It’s SUSU election time again and I’m sure many of you have already enjoyed spending the first five minutes of every lecture listening to someone wearing a spray-painted t-shirt or carrying an inflatable pineapple telling you about their manifestos. Many of them talk about student engagement and disinterest in the election and much has been made of the fact that three of the seven people standing for president are joke candidates. Across the other sabbatical positions, about half the candidates have inserted funny little catchwords between their first and last names, like ‘banana’ or ‘mamma mia’ or ‘Darth Vader’s electric fun palace’. At the presidential level, the serious candidates tell us that their jokey opponents bring ‘fun’ and ‘variety’ to the election and that they encourage people to vote by making the whole process less boring. Besides, it’s only a Student Union election, right? It doesn’t really matter, does it? Who cares about the issues, ha ha ha, as long as we are all having fun? In fact, let’s cancel the election all together, get blind drunk and have a big tickle fight in the middle of the red brick concourse. Winner gets to be president, ok?
Failing that, we could always just put one of the joke candidates in charge from the outset and avoid the boring elections altogether. They present an interesting paradox, those joke candidates. On one hand, their wacky names and funny policies surely bring in loads of apathetic students who otherwise wouldn’t have bothered with the elections, but on the other hand, the very fact SUSU includes them in the presidential debates makes the whole thing seem like a bit of a joke, which doubtless turns people off voting.
It’s almost like a weird sort of cognitive dissonance. SUSU desperately wants to be seen as a serious organisation that students should heed but at the same time, it doesn’t want to seem too boring; it’s accepted wisdom that students won’t pay attention to anything boring. The result is that lecture halls are presented with one person who wants to end student poverty and increase the representation of women at the Union and then another who is threatening to run the Vice-Chancellor through with a cutlass. Before long, the entire Union will doubtless turn up at a psychiatrist’s office with a bag full of manifestos printed on florescent tinfoil and an inflatable traffic cone on its head, searching for some kind of relief.
As a highly sympathetic individual, I couldn’t bear to see this happen to our Union. So here is my suggestion. If SUSU wants to engage people, it needs to drop the dissonance and become either fun, exciting and silly, or dull, boring and serious. One or the other. Real politics long ago decided (some might argue to its detriment) to be serious. There are silly candidates, sure, but they aren’t taken seriously. You don’t see Cameron, Milliband and Clegg debating alongside Alan “Howling Laud” Hope of the Monster Raving Loony Party, which is probably a shame.
So, serious or silly SUSU? Maybe we could hold an election to decide? The candidates standing for the serious party could have a debate, while the silly ones could have a dance-off in a bath of beans. Until then, I encourage everyone to get down to the SUSU building, consider all the posters carefully, discuss the finer points of the manifestos with your friends, then form an orderly queue and vote Andy “Disco Trifle McFirebolt” Smith for President. Student democracy forever!
For more information on the SUSU Spring Elections 2014, visit SUSU’s Election Page