Highest turnout to student general meeting in living memory

Over 650 students attended Edinburgh University’s Student’s Association’s Annual General Meeting last week.

Organisers were forced to revert to the contingency plan of relocating over 100 students to watch at a nearby lecture theatre in Appleton Towers, after the success of a wide-spread advertising campaign, promoting the event.

Vice President of Societies and Activities, Camilla Pierry was in charge of the overspill and told The Journal: “Appleton Tower was crazy. We'd set it up as a backup but never thought we'd have to use it. We've not had a turnout like that in years."

However, she admitted they had a few teething problems: “It was chaos for the first few motions with sound and visuals cutting out all the time, but no-one got stroppy, and once the stream was rolling people really engaged.

“There was a lot of cheering and heckling over in Appleton; while I would have loved to have been out on the stage and debating we made our own atmosphere."

The meeting lasted over three hours and people left toward the end, however the meeting remained quorate throughout.

EUSA president, Thomas Graham told The Journal: “It's fantastic to have so many people coming along and being involved in making the decisions. It's sad though, that despite having the highest turnout in living memory, that we still only had 2.5 per cent of students there.

“It was great to hear such high standards of debate. I think it reflects extremely well on our students that we can have such exciting, emotive, and intellectually rigorous arguments put forward in an engaging and respectful environment.”

The high turnout was overshadowed by the fact the only thing that officially changed after the meeting was an agreement that EUSA should promote awareness of more environmentally friendly and cheaper energy bills.

The No Platform Policy—calling for extremist groups to be banned from campus—restoration of bibles at Pollock and an Israeli Boycott motion all failed to pass. Plans to remove Tobacco products from display in EUSA outlets and a ban on EUSA staff using domestic flights did pass, but failed togain the required 300 votes needed to make decisions binding. 

As the Smoking Motion was only 32 votes off reaching the 300 mark, Graham agreed to take teh issue to the Committee of Management. There is a strong possibility they will use their power to implement it .

Mr Graham told The Journal: "The last major constitutional change was made in 1974. There is no plan at the moment. We need to reflect on what went wrong."