Oxford's oldest student newspaper

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The OxStew: Time to vote RON

As Chomsky told us in his great work Media Control: The Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda (2008), the media can convince you to believe anything. And because all student journalists are power-obsessed and all-round evil people, rather than the ordinary students struggling to complete their degrees that they pretend to be, we are going to convince you to vote for RON.

This newspaper has always considered itself a voice for the voiceless, and that is why we have chosen to speak up for the only candidate that no one is speaking for. RON is not just a nice guy. He represents the ability to be OUSU President in all of us (quite literally).

Students have for decades found RON excessively funny – especially since we got to know him personally in all EIGHT Harry Potter films. And yet we haven’t voted for him. We have also refused to admit to ourselves that the only reason we find an acronym which sounds like a name funny is because student elections are so boring.

And aren’t these current elections even more boring than usual? The only position candidates seem to have taken on any issue is “we like nice things”. In fact, we at The OxStew have decided this is the election that almost no one is talking about. So much so that whenever the student press talks about it, it is only really talking to itself (meta).

This election has been dull even compared to those held two years ago (because let’s be honest, last year was pretty boring too). In that election we had a candidate who stole someone else’s website and offered an OUSU petting zoo as the solution to all our welfare needs. We also had a candidate so obscure a certain student publication could not be bothered even to spell their name. We are of course referring to the unstoppable #Jane4Chang slate. Few thought that Jane could provide us with the chang we need. So when Trup offered us change, we took that instead. But two years later we’ve noticed that every candidate offers change, while very few offer chang. And in retrospect it has become clear that we should have taken chang while it was on the table.

The problem isn’t the candidates, who are all charmingly inoffensive, it is the quality of debate and what happens to them when they are elected. OUSU make voting in their elections less appealing every year by adding more and more positions that no one wants to run for. Dare to vote this year and you will even be attacked by a chain of spam emails.

The truth is that OUSU is an organisation which displays bureaucratic tendencies of the worst kind – whether it is allegedly spending £40 per person on sending people to a Free Education demo, when an Oxford Tube ticket is £14, or spending £1,222 on an event that eight people attended. Never has an annual income of nearly £1 million been spent on so little. After all, imagine what your Common Room could do with £1 million? And that is the only joke in our satire column this week.

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