Maternity care in the NHS has become a site of crisis. A series of high-profile reviews into unsafe care, rising maternal mortality rates, and persistent staff shortages has exposed a system under strain, one that disproportionately harms women from minority ethnic backgrounds and deprived areas. Most recently, the government has commissioned a national investigation into maternity care to be led by Oxford’s own Baroness Amos, Master of University College. Reports accumulate, inquiries are launched, failures are identified, recommendations follow – and yet the pattern repeats. The question is no longer whether there is a problem, but why it has proven so resistant to change. 

For Dr Lorin Lakasing, a consultant obstetrician who has spent more than three decades working in NHS maternity care, the answer is not especially mysterious. “This is not a system that’s working for anyone at the moment”, she says, describing a service that is failing both patients and the staff tasked with caring for them. Speaking to me from her clinic whilst still in her scrubs, it is clear that Lakasing’s life revolves around her profession. What is equally clear, however, is that she finds the job she loves increasingly untenable. 

What is striking, when speaking to Lakasing, is the sheer difference between the current system and the one she entered. Obstetrics was not a long-held ambition: she had initially been drawn to renal medicine, working with young patients on a dialysis unit, but found herself pulled in a different direction during a placement on a labour ward. It was, she recalls, “pandemonium”, with every room full – but also energising. “I just like this buzz. I like the adrenaline. I like all of this.” The appeal wasn’t just in the pace, but also the immediacy of the work – that decisions had to be made quickly but that their consequences were visible. It was possible, as she puts it, to “shift the dial”. The work was hard, but it was also clear in its purpose and grounded in shared responsibility.

That clarity, Lakasing argues, has eroded over time, not through a single reform but what she describes as a “perfect storm” of smaller changes. These shifts have accumulated slowly, reshaping both the structure of care and the experience for patients. “The minute-to-minute care [has become] less rewarding”, she reflects, describing a system that has become “less human, more process driven”. Care delivered by a team from a wide range of specialities, now central to how maternity services are organised, often manifests as a fragmented model in practice, with decisions made in meetings or on screens by clinicians who may never actually meet the patient. At the same time, the demands placed on doctors’ time have also changed significantly. Junior staff, she notes, are increasingly preoccupied with documentation and compliance, to the point that “they’re not actually interacting with the woman and explaining to her what’s going on”. What was once a patient-focused environment has become layered with bureaucracy.

The consequences of this shift have been profound for clinicians. Where Lakasing once remembers camaraderie and a shared sense of purpose, she now describes “a culture of fear and worry and blame”. The pressures of the job haven’t diminished but they have been redirected, demanding a  “constant sort of firefighting… just being able to survive to the next shift.” In this context, rising levels of burnout are understandably inevitable. This is compounded by the changes to the broader experience of  those entering the profession: “I think now you guys are all qualifying with debt, with all sorts of uncertainties about job prospects… I see how the mentality changes.” The result is a workforce navigating not only the demands of clinical care, but also a far more precarious professional landscape.

For patients, these changes have made a significant difference in terms of how they experience maternity care and care across the NHS. Consultations become shorter and interactions more impersonal. It is in this context that Lakasing understands the growing turn towards online sources of information: “If you get some five minutes of very bland midwifery interaction where they’re looking at the screen more than they are at you and you have a list of questions and you don’t feel like they’re answered, then you will look elsewhere.” 

What concerns her isn’t this instinct to seek the information, but the nature of what is found. She describes the rise of “harmful birthing narratives” – belief systems that present particular approaches to pregnancy and childbirth as inherently superior, often tied to moralised ideas of what it means to be a “good” mother. These narratives can often be difficult to challenge, particularly since they resonate with patients who already feel unheard or ignored by the system.

In extreme cases, the consequences can be devastating. Lakasing points to a recent case involving the deaths of both mother and baby, shaped in part by decisions influenced by online advice following a traumatic first birth. But her emphasis isn’t on the advice itself, but what preceded it: a failure of care that left the patient unwilling to return to the system. The problem, in other words, isn’t simply the misinformation available online, but the absence of relationships within healthcare that feel trustworthy enough to counter it. “The biggest victims are of course the patients”, she says, though she is equally clear that staff are also caught within the same failing structures.

A significant part of the issue, in Lakasing’s view, lies in how success is defined and measured within the NHS. Targets and regulatory frameworks have come to dominate the assessment of maternity services, often in ways that distort rather than support good care. “They are the crux of the problem.” The emphasis on measuring the service, she argues, has led to a system in which “we’re so process driven that we’re pretty much treating patient outcomes as an incidental byproduct of a great process we have”. 

The problem is not inherently the metrics, but that they frequently fail to capture what actually matters. The widely cited case of the Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust clearly illustrates this. The trust was praised for its low caesarean rate yet, just months later, became the focus of an inquiry that exposed significant failures in care, which may have led to the deaths of more than 200 infants and 9 mothers, and left other babies with life-changing injuries. “When we have metrics that don’t make sense, we get really bad behaviours”, she notes.

Attempts to address these problems through public inquiries have consistently fallen short. “They’ve all failed”, she says, arguing that earlier investigations have been too shaped by management perspectives that fail to reflect the realities of delivering care “on the shop floor”. More recent inquiries, focused on amplifying the voices of ‘harmed patients’, risk creating a different kind of distortion by implying that all adverse outcomes are preventable. “That’s clearly not true”, she says, explaining how “there are people who have very good outcomes whose care has been pretty ropey”, just as there have equally been “people where all the right things were done, but unfortunately, things didn’t work out as we had hoped”. The danger she suggests is that these approaches also feed a culture of blame without offering meaningful solutions. “What we need is action… proper, sensible, focused action.”

Digital reform, often framed as a solution to many of these challenges, sits uneasily within this picture. Lakasing acknowledges it as an “inevitable consequence of the modern age” but questions its implementation and impact. NHS systems remain inconsistent and under-resourced, with different trusts using incompatible software and “trying to run those ever more sophisticated software programs on pretty archaic hardware”. More fundamentally, digital tools don’t always translate into better care. She describes the example of patients accessing blood test results online, only to have them flagged on the NHS App as abnormal despite being perfectly typical in pregnancy. At the same time, digital innovation also risks exacerbating existing inequalities. “We do have refugees, asylum seekers… women who are homeless, women who are trafficked… I just worry that anything that might add to that would be a problem.” Access to digital healthcare assumes resources and confidence that just aren’t as evenly distributed as the policies imagine.

None of this, Lakasing is clear, lends itself to quick fixes. “This is my problem with politicians”, she says, “they’re always looking for a quick fix”. But the issues she describes are cumulative, and so too must be the solutions. “If you’re playing the long game, you need long-term strategies”. What she returns to, therefore, is something more fundamental: the need for a “unified set of aims” centred on safe outcomes rather than the processes used to demonstrate them. Without that maternity units become “very good at ticking the boxes that we’re being assessed on… that doesn’t mean that our outcomes are good”.

For those entering the profession, her assessment is both candid and cautiously hopeful. “Truthfully, we are in a particularly bad place at the moment, but it’s got to get better. It can’t not get better.” There is, in that, a sense of inevitability: “People are always going to want to have babies”. The future of maternity care, she suggests, will depend less on top-down reform and more on those moving through the system: the next generation of doctors – the medical students that will one day be our obstetricians and gynaecologists – who may be more willing to question its assumptions and reshape its priorities. “I tell the world to be hopeful and to come and see the wards and get stuck in”, she says, emphasising the enduring appeal of the work itself.

Lakasing, for her part, remains deeply committed to that work. And despite everything, her final reflection is unequivocal: “I have not regretted being an obstetrician, not for a singular minute of any day of my life.” It is a striking statement – a reminder that, even within a system under strain, the value of the work itself remains clear.

Several student societies have condemned reports that Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, also known as Tommy Robinson, has been invited to speak at the Oxford Union. Yaxley-Lennon is alleged to have been invited to speak at the Week 5 debate on the motion “This House believes the West is right to be suspicious of Islam”.

In a joint statement posted on Instagram by Oxford Students Against Discrimination and Stand Up To Racism UK, they condemned the invitation “in the strongest possible terms”. They also called on Oxford Union President Arwa Elrayess to confirm that the invitation has been rescinded; “issue a public statement apologising for extending the invitation and promising full transparency with speakers’ events”; and “acknowledge the harm” caused to students by the decision. 

It Happens Here (IHH) raised concerns about the rhetoric used by Yaxley-Lennon, which they described as racialising sexual violence. IHH told Cherwell: “When cases of sexual violence are used to advance anti-Muslim sentiment, the focus is shifted from survivors onto a political agenda…. His presence signals to survivors that their experiences are being instrumentalised, instead of taken seriously.”

In a statement published on Instagram, IHH also joined Oxford Feminist Society, Cuntry Living Zine, Intersectional Uprising Oxford, and Oxford University Women of Colour Society in calling for an immediate withdrawal of the invitation of Yaxley-Lennon. They have demanded “a formal apology and accountable action through new published policy”, and called for “the Union to be transparent about all future speakers”.

A spokesperson for the Oxford African and Caribbean Society (ACS) also criticised the reported invitation. They told Cherwell: “We reject the notion that ‘debate’ requires the inclusion of [such] viewpoints…. Granting Robinson an academic stage at a time of increased far-right activity confers a degree of respectability to ideologies that have historically marginalised our communities.”

In addition, a spokesperson for Oxford Students Amnesty International told Cherwell: “Amnesty International believes in supporting all democratic rights, including freedom of speech and expression. However, Yaxley-Lennon’s history of [criticism] towards Muslims, immigrants and other groups has endangered, and continues to endanger, students at the University of Oxford and Oxford Brookes University…His presence at the Oxford Union infringes upon the [opportunity] of all students to live and study in an atmosphere of safety and respect.”

The reported invitation comes within the context of longstanding accusations against Yaxley-Lennon of Islamophobia and intimidation. He was a co-founder of the English Defence League in 2009, whose supporters have repeatedly targeted Muslim communities and mosques across the UK. He has also been convicted on multiple occasions, including for contempt of court in 2018 after livestreaming defendants accused of sexual exploitation outside a trial in Leeds, in breach of reporting restrictions. He was jailed for 18 months after admitting to the charge.

Yaxley-Lennon has faced further convictions for assault and harassment, and has been widely criticised for his rhetoric, accused of fuelling anti-Muslim sentiment. His public statements have included describing Muslim refugees to the UK as “fake refugees”, a 2011 threat to “every single Muslim watching….the Islamic community would feel the full force of the English Defence League” if another Islamist terror attack were to take place, and a 2018 admission that he “doesn’t care” if he “incites fear” of the UK’s Muslim community. 

He previously warned members of the press: “If you’re a journalist and you think your office or your home is a safe space…it’s not”, and referred to a female BBC journalist as a “slag” after Yaxley-Lennon was questioned by police over an alleged assault of a man at London St Pancras Station in 2025. Yaxley-Lennon was not charged over the incident.

The Oxford Student Greens told Cherwell that while “a diversity of opinion can be conducive to intellectual debate, there is no space for the kind of inflammatory, hateful rhetoric that these figures promote”. They added that “fearmongering through the persecution of minority groups is a coward’s tactic used by people like Stephen Yaxley-Lennon… to push a political agenda”.

In a statement published on Instagram, the Oxford Labour Club also criticised the invitation, saying it was “disgusted” by the decision, writing that while “free speech is important… that does not mean that Tommy Robinson, a far-right extremist convicted of assault and harassment, should be platformed by the Union”. The statement further accused the Union of choosing publicity instead of taking a stand against the far-right, adding that Yaxley-Lennon “has stirred up racism, xenophobia, and hate”.

Turning Point Oxford defended the Union’s decision on free speech grounds. The President of Turning Point Oxford told Cherwell: “The Oxford Union is well within its right to platform whomever it wants… this would be the perfect opportunity for those who vehemently disagree with Tommy Robinson to put his ideas to the test”. They added that Yaxley-Lennon is “a culturally relevant figure in British politics” and that “the debate is of incredible importance”.

When approached, the Union did not confirm whether Stephen Yaxley-Lennon had been invited. A spokesperson told Cherwell that the committee “works tirelessly to curate a termly programme…[giving] members the opportunity to challenge…a broad range of speakers”, adding that “speakers for this term are still being confirmed”. They added that the Union “only host[s] speakers who agree to be challenged”, and that details of high-profile events are often released later “to mitigate any potential security risks…[which] is not a departure from normal practice”.

The response from across the spectrum of student societies represents extraordinary action, and the spokesperson from Amnesty told Cherwell that they were in touch with other student societies to discuss further action. Oxford Stand Up To Racism have organised a protest to take place outside the Oxford Union on Thursday, 28th May, which has been promoted online by multiple other student societies.

Sam Freedman is one of Britain’s foremost political analysts. I spoke with him after his appearance on a panel at St Antony’s College, Oxford, where he discussed the flaws of contemporary British politics. As co-author of Britain’s most popular political Substack ‘Comment is Freed’, Senior Fellow at the Institute for Government, and a contributor to a number of respected British publications, Freedman has the opinions of a journalist and the knowledge of a policy maker. 

In our discussion, Freedman’s answers are measured and carry a certain nuance, a habit from a life “half in that world” of Westminster and Whitehall, but stabilised by one foot firmly planted in academia and research.

His passion for politics was clear even from childhood. Freedman was twelve at the time of Norman Lamont’s resignation as Chancellor in 1993: “I remember running through my school trying to tell everyone in excitement, and everyone was like ‘what the hell are you doing’”. He laughs fondly at his childhood enthusiasm, reflecting: “I was an unusual child, always very obsessed with politics.”

Freedman is an Oxford alumnus, having completed an undergraduate degree and a subsequent MPhil in History at Magdalen College. He looks back at his time in Oxford with great fondness: “Probably like quite a few students, I look back and think: why did I wake up at one o’clock in the afternoon every day, and not take the opportunity to have the time to think and read in the way you never get when you’re actually working.” For Freedman, university was packed with amateur dramatics – directing and producing – as well as meeting his wife. 

His transition from academia to employment was driven by a desire for change. After a stint at the Independent Schools Council, he continued to focus on education and moved to a research role at Policy Exchange in 2007. He describes it as “luck” that this coincided with Michael Gove, one of the think tank’s founding chairmen, being promoted to Shadow Secretary of State for Education. “I was in a very odd position, being a policy person in a political world”, Freedman says. “Gove knew that, and hired me anyway.” 

Though much of his time was spent developing ideas that would find themselves in the Conservative Party’s 2010 manifesto, he takes care to distance himself from a particular affiliation. “I was never actually a Conservative, and I was never a member of the Conservative Party”, Freedman explains. “I had been a member of the Labour Party, and I liked what New Labour had done on education policy.” For Freedman, his work with the Conservative Party was an attempt to “create some continuity between what I thought New Labour would have wanted to continue doing on education policy, and what a new government would do”. 

I try to pin him down somewhere on the political spectrum, but he seems disillusioned with the very act of political categorisation. “Lots of people would describe me as a centrist dad”, he says, but this label doesn’t sit right: “It doesn’t mean anything.” Socially, Freedman describes himself as “very liberal…more liberal than the average person in the country by quite a distance on subjects like immigration”. In terms of economics? “I’m never quite sure what I think”, he says. “Sometimes I feel very left-wing, and sometimes I feel quite liberal.” 

Upon the Conservative victory in 2010, Freedman became a policy advisor, spending three years working on the new Conservative Government’s policy agenda. His colleagues from this time have become well-known, and highly controversial characters in British politics, but Freedman’s insight cuts through their facades. “Some people present in public exactly as they are in person”, he notes. Here he points to former Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who in Freedman’s eyes is “performing constantly, even in private”. 

He sees more nuance in the character of those like Dominic Cummings, former chief adviser to Johnson, whose “cunning genius” facade falls in private. Often getting into fights with people online, Cummings would “have these manic episodes, where he would…get very hysterical”. 

Freedman’s time in Westminster taught him that politics is less about the individuals and more about the institutions. “A lot of them were designed in the 19^th century for a completely different kind of politics.” Freedman jokingly adds that wanting to be a politician in this system makes one “slightly crazy…a sociopath”. From what he’s seen, the job is exceedingly tough: it is not particularly well paid in comparison to other jobs based in London, one must endure an “astonishing” level of abuse, and the entry-level position as a backbencher is “pretty thankless”. “Either you have to be obsessed with attention and status…or you have to really, really care about changing the world in a positive way.” 

I ask him how the deep-seated public hatred of Keir Starmer sits with him in this context. “I don’t quite know where it comes from… but I don’t think he’s been a particularly effective prime minister.” He attributes part of the uproar to a hostile media set-up. The “clickbait” culture has drawn on our more pessimistic instincts. “It’s shifted everything towards a much more aggressive and negative posture, which then makes politicians more defensive”. Ultimately, it’s a vicious cycle, and one he tries to avoid with his Substack. “I just try to be accurate…I’m not campaigning for any particular point of view.”

In terms of his go-tos for news consumption, he lists The Economist, the Financial Times, Bloomberg, and the New York Times. If you’re looking for a trustworthy news source, Freedman recommends “ones that are read by people in finance, because they want accurate information…money doesn’t lie to money”. Reading news sources from both ends of the spectrum seems to be a key way for Freedman to get a feel of the political climate: “I have subscriptions to basically everything”. 

His own role in the UK media ecosystem is shared with his father, co-writer at ‘Comment is Freed’. So how does that dynamic work? “We read each other’s pieces, but we cover quite different areas, and we have quite different styles.” Any reader of ‘Comment is Freed’ will know that Sam Freedman focuses on domestic politics, whereas his father takes an international focus. “Dad is a military historian…and he has a proper historian’s way of writing about these conflicts…whereas I’m more of a kind of journalist, so I tend to be more opinionated in my pieces.” 

I ask him what Substack offers in journalism in comparison to the average newspaper column. Not only is there more freedom when choosing what to write about, but Freedman finds he can write “at a length that no newspaper would ever allow”, with most of his pieces averaging around 3,000 words. “I prefer the freedom and the space to go into depth.” 

In the world of 24/7 media, public memory is much weaker than it once was, and scandals quickly recede from memory. For Freedman, a key example of this is the 2008 Financial Crash. “We have this way of talking about economic policy, as if Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves should just be fixing the economy, without ever really talking about the underlying structural problems…that the financial crisis threw up. Since it happened, we have just gone back to a fairly similar financial system to what we had before, which feels very vulnerable…We had the crisis, it passed, and now we are sort of pretending it didn’t happen.” This wilful ignorance, on the part of both politicians and the public, is the root of many political problems. 

I point to one of the changes often lauded as the solution to the plague of short-termism and political polarisation in Westminster: a change in the electoral system. Whilst Freedman is in favour, he argues it has been misjudged by left-wingers. “A lot of people overestimate the value of changing the electoral system in terms of how it would fit their politics.” He points to the progressive left, some of whom hold the belief that the change would see them dominate come election time. Yet, as Freedman makes clear, European countries with more proportional electoral systems still see right-wing parties flourish. For Freedman, a desire to change the electoral system should not be rooted in the perceived benefit to one’s personal political leanings, but rather “because of the underlying unfairness of the system”. 

Freedman argues that the peak of First Past the Post’s effectiveness has come and gone. With the recent insurgence of Reform and the Green Party into core Conservative and Labour Party territory, the two-party system seems increasingly obsolete. “It’s become impossible to justify, because you have five parties within 10-15 points of each other.” Freedman believes it will be a long, drawn-out and uncomfortable journey to change. “Right now, a lot of Labour MPs would acknowledge in private that the system doesn’t work, but they are not going to change it because it would hurt them. It might be that you need to have one or two elections with a very messy hung parliament before things change.” 

Whilst Freedman predicts change within his lifetime, by the end of the conversation, I’m left with the feeling that the flaws of contemporary British politics won’t be “fixed” anytime soon. Freedman, however, seems to be the kind of voice we need in the current political climate: one of nuance, pragmatism, and integrity.