OUSU Elections 2014 – On the Eve of Voting

Goodness, what on earth’s going to happen in the OUSU elections over the next couple of days? Many, many, many will not care. Many more will point out that I am hardly best qualified to opine or predict on the matter given that this time last year, when I was running, I didn’t exactly have my finger on the psephological pulse. Others yet will say “who?” and “what?” and “what are you still doing here?”

Things are different this year, though. The joke candidate’s dropped out before things even began, the Labour Club has remained in its kennel, nobody’s running any big nasty slates – in fact, there’s been quite a marked lack of nastiness so far, to such an extent that The Tab hasn’t run any articles at all about the elections. What’s going to happen between now and Thursday night, when the results are announced? Here, in a combination of listicle and wall-of-text, are my thoughts and non-predictions.

1.     These elections should show us whether the Age of the Mega-Slate is dead

So, Team ABC, why did you run with only three candidates (two from the same college)? Was it because you were worried about seeming too much like the mega-slates which were soundly beaten last year, or was it because you couldn’t find anybody to run with you (as an insider suggested to me)? Right to Education, why the strange mix of positions? Again, because (as claimed by one of your own) you have a legitimate interest in non-sabbatical positions, or because there’s a paucity of lefty finalists this year?

Whether opportunistic or deliberate, there’s been a change to the way slates look this year. They’re smaller and more oddly-shaped. Even For Oxford, the biggest to run for sabbatical positions, has only ten candidates. But that doesn’t mean we can’t get some important information about the way OUSU elections are likely to look in the future from 2014’s set. If the two teams with a sizeable number of candidates win unexpectedly big in key clashes – President and VP Access & Academic Affairs in particular, but not forgetting VP Grads or Common Room Support – we can expect to see a return to the blockbuster slates that came up so short against Louis Trup, Dan Tomlinson, and Ruth Meredith.

2.     These elections have been quiet, too quiet

As anybody with a perverse interest in student politics and a chip on their shoulder might do, I went to see all the Sabbatical candidates hust. I was struck there by how polite and warm the candidates were to and about each other, which is nice, and by how consensual and even similar what they said was, which can make everyone’s eyes glaze over. I noticed this also in media stories about the elections – the main antagonist so far seems to have been lack of access to husting venues (fair enough), and The Tab hasn’t breathed a word about any of the candidates, so it’s definitely been a nice one.

Now, I would be the last to call for a return to last year’s rhetoric and campaigning style, which I regret and for which I am partly to blame, but I don’t think there’s anything wrong with pointing out rotten policies and I don’t think that’s been done enough. So I asked the candidates for President to criticise each other’s policies, and I felt a great deal of relief at hearing what sounded like a couple of weeks’ grievances condensed into thirty seconds of criticism from each one. Adam Roberts’s single (sort of) manifesto pledge got both barrels—deservedly so, I’m forced to admit (sorry Adam, I thought you were lovely!). Will Obeney’s Out of Hours Pledge, it was rightly pointed out, was unlikely to change anything at all; Becky Howe’s welfare-dominated manifesto would, it was suggested, have been better-suited to a candidate for VP Welfare and Equal Opportunities.

I think legitimate criticism of other candidates is a really important thing, as long as it doesn’t turn sour. Last time, the mug-painting workshops and petting zoos got dropped from mentions in husts very quickly. I don’t think there’s been enough of it this time round, and I think it will affect turnout negatively at a bad time. Then again, I was wrong about most stuff last year, so…

3.     Some positions are hugely over-subscribed; others are painfully under-subscribed

I felt a bit sad watching the husts for VP Access and Academic Affairs. There are four candidates, and all of them are really good – in different ways, even though they all seem to agree on almost everything. This brings out my soppy side, reader, and I confess to wishing they could all be elected and implement their realistic, well-informed, achievable, worthy ideas. They can’t.

In contrast, half of the Sabbatical positions are uncontested. A disclaimer: I don’t know Ali Lennon, I’m sure he’s a very nice person, and I wish I could give him the benefit of the doubt. But I have some very serious reservations about his decision to run for the Welfare and Equal Opportunities position following the allegations against him of electoral malpractice only a couple of weeks ago (which I admit to knowing little about beyond what I have read in the newspapers and word of mouth). I didn’t think he husted well, and his manifesto is seriously unbalanced between Welfare and the other half of his probable future role. I feel appalling writing this, but I think that it’s something of a shame that the position is uncontested.

4.     The Oxford Left is quietly becoming huge (and closer to the centre)

Two years ago, and the far-left slate was so shambolic that it elected no candidates and lost its deposit. These days, Nathan Akehurst’s spiritual successors are running the tightest operation in town, with the best-designed manifestos of any slate, a host of candidates already elected, and… wait, are those a load of Labour Club members?

It’ll be interesting to see who wins out in the remaining contests Right to Education have in these elections – particularly in the four-way VP Access and Academic Affairs, but also further down the list in the Part-Time Exec roles. Whatever happens, they will have ensconced themselves in OUSU’s machinery very effectively.

With things as they are, it seems hard to avoid concluding that the equivalent slate’s Presidential candidate will sweep to victory next year. But who will it be, and how far left will they risk leaning? Already, the rabble-rousers have given way to the reformists. Elliott, Teriba, Raine, and co. like winning things, and unlike the previous lot, know how to do it.

5.     Manifesto designers needed

I hate to make this a big thing when it’s the content of manifestos that’s important. But couldn’t a little more effort have gone into designing the current year’s crop, especially when clearly the candidates’ time wasn’t all being spent buttering potential running-mates in coffee shops? Right to Education and Emily Silcock are excused: theirs look great.

6.     Some positions might be becoming too unassailable

Lucy Delaney is all but certain to become VP Women, and quite right too: she’s a superb candidate with an excellent track record. But she will be the third Wadham WomCam graduate in a row to do so, and her running-mate Aliya Yule has a similar profile.

WomCam is an extremely important Oxford institution and the most effective of the liberation campaigns, highlighting and improving one of the most significant issues with Oxford life. I should also note that my team last year put up a candidate for VP Women who was soundly defeated by Anna Bradshaw, the WomCam-backed candidate who has since been tremendous at OUSU. However, I worry that independent candidates with a great deal of good things to say might be put off. No matter how good the institution, it shouldn’t have a monopoly, and in this, WomCam could be the victim of its own (deserved) success.

Meanwhile, the Vice-President Charities and Communities role has gone to an independent candidate for the last few years, usually on the back of an extremely well-organised and well-supported campaign: Ruth Meredith’s stunt with the RadCam balloons last year, for example, made her the only non-Trup candidate to break 1000 first-preferences, and Dan Tomlinson pulled off an extraordinary coup in thrashing the Tom4OUSU candidate the year before that. This year, a slated candidate hasn’t even bothered to run, as Emily Silcock’s success in launching the On Your Doorstep homelessness campaign (and more generally in her OUSU Charities role) has scared off any rivals. Will C&C continue to be the slates’ bogey election?

7.     Novel manifesto ideas are good. Novelty ideas are bad.

Adam Roberts in person was engaging and friendly, though nervous, and his ideas were delivered with some charm. Adam Roberts on paper, however, I just cannot get to grips with. He’s attracted qualified praise for his ‘every year a referendum on what OUSU does’ single-idea manifesto from sources as radically opposite as Jack Matthews and Nathan Akehurst (who agree with each other rather more often than they should be comfortable with). Personally, I can’t see the attraction in the policy, and I can’t see even remotely how it would work.

First: the principle. If elected, Roberts would hold some kind of election where people put forward ideas which could then be voted upon by all members of OUSU. Sound familiar? It already happens, and it’s called the OUSU elections, where, in theory, candidates talk to people beforehand, find out their concerns, put them in their manifestos, and are then elected or rejected on that basis by the electorate. It seems to me that Roberts, in his admirable but misguided desire to be as boundary-busting as possible, has missed this point and missed the many obvious advantages to electing candidates based on manifestos that actively make pledges. (Ok, Trup was an exception.)

Nowhere that I’ve seen has Roberts satisfactorily explained very much about how he’d get around the many problems his idea would cause. (I wanted to ask him loads of questions, but thought it’d be a bit weird given that I don’t even go here.) In the interview video posted up by this paper, his response to the sensible question of ‘what would you do about Sabbatical Officers elected on their own manifestos?’ all he says is ‘I do think there is an issue with the way the system works at the moment’ before the editing kicks in, depriving us of any further explanation.

My questions are: why would this increase engagement with OUSU when even fewer people vote in referenda than in elections? Why, given that elections happen every year, won’t the ‘annual referendum’ just get scrapped in a year’s time? Have you asked the hard-working permanent staff at OUSU how their jobs might be affected by this idea, and what have they said? What will you do about other sabbatical officers elected on their own manifesto pledges? Will your pledge involve huge structural change of OUSU that goes unmentioned in your manifesto? Won’t the suggestions all be made, and to some extent voted upon, by the people you don’t need to engage in the first place? What makes liberation campaigns the exception in your ‘I’m a democrat, not a dreamer’ rhetoric, and what was your rationale in including that caveat? Why should members of oppressed groups without a link to one of the liberation campaigns not get a say in how policy that affects them directly is formed? Where do you draw the line in policies that would get decided by those groups, and do you agree that liberation can’t just be cordoned off to a corner of OUSU decision-marking?

8.     OUSU needs to do more to get people running

Another year, another set of elections without many independent candidates. With one exception, graduate students are running on slates, as they have been in previous years. Saying that OUSU should do more to encourage people to run is comparably obvious and unhelpful to saying that OUSU needs to work to engage students more. But I think that more effort could be made in some areas. Jack Matthews notes the decreased advertising for the elections in The OxStu. I’ve probably noticed it less because I don’t even go here (so why am I writing this? You ask. Good point). But some important positions won’t even get filled by these elections, and many more are completely uncontested.

It’s usually in the interest of slated candidates to try to get as many people running on their team as possible. This year, that’s happened quite a bit less, and there hasn’t been a rush of indies to fill the gaps either. We keep hearing that Oxford students do care passionately about a whole range of topics; is it that OUSU is the wrong platform for students to do what they care about, or is it that the idea of running continues to seem daunting and nebulous to many (and never occurs to others)? It would be good to see a packed roster this time next year.

9.     Door-knocking: good, necessary evil, or unnecessary?

Last year, when I went round knocking on people’s doors asking them to vote for me, I actually quite enjoyed it. Although my many victims probably enjoyed it rather less, they were almost always polite, mildly interested in what I had to say, and tended to care about at least one thing around Oxford. Some of them even thanked me for coming to talk to them in person. Very few of them realised an election was happening, and very few of those that did knew much about it at all. I was surprised by how receptive they were, although clearly not an awful lot of them then logged onto their computers and bothered to vote for me.

Unless almost everyone was doing a very good impression of politeness while secretly hating me for subjecting them to a two-minute conversation and a flimsy leaflet telling them how to vote, I came out of the elections believing that door-to-door canvassing, or ‘door-knocking’, was both important for and beneficial to the democratic process. Apparently, some loathe it, and fair enough.

I don’t know how the candidates are planning on campaigning this year, but I’d be surprised if they don’t do some door-knocking – especially in the teams that don’t have good College spread. Nobody has been carried on the same wave of viral success as Louis Trup, and so it seems unlikely that a repeat of the no-door-knocking trick will work quite so well this time.

If it is the case that there’s a fair-sized door-knocking operation, I will be interested to see whether the bigger slates can reap the benefits. Certainly, St John’s students will be sick to death of the two short knocks by the time Thursday evening comes.

10.  Mopping up

I don’t seriously believe anybody’s got this far, but if you have, perhaps you ought to leave a comment with your own thoughts below, or get in touch with me via Facebook or Twitter. Generally, I think that the press coverage of these elections has not been terribly good – Cherwell has shown the most interest by far, but only really in the Presidential candidates. The Oxford Student has been rightly criticised for washing its hands of the whole thing; as I mention above, The Tab has not even bothered to mention the election, presumably not managing to find a way to infantilise it into not being ‘boring’. Here’s hoping that the good work by OUSU officers in recent years to promote the Student Union drives turnout, but I worry about another sub-15% election. In case you were wondering, no, I really don’t have anything better to be doing: the pursuit of the safe Labour seat that every OUSU candidate longs for is going more slowly than anticipated.

Nick Clegg’s recent comments regarding the “prejudice” faced by Oxbridge graduates pursuing a career in the public sector represent a misguided view of the expanding range of prospects which recent graduates enjoy.

In fact, many public sector employers are working hard to increase the number of Oxbridge graduates applying to their schemes, as evidenced by both the presence of recruiters at Oxford and Cambridge and the number of Oxbridge graduates within public sector industries.

Some of the most successful schemes in the sector, including Frontline, Teach First, the Civil Service Fast Stream and the NHS graduate programme, ran a highly successful panel talk in Oxford two weeks ago, in which the representatives from each scheme were Oxbridge graduates.

Furthermore, the presence of Frontline and Teach First at Careers Fairs in Oxford and Cambridge for the past few years has been impossible to ignore.

While it may be the case that certain public sector employers are shunning Oxbridge graduates in an attempt to shed the image of “elitism”, there are plenty of others who are aiming their grad schemes specifically at Oxbridge students.

For students who want to make a difference and, in Clegg’s words, “give back”, schemes such as Frontline and Teach First are leading the way. 1 in 10 Oxbridge students apply to Teach First, and Oxford University alone contributed 96 graduates to Teach First’s 2013 intake of 1200 people.

Frontline, a brilliant new graduate programme that has a similar structure to Teach First and focuses on child protection social work, has also contributed to a surge in Oxbridge applications to public sector jobs. Of Frontline’s first cohort, 73% are from Russell Group universities, including 20% from Oxbridge. Only last week, a Frontline representative was in Oxford calling on more final year students to apply before this Friday’s deadline.

Frontline’s success represents a real change in attitudes towards public sector jobs among Oxbridge students. Clegg’s claim that employers from the public sector do not want Oxford graduates is far from the truth and potentially damaging to both teaching and social work, at a time when both are benefiting from a real surge in top graduates.

Upon gaining a place on the Frontline programme, Francis Goodburn, a recent Oxford graduate in Computer Science, said, “The two things I most want from a job are to know what I am doing is truly worthwhile and to take on varied, challenging work every day. With this in mind, social work seems like a fantastic career choice. I’m particularly excited about Frontline’s model of on-the-job training, and learning leadership skills that could help me make a difference to the lives of children and families. Having now secured a place on the Frontline programme, I’m looking forward to embarking on a career I may not otherwise have had the opportunity to do.”

Students like Francis must not be put off from applying to life-changing schemes like Frontline. Public sector grad schemes are not prejudiced towards Oxbridge graduates Mr Clegg; they are targeting and having great success in drawing in the brightest students and graduates.

This week Oxford students will go to the polls to decide their representatives for the coming academic year. In our annual campus-wide nod to democracy, a handful of candidates will battle it out for the votes of the ~15 % who were going to vote anyway, and the few percentage points otherwise who can be persuaded via personal connections; while the other 80 % continue in blissful ignorance.

The problem is, I’m not even sure that pitiful proportion of people will bother to vote. This election has been interesting in only one way – that it is hard to predict what the result will be. Apart from that it seems to have been quite boring, or even worse, not even register on people’s radar.

We have fewer candidates than usual, and not many of them are doing anything overly interesting. Half the promises are just photocopies from previous years, and the hustings remain bland, with little criticism coming from the candidates themselves. If you haven’t even got the courage to call out your opponents on the policy proposals you know to be hollow and misplaced, how are you going to have the strength to take on a room full of Oxford Dons, and win for students?

So candidates, there’s a few days left – let’s take this up a gear. Call out the crap, support the superb, and give students a debate they can get interested in. Because all of you nodding along to how important extended library opening hours are, is not going to drive people to the ballot box.

On the other hand, Louis Trup may encourage more than usual to vote. His new, slimmed-down weekly email appears to be getting more traction that the fluff-filled electronic message sagas of recent Presidents. Hopefully this can be turned into electoral participation, and convert this affair, from what can at times be a glorified popularity contest, into an election about policy and proposals.

And don’t feel that you, as the reader of this, get to shirk you democratic responsibility to vote, just because I think everything’s not how I want it to be. There are still some excellent candidates out there, with some new and bold ideas. There are some new faces, who’ve made a few slip-ups in their promises, but I’m sure will come through to be good Officers in 6 months’ time. And then there’s some real dross, which needs weeding out and rejecting.

The fact is, this election is still all to play for. None of the slates have outperformed in the husts or manifestos, and all of them have failed to convert their wider team into the kind of people-power machine needed to dominate the election. This gives us a race where independent candidates, especially those with good society-based connections, can still prevail.

Intrepid reader, you’ve stuck with me this far. Now make it all worthwhile. There is no Labour Club mega-slate Goliath this year that everyone expects to win – that beast was slain last year by our modern day David, Mr Trup. So your vote genuinely matters and can make a real difference. Read their proposals, watch the videos, and if you’ve got a question, contact the candidate. If after all of that, there’s no-one good enough for you, then vote Re-Open Nominations (RON). It’s your way of telling the candidates “I like democracy, but I don’t like you”.

There’s one problem, however. In the contests for Student Trustee, and NUS Delegate, there is no RON. And there aren’t more candidates than positions – so they already know they’ve been elected. But there is still one way we can all make our voice at least heard. The elections use the Single Transferrable Vote system, where you give your top preference a ‘1’, and continue numbering candidates after that until you no longer have any preference. Don’t think someone’s good enough to be NUS Delegate of Student Trustee? Then don’t give them a preference. As I’ve said before, there’s some dodgy candidates out there – don’t give them the satisfaction of having as strong a mandate as their colleagues. It will show up in the results and make our feelings as clear as day.

A few years ago, a slate of OUSU candidates ran under the name ‘Another Education is Possible’. Our socialist chums failed to gain enough support to see that come into fruition. This year, my tagline has to be ‘Another Election is Possible’. I just need your help to make the possibility, a reality. So candidates, let’s see a little more passion and conviction. And voters – get out there and vote – this could be the closest election in years.

Last year’s OUSU elections were a joke — lit-erally. In a moment of collective disdain at our student union, we elected a man who promised us world peace, a monorail service, and to eliminate Fifth Week. All scrawled on a “personifesto” using crayons.

Whilst I’m still waiting on the monorail, and the world seems distinctly unpeaceful, the election of someone who was originally a joke candidate did have a serious message behind it. Oxford students (or at least the plurality of those who voted) signalled that they did not take the institution that represents them seriously.

We can now look back and laugh. Louis Trup turned out to be a reasonable student leader. But OUSU still feels like an outsider institution in the ‘Oxford bubble’, removed from normal student life. The upcoming election’s severe lack of candidates only reinforces that idea.

So what is wrong with OUSU? Why are there so few candidates in this election? Why are we so dismissive of a type of institution that flourishes on other campuses across the country?

I had hoped that a year after Trup’s election we might have seen some changes: that OUSU would have rebranded itself, reached out to show us how important it was, and played a more visible role in university life. I’d hoped elections this time round would have been highly contested and therefore interesting.

But with a week to go, that fervour and debate is nowhere to be seen. Last year we blamed the calibre and intentions of those running — a predictable medley of slates and personalities. But we can’t say that this year. Those that are running have serious intentions — there just aren’t enough of them.

This lack of candidates is damaging to the student population of the University. It makes us look uninterested, ignorant of real student issues, and detached from students elsewhere in the country. And internally, a lack of candidates and competition makes OUSU uninspiring and dissuades those who could really bring about change from running.

Only through participation will this cycle of uninteresting elections producing a lack of candidates year-on-year be broken. Only when the student population starts to take part in the process will others be incentivised to run and inject some much-needed energy into OUSU. And with a R.O.N. option, we’re fully able to signal that none of the candidates are suitable and that we want more choice.

Of course, OUSU has to respond too. We have to be shown the importance of student lobby- ing, a presence in university committees, and representation at NUS. We need to know what OUSU could do for us in the future. But the more engaged people are with these issues, and the more students run, the more we’re likely to hear.

We can’t change the number of candidates running this year now. But rather than shrugging our shoulders come election day, we need to let OUSU know what we want and that we do care. Unless we turn out and cast our vote, nothing will change next year.