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The Cambridge Student • 19 January 2017
Comment
Theresa May: not good, just lucky Harry Robertson Comment Editor
T
o become Prime Minister of the United Kingdom takes a certain amount of skill and a good deal of luck. To do so as a woman, it must be said, is a particularly commendable achievement. In Theresa May, however, the scales are so heavily balanced towards luck that one might be induced to laugh at her long career of cons and flukes. Or at least one would laugh if it were not so terrifying that a politician who nobody chose to be elected as PM is leading the most important negotiations this country will face in our lifetime. Those who peddle the threadbare myth that Theresa May is a capable, no-nonsense ‘safe pair of hands’ often use as evidence her six years as Home Secretary. There must be something in this argument, and her resolve in the face of the daily sexism of the tabloids and the political establishment deserves respect. Yet May’s time as Home Secretary was near-disastrous. She set herself a plethora of targets, and missed them all. For example, she failed to fulfil the “no ifs, no buts” pledge to get immigration down to the tens of thousands by 2015, explaining it away with some almighty ifs and buts. And let us not forget the Big Brother-esque mobile billboards
telling illegal immigrants to “go home” (“not a success”, May later admitted). Or a judge finding her in contempt of court over her draconian refusal to free an Algerian national from a detention centre. Or her distaste for the European Court of Human Rights. I am perplexed as to why six years of cruelty and gaffes have been collectively forgotten by the British people. What of her more recent record? Showing more talent for the Machiavellian than policy, ‘Submarine May’, as Cameron’s team bitterly dubbed her, managed to keep stealthily below water except at opportune moments during the referendum. This may have been clever politics, but for someone who claimed Britain was better off in the EU, May did a remarkable impression of a person who really didn’t care what happened, as long as their career benefitted. Had the Most Spineless Politician of 2016 Award not seen such stiff competition (Gove and Johnson outdid themselves), the honour would surely have been hers. After those pantomime villains had destroyed each other’s chances, May and Andrea Leadsom were the only ones left in the running for the PM’s job. Having Andrea Leadsom as your only opponent—someone who spent a large part of her first hustings talking about massaging babies’ heads,
Editor-in-Chief: Will Tilbrook Founded 1999 Volume 19
and thought attacking May for her childlessness would be a good idea in 2016—is perhaps the crowning glory of all the flukes of May’s career. Once Leadsom’s whoopee cushion of a campaign deflated, May was free to become Prime Minister unelected. With the Labour Party in complete disarray, she remains unopposed. May and her disunited cabinet are making a complete mess of the EU negotiations, having only made a limp plan this week, six months after the referendum. At PMQs, the paltriness of Labour’s general opposition has allowed her almost every time to reach for a flippant, ready-prepared retort. Even when Corbyn’s questions are serious and important, she knows she won’t be held to account for her replies. And the same applies for her actions, be they her rash decisions on grammar schools or her inane “red, white and blue” plan for Brexit. A Tory government with such a slim Commons majority overseeing crises in negotiations with the European Union and in the criminally underfunded NHS should be suffering under relentless Labour attacks. But the charmed life of Theresa May continues, and despite never having proved that she’s much good, she has free reign to realise her reckless halfvision of Britain’s future outside the EU. DILIFF
Homelessness in Cambridge Anybody who has walked past Sainsbury’s will undoubtedly have seen the person selling the Big Issue outside the store. Some students will bow their heads and plug in earphones, desperately trying to avoid making eye-contact, while others are more inclined to stop and buy an issue of the magazine. Neither reaction is correct. Both behaviours can be backed up by valid reasons, but the fact of the matter is that homelessness continues to be an issue in Cambridge, and it is not something to be ignored. Some students may feel that the best way to help the homeless is indeed by buying a copy of the Big Issue, while others prefer to focus
on the source of the problem. The organisation Streetbite distributes food to the homeless, and many Cambridge students are involved in this scheme. Individual colleges have their own different ways of helping the homeless; a food bank donation box or a fundraising day, for example. We have by no means done nearly enough to combat this issue, but at least it is a start. And it is essential that students escape the University bubble from time to time and keep in touch with the real world and the issues that the less fortunate confront. Congratulations to those students who work hard to help the homeless, but let us not forget how much more there is to do to help these people.
Call for greater student safety Climbing sexual harassment figures revealed in Investigations confirm what the majority of women and non-binary people already know: that street harassment is a commonplace and normalised problem faced when coming to university and in our everyday lives. Although the statistics presented may be upsetting, it’s a really positive step that more people feel able to come forward to the police and report what has happened to them. Street harassment occurs in many different forms, from wolf-whistling and catcalling to sexual assault, and it’s worth remembering that although there are strong trends – such as
women and trans people being more likely targets — harassment can happen to anyone, and is a deeply troubling experience to undergo. It’s also worth remembering that, although Reetika’s investigation focusses on street harassment, the most common perpetrators of sex crimes are people a victim knows and likely trusts. With this in mind, The Cambridge Student welcomes Women Officer Audrey Sebatindira’s calls for greater student safety. It is also essential that the University act quickly to implement new guidelines.
Why Facebook is the Millennial’s Domesday Book
Joanna Taylor Deputy Editor
If you type “why are millennials—” into the Google Search bar, the first few suggestions Google makes are ‘important’, ‘so dumb’, ‘so lazy’, ‘so boring’, and ‘so anxious’. Millennials never do seem to get an especially fair, accurate, or in any way flattering portrayal in politics or the the media. I am setting out to answer that first
question — why are millennials so important? — across the course of this column. In order to make sense of the millennial, there is no better place to start than technology. We are a generation who once probably owned a tape player and Home Alone on VCR, but we now live in a world on the cusp of virtual reality, robots doing our jobs, and Amazon delivering our weekly shopping by drone. What I find perhaps most fascinating is the fact that social media has made each of us a historian, documenting and preserving pieces of our lives and personalities on Timelines in a far more thorough and scrupulous effort than the creation of the Domesday Book. We’re obsessed with publishing our social lives and doing research
projects into others’, which begs the age-old question: if a tree falls in forest and no-one is around to Instagram it, did it ever really happen? The digital biography we have each inadvertently created from around age twelve does, of course, have its major drawbacks: private companies have decades’ worth of dirt on us (and so do friends when they scroll back and drag up your old Facebook statuses) and can trigger major FOMO and even isolation. Snapchat is interesting because it contradicts my above point about our constant need to make moments tangible and permanent: every video and photo posted on there is, if you think about it, an admission of our own ephemerality and the transience of our
memories. It’s also interesting because the moments captured are often more authentic than on other forms of media, since we don’t pretend to be living in some hazy, edgy filter-world with fairy lights in the background. That same authenticity is what I love about the videos on Vine and YouTube: one thing I think millennials can be properly proud of is how well we do comedy. BME people dominate Vine, or at least did (RIP), while almost anyone can make YouTube videos, making technology a great equaliser in that respect. Although the BBC struggles to book its token panelshow woman each week, and Pointless has a primetime spot, millennials are already on at least post-post irony and are taking comedy in new directions.
Perhaps the best thing about technology is the extent to which it’s aiding our political awareness and engagement (‘woke’ is now in the dictionary), however. While many politicians are happy to turn a blind eye to the views of young people because there are few political repercussions for doing so (elections aren’t won on housing prices or tuition fees), social media offers platforms on which to discuss and debate ideas we wouldn’t otherwise come across. This does risk the simplification of ideas, the creation of echo chambers and — most crucially — the danger of political polarisation, but it also means that millennials are becoming galvanised on issues we care about, and shouldn’t be written off.