Debatable points
Sir: I cannot quarrel with your opening comments on the Oxford Union debate (Notebook, 16 October) in which I was privileged to speak against you last Mon- day. I'm afraid it was bad luck that you happened to come to a debate so shambolic in its early stages in which, I think it is fair to say, Mr Trevor MacDonald was the only speaker to emerge with any credit.
Your remarks, however, became conten- tious when they slide from the particular to the general. Guest speakers are not there, fortunately, to entertain; they are there to lend to the debate the benefit of their specialised knowledge and experience before discussion of a necessarily more abstract nature takes over. Secondly there is, contrary to the impression you seem to have received, always considerable interest in the motion amongst the undergraduate audience. Debates invariably continue for two hours or more of five-minute speeches after the guests have made their escape back to the reception. Lastly, your horrific pic- ture of 'the mass of bored undergraduates, hoping for some light entertainment to relieve the tedium of their daily lives' can only have resulted from too close a reading of the article of 9 October by David Taylor, who seems to have gained so little from his student days that one wonders why he bothered to write about them at all.
I need hardly rehearse here the scores of
distractions which beckon to an undergraduates who have the elementary initiative to step outside their rooms; but of particular interest to your paper should .he the Oxford Union Society which, like Its counterparts elsewhere, stands for no political party, but for the right of free speech, for the principles of parliamentary democracy, and for all the associated ideas of which we who read the Spectator every week are so fond. You question `whether there is any point any longer in university debating societies'. I hope you will agree,' on reflection, that it is far better to see it done not well, once in a while, than not to see it done at all.
Nick Thomas
Oxford Union Society, Frewin Court, Oxford
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