Those casually passing by the Union building during the next fortnight could be forgiven for mistaking the goings-on outside as some sort of satire on the style-over-substance vacuity of national politics.
It’s not: it’s just election time again, where, if the past few years are any sort of indicator, the winner will be the candidate with the best funny costume or whoever shouts louder than the competition for two weeks. It wouldn’t be terribly difficult to misconstrue it as a send-up of blindly following the hoody-hugging Blue Team or the tough-on-crime Red Team in a general election.
But in the end, the joke’s on us – we have to put up with the winners for the rest of the year. And if they’re not good enough, we’re stuck with them.
We’ll continue to see the people who run our Students’ Union elected in a popularity contest rather than on their policies and credentials for as long as debate remains so poor. It hasn’t been uncommon over the last few years for candidates’ own campaign teams to be unable to recite their manifesto promises when grilled; hustings are very poorly attended; and the one place where a real, substantial policy debate ought to occur – right here – is the one place where it cannot.
The Union’s constitution forbids gair rhydd from expressing comment on any candidate until after the election results are published. (Although, curiously, the prohibition doesn’t apply to sister publication Quench, which slack amending speaks volumes about the attention to detail shown by the last four years’ worth of presidents.)
The reasons for this ban initially seem sensible – an unprincipled editor could easily misuse their position to promote a friend contesting an election. But it’s an insult to students’ intelligence to contend that they can’t tell the difference between nuanced manifesto analysis and brazen propaganda.
While current president Joe Al-Khayat recognises the need for election candidates to engage with students far more, he refused to comment on whether he thinks the restrictions on gair rhydd should remain. They shouldn’t: if a manifesto promise is completely unworkable, as some invariably are, then the electorate should be informed.
Al-Khayat himself has done a remarkably good job over the last year – he’s done more work on recycling and fair trade than had been accomplished in the last five years, and proposed a very sensible reform of Student Council. But this was impossible to foresee while he was campaigning on the rather populist platform of shunting students from neighbouring UWIC to the bottom of the priority order for the sale of Come Play tickets – all the while dressed as GI Joe.
Similarly, while my editor here is undoubtedly talented, she won her job, in large part, not due to her ability to edit gair rhydd but because she spent two weeks wearing a dress made out of it. It seems like an odd way to appoint someone to a job – and can easily go wrong.
We’re fortunate enough not to have voted in any real turkeys (to sabbatical positions, at least). Manchester University isn’t so lucky.
At their Union, as at ours, the editor of the student newspaper’s job is an elected position. Last year, the role was contested by one Sajid Rafiq, who had never written so much as a single word for Student Direct. He mobilised his chums from Manchester’s Islamic Society – and he won.
His first acts as editor were to take down their website, costing them a good deal of advertising revenue; fire two long-serving staff, by text message, for questioning his decisions; and use his first editorial to attack this newspaper – for our lack of sheep stories.
Without the freedom to question a candidate’s suitability for their intended role, that could happen here. We’ve already seen, in the time I’ve been in Cardiff, how impotent students are when a sabbatical officer introduces a policy contrary to their manifesto or is simply ineffectual.
Last year, having promised to “extend the possibilities of lifetime membership” of the Students’ Union, Pete Goodman’s actual policy consisted of doubling its price and making it only a year’s extended membership. The previous year, Athletic Union President James Cole was suspended shortly after taking office and spent the rest of the year sitting at home pocketing his £15k salary while his deputy balanced doing both this extra job and a full-time degree. There was no support for motion of No Confidence, and even if there had been, we were informed it would have been “contentious under employment law”.
Between a poorly informed electorate and this lack of accountability and scrutiny, what is billed as “student democracy” is nothing of the sort. Elections, on their own, don’t make a democracy, nor news a newspaper. And that’s no laughing matter.
