Neil Pooran bemoans a missed chance to revive EUSA's beleaguered constitution

Last week’s Students' Association Annual General Meeting was the usual show of cheery, long-winded debate, which managed to reach quorum for once.  

As a true politics geek I manage to find a frankly shameful interest in the whole thing. Yet I recognise, as I’m sure most students do, that the AGM is far from being the best way of representing the voice of Edinburgh students. 650 is a great turnout compared to previous years, but it still can’t lay any serious claim to representing EUSA’s 26,000 members.

Unfortunately, a chance to change this moribund, ineffective system was completely torpedoed by an unfortunate mixture of incompetence and underhand scheming. This is nothing new in student politics, but given that the future of the entire organisation is at stake this failure needs to be addressed.  

The innocuously named ‘enabling motion’, first on the agenda at the AGM, was actually the first step on a route to giving EUSA a complete, root-and-branch reformation. It would have opened the door to having a campus-wide discussion on what we wanted our student union to do for us. Most importantly, it would have paved the way to having an online referendum later this year on the future of the organisation, including AGMs. In the unlikely event that students decided to maintain the status quo, this could have at least been decided by direct democracy rather than closed-door discussions.

You’d be forgiven for not knowing this though, as the four EUSA sabbatical officers who chaired the meeting seemed intent on pushing it through with a bare minimum of debate. In the end they got a sizeable majority of the meeting to back the proposal, but not the 75% majority required for a constitutional change.  

Part of the reason for this was the fact that, much to the sabbs' surprise, we heard some passionate, vociferous speeches from ordinary student members against the motion. They argued with apparent conviction that the motion would keep EUSA’s power in the hands of an elite clique, who would stifle dissent and decide for themselves what the union should campaign for. You know, the kind of guys we’d turned up to really stick it to.

The polar opposite of this is true, and this wasn’t the grassroots uprising it looked like. Most people who spoke against the motion happened to be in the Edinburgh University Debates Union, an organisation which has a huge vested interest in maintaining the status quo. The Debates Union gets a lump sum of money every year from EUSA, unlike all other student societies at the University which generally have to fight for their own financial survival. The EUSA constitution grants them several other perks, and it’s this kind of constitutional absurdity that the motion was supposed to examine.  

The Debates Union has previously rebuffed suggestions that they should be funded like other societies. Being a debating society, they have a ready supply of speakers who know how to win over a room.  

Sebastian Osborn, the Debates Union convener, has said that money wasn’t the only reason for the society’s unofficial move to oppose the motion. Given that he abortively submitted an amendment which would have seen Debates Union keep its money without altering the rest of the motion, this is a little suspect.

I’m not saying the motion shouldn’t have been challenged at all. It’s true that some might be worried that online referenda will be less representative than physical meetings. But we didn’t have the honest debate we should have had. In the end, a minority of views was able to dictate terms to the majority.

The whole representative side of our student union now faces a bleak future. It’s stuck with an outdated, useless constitution that calls for general meetings only a tiny fraction of our members can be bothered to turn up to. We’re left with a bewildering array of committees, subcommittees and executive committees that are supposed to represent the student voice, but are too fractured and distant to do so.  

Online referendums could have given the organisation the chance to be genuinely representative. Instead we’re left with a husk of democracy that will continue to fail to deliver.  

Be sure to thank the four EUSA sabbaticals and the Debates Union for that.

 Published 24 November 2009

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