It seems the year doesn’t start with a bang but a whimper for the newly-elected UCL Union Council as an emergency meeting, scheduled to fall during their mandatory training, barely reached quoracy (the number of people in the room needed to pass policy). The meeting had been called to discuss reducing the quorum level of Members’ Meetings (Annual General Meetings) in time for the first meeting of the new term - until Democracy and Communications Officer James Skuse set the precedent for introducing new items to the agenda with some additions he assumed would be rubber-stamped, such as the approval of his new election regulations.
It was here that the master plan came unstuck, faltering over the reasonably significant problem that the new regulations just aren’t very well designed. As well as declaring that candidates can now create joint campaigning materials, then neglecting to say what such materials might be, they offer such stringent instruction as: “As a general principle, your campaigning activities should not create an unfair advantage over other candidates.” Forgive any political naivety on show here, but is that not really the point of campaigning? An officer’s campaign should surely be founded on the principle of giving unfair advantage to him or herself otherwise how on earth does he expect to garner votes? Furthermore, what constitutes a particularly “unfair” advantage – is it, for example, an unfair advantage to have your votes cast almost entirely by drunken Sports-niters in the Roxy? Is it an unfair advantage to not have anyone to actually run against, the situation in which almost all of the currently elected councillors find themselves in?
The defence of both of these points was – somewhat ironically given the current debacle the DCO is in (see front page) – that he couldn’t “tell people what to do”, leaving the classifications of both what constitutes joint campaigning or an unfair advantage down to the Union Chair, who also acts as the Returning Officer during elections.
This creates several problems with the way elections at UCLU are governed, namely that if every election is overseen by the Chair, and it is down to his or her discretion what constitutes the breaking of election guidelines, no election will ever be governed in exactly the same way, making individual elections broadly incomparable. Furthermore, it places a dangerous amount of power in the hands of the Returning Officer, giving an almost open invitation for partisan governance depending on the officer’s political leanings. Given such shortcomings, it was a relief to have the guidelines referred back to their proposer and put out of their misery... until the next time.
A last minute addition to the agenda was a motion to defend the freedom of the press, almost the only source of interested debate within the meeting. This was designed to reduce the powers which individual sabbatical officers have to remove content from UCLU media outlets, instead referring the decisions to council or other democratic means. That UCLU states the active promotion of freedom of speech as an aim of its Memoranda and Articles (the new, shiny, less exciting constitution) yet has no current policy to ensure that the few who hold power do not abuse it, shows a gaping hole in their policy file. This hole has been shamelessly exploited of late in order to attempt to censor this publication.
The motion was turned back to the proposer at the request of Neil Chowdhury, Medical and Postgraduate Students Officer, due to concerns over welfare issues. This displayed the startling blindness of Chowdhury and chums to the bigger picture: instead of considering the ways in which the motion would benefit the media of UCL, they chose to read it as about the complaints to The Cheese Grater and UCLU is left for even longer without a freedom of speech policy.
There are greater issues arising from this first meeting, however: the procedure of referring matters back, which was applied to half the agenda items, shows the beginning of a worrying trend in the workings of Council. The Governance Review removed the ability to amend motions during Council, meaning that instead of being amended and improved immediately, motions will inevitably be sent back and forth. Given the most recent performance, there is a danger that this has endowed a stunted Council with the inability to make concrete decisions. It is hoped that this will not become standard procedure.