After the Copenhagen attacks on a café hosting a debate on free speech, only a month after a similar attack on the offices of Charlie Hebdo, I took to the streets of East London with the citizen TV channel Worldbytes to test the public’s attitude to free speech.  Some responses were reassuring, affirming the fundamental importance of free speech to liberal democracy, but others were more cautious, condemning the violence but worried about causing offence.  Have a look below:

I was particularly struck by the amount of people who advocated forms of self-censorship.  Although I would disagree wholeheartedly, I can understand why people may view self-censorship as a necessary evil for avoiding needless conflict in daily life.  Frank Furedi has written for spiked on the recent tendency to misconstrue tolerance as a polite gesture of passive “non-judgementalism,” but some of the interviewees called for neither tolerance, which would  allow for robust and challenging debate, nor for the suspense of judgement.  Instead, we saw the much more insidious view of self-censorship as a form of “respect.”  Britain has a great tradition of healthy scepticism towards every facet of its own culture and institutions, but when it comes to other potentially conflicting cultural values, it seems the only judgement we should express is a positive one.  This does a disservice not only to those who self-censor, but also to the other cultures we believe to be showing “respect.” It permanently cordons off people with views or upbringings different to our own as “other,” as people with whom we shouldn’t engage in the same way you would anyone else, and it refuses to take them seriously as people capable of handling the arguments and, indeed, offence that result from participation in democratic society.

“Snooze,” a short film I co-directed with Jonas Zimmermann and Rhys Edwards for Campus Moviefest, an international student filmmaking competition, is being screened on Saturday 29th November in Cineworld Haymarket.  Needless to say, I’m thrilled that it was one of the many entries that’s been selected and I can’t wait to see it and my face (I’m the one in the suit on the left) on the big screen.

The film stars Charlie Hooper (who previously won best actor for another Campus Moviefest entry) and features cameo appearances from all three directors. 

The rules of the competition only allowed us 6 days for writing, shooting and editing. Everything was shot in a single day in which we spent most of the afternoon riding back-and-forth on the Picadilly Line, trying to avoid TFL staff.

Thankfully there were remarkably less setbacks than I expected, given the guerrilla-style shooting the film needed, though we were seriously distracted at one point at the sight of a dog carrying it’s owner’s briefcase… The footage sadly didn’t make the final cut.

This article by  Hannah Jane Parkinson first appeared in Student Beans on 26/04/13 but annoyingly hasn’t named me as the person who submitted the motion to the JCR - nor did they get in touch!

At Jesus College, no less.

This article by Ally Leigh first appeared in the Oxstu on 25/04/2014

esus will be getting into hot water this term, after its JCR voted overwhelmingly for the installation of a hot tub in college accommodation.

Noting that “JCR members (especially finalists) have worked extremely hard this year and deserve a reward”, the vote fell unanimously in favour of putting £400 of the JCR budget towards the cost of the hot tub.

The hot tub will be installed in the Cowley Road third year accommodation, in weeks eight and nine of Trinity term. Unsurprisingly, the current second year students and the freshers and were most supportive of the motion. JCR President Andrew Rogers said: “essentially the 1st and 2nd years voted for the 3rd years to have a hot tub.”

Fraser Myers, who proposed the motion, and is captain of the Jesus female tanning team, was delighted with the result, claiming that “the JCR hot tub should provide an additional selling point to any Brookes girls I plan to invite home.

In reply to concerns that the arrangement would risk a restaging of the 2010 film Hot Tub Time Machine, Myers replied that he was “skeptical about its ability to alter the space-time continuum.”

Alex Russman, captain of the men’s tanning team, and a staunch supporter of the scheme, said: “As a linchpin of College’s social and extracurricular life, I can confirm the hot tub is vital for the drive to provide a warmer, and damper, environment in which to rendezvous at the 3rd year accommodation.”

Some students did question the lack of exclusivity of the hot tub. First-year Douglas Cameron-Hobbs commented: “Presumably ‘hot’ is solely defining temperature.  If not we need full college-wide disclosure and preferably a rota.”

However, most JCR members wholeheartedly celebrated the result, with Classics student Emilia Carslaw saying she was “looking forward to getting steamed.”

In light of the hygiene concerns that a hot tub frequented by over three hundred students represents, Jesus JCR voted unanimously to elect next year’s OUSU president and ex-JCR president Tom Rutland, as “Hot Tub Officer”, to be responsible for the hot tub’s state of cleanliness.

Commenting on his installment to the office, Tom said: “I’m always willing to get stuck in but I’m not quite sure how much I’m going to enjoy getting my hands dirty in this respect…”

The urge to relax in a hot tub with one’s fellow JCR members at the end of a gruelling essay crisis is relatively new movement to Oxford. However, the practice is commonplace in Cambridge, where popular nightclub ‘The Place’ (which bears comparison to Oxford’s own Park End) boasts a hot tub, fondly referred to by students as “a petri dish of STDs”.