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OUSU election: why are Oxford students so disaffected?

From the outset, I will make one thing clear: I voted in every OUSU election for every position for which I was eligible to vote because, unlike Russell Brand (at least when it suits him), I believe in the importance of voting. It appears to be the only thing we can do to exert any influence – however small – on the future of OUSU. And yet, I completely understand why students might not choose to vote: the fact that the vast majority of candidates usually come from a narrow ideological hegemony that can’t possibly represent the views of the average student; the fact that OUSU often seems irrelevant; and that the voice of the ordinary student after election time seems minimal to non-existent strike me as possible reasons, for example. None of these are answered by dismissively telling people to ‘just engage’ and casting aside those who don’t.

Firstly, we cannot escape from the fact that OUSU Council’s democratic credentials are dubious at best. No matter how much you bother to engage with it, you don’t have a vote unless you are a rep, so the obvious question appears: why bother turning up? The argument that turning up might manage to convince reps to vote a certain way obviously has some appeal, perhaps borne out by OUSU Council’s rejection of a ‘no platform for fascists’ policy. But given the overwhelming majority with which a motion not only condemning Le Pen’s visit to the Union but absurdly mandating that the OUSU President canvas every single student in Oxford to join the mob outside passed, I think it’s forgivable to wonder whether the former was simply an outlier.

The suggestion that this problem will be resolved by lobbying OUSU reps strikes me as disingenuous; ultimately (in my old JCR, anyway) the final decision rests with the OUSU reps themselves unless they are mandated to vote a certain way, and it is certainly not a satisfactory response to tell us to mandate our reps on every motion. For a start, have the people who would respond in such a way ever considered that maybe students don’t want their JCRs to be openly political, and would rather use their JCR meetings to discuss whether to fund a magazine or event; or buy new assets for the JCR; or hust for non-executive positions over some pizza in a friendly atmosphere rather than be forced to turn their JCRs into contentious political battlegrounds in the name of controlling OUSU’s political ravings?

Ultimately, this points us to what I see as the root of the problem: that OUSU believes it is entitled to have party-political opinions at all and claims a right not even claimed by elected governments, namely to speak for us – to own the thoughts in our brains, the air in our lungs and the tongues in our mouths. When OUSU steps beyond representing the interests of students to the University on student issues – such as welfare support, academic feedback, contact hours and support for rusticated students, among other commendable things – and claims that it has the authority to speak for us in the party-political arena despite the plurality of experiences and opinions in Oxford, it quickly abandons its credibility and holds itself out as a vanity project whereby ‘student leaders’ can claim that their opinions represent far more people’s than they do.

This problem is only borne out by the kind of candidates many positions traditionally attract, the vast majority of whom are unashamedly left-wing or far-left, with very little room for right-wing, or even centrist ideas, a picture which certainly holds true in the NUS to which we remain affiliated. This perpetuates a vicious cycle: far-left candidates tend to dominate positions; said candidates then use their positions to enunciate their political opinions, in all of our names, on any issue into which they can get a word; said statements fuel the impression nationally that all students think this way; and as a result centrist and right-wing students feel that next year’s election is inaccessible, and don’t stand. And so the cycle continues.

The election of a ‘joke’ candidate to President in MT13, seemingly followed by business as usual from everyone else, only reinforces the impression that reform from the inside is doomed from the start which is why criticism of OUSU from those outside the OUSU bubble is so important . OUSU doesn’t stop claiming to represent you because you don’t attend Council . When OUSU sabs represent their politics as speaking for others through their positions, we must reserve the right to disavow such a representation. When disaffiliated Colleges do not get their votes back from OUSU, we must reserve the right to remind it that it has no claim to speak for those Colleges.

Life in the echo chamber is always more comfortable than the realisation that your position demands you also serve the interests of those outside it. Until such a realisation takes place, OUSU remains open to criticism from all those in whose names it claims to speak.

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