“Does this stuff just bore you?”, asks an agitated Oxford don after an hour of forced discussion about the political economy of World War Two. “Is this why we now have George ‘unremarkable 2:1’ Osborne as Chancellor?”, he goes on, disheartened by the lack of interest his undergraduates have shown in Beveridge, Keynes and Hayek. Young people, it would appear to him, even Oxford history students, have no interest in political ideas.
Yet the arguments in our defence are compelling. We explain that we have lived our whole lives in a neo-liberal, post-Thatcherite ideological vacuum. Thehyperbolic clashes of the twentieth century’s intellectual heavyweights are a world away from the monotonous, and frequently broken, promises of the career politicians that have dominated the discourse of our lifetime.
The Russell Brand episode and the enormous response it received soon becomes our tutorial’s topic of conversation. We explain how ‘Brandism’ is emblematic of how disengaged our generation has become. The comedian is certainly no Keynes. However, what he said was something we have never yet heard – that it doesn’t have to be like this. That there should be an alternative. Although Brand may not know what that alternative is, even the suggestion that a new idea could take root excites a generation that has only ever known a gap where the Big Ideas should be. The very fact I just felt the need to give Brand an ‘ism’ only goes to show our yearning for an ideology. We are bored stiff by the status quo.
Yet as the Oxford University Student Union elections demonstrated last week, this paralysing lethargy is not confined to third year history students. With a turnout of only 21%, LJ Trup, the joke candidate promising to build a monorail through Oxford and turn the Bodleian Library into a night club, was elected.
Trup’s victory was in part down to a shrewd election campaign. He eschewed the usual door knocking and leafleting. He preferred to upload a video of himself belting out that speech from Braveheart, accompanied by bagpipes and hoards of screaming students. Unconventional, yes, but it certainly caught the imagination.
He owes his new 20k salary to his main opponent, however. The outstanding favourite for most of the race, Jane Cahill was cast as the stereotypical student politician. Her painfully unoriginal ‘Jane4Change’ slogan, her awkward, insistent use of hand gestures while talking and her frightfully organised campaigning clique of loyal followerswere alternatively mocked andloathed by students. Trup’s rallying cry ‘#LJTrup4ousu4chang’’ poked fun at his well-polished rival. In the final week of the campaign, Cahill even felt the need to write an article defending the notion of a ‘student politician’. We were clearly not convinced. Cahill, rightly or wrongly, came to symbolise everything we now resent in politics.
Like Brand, Trup isn’t a genius. Unlike every other political figure, however, he isn’t mind-numbingly boring. But our fetishisation of his charisma only demonstrates the dearth of remotely interesting people elsewhere.
This election result is just another symptom of disengagement with the political class, even if this time it’s only the student political class we are rebelling against. One thousand six hundred and eight five students were willing to vote for a man who wrote his manifesto in crayon. We are that desperate for an alternative.
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