With less than a year to go until graduation, I’ve decided to get LinkedIn.

Until now I’ve been a submarine Linked-Inner (if that’s the correct word). I don’t list any personal details on my profile, but I surface occasionally to see how everyone else’s CVs have been coming on. But with graduate job applications just around the corner it’ll shortly be time to pimp my own (sparse) CV online.

It’s a soul-destroying process, both seeing otherwise sane folk self-immolating themselves on the altar of career advancement, and repeating the feat myself.

A ‘working proficiency’ in Spanish, a friend claims? Bollocks, one thinks. I was with you when you tried to order us all a round of San Miguels and it wasn’t pretty.

I’m sceptical of many supposed personal developments listed by our academic peers. To gain “a deep understanding [of] the world of investment banking and sales and trading”, as one student at another university says he has, you might think a lengthy internship would be required. Apparently not: the student acquired the skill through completion of a ‘business game’ event run by a city firm whilst he was in sixth form. Impressive stuff. 

Or the friend who, bless her, got taken the mickey out of for the dubious claim that she acted as an “election strategy consultant” to a politician, “providing advice deduced from complex patterns of local evidence”. Delivering leaflets, I think, was what it boiled down to.

Indeed there are no prizes for modesty. Employers are unlikely to be impressed by an accurate account of what you did on that summer work experience placement – ‘gained a more thorough understanding of social media through regular consultation of my twitter and facebook newsfeed’ etc –  and so a wilfully evasive paragraph takes its place – ‘learnt about the organisation and industry mechanisms’ and such what, as if you absorbed the knowledge sitting in the office through osmosis.

It’s all very disconcerting. School and university colleagues behave very strangely on the professional networking website. Recently, shortly after I accepted the invitation of an acquaintance to ‘connect’, the chap ‘endorsed’ me for a ‘skill’. It would have been really charming if I’d been publicly recommended for ‘public speaking’, ‘organisational aptitude’ or ‘leadership’, rather than Microsoft Excel. But beggars can’t be choosers.

And then there are the school friends – long since culled from facebook – who emerge from the dead to ‘reconnect’ professionally.

It is mildly entertaining to see the morons of yesteryear profess expertise in ‘data analysis’ and ‘computational mathematics’ (using a calculator?). Also, who knew that so-and-so had made it onto The Weakest Link? Mental.

But mainly it’s just terrifying. The lab partner I had in GCSE biology who spent lessons flicking his mucus across the room in devestating projectiles is now a medical student, soon to be unleashed on the NHS. Thank God the CQC is on the case. 

I rant, of course, with the full intention of shortly committing most of these faux pas myself. LinkedIn is a buckaneering big willy market, unregulated by sanity, in which the currency is bullshit. Through the medium of management speak outrageous exaggerations are propagated, and everyone knows it. The inflationary effect of people’s CV boasts is that new entrants buy into the currency even more, leading to a bubble which – as far as I can see – is yet to burst.

Perhaps we should go the full hog and write Wikipedia profiles for ourselves; though we should probably avoid the hubris of Chuka Umunna, the Labour MP allegedly caught out for christening himself the ‘British Obama’ on Wikipedia.

Visiting the House of Lords is a stark reminder of the sort of society we still live in. My photo was taken, my body was scanned for hidden metal, my possessions were x-rayed. And for what? So that I don’t kill a crusty old man with a pair of nailclippers, or pull a Guy Fawkes and bring down this bastion of ‘old democracy’? 

There are 755 seats in the Lords, of which only 180 are crossbenchers and a meagre 21 are non-affiliated. The chamber is undeniably political- it’s a seething mass of donors, campaigners and high-flyers with a partisan inclination. 15 of these seats are still held by hereditary peers, one of whom, Lord Willoughby de Broke, has now aligned himself with UKIP. Of course, they aren’t really to blame for their part in this masquerade. They’re the out-dated relics; the standard bearers for absolute monarchy, serfdom and afternoon tea. It’s not for them to reform themselves.

But unlike the Queen and her family, the Lords still have a political purpose. Elizabeth II’s role in our constitution is incontrovertibly undemocratic, but, at the same time, we’ve come to accept that she’s really there to sell stamps and bring in the floods of Japanese tourists with their Yen that props up our ailing services economy. She’s the ultimate tour-guide and she’s handsomely rewarded for it.

The Lords has none of that purpose or charm, but, instead, serves a political function as part of our ludicrous bicameral parliament. Where the US’s bicameral system is represented by two elected bodies (the Senate and the House of Representatives), the country that gave birth to American democracy still harbours the fugitive anachronism of an unelected chamber. Life peers have diluted public consciousness of the problem, but have exacerbated the reality. Who elected Baroness Warsi to sit in cabinet meetings and espouse her contemptible views on gay rights? Who gave this chamber authority to comment on, let alone shoot down, any bill it chooses?

Of course, these are old arguments that were addressed in the 1999 House of Lords Act. But the problem hasn’t been solved, it’s simply been pushed away from the media limelight. The antiquarian concept of the ‘House of Lords’, or of a ‘Lord’ in general, is at the heart of Britain’s indefatigable class problem. A fresh faced 18-year-old David Cameron, finally removing his Etonian smock, faces the challenging question of whether he should pursue his political career by seeking election to the House of Commons, or by rubbing his posh friends the right way until he trumps his Grand Daddy (a mere baronet, yuck!) and gets a seat in the Lords. That is the process by which we have inadvertently built our Tory cabinet, a process that many in Oxford are complicit with.

I’m not a revolutionary or particularly ardent about politics, but we are in danger of forgetting that an appointed chamber is not a democratic chamber. Democracy is not one of those fancy socialist ideas. Nigel Farage believes in the democratic process just as strongly as Red Ed, Caroline Lucas or Dennis Skinner. Radicalism is saying that we should blow up the Lords, gumption is saying we should stop allowing it to decide our laws. Whilst we protect and revere these institutions, we are creating an all-too-visible glass ceiling that, for any number of reasons, isn’t being smashed to pieces.

When I visited the House of Lords with a sea of other Oxonians, I found myself awash with, not abstract repulsion, but idolising stares. The gilded interior of the Union, or the crystal port glasses of OUCA, have caused a collective amnesia about what we should aspire towards. If we wish, in the generation to come, to continue to be at the forefront of the international democratic process, then we need to consign all 755 mummified seats to the graveyard that holds slavery, partial suffrage and those poor, unemployed hereditary peers.

The Oxford Union is more than just an acquaintance of scandal, they are close and personal friends it appears, and so news of another has probably come as no surprise. That some of the actions committed are possibly illegal is, however, a new low. The influence and advantages offered by joining the upper echelons of the Union cannot be doubted, but that does not excuse the actions that a minority of Committee members have taken in order to get to the top. The malicious and possibly illegal actions of the few should not infringe upon the good work the Union and its members actually do, and we should seek to prevent such controversies occurring again.

The Union offers an opportunity for those interested in competitive debating to train and hone their skills, and to compete to an international level. Repeatedly, debate teams from Oxford succeed at a national and international level, highlighting the position of Oxford as a world-class University.

The work individual committee members put into organizing events, debates, and especially speakers is phenomenal – the appearance of John McCain and Nancy Pelosi are impressive victories that must be recognized, especially when one considers that for many it is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to meet such figures. I for one was beside myself when I saw Dambisa Moyo speak in Michaelmas.

Each weekly debate is thought-provoking and educational – recent debates over adoption by same-sex parents, the use of drones in warfare, and the ethics of financial services, are all highly relevant and have been used to expose students to different opinions and points of view. The work of those within the Union is brilliant, and it is a shame that the actions of a few diminish this.

We must all recognize, that despite the Union’s flaws, it is undoubtedly an Oxford institution. The Oxford Union is as much a part of Oxford as punting, subfusc and sunny days in the quad – we cannot deny that. To those outside of the Oxford Bubble, Oxford University and the Union are synonymous. And so, the reputation and prestige of both are interlinked. The recent scandal eventually leaked into the national press, like all Union scandals, once again reinforcing the image that Oxford University is a place of dirty politics.

It is not conducive to condemn it externally, no amount of comment pieces will permanently prevent those seeking elected Union positions from hacking and playing politics. It will be said that the Union needs to change: that it’s committee members should be forced to comply to rules more effectively, that hacking should be cracked down upon, and so on; but the Union cannot change itself over night.

Instead it is we Oxford students who should change the Union from within. The Union needs more people to be active within it, more people to run for election, and more people willing to discipline those who act in a negative fashion. The more decent people who are a part of the Union, the less likely it is that a very small minority will be able to besmirch it’s name, and by extension Oxford’s.

It will be hard to do, undoubtedly – the Union’s reputation of ‘hacking’ is deeply ingrained, students already have an action-packed term without adding Union responsibilities on top, and it can be difficult to operate in such a political atmosphere without succumbing to it, difficult to avoid fighting fire with fire.

Yet it is imperative that we at least try. We cannot stand by and simply bash the Union from afar, as the Union’s reputation can survive and outlast such sniping. We must be responsible for the institution that is an essential part of Oxford, and we can only do this through being active within it. To those who claim it is a dirty place, I ask that you get involved and help to clean it up!

The Union does have its flaws, like any association – in such a politically-charged place, there will undoubtedly be some controversies and scandals. But the flaws are not institutional, they can be fixed, and it is our responsibility to fix them.