THE Oxford Union Society is probably the most renowned debating society in the world and it is based at one of the world’s most eminent universities. Past presidents include a number of British Prime Ministers, such as Boris Johnson and Edward Heath, and other senior politicians, including Michael Gove, William Hague and Michael Heseltine. Traditionally, it has been one of the last bastions of conservatism and free speech at Oxford, the leftists being drawn to the Student Union. Surely, you wouldn’t expect it to be destroyed by wokeness, but you’d be wrong. It is in the process of being obliterated by this exact ideology.
As I’ve shown in my book Woke Eugenics, studies find that wokeness, and leftism in general, is associated with Machiavellianism (the desire for power), narcissism (entitlement and a need to feel important) and neuroticism: negative feelings such as resentment, hatred, fear and anxiety. Due to the ‘fearing a fight’ inherent in neuroticism, this militates in favour of virtue-signalling and, otherwise, covertly obtaining power.
It follows that leftists engage in hierarchal aggression: they feel they should have power, resent anything symbolic of power and so wish to bring it down. But they also desire to obtain power and feel entitled to the trappings of power; to acknowledgement of their importance. This leads us to the Gramscian ‘march through the institutions’, where they covertly obtain power by taking over and subverting all traditional power structures. Hence, we shouldn’t be surprised by the superficial contradiction of their castigating Oxford University as elitist and privileged but yet wanting to study there, nor by their having the same attitude towards the Oxford Union Society (usually known as the Oxford Union), yet wanting to be deeply involved in it.
The takeover of Oxford University itself by leftist academics has played a key role in this. Increasingly, students who perform poorly in the entrance exam or interview or who fail to make their A-Level offer are accepted anyway because they are ethnic minority, a female ethnic minority, have been to a bad school, or because they are otherwise part of the grievance hierarchy. Surrounded by people who are far more intelligent and knowing, deep down, that they are DEI tokens who don’t deserve to be at Oxford, such people can be expected to become resentful and, therefore, desire power to allay their negative feelings. Low intelligence also predicts corruption, because you underestimate the possibility of being caught, and low trust, meaning a tendency to see your rivals as enemies.
To make matters worse, Oxford is under financial pressure to reject Britons in favour of international students for the simple reason that they can charge them considerably higher tuition fees. These non-European foreigners will, often, be talented members of their own country’s upper class and, feeling like outsiders at Oxford, we can, again, expect them to allay their negative feelings by obtaining positions of influence. Neuroticism is associated with Machiavellianism because power makes the unhappy person feel a sense of control in a frightening or unstable world.
Finally, as I noted in Woke Eugenics, intelligence is associated with being socially conformist; having the effortful control to force yourself to conform and then optimally competitively signal the dominant ideology. In addition to intelligence, extreme academic success is actually predicted by the same moderately anti-social personality traits that are associated with leftism. For example, anxiety weakly predicts academic success, because you worry about failure and are constantly ruminating, while low conscientiousness means you’ll ‘think outside the box’.
What has the result of this process been for the Oxford Union Society? Since about 2012, it has been pretty much taken over by ethnic minorities and foreigners. Of the 42 presidents (there are three per year) since 2012, judging by their names, 26 of them have either been foreign or not native British, including all three in 2025-2026. Unsurprisingly, this appears to have coincided with a series of ‘controversies’ and with increasing evidence of incompetence and corruption.
A society that was once a haven of free speech – hosting Nick Griffin and David Irving on the same day (November 27, 2007) – has developed an anti-free-speech, woke faction which uses strict interpretations of rules to suppress political opponents. In 2012, presidential candidate Madeline Grant was formally disciplined by the union for bringing it into disrepute via sexism for her campaign slogan ‘I don’t hack. I just have a great rack!’ (‘To hack’ refers to creating political factions. There was concern that factionalism was overshadowing the focus on debates).
The following year, the male secretary-designate stood down because a female member of the committee objected to his ‘sexist‘ memes. In 2019, the Oxford Union had a kind of George Floyd moment when a blind Ghanaian man was dragged from the debating chamber for creating a disturbance. This led to a woke pile-on and the president and various other officers were forced to resign.
By 2023, one of the student newspapers was reporting a ‘democratic crisis’ at the Oxford Union. Returning Officers had the power to reject supposedly unfit presidential candidates for office and did so, candidates were fined for ‘vexatious claims’, a presidential candidate claimed he wanted to eat his opponent’s ballots, there were allegations of officers lying to members of the society, attempts at a cover-up and much else. In other words, the ‘bastion of free speech’ had turned into a banana republic. In 2024, the president-elect, Ebrahim Osman-Mowafy, was removed after a tribunal found him guilty of making vexatious allegations, leading to a campaign which argued that he was being targeted by ‘conservative’ members for being from a ‘non-traditional background.’ He was reinstated with the union’s governing bodies declaring themselves ‘institutionally racist.’
Naturally, this led to pressure to keep electing non-white presidents, furthered by the fact that all members of the society can vote for the president with most students being leftists. In 2025, black president-elect George Abaraonye, who’d been admitted to Oxford despite failing the usual A-level offer, had to resign after the backlash caused by him revelling in the assassination of Charlie Kirk, with whom he had previously debated.
Earlier this year, president-elect Catherine Xu was found guilty of electoral fraud, specifically getting people to impersonate legitimate voters. At the same time, the president, a Palestinian called Arwa Elrayess, praised Hamas, claiming they’d be ‘lauded as heroes’, leading to calls for her resignation. Prominent headmistress Katherine Birbalsingh highlighted the rudeness of her administration. The society wrote to Birbalsingh inviting her to speak in a debate and asking her which dates were suitable. Birbalsingh’s secretary replied and the society never bothered to write back.
The same president wrote to me, inviting me to participate in a debate on Islam. I replied with a query and, again, she didn’t have the basic British politeness to write back. In the end, I telephoned Elrayess to find out what was going on. She told me, in what can only be described as an extremely rude and dishonest practice, that they over-invite speakers for any debate and then pick who they want of those who can make it. This had happened to activist Carl Benjamin in the past. He was actually selected this time but then his invitation was withdrawn on the day of the debate via an email not signed by the president because of ‘sexist’ remarks they had suddenly discovered he’d made in the past, even though he’s infamous for these comments about MP Jess Phillips. This implies last-minute left-wing pressure. In terms of rudeness, in 2024, Michael Heseltine walked out of a debate, branding it ‘disgraceful’, after it was delayed by an hour, with students arguing over internal Union politics.
I was told by an Oxford student that this kind of shoddy behaviour is what has emerged as the Oxford Union has been taken over by foreigners, and this rather makes sense. Until about 2010, the Oxford Union was English, and mainly conservative, and it had certain standards: freedom of speech, gentlemanly conduct, honesty and a firm belief in democracy. As it has been taken over by leftists and people from clannish societies this has clearly changed, and we see vexatious allegations, being disciplined for upsetting woke activists, electoral fraud, incompetence, support for terrorist groups, joy in the murder of political opponents, and plain rudeness and dishonesty. This is, at least in part, because English traditions are inextricably linked to the English people. The Oxford Union is a microcosm of what is happening to England itself.
