OSLA to me has been a pivotal part of my university experience during these two short years. Whilst yes, there have been and probably will always be bigger societies such as the Union, which will carry more prestige, none come close to OSLA when it comes to how important it’s been to me. My time in OSLA started confusingly by attending a Council meeting before I was even a member. Hayden Williams, the society’s dedicated Webmaster for two years, and essentially my college dad if there ever were such a thing at Brookes, invited me down to my first Liquor and Liberalism.

To the lay political observer, the Liberal Democrats probably featured little in their key takeaways from the local elections last month. They would likely be aware of our result in Richmond Upon Thames, given its portrayal as the ‘People’s Republic of Richmond’ on social media, but even that, for most, was merely a sidenote to the big stories of the night: Plaid Cymru in, Reform surging, and Labour disintegrating. There was then a second tier of key takeaways from May 7th: an unprecedented Green rise; a remarkable SNP fourth consecutive term in power in Holyrood; and a debate about whether the Tory decline was slowing down or not.

If liberal interventionism was crippled in Iraq, it died in Libya. Iraq showed the world how easily liberal language could be attached to regime change, then Libya showed that even a more recognisably humanitarian intervention could still end in collapse. This is not to say the instinct behind liberal interventionism was wrong. The principle behind it is one of the most attractive features of liberal theory: sovereignty cannot be a license for mass slaughter, and dissidents should be protected from tyrants.