By constitution and by law OUSU is a democratic organisation. Anyone who gave up an hour during the OUSU elections filling in preference after preference for all of the positions on the ballot can testify to that. Furthermore, it is not just the sabbatical officers that have to be elected, but a myriad of part-time officers, student trustees and NUS delegates – all require democratic approval. To stop those officers from becoming an elective dictatorship, OUSU has a council. This is a sort of parliament to represent the student body. It is supposed to hold the officers to account on behalf of the rest of us, particularly the sabbatical officers who work full-time and are paid for their work. It also sets policy and authorises various discretionary expenditure. Where JCRs have elected officers and a JCR meeting or GM, equally OUSU has its officers and OUSU Council.

Who sits on OUSU Council? It consists mostly of JCR presidents, OUSU officers and other common room representatives. Strangely, it also gives votes (roughly 1/5 by my reckoning) to the elected officers and OUSU campaign representatives, meaning that not all students end up getting represented equally. If you were in the majority that elected one of the officers, or work on a campaign – your voice counts for a bit more. But that is a comparatively small problem. OUSU Council has much bigger issues elsewhere.

The first of these is much discussed. The  atmosphere of Council is ‘politics-on-my-sleeve’ left-wing; it can be intimidating and even hostile to speakers from the right. Jack Matthews, current OUCA presidentand a graduate student who has been to OUSU Council so long that he has been called it’s ‘institutional memory’ was in the student press just last week raising this issue. He remembers, when he first revealed that he was right-wing: “There was a clearly audible gasp from the members of OUSU Council. My first experience of student unions and the take home message was you’re not that welcome.”

Student politics is possibly one of the few areas of human activity where being right-wing is more of a disadvantage than being BME, female or gay. Certainly, the perception of OUSU as hopelessly left-wing and right-on is both widely held and broadly accurate, and is ultimately responsible, I suspect, for the disaffiliation of more right-wing JCRs, such as Oriel and Trinity. The old notion that the Oxford Union is for more right-wing people, and OUSU for the left is a damaging one. The Union – a private club, can do what the hell it wants. But OUSU is invested with the right to speak for all of us, which makes Council’s alternative universe of intersectionality-expounding, vegetarian RadFeminists all the more perplexing (I joke, slightly).

Then again, Council is a political body, and unsympathetic as it might be to those of Matthews’ ilk, most students, even at Oxford, are pretty left-wing. Right-wing positions are not comparable to unchosen components of someone’s identity. They can be critiqued in a political forum, and, unsurprisingly, they tend to lose out against the greater mass of student left-liberalism. As Churchill said: “If you’re not a liberal at twenty you have no heart” (for those familiar with the full quotation, we will conveniently ignore the second part).

OUSU Council’s run even deeper than petty squabbles over political bias. After sitting on it as a JCR representative since the start of the academic year, I am beginning to worry that it is failing to adequately fulfil its most basic role of holding officers to account. It only meets every two weeks, and when it does there are often only three or four motions – that is fewer motions than in many JCRs, an organisation smaller in staff and budget by orders of magnitude. Most motions at OUSU Council pass without opposition in any case. It is kind of hard to amend a policy document that multiple stakeholders, OUSU officers and the University have often been negotiating on for months before they present to Council a virtual fait accompli.

We only really know what officers have been doing from what they want us to hear that they have been doing in their reports, where of course they have been busily working to ‘win for students’ rather than (hypothetically) spending all day playing tiddlywinks at OUSU offices, or getting thrown out of hotels for mischievous hijinks. There is a scrutiny committee, but its termly reports read like interviews with the officers, pronouns changed from “I have been working hard” to “they have been working hard”.

These failings are understandable. Everyone on council is part-time and, just like any Oxford student, is juggling multiple other projects and work. The sabbatical officers we are meant to oversee are full-time professionals. I doubt that Rowan Atkinson sat on OUSU council during his time at Oxford, but it would have been appropriate. The whole structure is rather like trying to put Mr. Bean (OUSU council) into a boxing contest with Ricky Hatton or a diving contest against Tom Daley. The professionals are always going to win. Members of council have less time, less information, and fewer incentives to perform their role than the officers they are meant to oversee. Of these, it is the lack of information that is the most damaging.

OUSU officers need to communicate more about what they are doing day-to-day rather than writing the self-congratulatory emails everyone in the University currently receives. Maybe the sabbatical officers could begin by actually writing in those blogs attached to their pages on the OUSU website. Someone in the student press also needs to start doing a bit of digging through OUSU reports and documents and OUSU contacts to see what tit-bits they can unearth. At the moment OUSU is working, but more in the Mussolini ‘trains on time’ way than with a meaningful democratic connection to the students it purports to serve.

Lego’s origins in a Danish toymaker’s workshop make it sound like the start of a particularly earnest fairy tale, but Ole Kirk Christiansen’s famous interlocking bricks are a very real part of our societal development. Denmark, like much of Scandinavia, is a country built on solid, transparent politics, a strong welfare state and bipartisan governmental agreement: all of which could be represented in those multi-coloured bricks.

The Lego Movie, released earlier this month, doesn’t, on paper, seem to fit this ethos. It’s hard to see past it being a two-hour long advert for a children’s toy, and that’s not a very ‘Danish’ idea. Capitalism aimed at minors is perhaps the most cynical of all — I’ve only to remember the 1998 release of The Pokemon Movie to start weeping at how, age 6, I bankrupted myself in order to try and score a genuine Mew card. That’s not a society I want to be part of.

The Lego Movie presents us with a society, which, superficially, appears to represent some form of utopian socialism. Emmett, our hero, is a construction worker who is overjoyed at being able to work as part of a ‘team’ and does not question his position in the societal hierarchy. There are, of course, signs that all is not well: coffee costs $37 (although Emmett seems to be able to afford this) and the country/city/Lego-thing is ruled by someone called President Business, which is a subtle but telling reference to the films anti-corporate agenda.

Lenin said ‘freedom in capitalist society always remains about the same as it was in ancient Greek republics: freedom for slave owners’, and this seems particularly true of President Business’s relationship with the residents of the Lego City/Country/Thing. The surface socialism of their social system is, in fact, a corporate ploy to tap into the innate socialised goodness of the citizens. Steven Pinker wrote that ‘the strongest argument against totalitarianism may be a recognition of a universal human nature; that all humans have innate desires for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’, but Lord Business (as he prefers to be called, when not on Presidential business) suggests that the basic ‘desires’ of people might also be an instrument towards totalitarianism.

Which brings us to the film’s didactic message. The fact that the film’s protagonist is Emmett, an average Joe, rather than one of the Master Builders, would not be lost on a child (for whom, after all, the film is intended). Anton Pannekoek wrote on the ‘self-emancipation’ that can be achieved by working within a socialist system, and this seems to be the spirit that Emmett is channelling. Indeed, though he was working in a system that had been corrupted by President/Lord Business, the communal aspect (the workers’ mantra is ‘Everything is cool when you’re part of a team’) of his former employment influences his direction when he becomes leader of the new socialist system of Master Builders.

Here is the point where the complex politics of The Lego Movie may be lost on children under 5. The Master Builders appear to celebrate individualism, something that seems to tap into libertarian ideals. It would be fair to suggest that the Master Builders are guilty of supporting an oligarchical system of government, where those with a more creative disposition have earned the right to rule. Their attempts to push Emmett to be able to create increasingly complex structures is a form of plutocracy — the average construction worker may have personal fried chicken or bratwurst, whereas the average master builder has a spacecraft, motorcycle or pirate ship. Though they are opposing the corporate tyranny of Lord Business, they are guilty of imposing a form of creative fascism on those who do not share their skills.

Which is where Emmett comes in, and re-introduces a progressive form of socialism to the Master Builders. John Stuart Mill wrote that ‘It is the common error of Socialists to overlook the natural indolence of mankind; their tendency to be passive, to be the slaves of habit, to persist indefinitely in a course once chosen’, and it is for this reason that Emmett can become the leader of the Master Builders. The Master Builders would establish a Confucianist meritocracy in the Lego city/country/thing because they concur with Mill’s consideration of the indolence of the average Lego schmuck.

Emmett’s role, therefore, becomes to harness the unique abilities of the Master Builders in a form of mutualist exchange with the citizens (who have been doomed by the corporate superglue). Emmett and the Master Builders are not part of the democratic process and therefore cannot establish state socialism (perhaps that will be addressed in the sequel?), but the final mutualist exchange, where the skills of the Master Builders are used alongside, and for the benefit, of the Lego society as a whole, makes Emmett’s politics very clear.

Though the anti-corporate agenda of the film has been somewhat subsumed by its radical socialist agenda, the film’s final scenes revisit that, as Emmett convinces Lord Business (he’s ‘Lord’ cos he’s wearing his fancy hat) that he too is ‘special’ and can be part of this new participatory society. The focus on everyone being special (and everything being awesome) shows the way that the film has diverged from libertarian (or even left-wing) individualism, to make way for an extraordinary socialist society, which is, essentially, the same as the society that was present in the opening scenes of the film, just with more creativity, cheaper coffee and no more corporate tyranny.

Margaret Thatcher once told the Conservative Council that socialism meant ‘power over people, power to the State’. She would not have liked The Lego Movie. The power of the state is the power of individual Lego people to self-emancipate through work, whilst being part of a participatory system of exchange which recognises that it must utilise individual skills for the benefit of the larger Lego society. Thatcher wouldn’t have liked that, or the screaming children in the audience.

“My father thought it bloody queer/ The day I rolled home with a ring of silver in my ear.”

The first thing I notice about Simon Armitage is that he is still sporting the rebellious earring of poetical fame. Apart from this, he is an unassuming, subdued presence, sitting silently in the corner of the poetry workshop ‘Salutation and Cat’ we are attending. The moment Simon reads a poem aloud, however, all inconspicuousness disapparates. He has a magical voice, melodic and resonant, which leaves the room in awed hush.

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By the end of the session (which is wonderful, by the way, and I recommend it hugely to poetry lovers) I’m a bit star-struck, and I fumble around with the Dictaphone, accidentally playing a test recording. Simon wryly jokes that I’ve forgotten to delete my last interview with Justin Bieber, “the last one before he went completely mad”. Finally I get it working, and we begin.

Most of us first met Simon Armitage in our GCSE poetry anthologies. His catchy, irreverent and accessible style got even the categorically uninterested members of my class listening. My favourite poems were the dark ones – ‘Hitcher’, for example, in which a frustrated office worker clubs a carefree hitchhiker to death with a krooklok – “Stitch that, I remember thinking/ You can walk from there.” In 2008 (my Year 10) the inclusion of such “shocking” poems was debated when Duffy’s ‘Education for Leisure’ (a young narrator stalks the streets with a bread knife) was banned from the syllabus.

Armitage remembers it well. “I thought that was absolutely ridiculous. I think there was actually only one registered complaint. The poem was removed in the midst of a spate of knife crime, and in that climate it’s easy to start jumping at every word. But I think children are generally very good at drawing a line between what is real and what is imaginary. And if you’re going to remove any mention of violence from the syllabus, you’d have to start with all of Shakespeare.”

I wonder what Armitage thinks of the English syllabus at Oxford, with its strong and unusual focus on Old English. He praises this emphasis. “I like the fact that we cherish original poems in our language, and unless we keep reminding ourselves what that language is, we’re going to be unable to appreciate it in the original or translate it. Besides, I quite like the idea that in the coffee houses of Oxford you’re all sitting round speaking Old English to each other.”

I press the question further before he can discover just how flatteringly optimistic this representation of my Old English skills is. Surely the British bias against a module in European literature is a tad nationalistic? He laughs. “If you’re studying English it comes with the territory. If you want to do French, do French!”

Armitage’s passion for our linguistic heritage is expressed in his wonderfully rollicking translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. I ask him what is lost and what is gained in such a free interpretation. “What is lost is etymological fidelity. Certain scholars will spend their whole life trying to understand the meaning of a word and then find its contemporary counterpart. They would argue that any deviation from a strict translation is taking you away from the meaning of the poem which, by definition, must be true. I think what is gained from the way I’ve translated the poem is a re-affirmation of its power. If you want to keep the alliteration, you’re going to have to find other words; you’re going to have to go slightly further afield. So it’s a trade off, but from my point of view as a practising poet, without its musicality, without its sonic qualities, it’s just a story. It’s just fine threads that haven’t been woven together.”

This is not Armitage’s only unusual project. To name but a few: documentaries about technology and history; a musical about pornography; his band, The Scaremongers (listen for proof of the melodious voice). Most recently he undertook a long walk, “from Minehead in Somerset down to Land’s End and then across the Scilly Isles”. He journeyed as a sort of travelling bard, swapping poetry readings for a bed and a burger, and chatting along the way with whoever’s interested. Why that route?

“I did it because it seemed a complementary but opposite project to the Pennine way walk I did in 2010, which had been high, inland moorland, and to a certain extent on my own territory. So I wanted to find a walk that would take me away from home and be coastal. It strained a lot of new muscles! I was also interested in the idea of performing in tourist towns – to see if a poet could make his living next to the Punch and Judy stand.” And was he successful? “Well, I’m still here.”

I ask him what he’s working on at the moment. “I have a new collection of poetry that will be out next year. I’m translating Pearl, one of the other poems from the Gawain manuscript, and I’m working on a stage adaptation of The Iliad – The Last Days of Troy.”

Armitage’s varied work is also often political, although he has expressed diffidence about “poems that wave flags”. I ask him whether poetry should try to change the world, or just reflect it. He replies quickly: “I don’t think it’s a good idea to start being prescriptive about what poetry should and should not do. Poetry should be free. As you develop, the things you want to write about will develop and transform too, so setting rules is only going to hinder you.”

But as one of few truly influential poets of our time, does he ever feel a pressure to write about something? “I’ve never had anyone beating down my door demanding a poem…”

But to yourself? “Well, yes. Sometimes I am inspired by an event and then feel a moral duty to write about it, but that’s a responsibility only to my own conscience. Once, Seamus Heaney was accosted by a Sinn Fein official on a train. The man upbraided him for not writing something on behalf of the republican prisoners who were then on what was called ‘the dirty protest’ in the Maze Prison, striking for the right to be treated as political prisoners. Seamus understood the situation, but he said, ‘look, if I’m going to write anything – I’ll write it for myself.’”

It’s a mark of Simon Armitage’s charisma, (and really, really nice voice), that it doesn’t sound cheesy for him to conclude: “And he was right. With poetry, you always have to be true to yourself.”