A Less Perfect Union

Charlie Kirk’s tragic murder has had ramifications across America, but one of its strangest consequences has been to bring a venerable British institution to the brink of disaster. The Oxford Union, founded in 1823, was rocked by the revelation that its president-elect, George Abaraonye, had flippantly expressed jubilation when he heard that Charlie had been shot. Brittany Bernstein’s article here will bring you up to date with what has happened since (and the story is by no means over), but the deeper aspects say a lot about where Britain is today, and why what might seem a minor contretemps in a student society has been treated so seriously.

The Oxford Union has been described as “the playground of power,” because so many notable British politicians and prominent personalities got their start there. From Gladstone, through Salisbury, to Harold Macmillan, Ted Heath, and in more recent years Boris Johnson, all cut their political teeth on the Union’s peculiar brand of nonpartisan personal politics. At a dinner to celebrate the society’s sesquicentennial in 1973, former Prime Minister Macmillan asked, “What is the University? Only the background against which the Union is cast.”

Some might say this plays to the society’s inflated sense of its own importance. They might have a point, but the fact is that the Union is not part of the University and has indeed at times defied the University. It’s long-serving doorman, Jim, would tell me in the 1980s that in the 1950s he had proudly barred the University Proctors from entering the Union, on the grounds that they were not members. The Proctors were Oxford University’s disciplinarians — for instance, patrolling for students who were not wearing their gowns — and the Union provided the more independent students refuge from them.

Not only did the Union therefore give students a sense of their own dignity as young men (at the time, they were all men), but its prominence allowed them to meet on equal terms with those Britons usually referred to as “their political masters.” As the late Christopher Hitchens, a firebrand in 1960s Oxford, put it, “It’s quite good for the character to be debating with Cabinet Ministers at the age of seventeen.” As the Hitch went on to say, this also gave the students an opportunity to witness what feet of clay those masters had. “The idea was supposed to be that the Union Chamber prepared you for the rigours of Westminster, yet every week you could see household names from the Mother of Parliaments, doggedly proving that they were not up to Union standards.” I have to say that was my experience as well.

Yet while the Union promoted excellence and ambition alike in the Chamber, its elections were another matter entirely. For years, there was a pretense that electioneering was infra dig for the society, and that its officials were elected purely on merit and ability. Nothing could have been further from the truth. Precisely because success could launch a stellar career, elections were hard-fought and cutthroat. To me, they resembled the elections of the first century b.c. Roman Republic, with its shifting factions, professions of amicitia (temporary electoral alliances), and, of course, vicious knifings in the back. The manner in which candidates would seek to avoid the attention of those sainted souls, the Returning Officers, only helped them hone the edge of their political blades.

While the Union has a reputation as a conservative institution, it goes through radical, even left-wing phases. In the 1930s, for instance, the Union famously passed the motion “This House would in no circumstances fight for King and Country,” much to the outrage of the Society’s alumni, who attempted and failed to have the motion expunged from its records. In the 1960s, as Hitchens related, it adjourned sine die for the only time in its history, owing to a riot over the Vietnam War, in the presence of the then foreign secretary (a former officer of the Union himself.)

Yet throughout all of this, there were two constants, an at-times grudging respect for one’s political foes (even if rivalries formed in the Union’s back rooms carried on into Parliament and beyond) and a respect for what the Union represented at Oxford and in the United Kingdom both — a promise of a venue for the peaceful yet cut-and-thrust exchange of views crystallized in vigorous debate. To this end, the Union had rules of debate that make Roberts’ Rules of Orders look as if they’ve been scribbled on the back of a napkin.

Much of this seems to have collapsed in recent years. One thing that struck me when examining the term card (the booklet that lays out the society’s activities for the term) for Michaelmas is that, like Britain as a whole, the Union has become bureaucratized. Where previously the president and three junior elected officers ran the place, supported by elected committee members with a few appointed committees where expertise was necessary (such as the Library and Rules Committees on which I served), the current Union administration has no fewer than 18 “senior appointed” officers.

These include the laughable position of “Chief Whip” and do not count the “First Lady.” Many of these are performing duties traditionally reserved to elected officers, such as social events (which were the preserve of the secretary) or sponsorship (the job of the treasurer). There are a further 24 “junior appointed” officers, which of course includes the now-usual crop of DEI-related roles and responsibilities.

Of course, this gives the president enormous patronage power. If you can get a good job to list on your résumé and your picture in the term card without having to go through the messy business of election, why not? One of Abaraonye’s seemingly reluctant supporters has alleged on X that the entire current farrago in fact represents an acrimonious split within a dominant faction. While it was ever thus, the Union’s seeming bureaucratization may have shifted the locus of power — from the debating chamber and elections to patronage power and the ability to reverse elections. (Several recent president-elects have been disqualified from office, it seems.)

There has also been a change in the Union’s membership base. As Daniel Hannan explains here, membership now comes stapled to an offer letter from the prestigious Said Business School, with its largely foreign-born graduate student body, while the ordinary undergraduate has to pay a very large amount for membership. As Dan says, this skews the electorate and is self-reinforcing. Of the ten debates this term, four are about foreign policy and two are about decolonization; the traditionally light-hearted debate at the end of term is instead about whether 9/11 was “weaponized” to expand the American empire.

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