A Council Divided? A House which can have fun

For most people the thought of attending Union Council is not good – to be honest, most people don’t even know what Council is – but for those who do it is often thought of as a chore and is an evening that they would rather spend elsewhere. Personally I rather enjoy the process of locking people in a room until they come to an agreement on some important issues.

Tuesday’s Council Meeting (the second one this year) was true to form; it had the usual mix of papers, reports, lots of arguing and generally getting a numb bottom from sitting around for some time on hard seats; but it also had the delightfully amusing spectacle of members having to get up and walk to opposing sides of the room to vote – left for yes, right for no, and standing in the middle for an abstention. To add to the confusion, the matter under discussion was about how Council votes and whether the votes of individual members should be recorded, with the number of sub-points to be voted upon constantly changing. As a candidate that ran against Paul Beaumont (Chair of the meeting) for the job of shepherding Council, I am not sure if I’m glad I didn’t have the job of trying to deal with the chaos or not.

You could even come along yourself and contribute, you may find it fun - I do.

Another wonderful product of the meeting is that the Union’s Executive Committee now has no members, does not meet and does not have any remit whatsoever – this is to get around the rule that Council can’t get rid of the Exec but has decided that it has no function.

I reckon that this has been one of the most fun-filled Council meetings with yet more prime examples of how Council is bad at its job, and that sadly is why I am upset. Don’t get me wrong, I do think Council can be fun, and it doesn’t need to take forever; but when people bemoan the fact that they have to attend a two hour meeting as an elected representative (which they chose to run for) which has massive power over how our Union is run, I get quite worked up.

Council is an important part of the Union’s structure, regardless of whether you know or care about it. If you are on Council then you have decided to run for a position that means you have to be at Council, so turn up, and express opinions.

I do not consider that a two hour meeting is that long, and when even the Chair of the meeting complains about the length or apologises for the same, then all that happens is you reinforce the image that Council is too long and is boring. Read the papers, engage with the debate, and accept that there will be some items of business that don’t necessarily directly impact on you.

Whilst the spectacle of some of the brightest minds in the Country having to resort to walking to opposing sides of the wrong to add up who votes yes (or doesn’t vote) is fun to watch, the general farce that surrounded the debate and the final decision of sending a group away to research something that was researched last year and to come back and report on whether something is feasible despite a general lack of interest in adopting the new approach is ridiculous and sad. Surely we can actually produce a series of decisions that makes coherent and logical sense, with a final outcome which actually achieves something.

Council is an important part of the Union's structure regardless of whether you know or care about it.

What Council needs is a change of attitude – especially amongst some of its members. It needs to recognise that it has a big role, that spending 40 minutes debating something is productive (assuming good chairing) and that for the amount of power and responsibility it has, taking the time to do things properly with clear resolutions to vote on is the way things should be done, and that means that the meetings may be longer than people may be used to. The real test will be whether the attendance of members of Council continues to be high over the course of the year, and whether it once again will struggle to achieve the level of attendance to it needs to make decisions (something it struggles with every year).

What we as members of the Union need to do is discuss the topics that are coming to Council, engage with them and tell them what the issues are for us, what we think the cost of University degrees should be, and ask them whether they had fun at the last Council meeting. You could even come along yourself and contribute, you may find it fun – I do.