Ramsay's behaviour is hardly appealing

Tim Goodwin

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There is a possibility that by the time you’ve read this Edinburgh University will have a new student president. There is a possibility that the whole saga involving disqualified presidential candidate Adam Ramsay will have sorted itself out. There is a possibility that an appeal panel will have met, made a decision, and that everyone will be happy with that decision and so subsequently a result will be announced. I’m just not going to hold my breath, that’s all.

First of all, the panel’s got to actually meet, something it has categorically failed to do for more than a fortnight now. This has really centred around a dispute over whether the University Rector, one Mark Ballard (formerly MSP), is competent to sit on the appeals committee since he was eased into office by a campaign that had Adam Ramsay as its captain, or at least navigator. This led Mr Ramsay’s opponents to kick up a big fuss.

In true "offence is the best defence" style, Mr Ramsay’s camp responded by claiming that current student President, Josh MacAlister, couldn’t sit on the panel either, since he ran at the same time as Adam last year (and, obviously, won). Then just to make things more exciting, controversial Vice President Tom French, who previously resigned from the appeals committee to back Adam, kicked up a stink claiming he was impartial and should be allowed back on the committee.

So I guess it’s not all that surprising that they haven’t got around to actually considering the appeal yet. Last I heard of it, there was a meeting last Thursday to decide when there could be a meeting – if ever there has been a superfluous meeting, that was it.

So what’s all the fuss about? Well, in short, as anyone who’s been following this drawn-out saga will already know, Adam was disqualified for having a couple of campaigners canvassing in halls out of the regulated hours, after he had been warned against such behaviour on a previous occasion. The Ramsay camp say they won the popular vote, so the fact they were cheating doesn’t matter a bit and he should be crowned king.

Hold on a minute, I hear you cry, cheating doesn’t matter anymore does it? Well, it does, and that’s why Returning Officer Graham Boyack kicked him out of the election. There is also a claim that the penalty was too harsh. Well, what other penalty could have been handed out? Slap on the wrist?

The irony is that in previous elections, Ramsay & Co. have gone out of their way to disqualify candidates. They attacked Laura Woods in 2006 for having a banner up at the wrong time, and lied about having photos of non-student campaigners to try to get her ousted (Maggie Chapman, now a Green Party Edinburgh City Councillor, told me at the time that they had no photos, but that didn’t matter so long as you were firm with the Returning Officer). Failing that, they had a pop at me on the basis that my website wasn’t properly supported, something I had already been asked about and answered, and had already cleared as within the rules with Mr Boyack. Last year, when I was President, we received countless complaints from Ramsay supporters against Josh, none of them amounting to anything.

Then, the icing on the cake was that Mr Ramsay actually went on record and complained in Student newspaper that the Returning Officer’s decisions were never harsh enough. Well, that strategy seems to have backfired now, hasn’t it?

The truth is that this would never happen in the real world. Yes, it was members of Adam’s campaign team and not Adam himself who broke the rules. But in the real world, you have to take responsibility for your team’s actions. In the real world, if your guys are out of line, it is you that gets the blame. And in the real world, if your team cheats, you get disqualified, simple as that. The question is not whether or not Adam won the popular vote, the question is whether he should even have been on the ballot paper.

So we wait with bated breath for the appeals committee to meet. I wouldn’t advise you hold your breath – at the current rate you’d suffocate. But what I do hope, regardless of what the decision is, is that all parties involved have the sense and maturity to try to live in the real world and to accept the decision, not pursuing it through a General Meeting or the courts. Our electoral process has been ridiculed enough by this grubby little episode. Now’s the time for all of us to take a breath, grow up and accept reality.

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