The inside track
Tim Goodwin
It's not hard for me to think back to this time two years ago. At the time I was a third year student, happily going about my daily student life, and casually preparing to stand for the Presidency of the Edinburgh University Students' Association. Less than a month, 12 litres of wallpaper paste, 1,600 cable-ties, 2,500 flyers, dozens of pints and (I imagine) tens of thousands of handshakes later I got a new job.
The race to take on one of these positions is always frantic. Candidates have to face a barrage of questions, and generally a fair amount of abuse both on the doorsteps and around campus. They should expect to be told to 'piss off' more than once over the next few weeks and they will be expected to respond to such insults with a smile.
On top of this, their hours will be long, and most of the minutes will be pretty lousy. They'll be up at the crack of dawn scrabbling up lamposts with posters, and they'll be going to bed not too soon before the crack of dawn having spent the night adjusting their websites or pasting posters onto cardboard. And they'll awake with a start, sweaty from nightmares of campus-wide humiliation, to ask themselves that one essential question: should I have posters or flyers?!
My God, I'm glad that's not me again.
The one thing they should be able to count on, and the one thing that EUSA elections have always seemed to have on their side, is that the candidates will not be the ones dishing out the dirt. Kissenger is regularly misquoted as calling student politics vicious, but for the most part, we've managed to avoid this.
My worries are that this may all be allowed to change. The now infamous hate-rag (or should that be hate-blog?) EUSAless seems to be going out of its way to bring an air of sleaze, slander, and downright abuse to this year's election. Those commenting on the blog are amongst the worst culprits (one has even gone as far as criticising Nick Ward's candidacy on the basis of his sexuality) although the blog itself is usually much too quick to substitute exciting stories for truth, and is entirely unencumbered by fact.
Harry Cole, one of our presidential hopefuls, has called all candidates to sign a 'clean campaign pledge' he is drawing up. But how pure are his motives? As a Conservative, is he really in this for students, or is there an element of Labour-bashing? He claims not, but I have to wonder when he tells me that one of the biggest problems with EUSA is the fact that the current President has been a supporter of Tony Blair and then produces a video which bashes him as old and stale.
So I guess what I really want to push is this one point: the elections should be fun, but they should also be serious. The job of holding a student sabbatical position is extremely important, and it entails shouldering an awful lot of responsibility. But we're also students. This is demonstrably not the real world and we should not be out to attack one another.
When Brown and Cameron square off, it's one thing. When Cole, Ward and Ramsay square off it's going to be another. To the outsider, the student experience is chacterised as being fun, invigorating, and exciting. It's not characterised as being a world of bitching and backstabbing, even in the sphere of student politics. Maybe this is something of a fantasy land, but it should be preserved.
So good luck to all the candidates and congratulations. You've entered an exciting new experience in getting yourself nominated, but above all, you've done something really brave in stepping up to the mark. Go for it.
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