Thursday 19th June 2025
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The death of the FA Cup

Sebastian Page
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The death of the FA Cup

For the majority of people, Joe Ironside could be a next-door neighbour, or an aptly named blacksmith. For myself and perhaps just ten thousand other people around the world, the name is synonymous with cult hero status. On a miserable afternoon in January 2022, he pivoted on his weaker foot, and calmly swept the ball past Martin Dúbravka to hand Newcastle one of just two losses at St. James’ Park for the calendar year. Myself, alongside the fellow Cambridge supporters were sent into raptures up in the famous away end. I’m hugging strangers and someone’s set off a yellow smoke grenade at my sixteen-year-old feet. The magic of the FA cup is a sentiment that all fans of teams below the Premier League hope to experience, and the financial magic provided by a big team are the dreams of every team owner. 

The FA cup, which first took place in the 1871-72 season, and once won by Oxford University in 1874 after a victory over Royal Engineers, boasts some staggering prize money figures. This year (2023-24) will see just shy of £20 million issued (£19,829,800), as the final distributes £2 million to the victor, and £1 million to the loser. But for the lower league teams, these figures are dwarfed by the potential for TV revenue and gate receipts. The FA cup uniquely enforces evenly split gate receipts between the home and away sides, the only anomaly being an even more favourable 55/45 split in favour of non-league sides when they play away against teams in the Football League (clubs in the top four divisions). This year’s fairy-tale run by Maidstone United of the Vanarama South (England’s 6th tier) to the final sixteen, or fifth round proper, earned them around £350,000 in prize money, but owner Simon Ash expected a total revenue of nearly £800,000 after gate receipts from an away fixture at Championship side Coventry City (where I unfortunately watched a first half hat-trick from Ellis Simms put Elokobi’s side to the sword). This £800,000 does not even include the £125,000 offered for the rights to an ITV broadcast of the fixture.

The competition rules dictate that should a fixture end in a draw, the tie must be replayed at the other team’s stadium, however from the fifth round proper fixture to the final, fixtures will instead go to extra time and penalties, as fixture congestion has become an increasingly contentious issue in regard to player health. These replays offer teams like Maidstone the opportunity to earn these huge paydays, often reviving a club’s financial status. Maidstone operated at a £200,000 loss in the 2022-23 season, so this run will extend the club’s lifespan for the next four years, regardless of any future money earned, a guaranteed future that will even make professional sides jealous. However, on the 18th of April, the FA announced that all replays after the first round proper will be scrapped. Since Championship sides like Coventry City enter in the second round, and Premier League sides enter in the third, this makes it incredibly unlikely for a minnow like Maidstone to draw the lucrative away fixture away that could preserve them for years. 

There has also been increasing controversy surrounding the selection of games for television broadcast, as lots of games are selected to cater towards pure viewing statistics, rather than offering smaller teams the opportunity to sustain themselves. Standard mid-table Premier League clashes like Crystal Palace vs. Everton, that are broadcasted twice a year, take place over games featuring teams from lower divisions such as Watford vs Chesterfield or Newport against Eastleigh. Larger games like Liverpool vs. Manchester United take place to cater to international viewership, despite the forty-six times they have played each other this century. These hegemonic clubs do not need the broadcasting fees, when they already generate £2.8 billion from national and international viewership in the Premier League alone. The playoff final for Championship clubs to enter the Premier League is already known as the ‘richest game in football’ due to the prospect of receiving these broadcasting fees, and clubs are issued parachute payments to keep them financially afloat after relegation.

Beyond the financial side, the scrapping of replays denies fans and players a possible once in a lifetime opportunity to witness the atmosphere that most Premier League fans regularly take for granted, or even a Wembley visit. Many Cambridge United fans like myself will recount that day in Newcastle as one of the highlights of their years of support, and players share similar sentiments. Manager George Elokobi told Kent Online that: ‘The magic of the FA cup is still alive. It’s about showcasing our skills and coming up against a fantastic Championship side in a fantastic stadium.’ One of his star forwards and Grenadian international captain, Jacob Berkeley-Agyepong, shared a similar view, telling me via Instagram messages that ‘the run will live with [him] forever’, and that ‘[he] wants to go on another one’. The ‘special’ experience even led him to ‘tears of joy’ for the first time in his career after both the Ipswich and Coventry fixtures.

The main opposition to the FA Cup replay is fixture congestion, as competitions such as the UEFA Champions League are being expanded, meaning that players are being forced to play a dangerous number of games. When knockout competitions progress to their latter stages nearing the end of the season, players are at their most vulnerable, and any further playing time can be detrimental. Despite this, cup competitions offer teams the capability to rotate squads, and offer playing opportunities to younger players coming through the academy system. A fine example of this came from Liverpool’s Carabao Cup win over Chelsea this year (a competition played by teams in the top four divisions), as their final-winning team featured five academy graduates. Of these five, three were teenagers who had made a cumulative eleven appearances for a total of one hundred and forty-five minutes between them this season. Replays ultimately offer larger clubs the opportunity to nurture this talent through squad rotation, encouraging efficient player management and rotation.

The magic of the cup is a phenomenon referred to when the tale of David and Goliath is echoed. Scrappy teams with wage bills one hundredth of the size of their opponent’s shock thousands. The scrapping of FA cup replays may not totally eradicate the magic of the cup, but it marks another step away from beloved traditions, towards the rampant consumerism that has progressively taken over domestic and continental football.

24 hours inside the OA4P encampment

Selina Chen
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24 hours inside the OA4P encampment

Mud swamps over grass where disintegrating cardboard and puddled tarp trace a crude footpath; wooden pallets provide the only solid ground. Upon this foundation lies Oxford’s Gaza Solidarity Encampment, a community supported by donations where students learn from teach-in lectures and look after one another. As a Cherwell journalist embedded in the camp for the first night, I didn’t scrounge for polished statements but documented the mundane details of life in the “Liberated Zone.” Here’s what I observed.

Masks On

Sprung up during the pre-dawn hours of 6 May, the welcome tent stood at the encampment entrance where newcomers filled out an onboarding form asking for their first name or pseudonym only – no full names. Responses are kept encrypted and private, it said, and a legal team is advising their collective action. 

Many picked up face masks for anonymity, while some students also donned sunglasses and scarves. Some students didn’t bring their Bod cards in fear of confiscation. Tape covered up the initials and college crests embroidered on Oxford’s signature puffer jackets. All communications occurred on Signal and Telegram – two platforms chosen for their security.

A prospective camper raised his concern about losing his work visa, and a volunteer informed him that the encampment was setting up protocols to sort people into groups by levels of risk to stay or leave in case of a situation involving the police.

A Learning Environment

Prominent scholars visited the encampment: feminist philosopher Amia Srinivasan brought students lunch and Israeli-British historian Avi Shlaim gifted students a box of dates. Daily schedules are filled with teach-in lectures, poetry circles, and news announcements. Scheduled chants were interspersed with spontaneous cheers whenever a car honked its horn in support as it drove by.

Books were stashed around the camp and readers nestled in every corner. Some were doing coursework, the flutter of their pages accompanied by shuffles of flashcards. A volunteer left after dark for a midnight hospital shift; others trickled in and out throughout the day to attend lectures. Even the encampment couldn’t keep Oxford’s academic demands at bay.

Dr Refaat Al-Areer Memorial Library, a tent named after a Palestinian writer killed by Israeli airstrike, held a waterproof bag filled with books – everything from copies of a Palestine Colouring Book for kids to Edward Said’s Orientalism.

Books inside the encampment’s library.

In the Public Eye

Journalists from national outlets hovered around the premise, greeted and accompanied by one of the media-trained campers acting as spokespeople. Shireen Abu Akleh media tent, named after a Palestinian-American journalist shot by Israeli forces while covering a raid, hosted a number of interviews.

This was also where the embedded journalist Madeleine Jane slept. She had been documenting the organisation for two weeks and planned to live in the encampment until its end. She told me: “every journalist thinks ‘yeah I totally would have covered the civil rights movement’ and every historian thinks ‘yeah I totally would have marched with the civil rights movement.’” This was the historical moment of her time, one that she wants to be able to tell her grandkids about.

Most interactions were mutually courteous, but not all media outlets were welcome: Daily Mail’s interview request was declined due to past “unfriendly” coverage, although the dissatisfied reporter was still allowed to roam the encampment. Later, two students independently alleged that she had been unzipping tents to look inside.

Camera crews trickled out by sunset and returned as early as sunrise. “I feel like I’m on a film set,” a student remarked. And indeed when I pulled up the news, I saw many of the masked faces and sombre eyes I’d become familiar with during my time there.

Night

As dusk descended, exterior lights of the Natural History Museum cast a faint warm glow upon the two dozen tents. An estimated 50 campers slept there – fewer than the two hundred during the day – their soft chatter and occasional laughter audible late into the night. Many voices carried American accents, and topics of discussion involved their jailed friends across the pond and their surprise at the gentle demeanour of the British police forces.

The organisers arranged guard shifts, taking campers’ essay-writing schedules into consideration. The pair of guards chatted by the entrance throughout the night, providing me a sense of safety the countless times I woke up shivering in the cold.

Inside a camper’s tent.

I got up at 4am, unable to sleep any longer on the ground that chilled me to the bones, and opened the tent to sludge muddier than the night before. The guards told me that many automated sprinklers had turned on throughout the night with no obvious pattern, splashing the tents and worsening the drainage situation. They had put trash bags over the sprinklers as a temporary solution. 

The police came briefly at midnight and left without many words. A few foxes also visited – only to be shooed away.

Early morning guards replaced the night guards as golden sunlight swept over the campground. Campers stretched, challenged each other to push-ups, and ran laps around the grass – a brief reminder of their youth amongst the talk of war and death.

Connections and Hostilities

One of the early morning guards was an Israeli-born student who moved to the UK at age seven. His parents supported his involvement in the encampment, but his other relatives in Israel weren’t yet aware. “I often play a hypothetical in my head,” he said, “that if I hadn’t left I would have been drafted into the IDF [Israel Defense Forces].”

Two Jewish passersby separately approached the camp in the morning and expressed their support. One of them said that he had been involved in a Jewish student group for Palestine twenty years ago: “I’ve come to meet my juniors.”

The Israeli-British camper pulled out a Star of David from around his neck, “that’s me,” he smiled.

In another polite interaction, staff members from the Natural History Museum came to check that the encampment understood that the museum remains open.

But some encounters turned hostile. A construction worker employed by the company that upkeeps the grass entered the encampment despite being asked to remain outside. “Wakey wakey!” he yelled at the sleepy campers in the early morning as he took photos. He expressed his concern for the state of grass under the tents and foot traffic.

At breakfast a camper commented on the incident: “Grass grows back. Palestinian children don’t.”

Logistics

By day two shoes were caked with mud, and dramatic slips grew commonplace, so volunteers began fortifying the sinking footpath. The site ran on voluntary action, requiring no strict duties or hierarchies to be maintained. Yet the portable toilet remained in pristine condition.

The encampment’s portable toilet.

Dr Hammam Alloh medical and welfare tent, named after an Al-Shifa Hospital physician killed by Israeli airstrike, stored boxes of supplies including first aid kits, sanitary pads, tampons, clothes, and hangers. A rigged car battery was used to charge cameras for journalists.

Central to the encampment were donations from the Oxford community. Upon seeing Oxford Action for Palestine’s wishlist on Instagram, people arrived with everything from hot meals to chairs. The community tent was quickly filled with piles of food.

There was no top-down leadership structure in the encampment despite its highly organised operations. While designated volunteers took charge of various logistical aspects such as media, the encampment had no hierarchy, and indeed the organisers’ meetings saw horizontal decision making processes.

As the encampment continued to capture Oxford and national attention, the protesters fought to direct all eyes on Gaza.

Pro-Palestine protesters rally in attempt to present demands to Vice-Chancellor

Cherwell News
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Pro-Palestine protesters rally in attempt to present demands to Vice-Chancellor

A group of around 150, organised by Oxford Action for Palestine (OA4P), rallied outside the Sheldonian Theatre during Vice-Chancellor’s awards on 8th May, aiming to hand their demands to Oxford University’s leaders.

They gathered at 2pm outside the Theatre to demand that the University reveal and divest funding in Israel and arms companies, and boycott all institutional connections with Israeli universities.

Protesters travelled from the ongoing pro-Palestinian encampment and elsewhere in Oxford to the Sheldonian Theatre to deliver their demands. Shouts of “occupation no more” and “Israel is a terror state” could be heard and a banner titled “Our Demands” read: “Disclose all finance. Divest from Israeli genocide, apartheid, and occupation. Overhaul university investment policy.” 

Some protesters standing outside the locked gates to the Sheldonian Theatre had painted their arms blood-red and held them up to onlookers. A sign was displayed at the front of the demonstration which read “Stop Israeli attacks on Gaza”. Police and members of Oxford University Security Services were also present at the protest. 

A student at the protest told Cherwell: “it’s completely justified [referring to the concerns of the protesters]” and emphasised how the conflict has reached the point where people can no longer do nothing. Students described Israel’s recent actions as a “genocide”, and one sign read “Oxford Uni complicit in genocide”. 

The protest lasted just under an hour and protesters dispersed at around 3pm. 

The rally takes place on the third day of encampment outside the Natural History Museum. During the encampment, also organised by OA4P, members of the University have called for the University to disclose and divest investments into arms companies and those with connections to Israel. They have also demanded that Oxford cuts institutional ties with all Israeli Universities. 

An open letter, written in support of the encampment, has received over 350 signatures to date. The letter also calls for the Vice-Chancellor to “unequivocally condemn the killing of over a hundred university professors and Israel’s destruction of Gaza’s educational institutes and universities.”   

The day before, Cambridge students’ encampment delivered envelopes with their demands to the Pro-Vice-Chancellors and Vice-Chancellor. 

Ten Years to Save the West by Liz Truss review: Revenge of the lettuce

Hassan Akram
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Ten Years to Save the West by Liz Truss review: Revenge of the lettuce

I have met Liz Truss only once. It was in Oxford Town Hall in November of last year and I had tried (without success) to smuggle in an iceberg lettuce under my shirt. The lettuce having been confiscated, I made my way into the hall. Very soon Truss climbed onstage, looking pleased as a duck. She began to rant about how she had been toppled by transgender activists in the civil service and the left-wing economic establishment. What struck me even more than the talentlessness of her oratory was her absolute lack of self-awareness or self-reflection. “It is,” as James O’Brien puts it, “as if Liz Truss seems to operate in a universe where she’s never met Liz Truss.” 

The same attitude is clear throughout Truss’ new memoir. Reflecting on her time as Prime Minister, she can mention “policies I believed in ” in the same line as “catastrophic economic meltdown” without ever once linking cause to effect. She simply cannot accept that her policies were on the wrong side of the debate, and the few debates in this book which she does win are, as if in the shower, completely imaginary. Justifying radical low-tax policies, she writes that: “If we push taxes up to 80 per cent… fewer people will aspire to earn more or start a new business”. A sound point. But nobody is saying that we should push taxes up to 80 per cent.  

The closest she comes to self-reflection is in a paragraph beginning “To be self-critical,” which runs to about four lines. Mostly she complains that she had no political honeymoon, or that we need radical reforms to give prime ministers more agenda-setting and policymaking power. For one who regards herself as an apostle of democracy, she has remarkably little regard for checks and balances.  

High taxes, wokery, identity politics, the deep state, global left-wing media elites – these, in Truss’ eyes, are the evils from which she is destined to save the West. She comes out with solutions like “We Must be Conservatives” and “We Must Dismantle the Leftist State”. Much of it is pure Daily Mail stuff (although the Mail sells roughly more copies every fifteen minutes than this book sold in its first week). 

Truss, like so many populist politicians and pseudo-intellectuals, is eager to defend “Western values” from attack. But I doubt whether she or anyone of her political leanings could define that term if called upon to do so. It is a tricky one, not least because by naming something as a Western value the implication is that it cannot be an Eastern value. Then what exactly is a Western value, according to Truss? Democracy cannot be one, because she speaks at far-right conferences alongside maniacs whose stated aim is the outright overthrow of democracy. Tolerance? No, no, she wants to repeal the Equality Act. Human Rights? Impossible: she is also opposed to the Human Rights Act. Rational thinking? Individual responsibility? No, in Truss’ case they all fall flat. All that she knows for certain is that Western values are under siege from the woke mob. 

The “wokery” charge is interesting only in one respect. In principle Truss is right to object to “the rewriting of history”, though her examples on the matter are quite misguided. She opposes the idea of schools teaching more inclusive curriculums, or of students moving slaveowner statues from street corners into museums; she cannot see that for a country to have an honest rethink about its own history is not revisionist, at least not dangerously so. The real dangers of revisionism come when some countries – some, indeed, which she otherwise praises in  this book – completely erase or deny the barbarities of their own recent history, and, doing so, go on in the present day to enact even more terror. That is infinitely more dangerous than the kinds of trivialities which Truss falsely holds up as examples of “rewriting history”.  

One positive which emerges from this book is that she has at any rate given up trying to cast herself as a modern-day Margaret Thatcher. She compares herself instead, bizarrely, with Sir Robert Peel. A far closer parallel would be Anthony Eden, another Tory who, despite extensive experience as a minister, made such a hash of the premiership that his only choice was a very hasty resignation. Truss also expresses a strange admiration for the polemicist Thomas Paine, whose work she surely cannot have read; otherwise, she would have denounced his plans for an eighteenth-century welfare state as “handouts”. 

Some of Truss’ personal insights are terrifyingly banal. She confesses that: “Leading the nation in mourning after the death of our beloved monarch of seventy years was not something I had ever expected to do” (it would have been an oddly specific expectation if she had), and adds that this book is not “simply a chance to tell the detailed inside story of my time in government” (a good thing, too, for it would take a Joycean level of detail to fill so many pages with so few days). 

Making an effort to be likeable, she tries to be funny about the inside life of a Prime Minister, and shares some very lifeless anecdotes. For example, she once confused Mrs Macron for Mrs Biden at the UN! (The real master of this kind of gaffe was Truss’ foe Tony Blair, who once tried to tell an interviewer in French that “I desire to emulate the French prime minister in many positions”, but omitted the verb “to emulate”).

The accounts of Truss’ early career do make for fun reading. We learn that at school she was wildly paranoid about the risk of being stabbed with safety-scissors. (It would be useful if any psychology students are able to connect this early phobia to her later career: please do get in touch at [email protected]). She was shaped by her time as an officer at Oxford Student Union, which left her with a loathing of “political correctness”. In Parliament, when she inherited Labour’s Department of Education, she describes her horror at discovering… “rainbow decorations hanging from the ceiling”. (Now, this is just the kind of thing that makes it impossible to take her seriously). It is also interesting to learn that, as early as 2010, The Spectator had named her the “human hand grenade”, and perhaps, if we had known that, we wouldn’t have allowed her within firing distance of the economy.  

There is no question of Truss’ genius, at least in Truss’ own mind. I can only think that – perhaps having heard that the infallible sign of genius is to have all the dunces in confederacy against you – she cast the Treasury, the governor of the Bank of England, Joe Biden, the Office for Budget Responsibility, and the late Queen in the role of the dunces, and herself in the role of the genius referred to.  

And there is nothing that makes for funnier reading than a self-proclaimed genius.

‘Theatre is, at its best, one of the most democratic of the arts’

Natascha Norton
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‘Theatre is, at its best, one of the most democratic of the arts’

I had the chance to sit down with Gregory Doran, Oxford University’s Cameron Mackintosh visiting professor and the former artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, to talk all things Shakespeare, contemporary theatre and the importance of accessibility in the Arts.

Greg Doran is Oxford University’s Cameron Mackintosh visiting professor and the former artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company. His current project is the student-led adaptation of Shakespeare’s Two Gentlemen of Verona running at the Oxford Playhouse this May. This production marks the milestone of his direction of all 36 plays in Shakespeare’s First Folio, yet this is the first time Doran has worked with a student-dominated cast and crew. He tells me how after receiving an initial eighty student self-tapes, he and his co-directors and producers ended up with the twenty current cast members. “I was casting who I thought were the most talented actors in those roles. And what was great, and sad at the same time, was having to turn down so many talented people who actually were great actors, but, you know, [we] had a particular idea for the role.” However, this seemingly cut-throat approach was within reason, as he reminds me about the importance of suitable casting,“There was a great Shakespeare director called Tyrone Guthrie, in the 1950s, … who used to say that directing is 80% good casting. And I sort of believe that. I think if you’ve got the cast right, I don’t think you’ve got 20% of the job left to do, but it’s a huge part of the process.”

Having directed over 35 Shakespeare productions, Greg explains what keeps him coming back to the world of theatre, and to Shakespeare specifically: “I think I’ve always been a sort of Shakespeare nut. I was lucky in that I was brought up by the Jesuits in Preston and we did a Shakespeare play every year. So, from the age of 13, I was kind of looking at plays and wondering, you know, what kind of part might I get? I wasn’t looking at Shakespeare and thinking of answering essay questions, I was looking at Shakespeare for the opportunity to be in the play and have a good time. I think Shakespeare became a kind of thread or passport through my life.” Greg then went on to train as an actor following his university years, and did some (to use his words) “complete rubbish, sitcoms”, before auditioning for the Royal Shakespeare Company at age 26: “And that was the rest of my life.”

On being reminded of how many incredible projects Greg Doran has worked on, and with the student cast and crew having an equally fortunate opportunity to work with such a notable director, I wondered whether he ever felt any sense of impostor syndrome during his career and what he learnt from it. “When I became an actor of the RSC, I was in two productions in the first part of the first season, one of which I felt completely engaged in and that my contribution was embraced. You know, I felt part of it. The other one, I didn’t really know what I was doing, I was really being asked just to say the lines and follow the blocking. I realised how much better it is if you can encourage that investment from the cast, because then they will pay it back and the production will be more successful as a result. You could always tell a production where it isn’t an ensemble because the actors who aren’t speaking don’t look as though they’re listening, or that they don’t really know what it’s about. I think [theatre is], at its best, one of the most democratic of the arts because it is about what we produce in the room.” 

Having previously directed the likes of Dame Judi Dench, Sir Ian McKellen and the then Prince of Wales, now King Charles III, I wonder what drew Greg to staging his final untouched Shakespeare play in the First Folio with a strictly student dominated cast and crew. “When the Cameron Mackintosh professorship was offered to me, the one play I had not directed in the entire first folio was Two Gentlemen of Verona. And because of it being about young people, to do it as part of my professorship seemed to be the ideal opportunity. Even though it’s a much bigger time commitment, it just so happened that I’d stepped down from the RSC, I had lost my husband, and I had the time. Also, it felt like the time to give back, to share the legacy of all the people that I worked with, all the great actors and directors, having had the opportunity to be in their rehearsal rooms, and share that a bit with the next generation. That’s been the joy of it. And really, what’s been lovely is how the cast all kind of seem to be embracing that.”

But why put the play on in Oxford, and why now? “One of the reasons I wanted to do this play here was because it’s a play about young people, it’s about them leaving home, it’s about them making a way in the world for themselves, working out their own identities and making horrible mistakes. Falling in love and then falling in love with the wrong people. And it becoming quickly, kind of, difficult. And what was interesting was seeing how those actors responded to the play, and how quickly they saw how it reflected their own experience and their lives.” 

“For me, Verona is wherever you left home from, or whatever was, for 18 years of your life in this case, a sort of home. And to me that was Preston, which is where I grew up. I wanted people to connect with their own experience of coming into the bright lights of the big city and the excitement of that but also the challenge [it poses]…I mean, it isn’t like any other Shakespeare production I’ve done. Certainly, from the point of view of its contemporaneity, I think with comedy you need a very precise social structure that you recognise. And I guess, certainly, with the tragedies, I have found ways of finding something that is contemporary and then just smudging it a little so it doesn’t involve the kind of things that we take for granted in a contemporary setting. I often say in a modern dress production of Romeo and Juliet, when they get to them I always think, why didn’t she text him? And that’s an irrelevant question for me to ask but if the production has alerted you to that kind of contemporary detail, then why shouldn’t you ask those questions?”

Once only accessible in the flesh and on stage, the landscape of theatre has rapidly changed to include pre-recorded or live-streamed theatre productions in cinemas and on television screens. Greg reflects on the impact of technological advancements on the world of theatre: “When I became artistic director [of the Royal Shakespeare Company], I had done a production of Hamlet with David Tennant and Patrick Stewart and we were invited to be the first theatre production to do a ‘Live-from’ (like how the Met in New York [stream] the operas ‘Live-from…’). Theatre had never done it by that point. We were invited to do it with Hamlet.”

”One of the cast simply didn’t want to [record the performance]. They felt that theatre was transitory, and it should be left in the memory of the audience. But when I became artistic director, I thought, ‘Well, what I think we’re going to do is broadcast every production’, because I had decided that we would work through the entire canon of Shakespeare’s plays… I just felt that the technology was open to us to embrace. The technology of being able to broadcast live into cinemas around the country and indeed around the world. The joy of that was that somebody sitting in a cinema in Newcastle was sitting down at the same time as the audience in Stratford was sitting down. The response of a live audience was infectious.” He shares a heartwarming memory that was made on the night of the filming of Richard II. “I got a tweet from somebody who said:  ‘loving David Tennant’s Richard II at my Whiteley cinema, eating my chicken korma.’ I thought, well, A: I’m glad I’m not sitting next to you, but B: if that’s how you want your Shakespeare, then great! And if it’s not intimidating, then you kind of get a sense of what it’s about… and maybe next time you go and see it live in Stratford.”


Gregory Doran’s contemporary adaptation of Shakespeare’s Two Gentlemen of Verona promises to be an engaging display of young talent and creative collaboration. The production can be seen at the Oxford Playhouse from the 15th to 18th of May 2024, with tickets on the Playhouse website available now.

The Rwanda deal: Inspiration for other countries?

Mahdi Ghuloom
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The Rwanda deal: Inspiration for other countries?

The UK confirmed on the 1st May that it had detained an unspecified number of asylum seekers in the previous few days ready for deportation to Rwanda in July. This comes after legislation passed in Parliament that same week in support of such an arrangement, which would see forced deportations of asylum seekers to have their claims processed abroad. A man has reportedly already gone voluntarily to Rwanda. The policy purports to primarily focus on those who have taken a dinghy to cross the English Channel. According to the BBC, there are currently 52,000 people in this pool. Rwanda has “in principle” agreed to accept 5,700 migrants already in the UK this year.

Filippo Grandi, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, has said that the UK’s Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill is “setting a worrying global precedent.” One may wonder, then, whether the UK is the first to have innovated such a policy, and whether other countries will follow suit – as hinted at by the UN.

Firstly, the policy was ruled as unlawful by the UK Supreme Court, citing concerns that Rwanda could not be considered a safe country. Rishi Sunak subsequently circumvented this by drafting the now successful bill which legislated for the designation of Rwanda as a safe country.

As the UK’s Refugee Council has expressed, the concern with the Rwanda deal may not just be about Rwanda as a destination. It is concerning that a country like the UK, which does not take a very large share of the proportion of the world’s refugees, still considers it necessary to transfer them abroad. The UK is capable of finding other ways to promote safe routes to its country, and it can find the resources to process the claims it receives domestically.

Australia introduced a deportation policy in 2001, similar to the UK’s current policy, targeting migrants arriving in Australian waters by boat. Asylum seekers were transferred to offshore detention centers in Papua New Guinea’s Manus Island and the South Pacific island nation of Nauru. The policy went through several changes, including a brief dismantling between 2008 and 2012. It was only last year that the last few asylum seekers pursuing Australia as a destination were relocated from Nauru. The policy had a reputation of being extremely costly for Australia and one may wonder, given the UK is also facing financial pressures if the Rwanda agreement is implemented, whether the UK will sustain the policy longer, or even as long as Australia.

Additionally, the BBC reports that some 4,000 Eritrean and Sudanese asylum seekers based in Israel were sent to Rwanda and Uganda between 2013 and 2018. Other reports suggest they were given the choice of either being deported to their country of origin or accepting a payment of $3,500 and a plane ticket to either Uganda or Rwanda, facing jail in Israel otherwise. However, the agreement between the countries was secretive and eventually abandoned. Nonetheless, given the Australia model has already inspired the UK, and similar legislation in Denmark which was not implemented, it may be expected that other countries will also find inspiration in the formalised Rwanda deportation model.

But which countries may follow suit? According to the Spectator, “asked if they would like France to adopt a Rwanda-style bill, 67 per cent of the French canvassed replied favourably to the idea.” Although current French leadership remains opposed to the idea, any possible future change in leadership, especially a change towards a populist one, may lead to a French Rwanda-style deal. It is worth noting that French support is higher than the 37% that view the policy favourably in the UK, according to a YouGov poll in January. 

Arab Gulf States have also conducted weekly deportations of migrants, facing huge criticism. Given they are claiming to be working to improve their human rights records, they may see the UK-Rwanda model as one that they could follow. ُThough they are not signatory to the same international agreements, the UK is a country that publishes Human Rights and Democracy Reports as part of the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO)’s efforts to promote human rights abroad. If the UK is seen going through with such policies, then that may hold its weight in policy considerations of other countries – especially as they may view the UK as a global leader or have strong historic ties. 

Yet such a consideration may be misleading. Although the UK is indeed a country that holds its weight internationally, including as a member of the G7 group of advanced democracies, it is not immune to making mistakes on advancing and protecting human rights. This may be the UK’s contemporary moment of violating such rights. Therefore, it is certainly not a good idea for other countries to follow suit, even if they will naturally watch closely to see the legal and reputational backlash the UK may receive. If the UK survives this backlash, it may inspire them. However, this inspiration would stand in the way of better solutions that could be developed to migration issues. 

Lastly, even if other countries do not follow suit, the UK itself may expand the policy to deport asylum seekers to other partners. Reports have indicated Armenia, Ivory Coast, Costa Rica, and Botswana as contenders for similar arrangements with the UK. This is possible not only as Rwanda has limited capacity, but also because Rwanda may be risking domestic political trouble by receiving all these asylum seekers. In fact, though much of the blame for this policy is rightly set on the UK, Rwanda should also bear some of the criticisms that arise from this deal. Many countries have reportedly declined being approached by the UK for a similar deal, including Morocco and Tunisia. Rwanda still has the chance to be the last line of defence against this policy, preventing the proliferation of a costly, abusive, and populist solution to international migration.

Inaugural Vice-Chancellor Colloquium to mark Earth Day

Poppy Littler-Jennings
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Inaugural Vice-Chancellor Colloquium to mark Earth Day

This year’s Earth Day on April 22, saw the completion of the first Vice-Chancellor’s Colloquium, a forum based on collaborative efforts to improve the climate crisis. To mark the end of this programme, a special event attended by the participating students and the Vice-Chancellor, Irene Tracey, took place at the Maths Institute.

In October 2023, the Vice-Chancellor launched this new project and said it was: “an experiment in helping students learn from each other across the divide.” The conference was focused on climate change, to which the Vice-Chancellor said: “Building on the success and popularity of our student-led Oxford School of Climate Change, we’ve decided to make climate the unifying theme of the pilot colloquium.” 

The project ran for eight weeks with 200 undergraduate students from 25 academic departments and all 33 undergraduate colleges participating. The activities ran ranged from attending keynote lectures held by experts, to college-based skill sessions and student projects. The participating student body comprised 100 undergraduates reading STEM subjects, and 100 reading social sciences and humanities. 

This project focuses on adherence to the University’s Environmental Sustainability Strategy, which encompasses two main targets: to achieve net zero carbon and make biodiversity net gain by 2035.

The Vice-Chancellor has since congratulated all involved in the inaugural Colloquium, and said: “By working collaboratively, our students have developed some brilliantly creative and innovative projects that show the value of fostering strong cross-curricular skills to tackle global issues.”

The winning project was selected from a shortlist of proposals submitted by three teams. Their success was announced at the Maths Institute on Earth Day. This initiative intends to engender a connection between Oxford students and nature as well as providing a “platform for community and wellbeing.”

The winning proposal will install communal allotments at all colleges. Alternative proposals consisted of a review of college travel grants to promote low emission travel, and ‘Oxford Students’ Green Plate’, which is a book of plant-based recipes that seeks to reduce the carbon emissions that students’ diets contribute toward. 

Anna Serafeimidou, first year Medicine student at Wadham College and a member of the winning team, said the interdisciplinary nature of the Colloquium “actively bridged traditionally ‘different’ disciplines.”

Curriculum project lead in the environmental sustainability team, Dr Bill Finnegan, said: “The theme of climate also represents an alignment of strategic priorities for Oxford, advancing the curriculum priority of the University’s Environmental Sustainability Strategy – which I work on in parallel to the colloquium – and reflecting Continuing Education’s [the University Department] vision of promoting sustainability and social justice.”

Over 170 Oxford faculty and staff sign statement of support for students’ pro-Palestine encampment

Emily Henson
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Over 170 Oxford faculty and staff sign statement of support for students’ pro-Palestine encampment

Over 170 faculty and staff at Oxford University have signed an open letter expressing their support for the ongoing pro-Palestine encampment. The statement calls for divestment from Israeli actions in Gaza and for support for Palestinian scholars, following the destruction of all universities in Gaza. 

The letter calls that the University produce details of its endowment, displaying investment in arms companies, or items such as warplanes. This is in the hope that “we can have an open discussion on this issue with all the facts in hand.”

They urge the Vice Chancellor to “unequivocally condemn the killing of over a hundred university professors and Israel’s destruction of Gaza’s educational institutions and archives.” All universities within Gaza have been destroyed since 7th October 2023, according to the Palestinian news agency Wafa. 

The group joins Oxford Action for Palestine in calling for University aid in the rebuilding of Palestinian universities. They also ask that the University create opportunities for “Palestinian scholars to access library resources and education support online so that they can continue their learning”.

The group “consider[s] our students’ demands entirely reasonable given the University of Oxford’s commitment to global leadership in education and to furthering educational opportunities internationally.” The students demands include, divesting in arms companies and those “complicit in Israeli genocide”, ending all banking with Barclays and boycotting all institutional relationships with Israeli institutions and those who are “complicit in Israeli genocide”. 

Robet Gildea, a history professor at Worcester, told Cherwell: “It is very moving to see that students around Oxford Action for Palestine have set up an encampment to press for peace, justice and freedom in Palestine and to require from the University the highest ethical standards. As someone who marched against the Vietnam War in 1968 I understand the difference that the global protest of youth can make, and I encourage other academics to support this movement.”

Faculty at other universities globally have joined in support with student protestors. At Columbia, staff formed a human barricade around the encampment. Some participated in protecting students out of fear that university autonomy and academic freedom are being removed in crackdowns on peaceful protests. 

The full statement can be read here.

Navigating being a baby adult

Flo Johnston
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Navigating being a baby adult

After complaining that the Easter hunt had gotten too hard this year, my parents were quick to decide that it had in fact been my last hunt as I was an “adult” and it was “getting a bit ridiculous now”. I took this news super well and felt like my childhood had just died. Not that I had ever truly believed in an Easter bunny, but I did believe that I would always remain a child in the eyes of my parents. Coming to the slow realisation that I am now an adult, and have been for two years, is a reality that most people face at university, yet I can’t help but wonder when the word ‘adult’ will be something I actually feel. Becoming mature and ‘adult-like’ overnight is not realistic, so instead, I’ve compiled a list of mini challenges to help me (and anyone else that also feels out of the adult loop) make the transition into the world of boredom that I imagine adulthood to be.

1.        Become Linked-tf-In

When I think of maturity, I think of a person who understands this app. I genuinely had never found anything so humbling in my entire life, especially when I was told that everyone could see that I’d been stalking them. Since then, I have wisened up slightly and no longer keep tabs on my enemies through this medium. Now I actually check my profile viewers, because obviously my flood of job offers are about to come through, and I feel like this is my grand entrance into the world of work.

2.        Stop drinking squadka

This is a really hard challenge to stick to, especially within the cost-of-living crisis that has made boujee cocktails a luxury of the past. However, I am well aware that a true adult would never be caught dead with a vodka, water, and drizzle of squash combo drank out of a bop cup with a straw. Part of my dream for adult life consists of a love for red wine and neat whisky, which I hope my tastebuds are going to magically start liking in the next couple of months. If not, I might just level up to a vodka, lime, and soda, because even that seems to have more of an air of superiority.

3.        Buy a trench coat and wear it with chest

The trench coat is the epitome of an adult wardrobe and, because of this, I obviously bought one when I came to Oxford in an attempt to not fall victim to the puffer coat epidemic. However, it quickly became apparent that wearing a trench coat is a mental battle which requires a level of confidence that I just don’t have. I know that sounds ridiculous, but the amount of Sherlock Holmes, Inspector Calls related jokes I have lived through has made me feel like a child playing dress-up. Therefore, the day that I feel comfortable enough to strut around the streets with my detective coat billowing behind me will most certainly be the day that I see myself as a confident, mature young adult.

4.        Stop using Snapchat as my main form of communication

I actually am unsure how this is going to come about; do we all have to collectively agree to make the sad shift to WhatsApp and Facebook or is this an individual decision? I’m going to take a wild guess and say that the CEOs of this world don’t send daily red snaps backwards and forwards for no real reason. Instead, I imagine they communicate through concise WhatsApp messages ending with “kind regards, Susan”. I don’t think I will cope well with this challenge, but I’m beginning to accept the impending doom of Snapchat. Let’s not mention TikTok – that’s a whole different sacrifice.

5.        Complete a half-marathon

Pretty self-explanatory really. I don’t know one mature friend who hasn’t become a runner overnight and casually signed up for this major life commitment. This is the pinnacle of dedication and precisely what adulthood is all about: mundane routines and a love for boring activities.

This brings me to the end of my whistle-stop tour of adulthood. I know there’s definitely more to adulting than these trivial challenges but I hope that they will ease us into this terrifying, yet exciting experience. Good luck!

‘Women in STEM’ – empowerment or disempowerment?

Éilis Mathur
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‘Women in STEM’ – empowerment or disempowerment?

We’ve all heard the phrase ‘woman in STEM’; the term is now so well-known that it has left its textbook definition behind and become a sort of half-ironic, half-genuine, inside joke. I’ll use it to comfort my biologist friend through her multiple hour-long lab sessions, I’ll even use it to refer to myself after I submit my latest linguistics essay (I know, not a real STEM degree). But even in these more ironic uses, the label ‘woman in STEM’ still carries connotations of merit and success. It’s supposed to be a tool of empowerment: a reminder to women that even though STEM fields are often places of discrimination, they can overcome these difficulties. But more and more I’m beginning to realise that this is not the case at all. In fact, all the term ‘women in STEM’ does is disempower. 

It is true that STEM fields are not usually welcoming environments for women. Not only are women grossly underrepresented, but even once the door is opened, obstacles persist: stereotypes, gender-biased assessment, and psychological pressure – to name just a few. We really should be looking for any possible way to rectify this. This is where the label ‘woman in STEM’ comes in – it offers women validation for their ability and accomplishments within this environment.

The idea of ‘women in STEM’ tends to encourage people to only view the work of women in STEM fields through a gendered lens, a perception with which the work of men is never tinged. More and more female scientists are expressing their desire for their work to be valued in its own right and without this seemingly ineradicable gendered dimension. Friends of mine who study STEM degrees tell me about feeling as if they cannot shake off this aspect of their identity in their study. The term ‘woman in STEM’ doesn’t encourage them but serves as a constant reminder of the difficulties they face. From male-dominated lecture halls to a lack of women role models in STEM, they are already painfully aware of this. And this tendency to focus on the hardships of women in STEM doesn’t end even when you reach high-levels of success. Attending an all-girls school, I was frequently told about successful STEM women, such as Ada Lovelace and Katherine Johnson, during my school education. But these stories always seemed to focus on the obstacles they had to overcome to accomplish anything rather than on the accomplishments themselves. The stories I heard about successful men never did. 

Empowering women in STEM, but not women in humanities, is also undeniably problematic. While the success of an individual is not the absence of one’s own, the encouragement of women in STEM fields has led to an inherently sexist depreciation of the work of women in the humanities. The term connotes a sense of superiority which unavoidably implies superiority over humanities. The binary distinction between STEM and the humanities is deeply embedded at all levels of education. They are pitted against each other; every student has to pick a side. I have experienced this distinction most acutely within my family. Both of my parents are doctors, while my sister and I have opted to pursue humanities;although lighthearted, there is a sense of competition. It usually comes out during typical familial arguments over board games, as both pairs assert their area of expertise to be superior. While meant in jest, it does show how deep this fight between STEM and humanities goes. 

More often than not, STEM comes out victorious. STEM degrees are widely considered to be more valuable and employable, and as I’m reaching the end of the second year of my humanities degree, I’m experiencing first-hand the worry of ‘what on earth am I going to do with a languages degree?’ I used to see this fear as a reasonable one, and while there is some validity to it – STEM careers are typically some of the highest-earning – the difference is not quite so drastic as it’s often made out to be. After all, the success of STEM students does not equate to the failure of the humanities students. Statistics showing that the proportion of STEM graduates who secured a job within a year of graduation is only 1% higher than the proportion of those with humanities degrees prove this. So if STEM and humanities are of equal value, why does STEM always win? Granted several factors play a role, but it is no coincidence that the career path deemed less important is that which is female-dominated. I would argue that if it were STEM fields that tended to attract more women than men, the roles would be reserved. 

‘Women in STEM’ may just be a group of words with good intentions behind it,but in reality, the label does not empower women in those fields or in any others. Rather, it bolsters a set of damaging and inhibiting notions for women in STEM fields, all while undermining the work of women in the humanities. Perhaps it is time to stop viewing the term as a feminist force, and instead start seeing it as a tool of disempowerment. 

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