‘Lost the votes but won the argument’

Press, 8 March 1984, Page 12

‘Lost the votes but won the argument’

NZPA staff correspondent London

A New Zealander, Jeya Wilson, was on the losing side in a debate starring the United States Defence Secretary, Mr Caspar Weinberger, at the Oxford Union, but she has said, “We may have lost the votes but we won the argument.” Miss Wilson, who is reading for a doctorate in politics at St Anthony’s College, was speaking for the motion “That there is no moral difference between the world policies of the United States and the Soviet Union.”

It was defeated by 271 votes to 240. The historian and veteran nuclear disarmament campaigner, Mr E. P. Thompson, was the guest speaker for the motion and Mr Weinberger spoke against it. Miss Wilson, a member of the Victoria University team that won the Australasian Inter-University Debating Contest in 1982, was the only woman speaker in the debate.

“It was great. I really enjoyed it,” she said. “I was pleased, as a New Zealander, to be speaking there, and I was glad to be a woman speaking in an absolutely chauvinistic institution.”

The Oxford Union, which has had the former Prime

Ministers, Gladstone, Asquith, and Edward Heath among its presidents, is Britain’s most famous debating society. Miss Wilson met Mr Weinberger at dinner before the debate. “He told me about meeting Sir Robert Muldoon and said he loved New Zealand,” she said. “So he said he would be quite happy to take any comment from me because I was a New Zealander.”

Speaking in the debate, Miss Wilson said, “I do not think we should be satellites or sycophants of one or the other super-Powers, and when I speak of ‘we’ I mean my country, New Zealand.” Mr Weinberger, who was heckled as he arrived surrounded by the police and

security men, told the audience packed into the debating chamber that the morality of United States foreign policy was that it could be changed at any time by the will of the American people.

“We have never used our power to conquer we have used our power to help others,” he said. “If you told us to take our troops out of Britain they would be gone within a day or two,” he said.