s landmark walk is all in aid of Bogle’s charity of the year: The Booth Centre. The Booth Centre is a day centre that offers activities, support, and advice to help and support the rebuilding of the lives of the homeless in Manchester. Providing education and training in order to help people successfully find new homes, improve their health and ultimately increase their confidence in order for them to transition back into the community and thus thrive.

Although The Booth Centre is an incredibly deserving charity, you are more than welcome to walk for a charity close to your heart. 2015 saw participants raise funds for over 100 different charities, including the likes of local schools, natural disasters, grief, disability, and diseases.

New additions have been made to Bogle. Instead of the 55-mile expedition, participants are able to choose between ‘Bogle Ramble’ and ‘Bogle Stroll’. Differing from the Bogle Stroll’s 55 miles, Bogle Ramble provides a lighter 26-mile option. Consisting of one simple circuit of the North loop, the route covers the city centre, Salford, Farnworth and Failsworth. Bogle Stroll’s mighty challenge involves an epic walk around Greater Manchester, covering areas including Manchester Airport, Stockport, Fallowfield, and Salford. Either route will amount to a full day’s walking and definitely will take its toll on your feet; stamina is a must to take part.

In its 55-year history, countless stories have been shared on their website, including that of Diana Martin’s. “My husband and I met on the very first Stroll. Hundreds of us set off in the dark on February 20th, 1962.” Although she gave up after an impressive 28 miles, the couple recently celebrated their Golden wedding anniversary. “The Stroll was sponsored by Guinness in those days so he got a good dinner, lots to drink and a tie out of it—not to mention a wife!”

2016’s Bogle will start on 5th March, to find more information on how you can get involved, please visit: http://www.manchesterrag.com/bogle/.

Cottonopolis

I recently read a review of Cottonopolis on the Manchester Evening News website, and it opened with the phrase ‘Sophisticated Asian eatery,’ which led me to wonder what makes a restaurant sophisticated? Perhaps, having a waiter gently graze your crotch when placing a napkin on your lap? Or, all the food arriving at your table under silver platters, cooked by tweezer-wielding chefs in tall hats. Or is sophistication determined by the number of 0s on your bill?

Cottonopolis certainly has an air of smartness in its decor, but I don’t think it was ever going for sophistication. The restaurant sits on the corner of Dale Street, above The Black Sheep Skate Shop. It’s a Grade-II listed building and former tailor’s studio, which leaves behind some wonderful architectural features like the original wooden floorboards.

Plain clothes waiters inject a casual air into an otherwise sharp setting, dimly lit by naked lightbulbs suspended in wire cages. It was only on stepping out of the restaurant, into the roar of the street, that my friend and I released how pleasantly escapist the Cottonopolis atmosphere was.

After being seated I recommended my dining partner, Mr. Schmidt, try a pint of Krusovice, a Czech beer from a town of the same name in Bohemia. Although I’m not opposed to liquid Wednesday lunches I had a lecture later that day, but someone had to try it. While I stoically sipped my coffee, Schmidt was sinking very nicely into his pivo.

The menu, devised by Joe Grant and Alastair Long, both of Australasia heritage, is split into four categories: Ice, Fire, Steam and Oil, a quintessentially Northern Quarterian vogue style of menu layout. Where Cottonopolis does buck the NQ trend is with its food. It is refreshing to see a new restaurant that’s not serving the standard pizza or tarted up American comfort food. The menu is a spectrum of Asian cooking, drawing largely from Japanese influences with dishes like sashimi, sushi, yakitori, and tempora. There is also a  Chinese element with a selection of baos, and a small Korean contingent with Kimchi on offer as a side.

We opted for one of each, yellowfin tuna nagiri, chicken yakitori with a sweet soy mirin glaze and a peanut sauce, pork belly bao’s also with a peanut sauce, and salt and pepper squid with Japanese seven spices, rather than the Chinese five.

The tuna wasn’t the best quality; we had two opportunities to try it, because a delay on our chicken resulted in a complimentary tuna sashimi. It tasted better over rice with wasabi and a few sesame seeds, but when standing alone it a left something to be desired. The squid was great, not in any way chewy, and a first time try for Mr. Schmidt, who inevitably had “a lot of time for that”. The bao was ok, not my best, not my worst, but it didn’t need the peanut butter-esque sauce.

When the chicken finally arrived it did benefit from the peanut sauce, and when squeezed over with the lemon and swirled in the glaze, the whole thing came together really quite nicely.

I’m all for more Asian food in Manchester, and especially more Japanese food. With ramen tipped as the next big thing, on #2016foodtrendwatch, and London ramen chain Shoryu set to open a branch in Piccadilly later this year, it looks like the sun in Manchester is very slowly rising in the east.

Coincidently Cottonopolis does offer ramen, but as a lunchtime special with ribs for £8.00. Ramen is something that requires meticulous preparation and deserves fresh noodles, and this lunchtime deal looked a little throwaway, so I didn’t risk it. Like ordering ramen at Wagamama’s, the Mcdonald’s of Asian food, you would always leave disappointed.

Price £££ (3 out of 5)

Food 3/5

Drinks 4/5

Service 4/5

Atmosphere 4/5

Value 3/5

Pork and Shitake Ramen

Having admitted that ramen, Japanese soup noodles, requires meticulous preparation and fresh noodles, I’m now going to reject all of that and tell you how to make budget, easy ramen broth.

2 Pork stock cubes

150g Dried shiitake mushrooms

3 tbsp Good quality soy sauce

2 tbsp Sesame oil

1 Serving of dried noodles

1 Egg

1 Spring onion

6 pieces of bamboo shoot (optional)

With the stock cubes make up 1L of stock and pour into a large pot, bring to a gentle simmer then add the dried shiitakes. After about 35-45 mins remove the mushrooms and set to one side, these can be added to the dish later. Add the sesame and soy then simmer for a further 45 mins. When the broth is ready prepare some noodles and when they are al dente run them under cold water to stop them cooking, they will soften up more when added to the broth. At the same time, soft boil an egg for 6 minutes and 20 seconds, then run under cold water to stop it cooking before de-shelling and cutting in half. Finely slice a spring onion. When all this is done, pour a few ladles of the broth into a large bowl, place in your noodles then arrange the egg, spring onions and pieces of bamboo around the outside. The broth will keep happily for a week or can be frozen for later use.

Lunch with The Mancunion: David Aaronovitch

Talk to any writer about their life and their work and, as a rule, you can pre-empt the course the conversation will take. They’ll use your questions to launch a series of rehearsed speeches designed to impress. In ever-intensifying self-congratulatory tones they’ll talk about themselves, their opinions, and at all points emphasise their righteousness. It’s understandable: They are only human, after all. And on the whole, any writer worth their words is a brilliant self-promoter. But sit down with The Times columnist David Aaronovitch and you’re in for something completely different. Very few writers turn the interview back on you.

After two hours of conversation I stumbled down onto the Northern line with my pride shaken. The award-winning journalist had shown the amateur how it’s done. My assortment of questions were derailed from the moment I pressed ‘record’. He led the interview.

My first question, “What was your time like at the University of Manchester?” turned into a no-holds-barred dissection of my dissertation plans. An old history student himself, David seemed to know the literature better than I did, even after months of supposed study. After five minutes arguing over varying interpretations of Indian human rights, I realised my cause was futile and I retreated to the tried and tested evasion tactic that all humanities students know well: blame post-structuralist academics’ complexity.

He nods sympathetically. “I’ve never had time for them myself. As Orwell says in his essay on ‘Politics and the English Language’, when someone is being obscure, usually they have a hidden motive.” Evidently he was too much of a gentleman to comment on my own obscurity. I sighed a breath of relief. The rabbit was out of the headlights. For now, at least.

In the early ’80s David was the President of the National Union of Students in its most left wing days. He was elected as a member of the Eurocommunist bloc—a loose political term for someone who rejected both the West’s material greed as well as the Soviet Union’s reactionary party line. Instead they embraced liberation movements, from anti-racist movements to LGBT and women’s rights movements.

They say that age makes you more conservative and that you approach the world with a more levelled head. Certainly Aaronovitch’s political stance has changed over the years. Writing for Rupert Murdoch, one cannot claim to be a revolutionary but none of the old fire has gone. The man is angry: “I’m still 99 per cent Thomas Paine over Edmund Burke,” he tells me.

David Aaronovitch lives to argue, whether that be with the left or right. Jeremy Corbyn, George Galloway, Peter Hitchens, Mehdi Hasan, Alex Jones or Katie Hopkins—it doesn’t matter, he won’t hold back.

His new book, Party Animals: My Family and Other Communists, describes his hard left upbringing and its effects on his continued political outlook. He’s moved on quite a bit now. He’s one of a series of originally hard-left British writers who shed their purist roots and confronted what they perceived as dogmatism head on. It seems he still holds a real dislike for certain Tory attitudes, though.

“There is a real prejudice amongst Tories at large… a lot of them believe that the less of something there is, the fewer people have it, the better it is. This really goes on the rubric of ‘excellence’: ‘We don’t want all these students doing ‘Mickey Mouse’ courses.

“Of course, you define for yourself what one of these courses are—they’re usually courses which the person themselves didn’t do. Then they’ll say: ‘Wouldn’t we be rather better off if we had less of this?’ It’s a kind of attitude akin to ‘Hasn’t the seaside been ruined by all these people going?’

“Essentially as soon as it becomes ‘mass’, it’s not good any more. They are continuously worried about the competition coming from other people and the competition their kids face. And it seems to me, whether they’re aware of it or not, they continuously psychologically reduce the level of competition that their own people face.”

One episode Aaronovitch claims he’ll never live down is his 1975 appearance on University Challenge. David’s Manchester team answered almost every question with “Trotsky”, “Karl Marx”, “Che Guevara”, or “Lenin” in protest of Oxford and Cambridge’s unfair representation on the show, with their ability to enter as individual colleges. University Challenge “didn’t let the polytechnics on, who were of course our proletarian brothers and sisters in the struggle. It was an elitist institution [an] ideological arm of the state apparatus… We were entitled to take action against it!” Aaronovitch said, describing the incident in a documentary.

“Jeremy Paxman would have been absolutely brutal if we did that today. He would have just cut us off at the knees,” Aaronovitch explained to me. “’What’s that stupid accent for? What this Trotskyist nonsense!’”

David Aaronovitch is still proud of his Marxist roots: “Back then, saying you were a Eurocommunist allowed you to say you were Marxist and that you were on the side of the working people. But it also allowed you to say you were in favour of a Western-styled democracy. It was an intellectual stance. You had to argue your case.”

He gestures to his baguette—“this was your objective.” He gestures over at my olives—“this is where you are.

“Movements like Eurocommunism said: ‘We’re going to get to the objective, and this is how we’ll do it through this step and then this one’. Now I’m not saying that those steps weren’t unproblematic, but at least they were intellectually serious.”

David Aaronovitch clearly thinks Corbyn would not get to the baguette. “Now Corbynism isn’t intellectually serious. Take some of your Corbyn supporting friends aside and ask them: What do you want for this country? Do you want a new economic system called socialism? Will it be founded on the abolishment of capitalism? In the end they’ll say: ‘I want nice things and I don’t want horrible things’. It’s childlike and frivolous.”

I bite the bullet: “I voted for Corbyn.” David raises his eyebrows. Sensing I had put myself back into the headlights, I quickly add: “But I’m regretting it now.”

Gesticulating wildly with my cutlery, I try to make a joke out of John McDonnell throwing a copy of Mao’s Red Book at George in the House of Commons—“It demonstrates his incompetency, they simply don’t understand political spin!” My fork slips out my hands and clatters onto the floor—as Hampstead’s Café Rouge diners look up irritably.

Aaronovitch pauses for a moment. “Now this is something I’m struggling with. Why have young people voted for him? What would make someone like you, who’s essentially slightly left of centre, vote for an old Trotskyist? If I was to take you through his policies issue by issue, you’d never vote for him.”

I reply with the pro-Corbyn line: “Well I think young people are disillusioned with the old party spin and general way of doing things. He’s put important issues back on the map.”

“How old are you—21?” David retorts. “When were you ‘illusioned’? You haven’t been around long enough. You have the same opinion of Labour politics as Bart Simpson has about geometry.”

Out of surprise I choke on my beef pâté. In between coughs I wince: “Well, he speaks his mind.”

Sharply Aaronovitch replies: “Well his mind’s stupid! He’s never solved a problem in his life.” He stretches out his arms and gapes his jaw, “Corbyn’s a scarecrow, he hasn’t moved politically in about 50 years!”

Renewed with confidence at his comical skit I argue that Corbyn had redefined the parameters of political debate and that he was potentially starting a genuine grassroots movement, citing the hundreds of thousands who had joined Labour since his election.

I believed about half of it but Aaronovitch did not believe any of it, and proceeded to unrelentingly take Corbyn, and my initial support for the man, apart issue by issue—from Diane Abbott, to local councils, to Corbyn’s divorce. From Corbyn’s position on Northern Ireland to the current Ukrainian crisis, the word ‘naivety’ was thrown around more than once.

“The latest polls show Labour and the Tories basically on level pegging in Scotland. Now for the theory of enthusiasm in politics you put forward to be true, you would expect that that wouldn’t be the case!

“Corbyn doesn’t solve problems. He doesn’t know how to. He’s an opposition politician. He essentially, as a friend of mine put it, is a great masturbator. He’s in his room doing his stuff as it operates in his own head.

“Now for some reason all you young people have decided to help him with this—given him a ‘helping hand’ if you will. Mostly it seems that’s because you’ve all invested in him an idea of what needs to happen, which actually has very little to do with him.”

Aaronovitch proceeds to describe his break away from the idealism of his youth and the process of growing up, stating: “Now I don’t actually separate idealism from realism because to do that is to betray them both.”

However, when I ask him who he voted for in the Labour party elections, David replies sheepishly that he had voted for Liz Kendall, who polled just 4.5 per cent of the vote. I smile at the irony. No one can say there was anything idealistic or pragmatic about that political car crash.

I ask, “So just how much influence does Murdoch have over you at The Times?”

“Over me? None whatsoever.

“The most important thing about where I work, is for me to be arguing with people. It’s pointless being at a paper arguing with people who already agree with you. If what you’re looking for is an echo chamber, then what you’ll do is work for a paper whose readers have views that already agree with yours. But what kind of challenge is that?”

Today, according to Aaronovitch, you see a “silo mentality” all over the place—a refusal by many people to talk to others who don’t share the same political opinions as they do. Nowhere is this trend more apparent in than the student body. As a close friend of the feminist campaigner and writer, Julie Bindel, who was recently blocked from speaking by Manchester’s Students’ Union, David Aaronovitch turned his guns on the student movement.

“Why are students blocking people from speaking who they don’t like? Well it looks to me as if we’ve brought you up to be such a nice bunch really. You don’t sod off out of the house at 18 and not come back like our generation did. And you don’t think your parents are a bunch of shite, you actually quite like them.

“It’s a bit like the argument that we haven’t let our children play enough in the dirt because that actually effectively inoculates you against viruses. Have we been so incredibly protective, are you so precious, that whether or not you feel slightly bad at any one moment matters more than whether or not something is true?”

David Aaronovitch was Chair of the International Index on Censorship in 2013 suggesting that he knows his stuff on freedom of speech. Perhaps members of the NUS knew this, as he tells me that when Newsnight invited Student Executive members from the NUS to debate Aaronovitch on censorship in universities, only one member accepted the invitation—the Dane, Toke Dahle from Leeds University.

“Somebody coined the term ‘vindictive protectionism’,” he continues. “It’s where people claim to be active on behalf of other people who they think are being offended or denigrated. They use this as an opportunity to get pleasure from condemning someone else. The only time you can legitimately be very nasty to someone else is when you accuse them of being offensive or morally wrong. You can be really horrible them, whilst pretending to be the virtuous one.”

Mentioning the recent case at Goldsmiths University where Iranian exile, feminist and ex-Muslim, Maryam Namazie, was shouted down by protestors from the university’s Islamic Society, Aaronovitch laughs at the absurdity of one protestor who cried out “safe-space, safe-space!” when confronted by Namazie.

“Look, the men were behaving very badly at the front of the show. But when they’re kicked out, the women protesters at the back start off trying to be really offensive. But actually, Maryam engages them in debate and suddenly there is something going on there which is outside everybody else’s control.

“There’s a dialogue going on. They are talking to an older woman who actually has been a victim of Islamic extremism. Free speech allows things to happen which you don’t expect.”

David Aaronovitch’s latest book, Party Animals: My Family and Other Communists, can be bought here.

International Women’s Day: Beauty Charities

With International Women’s Day (8th March) just around the corner, what better time to start thinking of ways we can help out other women? Sure, telling someone how great you think they are is a good start but, if you’re looking to do a little something extra, here are two charities that keep women in mind and provide help to those who need it most.

Give and Makeup

Every week, two women in the UK are murdered by a partner or ex-partner. One in four women experience domestic violence in their lifetime and the average woman experiences domestic violence 35 times before phoning the police or telling a friend. It is with these figures in mind that Give and Makeup was set up by blogger and skincare guru Caroline Hirons. It is non-profit initiative that aims to get everyday essentials such as clothes, underwear, sanitary products, and personal hygiene products into the hands of women and children who have escaped, or are trying to escape, an abusive relationship and have been left with nothing.

We’ve all got spare products lying round the house. Whether it’s toothpaste, shower gel, or blusher, we’ve all probably got more than we need. Give and Makeup needs a variety of products to help them help women in need. Everything from nappies, tampons, deodorant, body lotion, bras, pyjamas, underwear, t-shirts, skirts, trousers, socks, children’s toys, and, of course, makeup. Most items can be sent second hand with the exception of mascara and lip-gloss (due to the risk of infections). For a list of where to send items please visit www.carolinehirons.com/p/give-and-makeup.html Alternatively, if you don’t want to donate clothes or makeup, you can make a donation online through Caroline’s website.

It’s difficult to imagine a life without having the basic essentials to brush your teeth, wash your hair, or apply a bit of makeup for a confidence boost, but sadly this is a reality for many women. You can do your bit by donating to Give and Makeup and help to make the lives of those in need a little more bearable.

Look Good Feel Better

Look Good Feel Better is a charity that provides practical support and workshops to women struggling with the side effects of cancer. They dedicate their time to improving the self-esteem, confidence, and well-being of those undergoing treatment. They run free workshops that focus on skin care and makeup, and create a sense of support and confidence to women who have often hit a low.

The charities held their first workshop in 1994 and have since helped nearly 200,000 women. They run workshops all over the UK and rely on volunteers to help make the brand a success. Providing women with a place to make friends, laugh, and feel good about themselves again is crucial during an overwhelming time where they can often feel isolated and reclusive due to changes with their appearance.

In order to run the workshops, they rely on product donations from brands, and also anyone who is able to help. Anything from eye makeup remover, cleanser, moisturiser, concealer, foundation, lipstick, eyeliner, and blusher is accepted, alongside fragrance and body lotions to add an extra bit of luxury.

Again, if donating products isn’t your thing, you can volunteer at one of their workshops. This is aimed more at beauty professionals, since the charity asks for a year’s minimum experience in the application of makeup or skincare. However, if you know someone whom this would suit, it’s always good to let them know.

Manchester students part of “largest anti-nuclear demonstration for a generation”

Anti-nuclear protestors from Manchester joined tens of thousands of campaigners in London this Saturday at the Stop Trident rally to dissent against government plans to build a new nuclear weapons system.

People of all ages gathered at the rally, organised by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND). A strong Scottish contingent was distinguishable beneath the banners, and the sound of bagpipes encouraged demonstrators on through the city.

Many there appeared to be regular attendees at such events, with t-shirts and badges simultaneously highlighting commitments to other causes. One protestor, who had travelled from Wales, told the Mancunion how she had been involved with CND since the 80s and continued coming to anti-nuclear demonstrations to voice her view that such weapons are “illegal, immoral, and a waste of money”.

Others were newer to protesting. One woman revealed that she had previously been in the RAF, at times working with nuclear weapons, but had since changed her views on nuclear weaponry. This was her first protest, which she had chosen to attend in the belief that “we all have to do something”.

The march ended in Trafalgar Square where members of CND and ‘MPs Against Trident’ stood beneath Nelson’s Column as protestors filled the square. Kate Hudson, General Secretary of CND, rallied the crowd by describing the event as “the largest anti-nuclear demonstration for a generation”—a statement later echoed in the Guardian—before introducing speakers that included leader of the Scottish National Party Nicola Sturgeon, chair of CND and Green Party MP Caroline Lucas, and leftist writer Tariq Ali.

The Conservative government argues that replacing Trident will help create jobs and protect the UK’s security but those speaking criticised the plan – that will cost an estimated £167bn – for making the country more vulnerable and using money that would be better spent elsewhere, such as on the NHS and schools.

Sturgeon questioned how the UK could expect to persuade other countries to disarm whilst it continued to itself own nuclear weapons. Lucas, referring to Trident as “a reckless vanity project that makes us less safe not more safe,” argued for greater investment in environmental issues to increase national and global security.

Opinion on whether Jeremy Corbyn would make an appearance had been mixed throughout the day, after some Labour MPs had condemned his decision to attend, claiming it contradicted current party policy. Yet, true to his word, he appeared as the ultimate speaker to deafening applause, stating that his belief in “a nuclear-free future” was behind his attendance.

He announced that, if elected as Prime Minister, he planned to replace Trident with jobs that “retain the community’s skills.” He also implored fellow MPs, when voting later this year on whether or not to replace Trident, to consider the “humanitarian effects on wholly innocent people anywhere across this globe.”

According to recent estimates, 100–130 of Labour’s 232 MPs are planning to vote to renew Trident, despite their leader’s outspoken opposition to nuclear weapons. Only one Tory MP is likely to oppose the plan, whilst the SNP and Green Party have both declared their opposition to its renewal.

Manchester CND reported that they were pleased with the turnout of Manchester students among campaigners and said they will be holding a planning meeting in the coming week to discuss how to further engage with the local community. They also mentioned plans to form a young people’s group within Manchester CND.

Is the “Oscars so white” boycott really a route to diversity?

How I wish that Ricky Gervais were to be the host of the Oscars. Whilst Chris Rock is an accomplished professional, the award show is in desperate need for a reality check. In a show riddled with calls for boycott and ‘whitewashing’, Gervais might have been one to point something out: there is no difference between white and black ‘disgusting, pill-popping, sexual-deviant scum’. Yes, each of the glamorous elite may have had different upbringings, but the status of the black celebrity is one that is one of a great exception to the struggle of the black working class.
Ta-Nehasi Coates’ recent book, Between the World and Me, offers a fantasist insight into the plight of the black body, and how social, political, and economic structures landed so many black bodies in poverty traps and ghettos. These areas persist today: West Baltimore, Woodland in Washington DC, and South-side in Chicago, to name a few. It is a documentation of his journey in his black body from learning the ways of the street in West Baltimore, to academic revelations at Howard University, to his alienation in New York, where even in the original multicultural city he felt out of place in a black body. This widely praised book is an example of diverting attention away from trivialities and closer to a frightening reality.
One of the most important things to draw from the book was this: race comes from racism. The very concept of race that still somehow lingers in the modern world is the result of a desire to understand the world in its totality. So when we say white we mean the European majority in the home continent and much of the conquered lands. When we say black we mean the sub-Saharan African minority—or the effective political minority, as was the case in South Africa—within a white society. Race is such an outdated and problematic term, but it remains so commonly used. Ethnicity is far more accurate: a description of a smaller society and their cultural practices. The construction of ‘race’ ignores the intricacies of ethnicity.
Understand that when I discuss race, I do so in this knowledge. It is telling of the history of the use of ‘race’ as a term that if I were to discuss ethnicity (instead of race) in this article, it would become clumsy to read and write, due to the difficult distinctions I would attempt to make between ethnicities. The concept of race thrives off the simplicity of everyday human thinking.
Coates reinterprets the “American Dream” (persist through the initial cringe of nostalgia for GCSE English) as something that the black body cannot truly achieve. ‘The Dreamers’ are the white suburban class that keeps quiet in the safe knowledge that they are not black—to the detriment of the cause. That idea was very relevant to a previous era. But today, when there is a black president and black celebrities everywhere, that notion no longer carries as strongly. Instead, I would argue, those few high-achievers are used to create the illusion that black America has adequate social mobility.
The policies of racial equality have, rightly, become norms in the modern world. Whether it is through literature or through movements such Black Lives Matter, there are strong challenges to racial inequalities and questions of racism to be found everywhere. However, it is incredibly painful to watch many on the left jump on the bandwagon of the Oscars. The Economist thankfully published a useful article that showed how over the last century, representation of blacks at the Oscars has been roughly in line with the American black population as a whole. For the most part, a modern Oscar nominee is wealthy and living in a circle of wealthy people. For such individuals to call for a boycott is an insult to rest of black America, many of whom face the daily struggles of simply living in a black body. This is quite simply a dispute over how to best propagate the notion that blacks have adequate social mobility.
And what is a black body in film? Are we assuming that a whole long and messy history is observable because of the colour of the skin presented through film? No. What matters are the stories that the industry presents, not the actors and actresses that are used. In the last few years we have had blatant pro-military propaganda in the form of films such as American Sniper, but we have also seen great attempts to uncover history and bring moral justice in many fields, such a: 12 Years a Slave, the Danish Girl, or Selma.
Progress will not be won for social justice by cramming black bodies in front of the camera. These insulting elites are an embarrassment to the causes of justice and equality. They seem to forget that they are actors and actresses, not writers. For the most part, their job is one of presenting art, not creating it. This whole saga is a good example of how the success of those at the top can be used to generate propaganda to hinder the causes of others that are struggling, whether because of race, sex, gender, sexual orientation, religion, age, or class. On the grandest of levels, we may look back on the history books of our times and, disgustingly, be content with the years 2008 and 2016 simply for the election of a black man and then a woman to the American Presidency.

Manchester Labour Students co-chair quits amid ‘institutional racism’ and ‘leak’ allegations

Manchester Labour Students co-chair Mo Ahmed, the only BAME Labour Students club chair in the country, has resigned from his position during the Labour Party youth conference in Scarborough.

In a statement on Facebook, Ahmed claimed that his resignation was the result of his being accused by “several people of having leaked images from a private chat that I was a member of during the North West Young Labour Elections, and subsequently during the NEC [National Executive Committee] Youth Rep[resentative] campaign.”

He stated that the alleged images “contained negative content that targeted one of the NEC Rep candidates… such images were given to the Morning Star, which published an article about her.”

Ahmed “strenuously denied” having leaked the images, stating: “There were just 8 people involved in the chat, and I was the apparent culprit who did it.”

He went on to claim that the “conference was not a safe space”, and cited his long history of depression as further reasons for his sudden resignation.

“I ran as far away from conference as I could and spent the next few hours of conference shaking and crying on a hill. Alone, feeling lonely, frightened, and afraid and pathetic, and weak because of my mental reaction.”

Ahmed railed against what he called the “institutional racism of the worst kind” within Labour Students, as well as youth politics more generally.

He cited a vote held by Labour Students whilst BAME members of the party were holding a caucus “outside of the conference hall.”

Ahmed lambasted the treatment of BAME students within the youth wings of the Labour Party, alleging: “We don’t feel welcome. We are totally invisible.”

Ahmed has become increasingly marginalised since the election of Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the party on a national level, adding: “Given how I have been treated this weekend, I will refuse to attend any further Labour Student events, and will steer clear of Young Labour as much as possible”.

He thanked his co-chair, Ally Routledge, and the committee of Manchester Labour Students “for doing a fantastic job”.

He ended his statement: “Youth politics destroyed my mental health.”

*

Ahmed returned to the conference on Sunday to deliver a speech alongside Huda Elmi on the treatment of the BAME Young Labour members.

Elmi opened the speech denouncing the weekend as “one of the most difficult experiences for myself and other BAME members” and claiming the Labour party has “failed” ethnic minority members.

The institution of Young Labour was criticized by Elmi for having a “toxic culture of tokenism” with all the chairs and returning officers being white and Young Labour not having a BAME officer.

Elmi introduced Ahmed to the stage describing him as “one of the most dedicated and outspoken BAME members who has been vital to the success of our movement”, highlighting that “something is wrong with the system” when this member “felt victimized to the point where he needed to exclude himself from the event and resign from Young Labour”.

Ahmed declared to members at the conference: “I am BAME and I also suffer from severe depression. I have been brave enough to speak about this publicly but for many people that hasn’t mattered”.

Continuing, he described “being appalled by the fact that labour students’ seemed to have forgotten that [BAME members] existed and decided to proceed with the conference agenda without us, until our Labour Students BAME officer stopped them”.

Ahmed admitted feeling like “the Labour Party takes us for granted” and questioned why “if the Labour Party relies so heavily on the votes of my community, why are we being treated in this way?”

Ahmed and Elmi’s speech received a standing ovation and wide praise on Twitter, after which Ahmed described Labour as being “in danger of creating a culture where BAME people and non-BAME people sit separately at conferences because we feel so uncomfortable and frightened. That would be a form of separation that would set us back decades. I am heartbroken. I don’t see this as my party anymore. I don’t see this as my party anymore! This has to change.”

In a further Facebook update, after delivering his speech, Ahmed announced his decision to “remain involved in Labour Students and Young Labour” as he believed he owes “it to [his] community to champion their rights”.

In the same post he declared that the events at the conference “will be a catalyst for change. We will change our youth movement”.