On 25^th January, the University Physics Department held a special stargazing night at the Denys Wilkinson Building on Keble Road. Running from 2 PM to 9 PM, it was a chance for over 1,000 people of all ages to see both inside the Physics Department, and out at the stars. 

Running annually since 2012, the event acts as an open day for the Physics Department and provides opportunities for families to learn about space and the night sky. Activities included a series of child-friendly talks, arts and crafts stalls and a new virtual reality experience designed to bring users closer to the Universe. 

Lectures ran throughout the day. The topics embraced were suitably eclectic, ranging from “Dark Matter and His Dark Materials”, via “How do we know the Milky Way galaxy is a spiral?” to “Giant Galaxy Burps”. Talks were given by University lectures and researchers, including Dr Becky Smethurst, who also runs the YouTube channel Dr. Becky designed to bring astrophysics to a wider audience. 

The event also featured a diverse array of ways of observing space. Attendees were provided with the opportunity to use the Roswitha Wetton telescope, located on the Denys Wilkinson Building’s roof, in order to find neutral hydrogen in the Milky Way. Later, tours of the night sky were hosted in the planetarium for visitors. For seasoned amateur star-gazers or those who wanted to give it a go for the first time, hints and tips about viewing the universe were given in workshops from local experts from Oxfordshire’s amateur astronomy groups, as well as from members of the Department. 

Aside from observation, plenty of opportunities were provided to explore the department and its work. Astronomers were on hand to answer questions on space in the “Science Café”. Games were hosted in the lecture theatre, and a series of astronomy-themed craft activities were run. These “Astrocrafts” were newly themed this year around the theme of upcycling and the transformation of old cereal packets and CDs into spectrographs. 

The University Physics Department was unavailable to comment on the night’s success, but with now nine years under its belt, it’s likely the event will continue in future. 

Following December’s devastating election defeat, Jeremy Corbyn has announced his resignation and the leadership race to replace him has begun in earnest.

The current candidates are Keir Starmer, Rebecca Long-Bailey, Lisa Nandy and Emily Thornberry. Clive Lewis and Jess Phillips have already dropped out of the race.

Though all the candidates have committed to maintaining the Party’s policy platform created under Corbyn, Long-Bailey remains the candidate of the Left; the other three candidates are on the soft left of the Party.

Provided they receive the requisite nominations from Trade Unions and Constituency Labour Parties (which may not happen for Thornberry), the candidates will proceed to a membership vote, in which they will be ranked in order of preference. The candidate with the least number of first placed votes will be eliminated in each round, with their votes redistributed to the candidate ranked second on each ballot. This process will continue until a candidate receives a majority of the vote.

Starmer and Long-Bailey are the most likely victors, polling showing both having a significant chance of winning.

Labour is also undergoing an election for Deputy Leader after Tom Watson opted not to stand for reelection in 2019. The candidates include the frontrunner Angela Rayner, along with Rosena Allin-Khan, Richard Burgon, Dawn Butler and Ian Murray.

Voting will commence on February 21, before the results of the election are announced on April 4.

Here, Cherwell profiles the major candidates, their strengths and weaknesses.

Keir Starmer

The Shadow Brexit Secretary is widely seen as the frontrunner in the race, appearing as a ‘safe pair of hands’ to Party members who have experienced four consecutive election defeats.

The MP for Holborn and St Pancras received the most nominations from MPs with 88; his closest challenger was Long-Bailey on 33. Among his supporters is the Anneliese Dodds, the MP for Oxford East, who hosted him in Oxford a fortnight ago. 

His left-wing credentials have been questioned by some within the Party. He backed Owen Smith “100%” during his failed attempt to defeat Jeremy Corbyn in 2016, and has since employed a number of Smith staffers on his leadership campaign.

Still, he stressed in his launch piece for The Sunday Mirror that Labour “must not lose sight of our values” and has pledged to unite all factions of the Party. More damaging may be his role in crafting the Party’s Brexit policy, widely seen as pivotal to December’s defeat, though attacks have yet to land. 

Emily Thornberry

Thornberry may be the candidate Boris Johnson most fears facing over the dispatch box at PMQs, ably deputising for Corbyn over the last few years in questioning both Johnson and Theresa May. She has been notably loyal to Corbyn, despite not standing politically on the left of the Party. One of the few who did not resign from the Shadow Cabinet in 2016, Thornberry served as both Shadow Foreign Secretary and Shadow Brexit Secretary for several months.

Nonetheless, she has been repeatedly dogged by claims of being the candidate of a liberal metropolitan elite. She was forced to resign as Shadow Attorney General in 2014 after she tweeted a picture of a house adorned with three flags of St George in Rochester and Strood. Thornberry has also been a key figure in the pro-European wing of the Party, wearing a necklace made of the EU stars at Party Conference last year.

Thornberry scraped into the next round with 23 MP nominations, and has largely failed to gain traction in the campaign.

Lisa Nandy

The Wigan MP represents perhaps the Party’s best chance at unifying its various factions. Nandy has a solidly left-wing voting record in Parliament, though is not seen as a Corbynite after she resigned from the Shadow Cabinet in 2016.

Nandy was one of the few Labour MPs to argue against a second Brexit referendum, and has based her campaign in attempting to reconnect with Labour’s traditional voters outside of metropolitan areas, many of whom were lost in the election.

After Clive Lewis failed to secure the necessary parliamentary nominations to proceed to the next round, Nandy is the only BAME candidate for Leader, though Dawn Butler and Rosena Allin-Khan are standing for Deputy.

Unlike the other three candidates, Nandy remains a largely unknown quantity, and could pose a potent challenge to Starmer and Long-Bailey as the campaign continues.

Rebecca Long-Bailey

Cherwell met with, and interviewed, Long-Bailey last week. Our profile of her can be found here.

https://cherwell.org/2020/02/01/rebecca-long-bailey-on-aspiration-and-going-further-left/

I meet Rebecca Long-Bailey in her latest makeshift office, a slightly grubby kitchen in Blackbird Leys Community Centre, one of the poorest areas of Oxford. She made this the latest stop of her campaign for the leadership on Monday evening, as she attempts to maintain the Left’s control over the Labour Party.

Long-Bailey is a woman of great modesty, raised the daughter of a Salford docker and trade union representative, I get the sense from our surroundings that socialism is not merely a vocation for her, but a calling. Her main rival for the leadership is Keir Starmer, who, when he was here in Oxford a fortnight ago, held his event in Wesley Memorial Hall. The contrast could not be more obvious.

I start on the much-hyped idea of the ‘Red Wall,’ the northern seats which Labour lost so heavily in December. Given that across Europe social democratic parties have lost their industrial heartlands and failed to win them back, I ask, is Labour is barking up the wrong tree in trying to win them back?

Long-Bailey is unchastened: “I think we need to win those seats back but we’ve also got to win the seats that we need to win a general election and that means appealing to all cross sections of the United Kingdom. It’s important to focus on the reasons why we lost so-called seats in the ‘Red Wall’ and we lost them for a variety of reasons. Brexit, and our position, the compromise that we out forward angered both leavers and remainers, and came across as quite confusing on the doorstep, certainly our activists reported that. I think the facts that our election campaign didn’t offer an overarching narrative or a message which resonated with communities and spoke to life improvement and aspiration was a huge thing. Many people didn’t understand that the Labour Party’s role was to improve their lives and they saw us as a Party sometimes of handouts rather than of aspiration. So I think it’s important to rebrand ourselves and focus a lot on the message going forward.”

Pressed on her definition of “aspiration,” an ideal most commonly associated with the Left’s most hated Labour leader, Tony Blair, Long-Bailey outlines her view of socialist aspiration.

“It’s aspiration but it’s real realisation of aspiration and it’s not just realising the aspiration of somebody who might be lucky enough to climb the ladder and achieve success like I did. It’s about making sure that no matter where you’re from, whatever community you’re from, no matter how wealthy your parents are, we all rise up together. And that only happens with a government that is ready to invest in the economy, to collaborate with businesses, to provide the critical infrastructure that we need to spur on investment and growth. To make sure that we’ve got an education system that’s fit for purpose, it skills up our people for the future, particularly with the fourth industrial revolution and automation presenting another huge challenge. So it runs right through everything. The Green Industrial Revolution is another one where it’s about aspiration, and again it’s not just aspiration of individuals to do better, it’s aspiration about what kind of world we want to live in and what our place in the world should be.”

Moving to parliamentary politics, Long-Bailey has recently come out in favour of mandatory reselection, meaning no Labour MP would be automatically reselected as a parliamentary candidate in each general election. Labour MPs have been notoriously difficult to deal with under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn. What’s their reaction been to mandatory reselection, I ask Long-Bailey, and how would you deal with the PLP over the next 4-5 years if you were to win the leadership?

“The important point about open selection is that firstly no MP should ever feel that they’ve got a job for life, and most don’t if I’m honest, they realise that they’ve got to be accountable to their members,” Long-Bailey responds. “But the process that we’ve got within the Party at the moment was a bit of a fudge. We wanted to make the Party more democratic; Jeremy did a democracy review, and it resulted in our trigger ballot system being such that branches themselves had to actively campaign against a sitting MP if they wanted to have an open selection. So it’s very negative and it didn’t allow any new candidates to emerge without the stigma of being the person who tried to unseat the relevant MP. Now I think we need to have a discussion within the Party about how we can have a fair and open selection process that also recognises the hard work of MPs, and they shouldn’t have anything to worry about if I’m honest if they’re hardworking and they’re accountable to the local members then they should be welcomed with open arms in terms of going forward in that open selection process. But it also needs to be a system that allows for women to progress through the Party, for black and ethnic minorities to progress through the Party. So we need to have that frank discussion and I understand the concerns because on the other side of the fence there are concerns that if we have an open selection process then that might allow individuals with lots of wealth and means to campaign behind them, to suddenly install themselves in a constituency and actively campaign because they know that an open selection is coming up. But I don’t think we should be frightened about that because we’re supposed to be a democratic Party and we can’t democratise the economy if we’re not even able to democratise ourselves.”

Long-Bailey is the hope of Labour’s left in this election. If she loses, the consequences to the socialist revival that has occurred in the Party may well be dire, something which Long-Bailey seems aware of.

She finishes the interview with an appeal to socialist values and a rejection that Labour lost last year by going too far left, implying to could go even further.

“I think this leadership election is important and I know all of the candidates have talked about sticking to our values and not deviating. But I think I’m certainly the candidate that has spent the last four years working on many of the policies that were contained within our manifesto that would have helped us realise our vision of improving our communities lives. And I think the fundamental point and one of the particular reasons why I stood in this election was that, not because I’m personally ambitious, I’ve always been a worker in the background, developing the ideas and the policies, but I’m ambitious for my community and worry because we heard this after the general election that people were complaining about the policies. It was the policies that needed to change rather than the message, and the leader etc etc. And what I would say was that it wasn’t the policies, most of our policies were broadly popular and when you polled them independently without attaching them to the Labour Party, they did very very well. So it’s not the policies, it’s the way we packaged them and in fact I think we could go further than where we are at the moment in terms of our policy offering.”