Three newly elected sabbatical officers across two University of London institutions have been barred from taking office for their comments and actions in support of Palestine.
Nick Miao Co-Editor-in-Chief
Their dismissals emerged just days after multiple University of London institutions, including UCL, King’s, and SOAS, vowed to file a court order to forcibly remove the pro-Palestine encampments from their campuses, following the footsteps of Queen Mary and LSE.
King’s College fired the starting gun on the sacking spree last Wednesday 10 July when its Students’ Union (KCLSU) barred Hassan Ali, who won his election by a margin of nearly a thousand votes, from taking office as Union President.
Ali, who was KCLSU’s Vice President for Welfare and Community last year, had been suspended as a sabb since November 2023 after he and two other student officers issued a joint statement criticising KCLSU for its ‘deafening silence’ on the ongoing genocide in Gaza. According to Roar News, no public acknowledgement of their suspension had been made until last Wednesday, when Ali was determined to have breached the Trustee Code of Conduct and was therefore ineligible to take office.
In a statement, KCLSU said, ‘We are aware that results were published on 15 March indicating that Hassan Ali was elected as President and although not stated on the website, these were actually provisional and not final results because the Returning Officer had not formally closed the election, which they have now done.’
Just five days after Strand Poly ousted its new President, the SOAS Spirit reported that the Board of Trustees at SOAS Students’ Union (SOAS SU) dismissed two of its newly elected Co-Presidents on Monday 15 July, citing their public criticism of SOAS SU’s CEO Irfan Zaman and their ‘continuing escalation of tensions with the University as an institution’.
The sacked sabb officers, Abel Harvie-Clark and Alex Cachinero Gorman, were part of a ‘Student Power’ coalition of pro-Palestine activists who went on to sweep all four sabbatical roles at SOAS SU. The pair are expected to appeal their dismissal internally.
Harvie-Clark had previously been suspended by SOAS in October 2023 over his involvement at a Palestine solidarity demonstration but was cleared of any wrongdoing by December. He was threatened with suspension in March 2024 for breaching SOAS’s new ‘anti-protest policy’ and was suspended again in May following another pro-Palestine rally, pending a disciplinary hearing where he may face permanent expulsion from the University. The results of his hearing, which occurred last Thursday 11 July, have not been made public at this time.
At a rally demanding the pair’s reinstatement on Thursday (18 July), the Spirit reported Harvie-Clark saying that ‘They’ve targeted us because we’ve shown we’re not going to be intimidated by their threats’. He went on to describe SOAS SU’s decision to sack him and Cachinero Gorman as the ‘desperate act of a failing regime’.
The dismissal of three elected sabbatical officers who were vocally pro-Palestine is likely to leave a chilling effect on other students’ unions and their new sabb teams, many of whom may now fear facing a similar fate if they step out of line. It also appears to represent a broader, concerted effort by universities – sometimes aided by their students’ unions – to crack down on anyone who dares to speak out against Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine and the war crimes it is committing against Palestinians using British weapons.
If universities are, as our glorious President and Provost Michael Spence keep insisting, serious about their ‘foundational commitments to pluralism and to freedom of speech’, then they must ensure that students are not intimidated or penalised for being vocal about issues that universities deem to be sensitive. The right to expression and protest must be applied equally to everyone, not just campus Tories and transphobic academics.
Students’ unions will also do well to remember that they represent the interest of students first and foremost, not the university’s. The corporate executives and accountants – the ‘real adults’, so to speak – who run Britain’s students’ unions would be greatly mistaken to think that sacking a few pesky sabbs will spell the end of their woes. As it happens, overturning the results of a democratic election is typically quite damaging to trust and confidence, something that is already in short supply. These dismissals must not be seen as a precedent but as a case study of failure. Ultimately, King’s and SOAS students are the ones who will suffer the most from this decision, as thousands are now denied political representation at their own students’ union. This has been a sad week for student unionism in Britain.