Franek Bednarski (The Ex-Communications Director) is a first-year undergraduate reading Literae Humaniores at Jesus College.

There are certain conservative commentators who, in their modernising drive to bring our society, economy and culture up to the standards of the current age, have found a target which they are intent on vanquishing: Sunday trading hours. They argue, in their zeal, that the statutory limitation of business hours on the first day of the week is anachronistic and unnecessary, depriving employees of the liberty to choose when to work and when not to while drawing on an outdated, religious mode of thinking. I, indeed, too, I must admit, have at times been partial to such arguments, seeking to buy food, groceries, water, or even, in a more barren age, alcohol.

Peter Walker (ex-Committee Member) is a second year undergraduate reading Literae Humaniores at Merton College.

Tamworth is not the most obvious setting for an aetiology of the modern Conservative Party: it was an industrial town to the north-east of Birmingham on the border between Warwickshire and Staffordshire. Dreaming spires and sandstone buildings perhaps present a more plausible milieu for the genesis of Toryism than cotton mills and coal pits. Of course, Tamworth had once between the capital of the Kingdom of Mercia, but it had also achieved little of note in the intervening eight hundred years. History, however, does not play by the rules of mythology.

Christie Thomson (Committee Member) is a second-year student at Christ Church.

The UK port industry has suffered setbacks as a consequence of Brexit and the pandemic. Freeports are part of the Government’s plans to promote a sustainable and inclusive economic recovery at the national and local level. However, there is mixed evidence on whether freeports will achieve these aims.

Charlie Chadwick (The Publications Editor) is a first-year undergraduate at St Anne’s College reading Literae Humaniores.

What decade am I describing? A record number of Oxbridge admissions are from state schools. Prospects for bright, working-class kids are looking up. Private schools are struggling to compete, parents questioning the purpose of exorbitant fees. No, wrong. This is not 2022. It is, in fact, a description of the state of education in the early 1960s. What was the reason for this, you ask? The answer is very simple: grammar schools.

Spencer Shia (The Returning Officer) is studying for an MPhil in Late Antique and Byzantine Studies at Exeter College.

On the 3rd of May, POLITICO magazine leaked a draft majority opinion of the U.S. Supreme Court case Whole Women’s Health v. Dobbs. The opinion, authored by Justice Samuel Alito, seeks to overturn Roe v. Wade and its superseding case, Planned Parenthood v. Casey, which held that the American Constitution protects a right to abortion. This led to fury from the left, spawning myriad protests and op-eds largely attacking the court for reasons of public policy or abstract philosophy. However, whatever one may think about abortion, the role of the judiciary should not be to promulgate policies its members deem good and just.

Ioannis Angelos Karanasios is a first-year undergraduate reading Jurisprudence (with European Law) at Pembroke College.

We live in a society that is sick of itself; guilty and ashamed of its pride and joys yet fearful and resentful of change and of recognizing its vices and unfulfilled potential. The strain of the disease is particularly acute and tragic when one ponders the state of interpersonal relationships and human connections in the modern world. The individual is suffocated with emptiness. Distractions become the mundane spectre haunting our everyday life.

Jake Dibden (Committee Member) is a first-year History and Politics student at Trinity College.

Over the course of the last year, the government has had to increase rates of taxation which, as with any sniff of tax rises, caused outrage amongst members of the Conservative Party. For some reason, born out of nostalgia for the brutal free-market, low-tax economics of Thatcher, and the fetishisation of Reaganomics, even the youngest members of the Conservative Party see increases in taxation on personal wealth as being inherently contradictory to our position as the ‘party of aspiration’.

Ellie Williams (The Social Secretary) is a second year undergraduate at Regent’s Park College reading Classics and English.

It was a cold Hilary morning in deepest, darkest Cowley. The OUCA contingent had bravely set out to help the East Oxford Conservatives understand the views of residents on local issues. ‘Bravely’ is by no means an understatement. The unsuspecting OUCA members were faced with an onslaught of very opinionated and heated citizens at every door. However, it appeared that one issue in particular was, to quote one gentleman, ruining their lives.

Franek Bednarski (The Communications Director) is a first year Classicist at Jesus College.

When Constantine, having swept through the empire in triumph and vanquished his rivals, finally captured Rome from Maxentius, he decided to construct a great triumphal arch between the Palatine and the Colosseum. Built in a space surrounded by older works of architectural beauty, depictions of the titans of the old Rome, he wanted it to convey the key tenets of his own reign: from the inscription referring to his own divine inspiration to depictions of imperial grandeur, it was to be the culmination of his victorious tour of the provinces and a final portrayal of his unquestioned power.