The biggest problem faced by UCL Union is that no one could possibly care less.
After years of (sometimes) carefully plotted plans being disrupted by the annual farce of General Meeting inquoracy (not enough people turning up, to the layman), this year the campus hackocracy cooked up the clever ruse of reducing the number of attendees required to make decisions from 448 stu- dents to just 112, or 0.5 percent of UCL students. Is this the mag- ic bullet that Union democracy has been waiting for?
Unsurprisingly not. Half an hour after the scheduled start of the Welcome Members’ Meeting on 18 October only around 80 people had bothered to turn up, leaving Union Chair Zubair Idris with no choice but to call it off. He stated that the Union would “do a bit of soul- searching” to find out what went wrong.
It seems that Idris forgot the truism of student democ- racy: “apathy rules all” - the empty seats in the 535 capacity Bloomsbury Theatre should re- mind us to never overestimate engagement.
Historically, each of UC- LU’s 181 societies has been forced (under threat of with- drawn funding) to send two un- suspecting delegates to the Wel- come and Annual meetings in October and February, respec- tively. This meant that although interest was at an impossible nadir, with inevitable walkouts, at least enough people would arrive so that the Union merry- go-round could start moving. This obligation was dropped last year, leaving only the hacks and hackcessories who come to this sort of thing for fun.
However, there aren’t nearly enough of them. From a democratic perspective, the WMM was supposed to be the gala event of the term, and a chance to get freshers mildly in- terested in student politics.
As luck would have it, not much was missed. On the agenda, tedious hackery such as changing the name of the Welfare Officer to “Welfare and International Of- ficer” stood alongside a silly mo- tion to elect the Provost. While the hacks may stew over non- sense like this, normal students won’t notice the difference and UCLU democracy will continue to be a campus irrelevance.
The sabbatical officers held an emergency meeting the fol- lowing day to assess and address the abysmal failing of Democracy and Communications Officer James Skuse’s vanguard assembly. The man himself was apparently too ashamed to discuss his own shortcomings: Skuse didn’t turn up.
What went wrong is him. Skuse’s manifesto stated that he would increase student involve- ment through “well publicised forums, deadlines and meetings”. This publicity, it seems, does not stretch to sending an all student email about one of his most im- portant events of the year.
The failure to reach the lowered quoracy came as a bit of a surprise, and various big swing- ing Union dicks were notably ticked off. When asked for com- ment, serial hack Andrew Tranter replied: “this is shit,” whilst the Education and Campaigns Of- ficer Luke Durigan swore repeat- edly and made guttural sounds.
The events of the evening can perhaps best be summed up by an anonymous voice floating across the Union bar as the hacks drowned their sorrows: “There are two things currently wrong in this Union – its democracy and its communications.”