Oxford Union blues

The Oxford Union is 200 years old this year.

The only reason I know this is because I follow James Price, a former President of the Union, on Facebook and a few days ago he posted this:

As the founding Chairman of The Oxford Union’s Bicentenary Committee, I’m so excited that 2023 has arrived!

The amazing (and quite new) team at the Union, staff and student committee, are working so hard to put on a range of events to commemorate this epic milestone.

The Union has a unique place in the history of our country (and the world) and we will make sure we reflect that heritage as well making the place more accessible to future generations of students.

And finally, we will make sure the Union remains, in the words of Harold Macmillan, “the last bastion of free speech in the Western world”.

I’m proud to say that I have taken part in two Oxford Union debates. The first time was in February 2005 when I teamed up with TV chef (and Forest patron) Antony Worrall Thompson to oppose the motion that ‘This House would ban smoking in all public places’.

Proposing the motion was Professor Sir Charles George, president of the British Medical Association, and Lord Faulkner of Worcester.

The result was a win for the ayes, 118 - 82, which was ironic because only a few months earlier the Union had been forced to reverse a self-imposed smoking ban after students deserted the Union bar in favour of the local pubs!

Ten years later the IEA’s Mark Littlewood and I were asked to propose the motion ‘The tobacco industry is not morally reprehensible’.

Australia’s leading anti-smoking campaigner Professor Simon Chapman was approached to oppose the motion but Chapman rejected the invitation so our principal opponents were Baroness Finlay of Llandaff, the peer who proposed the bill to ban smoking in public places in Wales, and Professor Gerard Hastings, founder of the Centre for Tobacco Control Research and a special advisor to the House of Commons’ Health Select Committee.

You can read my report of the debate here but the bottom line is I was on the losing side, again, with the ayes winning 77 - 60. So not my finest hours and I can’t say I fully enjoyed either experience.

Don’t get me wrong. I was thrilled to be invited and I enjoyed the theatre of the occasion - the pre-dinner drinks followed by dinner with the committee and fellow speakers, then the debate in an historic location and the knowledge that we were following in the footsteps of presidents and prime ministers - but public speaking makes me nervous and walking into the debating chamber was a bit like being led to the gallows.

It doesn’t help that I’ve never mastered the ability to give a speech without notes or a full script. I wish I could because I envy those who can.

The last time I remember giving even a short speech without notes was when I addressed the ASI’s Next Generation Group in the upstairs room of a pub in London.

The space was quite small and the audience (who were standing) were so close some people were almost in my face so although I had a written speech prepared it wasn’t possible to read it.

It therefore remained in my pocket and I blurted out what I could remember - for ten minutes. Funnily enough it was probably one of my better received speeches although, to be fair, alcohol had been consumed (by everyone).

It taught me though that sometimes it’s not what you say but how you say it (the conviction, the energy) that people remember.

I doubt I will get another opportunity to address the Oxford Union but at least I can say I’ve done it and one day perhaps, in a few hundred years, an historian writing about the Union’s 500th anniversary will stumble upon a reference to a 2005 debate about banning smoking in public places and ask, “What was that all about?”

By coincidence the subject of yesterday’s post, ‘Arise Sir Julian’, resigned his life membership of the Oxford Union in 2007 in protest at the Union’s decision ‘to offer the privilege of a platform to this country’s best-known Holocaust denier and also to the leader of the British National Party’.

You can read the full letter here.

On a lighter note see: Oxford Union elects ‘joke’ candidate president seven years after he graduated (Independent).

Below: Yours truly addressing the Oxford Union in 2015