Page 607 – Cherwell

The Mango Tree

Culture

Rebecca John

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19th January 2020

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Here we are
Ages ago,
Not so very long ago,

In khakhi shorts and pockets of mangoes,

Sweet and sour.

In crisp white cotton, shared lives
Sweet and sour.
Here we are

With a bundle of memories packed up,
With a bittersweet thread tied up,
In feet that remember,
Remember the watery mud,
Remember the muddy water.
In shiny, sharp shoes, black shoes,
That don’t want to say farewell
Don’t want to turn away

Here we are In our memory,

Under the blue skies,
Above the brown soil,
Upon the rough branches.
Before our first memory
In our last memory
Together.

Royal Distractions – 17.1.20

Cherbadly

Jack Womack

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19th January 2020

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For the purposes of this column, I think it’s important for you to understand that when it comes to the royal family, my capacity for hypocrisy is jaw-dropping.

I have shed many a tear watching Lady Diana documentaries. Recently, I put off several important commitments to read the memoir of Princess Margaret’s lady-in-waiting.

In 2018, I travelled to Berkshire just to be part of Harry and Meghan’s wedding day.

That last one is made up, but if you believed it was true during the split-second you spent reading that sentence, hold onto those feelings of surprise and judgement, as it’s really the only appropriate reaction to my creepy, borderline-obsessive interest in the House of Windsor.

However, within certain groups, I will miraculously transform into a die-hard republican – purely and shamelessly to save face, ranting to anyone within earshot on how our learned loyalty to the crown condemns us to be subjects rather than citizens.

Usually I find it easy to reconcile these conflicting parts of my muddled identity, shifting my position with the wind. But a little over a week ago, without so much as a text to warn me, Harry and Meghan dropped their ‘bombshell’ announcement on sussexroyal.com, thereby making it impossible for me to continue my delicate balancing act.

As anyone who has left their house in the last ten days will know, it is essential that you have a pre-prepared position on Meghxit, ready to drop into any conversation in which it may be required.

Arrive without one and everyone assumes you simply haven’t been paying attention. ‘I’m not sure what to think really – they both seem like nice people’ you say, watching the last vestiges of respect your friends might have once felt for you drain from their disappointed faces. Normally I love these moments in which the nation is gripped by royal fever. There is something reassuringly camp about those weeks where everyone is talking about the royals like they have a personal stake in what happens.

The ‘crisis summit’ called by the Queen was frantically discussed on daytime TV as if the pundits hadn’t realised they weren’t invited. I don’t think the Queen
watches Loose Women, but if she tuned in this week, I imagine she’d be checking with her advisers to make sure Ruth Langsford wasn’t on the guest list.

And so to the summit itself. According to one of the many unnamed sources who are single-handedly keeping this story going, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex decided in the end “that it wasn’t necessary for the duchess to join” – which, oddly, is almost verbatim what my sister texted me when I asked if she was coming to our family’s Christmas drinks party this year.

Somehow, I imagine the Duchess was more involved in in the making of that decision than her husband. I doubt being glared at for a full 90 minutes by three generations of in-laws was top of Meghan’s to-do list, so you can’t really blame her for not immediately jumping on a plane.

You would think the summit might be the dramatic climax this national psychodrama so desperately needed, but a salivating tabloid press don’t seem ready to let go just yet.

And in a way, senior royals should be glad of it. While the spotlight still shines squarely on the sixth in line to the throne, other uncomfortable questions can be quietly swept under the royal carpet.

The BBC documentary Exposed: The Church’s Darkest Secret aired this week, but you’d be forgiven for not knowing. Serving as a useful reminder that Prince Andrew is far from the only royal with a habit for dodgy friends, the two-part programme detailed the horrific crimes of paedophile Bishop Peter Ball, convicted of the abuse of 18 young men between 1977 and 1992. Whispers of Ball’s predatory behaviour led to him receiving a police caution in 1993, a caution which wasn’t enough to dissuade Prince Charles from offering Ball a house on his Duchy of Cornwall estate.

Ball was jailed more than 20 years after the initial allegations against him – virtually breakneck speed by the standards of similar cases. If Ball’s story is anything to go by, perhaps we can look forward to Prince Andrew’s trial around the year 2040.

While media outlets may shriek that the Harry/ Meghan debacle represents an existential threat to the monarchy, the reality is that in making the issue a national talking point, the real scandals are obscured behind a fake one.

The House of Windsor has always depended on their ability to maintain the fiendishly difficult balancing act of appearing both impossibly removed and yet charmingly relatable.

As ‘relatability’ goes, a grandmother angry with her grandson is easier to stomach. Harder to shout, “They’re just like us!”, when unlike the Princes of Wales and York, you don’t have any friends who happen to be paedophiles.

Cherpse! Roza and Tom

Lifestyle

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18th January 2020

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Roza , 2nd year, PPE, Hertford

I was quite surprised by Tom’s plan to go to a pub at 2:30 in the afternoon but I wasn’t opposed to it. We went to the Turf and the date was literally us chatting over a beer; I felt like the conversation had a nice flow and that was a positive surprise, as I was anxious that it might be awkward.

First impressions?
My first impression of Tom was that he seemed nice.

What was the most embarrassing moment?
The whole thing was pretty consistent, so it would be hard to choose, but perhaps the moment when I thought he wasn’t going to show up because I didn’t check directly under the Bridge of Sighs.

Is a second date on the cards?
I would be open to it :))

Tom, 3rd year, Geography, Christ Church

It was a dark and stormy night (afternoon)… Storm Brendan was testing my resolve, and standing under the Bridge of Sighs, the date was off to a strong start with Roza arriving 10 minutes late. Realising she went to Hertford made my choice of Turf look pretty vanilla, but it was better she learnt that about me sooner rather than later. Chat flowed well, however hearing that she had previously travelled on a 33hr bus journey made me question whether she had retained her sanity. Seeming very relaxed she was easy to talk to and I enjoyed speaking about our mutual dislike of Fever (that was the make or break moment of the afternoon). Then discussing bad dates she had been on was encouraging. Discussing the fact she did not know that the answers to these questions get published was more worrying. Overall I feel we got on well, but then again she was Polish and kept bringing up Brexit so may have been looking for a visa.

First impressions?
Late…

Did it meet up to your expectations?
I borderline thought she wasn’t coming at one point so was all up-hill from there

What was the highlight?
Flexing that I had to leave for hockey

What was the most embarrassing moment?
It takes a lot to embarrass me nowadays

Is a second date on the cards?
Probably depends on her visa situation

Activism and Luxury Fashion in Hong Kong

Culture

Tara Mewawalla

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17th January 2020

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Activism and Luxury Fashion in Hong Kong

Louis Vuitton is the most recent in a string of luxury fashion brands to close down branches in Hong Kong. The store in question was located in Times Square Mall in the previously bustling shopping district of Causeway Bay and was forced to close, according to the brand, due to an inability to renegotiate rent prices with the landlord after the shop saw profits fall.

Similarly, Prada has announced it will close its Russell Street store when its lease expires later in 2020, and other luxury brands Hugo Boss, Ralph Lauren, Gucci and L’Occitane are all on record revealing the damage the protests have caused their stores.

As Hong Kong faces its first recession in a decade it is clear that stores catering to people’s discretionary income will be amongst those worst affected. According to Forbes, clothing and footwear sales dropped by 31.8% in November alone, a huge shift in the market for a well-known luxury shopping destination; Bernstein analysts estimate the territory accounts for a huge 5-10% of the $285 billion annual global sales of luxury goods.

Perhaps unexpectedly, it is not usually direct action on these stores that forces them to close down; in fact, protestors tend to vandalise properties as a result of their pro-mainland owners rather than because of the economic or social status of the shops and those who buy from them. Protestors attacked the Hong Kong Adidas store on December 23, for example, after the brand announced that Liu Yifei, a public supporter of Hong Kong police, would be its womenswear ambassador.

For luxury brands, though, profits are decreasing rapidly because fewer tourists are using Hong Kong as a shopping destination. Forbes estimates tourists account for up to 70% of luxury purchases there, and whilst the largest declines came from mainland China, dropping by 58%, numbers of longer-haul visitors from the U.S., U.K., France and Australia also fell by 36.1% in November. Losing such a significant proportion of their target market, it is hardly surprising that high-end brands should see their profits suffer.

For other, more affordable commodities and services, the protestors have developed an online colour code to indicate for different restaurants, shops and service providers: black, red, and blue support trashing, spray-painting, or simply boycotting a location, while a yellow marker encourages protestors to actively support the shop with business.

Activists can use their economic power to send a political message and empower the communities around them. Services boycotted regularly include banks, metros and large conglomerates like Starbucks: big corporations that pro-democracy Hong Kongers feel are representative of the Chinese elite.

Indeed, economic inequality is growing in Hong Kong, with the Gini coefficient at 0.539 (where zero indicates income equality on a scale from zero to one), the highest it has been in 45 years. Hong Kong’s malls, centres of commercialism and luxury, have also become targets for protest, with protestors staging a peaceful rally in the suburban New Town Plaza luxury shopping mall in July. The professor of architecture at the University of Hong Kong, Cecilia Chu, describes how “the mall quickly evolved into a major site of protest because it now comes to represent something more specific: the corporate power of developer Sun Hung Kai, which is seen by protesters as a ‘colluder’ with the government and police.”

The inequality in Hong Kong is most apparent in its housing prices, and the inability of some elite corporate developers, such as Sun Hung Kai, to decrease their rent prices affects both ends of the spectrum, from luxury brands like Louis Vuitton to local activists seeking better housing.

Andrew Sheng points out that the struggle in Hong Kong is often figured as a ‘fight between two civilisations’, as Hong Kong legislator Fernando Cheung stated. Pro-democracy activism is synonymous with improved welfare and equality, but in failing to recognise the distinction between the two, we can forget the frustrations the Hong Kongers have at their economic and social circumstances. While the closure of luxury fashion stores in Hong Kong is not a direct result of protestor action, it represents the anger held against the wealthier, elite supporters of China.

Jane Eyre: A Victorian Heroine For Our Time

Books

Elizabeth Stanley

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16th January 2020

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Jane Eyre: A Victorian Heroine For Our Time

This year is set to be a big one for the Brontës, with the bicentennial anniversary of Anne’s birth coming up later this month, and an entirely new adaptation of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre hitting theatres across the UK. Adapted for the stage by renowned playwright and director Nick Lane, the play began its international tour in September 2019 at the Wilde Theatre in Bracknell, U.K. The Blackeyed Theatre in Bracknell recently announced the play’s 2020 touring dates which kicked off on January 10th at Theater Ainsi in The Netherlands.

The anniversary of Anne’s birth is also expected to be marked across the country and has already been celebrated in the sisters’ hometown of Bradford where an event was held on Friday in celebration of the writer’s life. A collaboration between South Square Centre and the Brontë Parsonage Museum, the event has been described by the latter as ‘inspired by her creativity and the conviction with which she held her beliefs’. Both organizations are committed to heightening the public consciousness about Anne, who is often considered the lesser-known Brontë sister, and ensuring through a celebration of her work on her 200th birthday that she gets the recognition she deserves.

Although Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall are not nearly as well-known as Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, which might have something to do the editing of Anne’s novels that happened after her early death, they are literary classics full of the passion and strength that infuses the works of her sisters.

Nick Lane, director of the new Jane Eyre adaptation, said: “I’m still pinching myself that I was given the chance to adapt such an incredible, iconic novel as Jane Eyre,” “and I’m looking forward to seeing how the show has grown.” This production demonstrates of Jane Eyre, once again, the amazing endurance of Brontë’s gothic masterpiece.

In recent years alone, Jane Eyre has inspired an eponymous ballet by British choreographer Cathy Marston (2016); an award-winning film starring Mia Wasikowska and Michael Fassbender (2011); and a Broadway musical (2000). Contemporary magazines have picked up on Jane’s popularity in articles such as Verily magazine’s “4 Ways Jane Eyre Speaks to the Modern Woman” (April 2017) and the Huffington Post’s “11 Lessons That ‘Jane Eyre’ Can Teach Every 21st Century Woman About How To Live Well” (December 2017). In light of both Anne’s birthday and Lane’s new play, there seems to be a renewed interest in Brontë characters and how they’ve stood the test of time. What is it about Jane, over 150 years after her creation, that inspires such fascination in the modern world—a world so radically different from the one in which the Brontë sisters lived and wrote their influential novels?

I believe Jane’s power to inspire lies in the lessons readers learn from her vibrant inner life and determined self-sufficiency. Many fans admire Jane for her “resilience”, “sense of direction”, “integrity”, and “hope”—as Verily magazine phrased it in the aforementioned article, something with which I completely agree. These are some of the novel’s most striking themes. But Jane is special for more than a list of abstract values. It is her very character, her inner life, from which we should take inspiration. She is completely self-sufficient—her strength and goodness lie within her. She does not need others to applaud her, and she can endure extreme solitude, loneliness, and heartbreak because she herself is the source of her own strength.

Since early childhood, Jane has to depend on herself for comfort and guidance. She is met with little compassion or kindness—for most of her young life her only close friends are Helen, a fellow student at Lowood school, and Miss Temple, a beloved teacher. Her resilience in the face of the disapproval and cruelty of others is what enables her to survive. When Jane learns about Mr. Rochester’s mentally unstable wife, she must decide whether she can still live with him without being married to him. The desires of her heart do battle with her principles. Principle wins. In what may be the most famous lines of the novel, she writes, “I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself …. I will hold to the principles received by me when I was sane, and not mad—as I am now. Laws and principles are not for the times when there is no temptation …. If at my individual convenience I might break them, what would be their worth? They have a worth….”

Jane is deeply in love with Mr. Rochester, but she also knows that living with him in such a state would violate her “principles” which, she says, “are for such moments as this, when body and soul rise in mutiny against their rigour…”. The lesson we can take from Jane, and from many other Brontë characters, such as Helen from Anne’s The Tenant Wildfell Hall, is that there are times in life when your sense of self and your own beliefs and values are all you have. You alone must make some significant decision without depending on others, without considering whether even your closest friends and family would approve or disapprove. You must be your own counsellor and risk being “solitary”, “friendless” and “unsustained” for the sake of what you know to be right, whether others understand and sympathize with you or not. Jane is completely and utterly alone in the world when she decides to leave Mr. Rochester and strike out on her own without money, family, or friends. But she does it, because she will not sacrifice herself and her values for anything.

Today, it seems we are always seeking approval from others—whether it be from our teachers and professors in the form of good grades and positive comments on our work, or on social media in the form of likes, comments, and public confirmation that we are pretty, handsome, or worth talking to. Jane teaches us to stop looking toward others for guidance about the values that we should adopt or the actions that we should take. She seems to urge us to rely on ourselves and to spend more time considering the values and beliefs that fuel us. To me, the enduring lesson we can take from the Brontës is this: start looking for strength within yourself and your own character. That is the source of true autonomy and integrity.

Learning To Live – Educated by Tara Westover

Books

Sarah Moorhouse

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16th January 2020

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Learning To Live – Educated by Tara Westover

‘Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery/ None but ourselves can free our mind’. These lyrics from Bob Marley’s ‘Redemption Song’ course through Tara Westover’s 2018 memoir. She describes hearing them whilst studying Isaiah Berlin’s concept of ‘positive liberty’ at Cambridge University, and how they became for her the definition of Berlin’s theory. What Marley and Berlin were advocating was intellectual self-reliance, and this is the touchstone to which Westover’s tale advances.

And it’s a remarkable tale: Westover was born into a Mormon family led by a fanatical father who refused to enrol his children in school. As a result, she first stepped into an educational institution aged seventeen, having managed to pass the entrance exam for Brigham Young University based entirely on her own preparation. From there she gained entry to Cambridge, which she now holds a PhD from. It’s the educational equivalent of a rags-to-riches story.

What makes Westover’s journey all the more extraordinary is the violence she endured during her childhood; she was tormented by an abusive brother and refused access to a hospital each time she was injured working at her father’s junkyard, a place that would horrify any health and safety official.

Whilst this makes for a gripping narrative, the memoir could have fallen into sensational territory if it were not for the equanimity of Westover’s voice. Her language is crisp and unindulgent, albeit marred slightly by the occasional cliché; hackneyed phrases such as ‘I could hear the blood pounding behind my ears’ interrupt her otherwise sophisticated prose.

However, the singularity of Westover’s life-story sustains the reader’s interest on every page. The tension that escalates between Westover, with her growing intellectual independence, and her family, with their ideology of self-sufficiency (her father prepares for the End of Days whilst preaching of the evil of government institutions), culminates when her family refuses to believe Westover’s accusations against her abusive brother. Their insistence that she is lying threatens to precipitate a crisis; Westover begins to doubt her own memory. However, she refuses to back down, holding onto the self-belief she has acquired at university. Her words are worth quoting in full:

“Everything I had worked for, all my years of study, had been to purchase for myself this one privilege: to see and experience more truths than those given to me by my father, and to use those truths to construct my own mind. I had come to believe that the ability to evaluate many ideas, many histories, many points of view, was at the heart of what it means to self-create.”

Westover’s description of the ‘privilege’ of education is an important reminder to any student of the significance of the opportunity they have. Reading her words, I felt newly conscious of the value of learning; we tend to normalise experiences as we become accustomed to them, but reading Westover’s book as a current university student, I felt re-exposed to what the process of being educated entails. ‘Evaluating ideas’ is at the heart of Westover’s book, and the Oxbridge tutorial is its conscience; one of Westover’s salient achievements in Educated is an affirmation of the continuing relevance of tutorial teaching. She learns through reassessment of her upbringing and her exposure to historiography that knowledge, personal and public, is not absolute. Westover writes that “in knowing the ground was not ground at all, I hoped I could stand on it”; she shows us that such an awareness is the real reward of a university education, and that out of this, selfhood can be formed.

BREAKING: Oxford announces record state school offers

Molly Innes

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15th January 2020

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BREAKING: Oxford announces record state school offers

Oxford University has announced that more than 69% of undergraduate offers have been made to students attending state schools. The increase of 4.6% is the “best percentage increase the University has ever seen.”

30.9% of offers were made to students from independent schools; this is over 12% higher than the 18% of students who attend independent sixth forms, according to the Sutton Trust (2018), and dramatically higher than the 7% of all UK students attending independent schools.

78% of offers were made to UK applicants, 7% to EU applicants and 15% to Overseas applicants. The University specifies that ‘UK applicants are more likely to receive an offer.’

The University was unable to provide a breakdown of the split between Grammar, Comprehensive, Academy and other forms of state schools as they do not currently collect that data. The data on the inter-state school split is not published in the University’s annual data report either, however the May 2019 access report published by the University highlighted that ‘In 2018, 11.3% of UK students admitted to Oxford came from the two most socioeconomically disadvantaged groups (ACORN categories 4 and 56).’

Oxford’s successful UNIQ programme has led to 250 students being made offers this year. The offer rate to students who attended UNIQ programmes is 33.6%, in contrast to the offer rate of 21.5% across UK applicants. The increase in offers to UNIQ participants comes after the expansion of the scheme last year, which saw more than 1,350 pupils take part in the programme – an increase of 50%. This is the largest number of UNIQ participants to receive offers in the programme’s history, thanks to the dramatic development in 2019.

This year, Students from POLAR4 quintile 1 accounted for 6.4% of UK offers – up by 1.4%. These students represent the areas with the lowest progression to higher education.

Dr Samina Khan, Director of Undergraduate Admissions and Outreach at Oxford, said: “We are delighted by this record number of offers to state school students, and to students from under-represented backgrounds. This creates a strong foundation for what we aim to achieve. We know that students from some backgrounds are not as well-represented at Oxford as they should be, and we are determined that this should change. Having taught in state schools during my career, I know the wealth of talent that lies there. We wish the students every success in their studies, and hope they flourish at Oxford.”

The number of offers made to young people from areas with the lowest progression rates to higher education have increased. Students from POLAR4 quintile 1 accounted for 6.4% of UK offers – up by 1.4% from 2019 offers.

In 2015 the University made 56.7% of their offers to students from state schools. Across the past five years, there has been an increase of 12.4% in state school offers. This comes after pioneering Oxford schemes have taken place, from the UNIQ programmes to Lady Margaret Hall’s Foundation Year and University College’s bridging scheme. It also coincides with the University’s formation of the Foundation Oxford and Opportunity Oxford schemes.

Opportunity Oxford launched at the end of the previous academic year, and this week more than 100 candidates from under-represented backgrounds received offers to study as a part of the scheme. Dr Andrew Bell, Coordinator of Oppertunity Oxford and University College Senior Tutor, has stated:

“Opportunity Oxford is a major new initiative to increase the number of offers made to UK students from under-represented backgrounds, and to provide academic support to those students to ensure that they have the best possible start to their university careers. This year, more than 100 offers have been made under the scheme across 28 colleges. We anticipate making 200 offers per year under the scheme from 2022 onwards. We’re really excited to have launched Opportunity Oxford, and we very much look forward to welcoming our first cohort to Oxford later this year.”

This article was updated at 20:02 15.1.20 to clarify POLAR.

Further clarification was made at 00:11, 16.1.19 concerning Opportunity Oxford.

Opinion – Love Island, veganism, and viewer hypocrisy

Opinion

Alex O'Connor

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14th January 2020

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Opinion – Love Island, veganism, and viewer hypocrisy

When I was younger, I used to have no reservations about killing innocent animals simply for enjoyment. My dad used to drive me in his truck to have a fun day out off the backs of murdered creatures; it was a fantastic way to bond with each other and was something he had done with his own father before the latter’s death. Sometimes, on special occasions, we would even pose for photos together with the slaughtered carcasses to post on social media. It was thrilling, and everybody I knew was doing it, too. My brother was the only person I was aware of who refused to partake in this, telling me that he thought what we were doing was immoral, but we would simply (and mockingly) explain to him that it was ‘a cultural thing’, and that he shouldn’t be so pushy and irritating.

Yet, unlike Love Island’s Ollie Williams, I have never been hunting. Instead, my participation in the circus of inhumanity I have just described ended the day I stopped eating, wearing, and using animal products. The animals I was once responsible for killing were not wild buffalo or warthogs, but cows, chickens, and pigs. The anger being directed at Williams for his unthinking behaviour, after photos emerged last week of him allegedly on trophy hunting expeditions in Africa, is not misplaced, yet it is indicative of a blinding cognitive dissonance and arbitrary bias within his detractors against those animals that we happen to have developed a taste for.

Am I being so bold as to draw an equation between animals killed for sport and animals killed for food? Not at all: firstly, a source close to Ollie Williams has claimed that he has only ever been hunting on strictly conservational motives (a shaky claim, but one we should perhaps accept before the contrary is proven). More to the point, however, one of these is quite obviously far worse than the other, and it would be hopeless to attempt to deny this. Trophy hunting is nowhere near as awful as the modern animal agricultural industry.

Animals killed for sport suffer far less than those who populate our factory farms. Unlike farmed animals, they do not suffer from years of confinement, torture, and isolation before eventually being killed. They are not bred with the express purpose of being exploited throughout their entire lives. They are not separated from their children at birth (as almost all dairy cows are), nor do they have their tails cut off and teeth yanked out (as is done without anaesthetic to young pigs to prevent cannibalisation when they later go insane), nor are they ground up alive as newborns because of their gender (as are around forty million male chicks each year in the UK alone due to their inability to produce eggs).

The over seventy billion land animals slaughtered for food each year also vastly outweighs the seventy thousand killed for trophy hunting in the same period: for reference, using these rates, at an average reading speed of 225 words per minute, since you began reading this essay a quarter of an animal has been killed by trophy hunters. In the same space of time, over 290,000 equally innocent animals have been killed because we like the taste of their flesh and secretions, and even this does not include sea life. After finishing this paragraph, too, the number has risen to over 350,000.

This is why, though I naturally condemn Ollie Williams’ trophy hunting (if indeed that is what he was doing in the incriminating photographs), I cannot support any calls for his removal from a television show on those grounds. This is not because I have no desire for immoralities to attract repercussions, but because I would be betraying my ethical principles to attempt to engender such consequences selectively, and only to those immoralities that happen not to constitute a societal norm. To support his dismissal, I would be committed to supporting the dismissal of any contestant on the same show and other shows like it who are responsible for the unnecessary death of animals, and then there would be nothing to watch.

This is not to say that it is always immoral to eat (or otherwise use) an animal product: to make such a claim would be unconvincing at best, classist and ableist at worst. Yet just as we can recognise that some people need to hunt to survive and yet condemn people in Ollie Williams’ position for hunting without such an excuse, we can recognise the nuances of dietary requirements whilst unequivocally denouncing the unnecessary taking of an animal’s life, refusing to condone the treatment they receive in factory farms, and coming to realise the tragic irony in pointing our greased-up meaty fingers at the people on television who we feel should know better.

Petition launched to protect UK’s role in Erasmus

News

Trudy Ross

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14th January 2020

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Petition launched to protect UK’s role in Erasmus

A petition to put pressure on the government to protect the UK’s role in the EU’s Erasmus scheme has received over 26,000 signatures.

MPs voted against the Liberal Democrats’ amendment to the Withdrawal Agreement Bill, which would have required the government to negotiate full membership to the EU’s Erasmus+ education and youth programme.

The vote has caused a backlash among the British public, and many are sharing the petition or expressing their outrage on social media pages.

Among the individuals to assert her opposition to the government’s decision is Dr Anna K. Bobak, a fellow at Stirling University, who tweeted: “Apparently continuing Erasmus is not a priority for the British Government after Brexit. Fostering student exchange, cultural diversity, and widening horizons are not important enough. Erasmus is not just a ‘gap year’, it’s an enormous learning opportunity.”

Erasmus (European Region Action Scheme for the Mobility of University Students) is an EU-funded programme which organises student exchanges across the continent. Exchanges enable students to either study part of their degree or undertake a work placement in another European country.

Since students are given funding for living costs by the programme and are not required to pay tuition fees for their overseas studies, individuals from a range of backgrounds are given the opportunity to develop the key life skills which come from living and working abroad. Funding support is also available for students with physical, mental, or health-related conditions.

Layla Moran, the Oxford MP who pushed the amendment, said of the programme: “The EU has achieved something our parents could only dream of: making studying abroad fashionable and affordable.

“The benefits are huge: learning a new language, picking up skills and work experience, building lifelong friendships and providing a huge boost to your confidence and independence. Without Erasmus, the opportunity to study abroad is only available to a select few.”

Oxford is one of the many UK institutions which makes use of Erasmus to support their own students while studying abroad, as well as receiving a number of incoming students from across Europe.

The petition is sponsored by Scram News and can be found on the Action Network website at https://actionnetwork.org/forms/save-erasmus.

Review: Frozen 2

Culture
Film

Jemima Sinclair

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13th January 2020

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It’s not every day that Disney releases a sequel to a ‘Princess’ film. I approached Frozen 2 already resigned to the fact that this sequel could never live up to Frozen, and sure that the inevitable lack of substance I’d encounter would be the result of a money-driven, panicked studio trying its hardest to capitalize on one of its biggest franchises ever. To my surprise, this film instead comes across as a good effort at a plausible and engaging continuation of the original story. I, and parents everywhere, breathed a sigh of relief.

This film achieves many true successes: the songs by Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez are catchy and well-written (if not as memorable as the first film’s), the jokes are often surprisingly funny, the emotional tone of the film comes across as genuine, the autumnal colours are refreshingly muted, and the animation, from the depiction of water to the stitching on the costumes, is notably gorgeous. The interaction between Elsa (Idina Menzel) and the water-horse, in particular, is stunning. However, it’s not all good news: the plot moves from an understandable emphasis on discovering the origin of Elsa’s powers to a rambling and unfulfilling meander of a story with too many characters and an oddly shoe-horned pseudo-colonialist storyline.

The plot begins, after a flashback to Anna and Elsa’s childhood, with a newly philosophising Olaf discussing the nature of change with Anna, and a fourth-wall-breaking self-aware acknowledgement of the passing of time through the catchy ‘Some Things Never Change’. The cosy charades-playing family dynamic of Anna, Elsa, Kristoff, and Olaf is cut short by Elsa hearing a mystical call to adventure. Her following song, ‘Into the Unknown,’ doesn’t match the explosive magic of ‘Let it Go,, but it does, along with the later ‘Show Yourself,’ make a decent effort at capturing similarly powerful emotion in typical theatrical style.

Following an elemental attack on Arendelle, the main characters journey into the magical forest for an unfocused but charming adventure. High points include: Kristoff’s surprisingly hilarious song and refreshingly gentle masculinity, as manifested in his repeated proposal attempts, and also, in contrast, the standout emotional rawness of Anna’s song, ‘The Next Right Thing,’ which is aided by an impressive performance from Kristen Bell. This song and Olaf’s played-for-laughs existential crisis throughout the film give Frozen 2 an increased sense of emotional maturity that is both a welcome change from the original and also speaks well to the growth of Frozen’s original audience, which it found a whole six years ago. This maturity, paired with Olaf’s show-stoppingly funny rundown of the entirety of the previous film, does a good job asserting this film as a fresh and relevant continuation of the original story that does just enough to leave the past Frozen behind.

Despite this, the focus on the characters’ pasts is disconcerting; the almost worshipful focus on Elsa and Anna’s parents (after their controlling and abusive role in the original) doesn’t ring true, and, without giving too many spoilers, the plot twist surrounding the sisters’ mother was embarrassingly badly handled. Most intriguing was the addition of a political subplot regarding the sisters’ ancestors and their personification as treacherous colonisers of the forest’s indigenous people; this topic is oddly and unfortunately skated over, leaving audiences with the sense that it either should have been further developed or instead cut out entirely. The finale itself is similarly disappointing. Without giving too much away, I will say that the film’s last ten minutes gave the unfortunate impression of a studio with too many ideas and too little focus.

On the other hand, the lack of a traditional Disney villain works well in this film – it seems fitting for this era that the demons these characters are facing are their own. It’s also a relief to find that Elsa is not given an unnecessary love interest, though in the wake of the Twitter-famous demand to ‘#giveelsaagirlfriend,’ it’s remarkable that this film was able to both reject the idea of a romantic storyline for her and also leave the subject of Elsa’s romance open to interpretation by way of the final act’s open-endedness. To focus instead on Elsa’s journey of self-discovery seems to speak to our current era, and the deeper dive into the relational dynamic between sisters results in a story with even more relatable themes and more sensitive portrayals of emotions than those seen in the original.

Despite its unsatisfying storyline, Frozen 2 represents some of Disney’s best work in its beautiful animation, engaging characters, and universal appeal – it’s a far cry from the cash-grabbing mess it could have been.

UrbanObserver

Oxford's oldest independent student newspaper, est. 1920