Pete’s week

Peter Bowden tells it like it isAn hour into OUSU Council, there came a hollow, echoing thunk: a grenade, pinless and imminent. Sadly, this wasn’t technically a matter ‘arising from the minutes’, and, agendas being agendas, they gave it a few minutes. Our time arriving, we threw down a motion to expel the grenade; several factual questions later (‘is this an equal opportunities explosive?’), someone thought it might be nice to debate it.How to get rid of it? No one’s really sure; the motion hadn’t really made that clear. I’m minded to accept a friendly amendment, one that mandates us to just run away. But there’s an objection: maybe we could just throw it into the air, and hope we survive? Council isn’t sure. Luckily, three of the Vice Presidents are working on a joint report into methods of escaping short-fuse anti-personnel weapons, and they should be done by sometime in 8th week. Maybe we could delay for now? There’s a speech in proposition, and one in opposition. We move to vote. Two minutes through the secret ballot, the flames melt the skin off the first eight rows, searing metal justice piercing their skulls, the piled corpses of the Exec forming a mangled bleeding cenotaph to bureaucracy itself.Last term, I ran in an election for Lincoln’s OUSU rep. My manifesto was filled with meaningless buzzwords: ‘equality’, ‘fairness’, ‘representation’, ‘communication’, ‘access’, and ‘transparency’, because no-one ever dares to argue with these. No candidate has ever railed against ‘fairness’, and promised to be a rigid, elitist autocrat who cares for nothing, and longs only to screw the poor. I stopped myself writing anything concrete or meaningful, to avoid suspicion. I won in a landslide, thus tearing a giant flaming gash across democracy’s already dubious track record. This made Council mandatory.Normally, when I say that I’ve lost the will to live, I say it thinking that it stands a chance of returning. After last Friday’s OUSU Council, I don’t want it back. I stayed for two motions. The first of these was to censure one woman for leaking confidential information, a fairly clear-cut case. This took an hour and a half, time which included a motion not to put the motion (from her), a motion to delay the motion, a motion to vote on the motion by secret ballot, and at least three motions to vote to put in motion a vote on whatever motion we happened to be voting on. The second motion took just as long; the aim of this was to strike out a motion that we’d passed at the very last meeting, lending the whole experience an air of unimaginable pointlessness, as constructive as watching a dog chasing its tail in a reasoned bid to eat itself. Everything you’ve heard about OUSU is all true, and worse. Next year I’m running for President, and it’ll be on a ticket of equality, and justice, and fairness.