The right lessons must be learnt from the Ball

This year’s Summer Ball, which is tomorrow if you are reading this on Friday, is potentially a fork in the road. If it proves to be a great success then the Union will have been vindicated and there will be a powerful argument for its continued expansion. If it is not a great success, there will be cause to step back and reflect. Either way there are lessons to be learnt but they must not be the wrong lessons.

Let us take the first outcome. That the number of tickets sold reaches or even defies expectations. That the experience of the majority of students who attend the Ball is overwhelmingly positive and that the increased focus on live music and the festival atmosphere is vindicated as the right move. The plans that the Union laid out last week, that they have this week clarified as a “vision” rather than a concrete strategy, will have received a boost. There is no better way to gauge student opinion than to count the number of people who voted in favour with their feet. But the Union must be careful not to mistake this boost for carte blanche. They have made the right noises about doing a better job of bringing student input on board, but they must deliver on these promises. The need to plan the Ball in advance carries with it the danger that students are only able to tweak the details instead of building the foundations. In this respect the Sabbs, as student representatives, have an important role to play.

The alternative outcomes are that the Ball is a damp squib or, god-forbid, a unmitigated disaster. There is no denying that this would be a vote of no confidence in the Ball, but it would be wrong to assign blame to this or that aspect of the Ball without evidence.

It’s not often that one gets to compare ongoings in the Union with ongoings in Parliament and Government, but this happy, or unhappy opportunity (depending on your view) has arisen in the case of the Summer Ball. The Government was forced to pause the NHS reforms and embark on a listening exercise after the fierce opposition to Andrew Lansley’s reforms. The reforms are now substantially changed. If the Ball fails to impress, and we hope that this does not prove to be the case, we would urge the Union to embark on a similar listening initiative this year, before students leave for the summer holidays and before the groundwork for next year’s Ball begins to be laid down. It would demonstrate the Union’s responsiveness to its students but furthermore it would ensure without any doubt that the plans for next year’s Ball would be finely tuned to the wishes of the students that the Union is duty-bound to serve.