George Abaraonye, the President-Elect of the Oxford Union, has been ousted following outrage over his celebration of Charlie Kirk’s shooting after 70% of members voted to remove him. The Telegraph has more.
George Abaraonye, who was due to take over as president of the 202 year-old debating society next term, has been forced out following a vote on Saturday.
The Oxford Union published the results of the vote on Tuesday morning. Of 1,746 votes cast, 1,228 [70.3%] were in favour of no-confidence, meaning the no-confidence motion carried. Rules state that at least two-thirds of valid votes must be cast in favour for the motion to be passed.
The outcome of the vote was set to be published on Sunday but the process was delayed over identity checks on proxy votes submitted by alumni.
Sources claimed that close to 1,000 life members of the Oxford Union registered proxy votes against the philosophy, politics and economics (PPE) student last week after an organised push to oust him.
A notice posted at the university read: “As this threshold has been met, the motion of no confidence has been carried.”
Oxford Union officials told the Telegraph the vote count had descended into chaos as they had to check the identity of every proxy vote manually.
The process was temporarily suspended on Monday morning after the Oxford Union’s extraordinary returning officer claimed he was “subjected to obstruction, intimidation and unwarranted hostility by a number of representatives”.
Mr Abaraonye, 20, has contested the results, claiming he “is and remains the President-Elect”. He then claimed the poll was “compromised” and he did not know “if or how many proxy votes have been tampered with”.
The debating society has been engulfed in a free speech row after The Telegraph revealed in September that Mr Abaraonye had shared messages in which he appeared to celebrate the lethal attack on Kirk, a Right-wing US influencer.
The final-year PPE student at University College, Oxford, sent texts to a chat group, including one saying, “Charlie Kirk got shot, let’s f—— go”, a common celebratory phrase among Gen Z.
Another message, believed to be sent from his Instagram account, said: “Charlie Kirk got shot loool.”
The student had debated Kirk in the Oxford Union chamber months earlier, with the pair exchanging views on marriage, gender norms and toxic masculinity. …
In a statement to the Telegraph last week, he said: “The union is a formative space where students learn, often through error. Making a mistake and growing from it is part of the university experience. For members who know me or have engaged with me since, I hope they see that growth and my commitment to the role.
“Ultimately, the specific outcome [of the vote] is secondary to the principle. The goal is to demonstrate that the Oxford Union will not be bullied by cancel culture and will stand firm in its commitment to free speech, a fair process and reasoned debate.”
After the results were announced, Mr Abaraonye’s team released a statement which read: “This poll was compromised from the moment Moosa Harraj [President of the Oxford Union] and his majority on the Standing Committee brought compromised and untested Poll Regulations.
“George is proud and thankful to have the support of well in excess of a majority of students at Oxford, who voted to have a safe election and resist attempts to subvert democracy.”
Worth reading in full.
See Related Article Below
Daniel Hannan: The Oxford Union Has Ditched Its President – but He Was Merely a Symptom of Deeper Decline
DANIEL HANNAN
Lord Hannan of Kingsclere was a Conservative MEP from 1999 to 2020 and is now President of the Institute for Free Trade.
Believe it or not, I feel sorry for George Abaraonye, the now-ousted president-elect of the Oxford Union. He put himself in an impossible position by his response to Charlie Kirk’s murder, and mine was one of the votes that ousted him (the tally, after three days of wrangles and challenges, was 1228 to 501, comfortably in excess of the required two thirds majority).
Still, social media have a way of freeze-framing our worst moments and inviting the world to judge us by them. I certainly wouldn’t want to be evaluated by the stupid things I said when I was 20. I was also unimpressed by the way self-proclaimed free speech warriors on the Right called for Abaraonye to be disciplined by his college or even by the police.
But he could not remain at the helm of an organisation dedicated to free expression. Kirk, let’s remember, was murdered while touring campuses under a sign inviting students to “change my mind”. Someone decided instead to shoot him dead, the bullet passing, with grisly symbolism, through his throat. If your immediate reaction is to cheer, you are the wrong person to run a debating society.
Abaraonye was slow to apologise, claiming at first that his views were less controversial than Kirk’s. Eventually, he declared that his intemperate remarks (“Charlie Kirk got shot, let’s fucking go” and “Charlie Kirk got shot loool”) “did not reflect my values”.
Well, maybe. Though I am reminded of something CS Lewis said in one of his wartime broadcasts:
“Surely what a man does when he is taken off his guard is the best evidence for what sort of a man he is? Surely what pops out before the man has time to put on a disguise is the truth? If there are rats in a cellar you are most likely to see them if you go in very suddenly. But the suddenness does not create the rats: it only prevents them from hiding.”
Abaraonye has the right to free speech. He can express whatever idiocies he likes without facing legal sanction. Equally, the Oxford Union has the right to free association, and can decide that he is no longer a suitable public face.
Another reason I feel a batsqueak of sympathy for Abaraonye is that he was caught out by the vibe shift. Had he expressed the same views at the height of the BLM madness in 2020, no one would have batted an eyelid. His supporters portrayed the campaign against him as having been got up by racists and are even now refusing to accept the result.
They blame the Returning Officer who, worn out by their behaviour, ended up excluding some of them from the count. Their statement contains the unintentionally hilarious line: “We equivocally deny that any representative appointed by George engaged in intimidating or disruptive behaviour.”
They also claim that, had the vote been confined to current students, he would have won. And, sadly, they are almost certainly correct. Which brings us to the underlying problem. The Oxford Union has gone off the rails. Obsessed with the need to “decolonise”, it will elect any candidate who is not white or who promises to smash the patriarchy.
The Union was never the bastion of white privilege that its young culture warriors imagine: a glance at the photographs on its walls suggests that, for most of the past century, its officers were less white than Britain as a whole. But it is now very difficult for a white candidate to be elected at all.
This trend reflects an altered electorate. Although no one will admit it on the record, several Oxford colleges are evidently subordinating meritocratic admission to DEI. Abaraonye himself is reported to have got in with A, B, B at A-level, well short of what is normally required.
At the same time, Oxford has many more international students, especially post-graduates. A deal with the Saïd Business School gives its students, 97 per cent of whom are from overseas, automatic Union membership. Nothing wrong with that: the students get a richer experience, and the Union badly needs the cash.
But it does skew the electorate. The term before last, for example, all four elected officers were Pakistani nationals. This term, there is more diversity: two Pakistanis, one Brit of Pakistani heritage and one Korean. Many of the debates are about niche foreign policy issues or about Palestine. This tends to put ordinary undergraduates off paying for membership, thereby skewing the electorate yet further and worsening the Union’s financial woes.
Can anything be done to break the cycle? The way to get more undergraduate members would be to let the Union include its brochure with the bumph sent to offer-holders. This used to happen, with the result that many students were given membership by family members who did not want to give them drinking money.
The ending of that arrangement, following a long campaign by the Oxford University Student Union (which envied the Oxford Union’s premises and complained that its name was confusing) marked the start of the Union’s decline. Perhaps the current Chancellor, William Hague, himself a Union hack in his time, might use his convening power to restore the old deal (with the Union, naturally, paying a fee for the service).
In the short term, some of the alumni who voted on Saturday might also back a restorationist slate of some kind – by which I mean candidates who value the history and traditions of the Union. If you have life membership, make a note of the date of Friday of Seventh Week: 28 November.
This article (Daniel Hannan: The Oxford Union has ditched its president – but he was merely a symptom of deeper decline) was created and published by Conservative Home and is republished here under “Fair Use” with attribution to the author Daniel Hannan
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