Tommy Robinson ‘equated with Nelson Mandela’ at Oxford Union

Reports state that Oxford Union president, Arwa Elrayess, allowed one of her senior committee members to link the controversial figure with the former president of South Africa.

Miss Elrayess is facing calls to resign and is being met with condemnation from her own committee over the invitations of Carl Benjamin, Tommy Robinson, Karim Khan, and Laurence Fox.

In a letter calling for resignation, Shermar Pryce, former chief adviser, said: “I am appalled by the absolutely idiotic and frankly insane comparison made between Tommy Robinson and Nelson Mandela by the director of finance: to, in any way, equate a violent, race-baiting criminal thug with an icon of liberation is a grotesque insult to history and a testament to the moral rot within the senior committee.

“I am beyond convinced that the current form of the TermCard is the direct result of such people being enabled and empowered.”

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Nelson Mandela (Image: Mark Draisey)

Miss Elrayess has previously defended her choice to invite the controversial figure in an article published in The Telegraph

She said: “For more than 200 years, the Oxford Union has existed to host debates – not to platform views uncritically, but to subject them to the most rigorous scrutiny. You do not invite a speaker to endorse them: you invite them so that their ideas can be examined, and their claims tested.

“Today, the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act – passed under the last Conservative Government – exists precisely because we have recognised, as a nation, that the strategy of silence was not merely failing, but becoming a crisis.

“Universities are where ideas are meant to be tested, not protected from scrutiny.”

In late 2025, Robinson’s followers used the anti-apartheid anthem ‘Something Inside So Strong’ at a UK rally, the song’s writer, Labi Siffre, issued a cease-and-desist letter.