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  1. The Weekend Report
11 May 2024

On the Oxbridge barricade

Pro-Palestinian protesters at British universities are obscuring their own message.

By Harry Lambert

The University of Cambridge has more than 20,000 students. At lunchtime on Thursday 9 May, 41 of them were encamped on a small patch of lawn along King’s Parade, outside one of the university’s grandest colleges in the centre of town.

If 41 students had set up camp anywhere else in the country other than Cambridge or Oxford, it is unlikely their protest would generate much interest or publicity. But a historical reverence for these institutions has handed students here an outsized voice in the national story. When Oxbridge students act, the media duly follows.

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