Living up to election promises

"I want it to be the year where your Union makes a Guinness World Record attempt.” “Vote for me for better quality lecture notes.”

Sorry, what? Can you say that again, please? I think my brain might be haemorrhaging. I was expecting to hear some realistic, sensible proposals coming out of your mouth, but instead all I’m registering is a massive pile of crap. If you haven’t got it already, those phrases up there are all extracts pulled directly from the manifestos of next year’s Sabbatical officers.

Just look at them. What do they even mean? They’re either so vague and woolly as to be pretty much meaningless, or else they’re so badly thought out that they’re unfeasible in practice. People promise stupid things – one candidate promised to campaign for a “freeze on fees for international students.” Seriously, what position do people think they’re running for? – Rector? If not, then this ‘campaign’ is pretty much futile – I’d like to see a Union Sabb forcing the college out of hundreds of thousands of pounds a year in the name of some ideal.

For many candidates, their manifesto is just a big pack of lies – stuff they just came up with to get your vote. I hold the (somewhat cynical) view that many candidates have no intention of keeping any of their election promises because they know once they’re in power, they can do pretty much whatever the hell they like. After their year of ‘representing our views’, they walk out the door and disappear. I’m not saying the elected officers don’t make a difference – anyone remotely involved with the Union knows that they do. The question I’m asking is – did they make the difference that they promised?

The short answer is that no-one knows, or, at least, no-one bothers to check. Once the year is done and dusted, no-one looks at whether the elected officers achieved what they promised us they would, or whether they sat on their thumbs all year.

What all this leads to is a system where candidates can say one set of things in their manifestos and then, upon election, act completely differently. This renders the whole democratic process meaningless – if we can’t rely on what candidates say they’ll do, how do you choose who to vote for?

Clearly then, it is important that the elected officers are held to account if we want to bother with this whole voting business. Felix doesn’t enjoy covering it, because stories about Union politics are boring and the majority of students couldn’t give a toss anyway, so without the voters themselves to dole out the punishment, who else is left? Thankfully, there’s the Union Council.

Union Council voted last week to deny the current Deputy President (Finance & Services) an Honorary Life Membership of the Union, an accolade that was given to the five other Sabbs. The decision was quashed by Court because the voting procedure was unconstitutional and it still hasn’t been fully resolved, but I’m glad that Council did it. This isn’t a poke at the DPFS himself – I don’t know anything about his job and I don’t know whether his performance deserved such a ruling – I’m just glad that the Union Council actually has the balls to deny an elected officer such an award if they think that it isn’t deserved.

It means that someone is holding people to account, and is smacking them down if they’ve done a bad job. Although it’s a tiny decision in the grand scheme of things, it shows that their heart is in the right place. If elected officers are finally being held to account for their performance in office, it means that we might actually be starting to move away from a culture of nonsense manifesto points and Sabbaticals who can do what they want. Ultimately, that’ll lead to a more meaningful election process and, therefore, a better Union for everyone.