Do young people still have confidence in the Oxford Union?
Why does the row over the president of the Oxford Union celebrating Charlie Kirk’s murder matter? Asks James Price
As a dog returneth to its vomit, so a fool returneth to his folly. And so I return to student politics, yet again. Five years after I accidentally became the oldest ever president of the Oxford Union, the ‘last bastion of free speech in the western world’ finds itself in an even worse state than when it was being run by yours truly.
The latest scandal began when the Union’s president-elect, George Abaronye, was found to have laughed at the political assassination of American debater Charlie Kirk. More crass still than the next head of the world’s most famous debating society rejoicing in the murder of the world’s most famous professional debater, was that Abaraonye had met with and debated Kirk only a few months before. To Abaronye, the murder victim was not just a figure on a Youtube video, but a flesh and blood person whom he had met.
This struck a chord with the membership of the Union, many of whom turned out to vote in a no confidence motion that descended into the farce of the Union’s byzantine disciplinary rules (I still sometimes have dreams about Rule 33 and accusations of electoral malpractice).
Whilst some decried this as an attack on freedom of speech others, including me, have praised it as a victory for freedom of association. The role of president of the Oxford Union is inherently newsworthy. It has given us multiple Prime Ministers, including Asquith, Gladstone, Johnson, Heath, Salisbury, (Macmillan would have been president were it not for the trifling matter of the First World War). It has also given us many who almost made it, like Gove, Heseltine, Hague, Healey, and about 600 others who all felt they could or should have been.
A privileged role
The duties of a president include chairing contentious debates in an even manner, getting to run a proper organisation at a very young age and hosting interesting and often controversial speakers. So far, these have included four US Presidents and other world-famous figures like Albert Einstein, Stephen Hawking, Mother Teresa, and the Dalai Lama. This is a great privilege of the role, and the members clearly felt that someone who cheered the death of a young father was undeserving of the that mantle.
Why does any of this matter though, other than the insufferable habit of Oxonians to try to shoehorn the college they went to into every conversation, anecdote, and article?
Well, one reason might be that the Union has long been seen as a synecdoche for young elite opinion.
The nihilism shown by Abaraonye has shocked people because it confirms our worst fears about the dark undercurrents amongst students and young people towards the small l liberal values we are accustomed to. In the 1930s, the Oxford Union voted against the motion that “This House would fight for King and Country” allegedly emboldening Hitler by making him think that Britain wouldn’t fight. In that, he was wrong, and those students grew up to fight every bit as valiantly as their compatriots.
This time though, I fear that so much attention is being paid to the Union because of the forces at work. Reputational damage was always a bug of student scandal; today it seems to be a feature. In this, the Union is a totem for an ideology that despises our institutions and the comforts we once took from them. Abaraonye was caught in another text saying he got involved because he hated the Union. Beyond this vote, if we have ‘no confidence’ in our institutions, then we lose something truly special.
James Price is a former president of the Oxford Union