Oxford City Council and charity Aspire have made a successful bid for government funding to tackle homelessness and move people who had been sleeping rough into permanent, safe housing.
The newly-awarded portion of Government money will be split three ways. £897,233 will go to providing 124 rooms of interim housing for people in vulnerable housing or rough sleeping before the pandemic and £25,000 will go to moving people into more settled private rented housing, by paying deposits and helping with rent in advance.
The remaining £142,312 will go to Aspire to refurbish empty properties and make them available as move-on accommodation for people who have experienced homelessness.
Aspire CEO, Paul Roberts, told Cherwell that: “The timing of this funding support could not be better. It will enable us to complete the conversion of the remaining three of the five vacant properties in central Oxford made available by one of the Oxford Colleges.
“This will provide move-on accommodation and dedicated support for another 17 homeless persons currently temporarily housed in hotels.”
In March, the Government announced the ‘Everyone In’ scheme to try and urge local authorities to provide as much accommodation as possible to those sleeping on the streets during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Throughout the country, around 15,000 individuals were moved into temporary or permanent housing. To stop those helped from returning to unstable housing situations, the Government launched the Next Steps Accommodation Programme (NSAP).
This has various streams of funding which aim to ensure people do not return to homelessness. £105 million was provided for emergency housing support, including securing hostel and hotel rooms for rough sleepers particularly vulnerable to COVID-19.
Support for individuals wishing to reconnect with family and friends was also promised. £433 million is planned to be spent between now and May 2024 to move people into permanent residence. A £23 million fund is also available to support drug and alcohol treatments.
In Oxford, 241 people have already been housed under ‘Everyone In’ arrangement, including 93 people who have been helped into more permanent housing. This includes Saïd Business School providing 12 rooms, University College providing six rooms, and Pembroke College assisting with catering. Numerous commercial hotels and hostels also made rooms available.
More people sleep rough in Oxford than in most UK cities, excluding central London. The number of rough sleepers in Oxford has increased by 400% since 2012. O’Hanlon House, one of several homeless shelters in the city, provides beds for 56 people over 22 years of age, and about 20 younger people. In November of 2019, it was estimated that 43 people were rough sleeping in central Oxford.
Image credit: Andi North/ Flickr. License CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
What does it mean to be a bisexual woman? According to most mainstream media, it means cheating on your partner and being indecisive or promiscuous; spend enough time on TikTok during quarantine, like I did, and you might think it’s cuffing your jeans, having a bob haircut, and not knowing how to sit still on chairs. And then there’s the other classic accusation, that we’re confused. Strangely I think that might be the closest to the truth we’ve got so far – lots of us are confused. But not for the reasons you might think.
During my time at university, most of the LGBTQ+ people I’ve met here have been bisexual – there are a lot of us around. In fact, it’s been estimated that bisexual, pansexual, and polysexual people comprise 40% of the entire LGBTQ+ community. It’s ironic, then, that despite being a majority we are so often invisible. Bi women are often perceived as only being truly romantically interested in men, faking their sexuality for attention, or as (my personal least favourite description) ‘spicy straight’. Bi men, on the other hand, are assumed to be gay but in denial, or not to exist at all. In a particularly controversial tweet, American psychologist John Michael Bailey claimed to have proved the existence of male bisexuality just a few months ago, as if the men already identifying as bisexual were not proof enough. Generally, bisexuality is viewed with a veneer of scepticism, by people both outside and even sometimes inside the queer community.
It’s often difficult for queer women to discover and come to terms with their sexuality. From a scarily early age, society instils the idea in women that their purpose is to marry a man and raise children with him. Unlearning this can take decades, so it’s extremely common for lesbians to experience ‘compulsory heterosexuality’, the belief that they are attracted to men when they do not tangibly experience that attraction. But growing up as a bisexual woman is often puzzling because you are attracted to men. You might have known throughout your childhood that you liked other girls, heard your Year Seven classmates calling you a lesbian behind your back, and then watched Titanic aged 12 and fancied Jack as well as Rose, and breathed a deep sigh of relief because you’re ‘normal’ after all. Or, conversely, you might know that you like men, but think it’s normal for straight women to want to kiss or sleep with other women, and only learn later on that this is called attraction.
As a bi woman, it took me quite a long time to reach a point of total confidence in my sexuality. I was at an all-girls school between the ages of 11 and 18, and so for a while I was convinced that I was a lesbian because I simply hadn’t encountered a man that I liked for years. Aged 14 I made the error of coming out as queer over Instagram on a whim, and school became very miserable for the next two years. After coming out at an all-girls school, you feel predatory for even so much as looking at another woman, like everyone is watching you to detect any evidence that you might – gasp! – fancy them. Sometimes I did fancy straight girls who would have been disgusted if they’d known, and when I saw them, I started deliberately looking the other way, a tragicomic attempt to avoid any kind of suspicion falling upon me. But there were still the invasive comments, the barely whispered comments in the changing rooms.
Then after watching Colin Firth in the BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice I had to admit I was at least somewhat attracted to men. A year or so later I met my sixth form boyfriend and took the opportunity to distance myself from queerness almost completely. There was a running joke amongst my year that I’d “left my lesbianism in Year Eleven” and was now straight, and I didn’t mind it at all. I was more than happy to leave all that behind if it meant people would think of me as normal. I only started feeling comfortable in my bisexuality in my second year of university, and I don’t think this experience is at all unique. We often view coming out as a one-time thing, and there’s a pressure to get your identity ‘right’ first time. When your sexuality seems so fluid and unclear, it’s difficult to be confident enough to publicly pin it down.
It’s also hard to settle on ‘bisexual’ as a label when there are very few positive bisexual characters in media in whom we can see ourselves reflected. At the time of writing, I literally cannot think of any bisexual male characters in films or TV shows I’ve watched apart from Captain Jack in Doctor Who; when it comes to bi women, representation is a little better, but writers appear reluctant to actually use the word ‘bisexual’. Back in 2013, Orange Is the New Black was considered ground-breaking television for its portrayal of LGBTQ+ characters and relationships and its diverse cast, but despite Piper Chapman having relationships with both men and women, the show waited six whole seasons before anyone used the word ‘bisexual’ to describe her. Similarly, Annalise Keating of How To Get Away With Murder is never defined as bisexual, despite her past romantic relationship with Eve and her complicated relationship with Bonnie. Even in Fleabag, Fleabag unsuccessfully tries to go home with another woman mid-way through the second season, even though in the rest of the series she has never previously expressed attraction to women, and she never does again.
These women’s same-sex attraction is treated as a fun, quirky addition to the storyline, rather than a very real part of their identity, likely so that shows continue to be marketable to cisgender heterosexual audiences. It’s hard to find any bi women characters in media who publicly own that label, and whom we can relate to, and even harder to find characters who are bisexual people of colour, bisexual and disabled, bisexual and transgender – how can it be easy to know what you are when you can’t see yourself anywhere?
Even once they’ve come out, bi people often feel like they are constantly proving themselves right. When coming out to friends and family, we’re often subject to questioning over how many people we’ve dated, and of which genders, as if we’re supposed to have dated a certain equal number of men, women, and non-binary people before we can become an official, card-carrying bisexual. And then once we do find a partner, our bisexuality is often treated as irrelevant because we’ve ‘chosen a side’. We become even more invisible.
Where we are most visible, it’s often in the wrong ways. To many, ‘bisexual’ is not a sexuality but a porn category. It’s why so many bi women, to their frustration, are bombarded with messages from couples on dating apps asking if they’d like a threesome. Bi women are often expected to engage in performative acts of sapphism for male sexual pleasure – their same-sex attraction is viewed through the third party of the male gaze, something to be exploited by men rather than true desire that exists regardless of who else is in the room. Even more upsettingly, this could partially explain why bisexual women are far more likely to be subject to sexual assault than their heterosexual peers and even other groups within the LGBTQ+ community. According to the research of Dr. Nicole Johnson, who has carried out several studies on domestic violence, 75% of bi women have been sexually assaulted – bi women of colour and bi trans women are the most at risk.
23rd September was Bi Visibility Day, and there’s a reason why the name focuses on visibility rather than pride or celebration. It’s frustrating to be so frequently disbelieved, subject to homophobia or biphobia from much of society and then deemed ‘too straight’ for some LGBTQ+ spaces, and it’s exhausting to have to work so hard even to be acknowledged. Bi Visibility Day was first celebrated 21 years ago; the first bi activists started their work in the early 1970s, and that work still isn’t over. Perhaps the fight to be accepted hasn’t even begun if we have not yet ended the fight to be seen.
An Oxford undergraduate has launched a video project to raise awareness of the experiences of ethnic minority students at the University.
Walk in my Shoes, an Oxford SU project, will give a voice to BAME students through video content uploaded online.
The project’s first series focused on the experience of being a mixed-race student at the University and how ethnic diversity can be improved within Oxford. At time of publication, the most popular video has gained over 800 views on Instagram.
“Walk in my shoes (WIMS) will allow other ethnic minorities to feel supported and relate based on similar experience,” said Tony Farag, the project’s lead.
“This project was particularly important to me because I realised that ethnic minority students often experience a lot in places like Oxford which many people do not know or understand. I wanted to give a voice to students who are often voiceless or are assigned a voice by others.”
He added: “WIMS was inspired by the need for a greater sense of empathy, understanding and awareness. I wanted to create a platform where ethnic minority students could openly and honestly express their personal stories, whether positive, negative or a bit of both.”
Tony, a Geography student and BAME representative at St Catherine’s College, hopes the project will promote communication between the student body and the University, leading to “informed changes guided by the voice of the students.”
Walk in my Shoes also aims to help prospective applicants. Tony said: “The project will hopefully also provide… a resource through which [prospective students] can realise the diversity of the student body at Oxford, not to mention an authentic and honest review of the current ethnic minority experience at Oxford.”
“The project will make a statement of proactivity emulated by many ethnic minority students who endeavour to make Oxford a more welcoming and diverse place.”
558 BAME students successfully applied to Oxford in 2019 for undergraduate study, accounting for 22.1% of UK students admitted.
Oxford will consider socioeconomic data in PhD applicants, as the University looks to improve access to postgraduate courses. Tutors across departments use contextual data in undergraduate admissions, but this is the first time a similar approach will be taken for DPhil candidates.
Admissions staff will consider information such as whether UK applicants received free school meals at secondary school when shortlisting for interview. The new scheme will cover five doctoral training programmes across the sciences and medicine, starting with applications for 2021 entry.
Stuart Conway, Professor of Organic Chemistry, told the Times Higher Education magazine: “Some students are working to support themselves throughout university. They will be on an upward trajectory if they are applying to us, but they may not have seen the full results [of what they can achieve].”
Gail Preston, Director of the Interdisciplinary Bioscience doctoral programme training, added that socio-economic data may level the playing field for applicants unable to take up research placements: “Many applicants will spend their summers going to different research groups and getting researching experience, but others find it hard to do this.”
Oxford will also remove names and gender pronouns from applications to ensure more equal gender balance. 52.5% of graduate students admitted for 2019 entry were male, compared to 45.6% of undergraduates.
Conway hopes anonymisation will ensure students from ethnic minority backgrounds do not face discrimination.
“We had a few people come up to us at open days, saying they didn’t think Oxford was for them, but this kind of thing showed we are taking these issues seriously,” he said.
Applicants will also submit standardised forms rather than their CVs. This aims to give tutors “fairer and more consistent” information.
Professor Preston said: “Some applicants leave out information that we would like to know about, while others have greater support when filling out these applications.”
This is the latest in a series of steps to improve postgraduate access at Oxford, mirroring efforts to support undergraduate applicants from under-represented backgrounds.
Oxford announced the launch of ten scholarships to Black UK research students last week. It acknowledged that Black students are under-represented at Oxford, accounting for only 1.5% of postgraduate students.
The Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Education, Professor Martin Williams, said: “I am thrilled to announce Black Academic Futures programme – the next step towards our vision of ensuring over time that finance is not a barrier to educational opportunity… at Oxford.”
The University also voted to remove the £75 application fee for postgraduate applicants, after pressure from the Oxford SU and student campaigners.
A University spokesperson said: “This pilot scheme for doctoral training programmes forms part of the long-term, University-wide efforts to increase the number of promising postgraduate students from under-represented groups at Oxford. We are making steady progress towards improving postgraduate access through a number of recently-introduced initiatives and will be announcing further new schemes very shortly.”
Oxford has 11,813 postgraduate students, 63% of whom come from outside the UK.
Oxford City Council has approved plans by the Blavatnik School of Government to erect a statue of a giant pink pen in the Radcliffe Observatory Quarter.
The artist behind the piece, Sir Michael Craig-Martin is well-known for his sculptures of line drawings of single objects, and he told Cherwell: “The image chosen for Oxford was the fountain pen. The image can be seen as a reference to the signing of important documents, an age-old formality that continues to the present-day.”
Craig Martin is currently the Emeritus Professor of Fine Art at Goldsmiths, University of London, where he was a significant influence on the Young British Artists movement in the late 1980s. He is also internationally regarded for his conceptual work An Oak Tree which has divided critical reception since its debut in 1973.
The design and access document submitted to Oxford City Council explained that the sculpture was intended to “express the research and learning carried out by the Institute”, although comments by residents to the Council’s planning department included the view that a fountain pen was an “inappropriate choice” due to it being “outdated technology”.
A spokesperson from the Blavatnik School added: “When the Blavatnik School building was granted planning approval, one of the conditions was that we would commission a piece of freely accessible public art.
“We’re delighted Sir Michael Craig-Martin’s installation has been given planning permission – he is already known in Oxford for his mural at the JR Children’s Hospital and we hope his new installation will further contribute to the city’s environment and community.”
Image Credit: The Blavatnik School of Government. (Image edited)
A ‘Shoe Strike’ organised by Parents for Future Oxford, in support of youth climate strikes and the future generations who stand to be most impacted by Climate Change, took place last Friday morning in front of the Radcliffe Camera.
In accordance with government regulations, only six members of the organisation met to set it up. They laid out 177 pairs of shoes, some with notes attached stating hopes and fears for the future. These were accompanied by a sign that read: “Would you want to be in our kids’ shoes.”
The symbolism of the shoes was to represent both those unable to protest due to COVID-19 restrictions and future generations who will be the most impacted by Climate Change.
This was part of a global movement that saw parents joining youth climate strikers taking part in a global day of climate action on September 25th 2020. Parents from Brazil, Nigeria, India, Australia, Poland, Israel, UK, and Germany all took part in the day to support their children in the fight for climate action.
Speaking to Cherwell, Rowan Ryrie of Parents for Future UK said the intended impact for the ‘Shoe Strike’ was “to try to engage more parents in recognising that we need to take action for our children’s generation. Although activism isn’t something that necessarily comes naturally to parents, in the current situation we are in with climate chaos getting worse, all parents need to be able to speak up… to raise the issue as an intergenerational issue.”
Alongside this strike, Parents for Future Oxford is encouraging people to take action digitally by writing to MPs about supporting the ‘Future Generations Climate and Ecological Bill’, and taking part in the ‘Fridays for Future Digital Strike.’
The organisation, Parents for Future, was launched in 2019 by a network of parents inspired by Greta Thunberg and the Fridays for Future movement. There are now over 130 groups in more than 27 countries working to engage adults on the issue and normalise climate activism amongst parents.
Since the art installation, there have also been further donations of shoes to the cause and these, alongside the shoes that were part of the installation, will be donated to charity. The organisation has noted that they have spoken specifically with refugee charities as a potential destination for the shoes.
Image Credit: Parents for Future Shoe Strike Oxford
Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum has indefinitely removed its controversial collection of shrunken heads from the public view as part of a “decolonisation” process. The Shuar tsantsas or shrunken heads are from South America and were formed from human, sloth or monkey heads. Shuar people have long argued against the public display of their ancestors’ remains
A statement by the Pitt Rivers Museum, which focuses on anthropology, ethnology and archaeology, says: “The decision was taken to remove the tsantsa from public display because it was felt that the way they were displayed did not sufficiently help visitors understand the cultural practices related to their making and instead led people to think in stereotypical and racist ways about Shuar culture.”
The statement cites visitors talking about the people who had made them as ‘savage’ or ‘primitive’ and using words like ‘gory’, ‘gruesome’ or a ‘freakshow’. The Museum is now working with Shuar partners to decide on the best way forward with regard to the care and display of the items.
Director Laura Van Broekhoven said: “The implementation of the review is part of the museum’s strategic plan to bring its public facing-spaces more in line with its contemporary ethos of actively working with communities and respecting different ways of being as we become a welcoming space for all.”
The UK government’s Guidance for the Care of Human Remains in Museums recommends that “Human remains should be displayed only if the museum believes that it makes a material contribution to a particular interpretation, and that contribution could not be made equally effectively in another way. Displays should always be accompanied by sufficient explanatory material… As a general principle, human remains should be displayed in such a way as to avoid people coming across them unawares.”
Shuar Indigenous leaders Miguel Puwáinchir and Felipe Tsenkush said their ancestors handed over the sacred objects to colonialists without realising the implications, in a statement provided by the museum: “We don’t want to be thought of as dead people to be exhibited in a museum, described in a book, or record on film.”
The Shuar tsantsas were made in order to capture the power of one of the multiple souls that Shuar and Achuar people believed their men had. That power was used by the group to strengthen themselves and increase harvests, making it distinct from different kinds of “war trophies”, for which they are sometimes mistaken.
Jefferson Acacho, a leader of the Shuar federation in Zamora, Ecuador, who is working with the Pitt Rivers Museum to decide the future of the tsantsas, said some of the heads were those of clan leaders who died of natural causes: “When a leader died it was a way to show respect for them. The lips and eyes were sewn together because it was thought that a head could still see and eat after death, which would give it more power. This would prevent them from gaining more power and causing harm.” Pitts Rivers Museum acquired its collection of shrunken heads between 1884 and 1936
Other items removed ahead of the museum’s reopening on 22 September included decorated skulls, scalps and Egyptian mummies. Pitt Rivers still houses more than 2,800 human remains and has committed to “continuing to reach out to descendant communities to find the most appropriate way to care for these complex items”.
Two new blue plaques have been unveiled in central Oxford, commemorating two pioneering women associated with the university.
Both women – the classicist Annie Rogers and solicitor Dr. Ivy Williams – were among the first to matriculate and graduate with full degrees in 1920.
The blue plaque remembering Rogers is fixed outside 35 St Giles, where she lived between 1891 and 1899. Although she could not be awarded a full degree, she obtained marks in her finals which warranted first-class honours in Literae Humaniores (Classics) and became Oxford University’s first female don.
Rogers dedicated her life to gaining women the right to obtain full membership of the university. Her posthumously released memoir Degrees by Degrees provides an account of her campaign, including as a tutor at the Society of Oxford Home Students, which later became St Anne’s College.
Dr. Ivy Williams graduated in 1900 after being accepted by the Society of Oxford Home Students to read Jurisprudence. However, like Rogers, she also had to wait until 7th October 1920 to matriculate and receive her degree on 14th October.
Dr. Williams became the first woman to be appointed to the Bar of England and Wales in 1922, two years after the Disqualification (Removal) Act opened the profession to women. She did not continue to practice the law, instead returning to the Society of Oxford Home Students as a lecturer. As her sight began to fail in later life, she taught herself to read braille and wrote a textbook on the subject which was published by the National Institute for the Blind.
Dr Williams’ plaque is outside her home on 12 King Edward Street, which is now the Oxford Sixth Form College.
The Oxfordshire Blue Plaques Scheme is responsible for the commissioning and erecting of 66 plaques across Oxford, and more across the county. Other famous residents commemorated include the authors C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, alongside medical breakthroughs such as the first isolation of penicillin. The new plaques bring the total number of women represented to 15.
Oxfordshire hopes to launch its own contact-tracing system by mid-October, joining a host of other local authorities who have also implemented regional tracing networks.
Figures released on Friday revealed that almost one in five positive cases in Oxfordshire went unreached by the national contact-tracing system and only 62% of positive case’s close contacts could be identified, a figure below the national average.
The county’s director of public health, Ansaf Azhar, made the announcement at a meeting of the joint health overview and scrutiny committee last Wednesday. He also gave notice that he was looking into securing testing locally for key workers, and that work had been done to ensure university sites were COVID-secure.
On the 10th August, the government announced all local authorities would be offered dedicated ring-fenced teams of contact tracers, after the national contact tracing scheme faced criticism from local authority leaders for its lack of local focus. Andy Burnham – mayor of Greater Manchester – told The Guardian in May that the government “could and should” have involved local authorities more with contact-tracing.
They warned that local contact tracing must work in tandem with the University’s testing scheme, saying: “Contact tracing will inevitably straddle both [the local and University context]. What would be really helpful is if both systems were intermingled, and testing stations, and tracers, and telephone numbers, were shared.”
Blackburn with Darwen council, in Lancashire, began local contact-tracing in early August. The lead officer, Paul Fleming, said that local systems “complement the national system, because we have the local knowledge of the area and the ability to send officers round to people’s addresses”. After one week, according to the council’s director of public health, 90% of the cases the national system could not reach had been contacted.
Peterborough has also launched a local service. Its director of public health, Dr Liz Robin, said: “National test and trace isn’t always able to [reach people] fast enough – and some people don’t respond to the national text and telephone system – so we’ve asked Public Health England to let us take this on locally, as we know our communities best.”
The campaign group Oxfordshire Keep Our NHS Public told Cherwell: “All local authorities should have been involved from the outset; international evidence shows the keys are Directors of Public Health, their departments, the NHS infectious disease departments and their labs, and environmental health – all working with the voluntary sector as locally as possible.”
On July 14th, a group of investors led by Blackstone announced that it would be trading a 10% stake in the oat milk producer Oatly for $200m. This valued the firm, founded by food scientist Rickard Öste in 1994, at $2bn. Not only did this signal a broader shift by the establishment investing industry into the ‘ethical consumerism’ market, but it raised the ire of Twitter. In a classic ‘cancel culture’ move, many have characterised the deal as a sell-out by Oatly, prompting calls to boycott the brand. This reaction demonstrates how polarised online debate has become, and how out of touch it often is with the market economy.
Those that have called for boycotts characterise Blackstone as an unethical operator. Having made investments directly and indirectly in Hidrovias do Brasil SA, which is currently building a network to transport soybeans and grain grown in areas cleared from Amazon rainforest, the firm is seen as a profiteer which earns money through environmental destruction. Millennial perceptions of Blackstone are made no more favourable by the fact that its CEO, Stephen Schwarzman, is Trump’s largest donor for 2020. Money received from, or via, Blackstone is thus ‘dirty money’. The stake which the investment house itself now owns is equivalent to being bought out by unprincipled financiers, who will now corrupt the original corporate philosophy of Oatly.
Twitter’s portrayal of the Oatly saga is of a Marxist bent: rather than featuring the capitalists and the workers, the struggle is between the ethical and unethical. The capitalists are slave to profits, rather than a search for moral virtuosity, and thus their actions are ultimately unethical. Those who use their own pecuniary and social powers to promote sustainability, frugality, and/or ethical living, are said to be ethical.
But for the deontological moralist – and those that subscribe to this narrative often voice a deontological worldview – it is impossible to be an ethical consumer. All money in a capitalist system is ‘dirty money’. This is not because of inherent flaws in capitalism, or the appropriative nature of consumerism. Rather, it is the complexity and anonymity of a global economic system that is the issue. Any company functioning within such a system will necessarily accept money linked to unethical behaviour.
This is fundamentally a problem of market organisation. Because companies cannot choose who buys their products, they cannot ensure that money they receive as revenue is coming from morally blameless actors. It is easiest to see this from the perspective of an individual consumer. Oatly is mostly bought by people that lead ethically dubious but completely normal lives. These average people might wake up in the morning on a pillow stuffed with animal feathers. They then reach for a phone to check their emails, which was made by mistreated workers in China. When they have a long shower, they contribute to water shortages in other areas of the country. The clothes they put on were made by Bengali children, who work in gruelling conditions from the age of twelve. They drive to work in a hybrid, which has twice the carbon footprint of a regular car because of the way it is manufactured. When they get to the office, they switch on a computer made using heavy metals mined in warzones. The plastic of the desk chair they sit in was synthesized from oil extracted and sold by ruthless dictators.
The average person endorses exploitation, unsustainable practices, and unethical behaviour through their purchasing decisions. Everyone participates in moral nastiness on some level. It only takes one deviation from an ascetic and wholly green lifestyle to become implicated in globalised networks of immorality – and most people deviate hugely from the green ideal. So many aspects of what we consider to be a normal life involve participating in these globalised networks that unethically penetrates both our private life and our livelihood, often without us realising.
Oatly products are, by and large, bought by average people. Thus, Oatly consumers are actors involved in unethical behaviour. What’s more, the revenues Oatly utilises to finance its business operations and continue expanding is given to them by these unethical, or unethically involved actors.
Blackstone may engage in unethical behaviour, but the $200m they invested in Oatly is not of a different class to the $200m in revenue Oatly earned during 2019. Whether we consider the Blackstone board and Oatly consumers to be immoral in themselves, or whether it is the actions that bring about their income that are immoral, Oatly is, and always has been, receiving ‘dirty money’. Again, this is true for every firm operating within a modern business environment. Although firms may be able to be selective on the investment side, because markets are impersonal, firms cannot choose their consumers.
Theoretically coherent moral systems are often difficult to apply to the real world. Reality is fraught with decisions in which all the available choices involve compromise. But supporting Oatly after the Blackstone announcement is not one of these. We must see the company as operating inside the capitalist-consumerist space, because this is true no matter what the beliefs of their founders or supporters are. And as a firm subject to market pressures, they need to take every chance they can get to expand and build a competitive edge. Oatly is one of the few brands in their segment that has broken into mainstream retailers. As they said in July’s press release, they initially thought that selling their product on supermarket shelves was morally problematic, given that supermarkets profit from the meat and dairy industries. However, in a Benthamite turn they concluded that the positive impact they would have by making oat milk products visible and available to the widest range of consumers outweighed the downsides. They recognised that in order to pursue their goals, they had to co-opt traditional market players.
Although it is laudable that consumers have started to hold companies to higher ethical standards, those that call for a boycott of Oatly do not see the counterfactual. The choice may not be between Oatly and another dairy substitute, but between Oatly and nothing at all – not everyone has access to the kind of retailers that would stock niche alternatives to their oat milk.
The Oatly issue is part of a broader issue of a lack of pragmatism when it comes to sustainable living. Ethical consumerism has often been called a newer and more subtle form of conspicuous consumption. In a twenty-first century manifestation of Thorstein Veblen’s nineteenth century theory, ethical consumerism is driven in part by a desire to display class. The bourgeoisie achieves this by emphasising a detachment from material concerns. The person that can afford to spend three times as much on organic produce, go out of their way to find sustainably produced clothes, or buy a brand-new electric car, exhibits heightened concern for others and for the planet, thereby showing their virtue. Although this concern may be founded upon an authentic desire to be virtuous, it inevitably takes on class dimensions when colliding with consumerism. Products which use eye-catching branding or aesthetic cues to distinguish themselves as cool, rare, or expensive contribute towards a problematic culture of conspicuous ethical consumption.
Ethically conscious living should not be synonymous with elitism. Ordinary people should have access to products made with as little damage to the environment and human life as possible. Buying Oatly is one of the ways to bring this about. A boycott only impedes the path towards a less destructive and harmful society. We should cherish brands that lean towards the ethical side, because they are rare. In a system of rent-seeking individuals, we should feel lucky to have them.
