Quite frankly it is shocking that it has taken you this long to acknowledge that a serious attack on the Guild has taken place with the Trustee Board’s attempt at sacking the VPE without any consulation from students, followed the massive blunder of Mark announcing that it was an ‘admin error’.

For me this blog post is too little, too late.

Firstly I think it’s commendable that you have chosen to post publicly on this issue to give us a better understanding of what has gone on. I’m sure you were under significant pressure to keep silent on this but you’ve done the right thing.

I hope that at least privately you do not accept the Guild’s current line that this whole thing was an “admin error” and rather that that was a weak attempt to cover up yet another attack on student democracy in this institution after it’d gone wrong.

There is a organised group in this union (which includes much of the senior management and trustees, though of course not all, I’ll call them the ‘cabal’ for now) who in recent years – in co-ordination with the university management – have been involved in a systematic project to de-democratise the Guild; transferring power from students into the hands of untouchable bureaucrats and turning it into a subordinate “Student Experience” department of the university, rather than a separate body committed to protecting and campaigning for the interests of students even if this means challenging the university. The changes to the Guild’s governance structures, from the abolishing of General Meetings, the creation of the Senior Management Team and removal of the student-only Trustee Board in 2008 right through to the most recent transferral of powers previously held by the Sabbatical Officers to the SMT can all be best understood in this context.

I suspect that the cabal has underestimated the extent of student resistance to their project (possibly because they believed students were only interested in cheap booze and wouldn’t notice or care) and now see that their gains face being reversed. Rightly or wrongly, they believe that Edd Bauer is the driving force behind this threat to their project and seem to believe that getting rid of him would make much of their troubles go away. These people are pretty damn determined to get what they want, and the nature of what they’re doing should tell you that they do not have any respect for democracy or student welfare, will shamelessly lie to the student body and stretch the Guild’s rules however far they think they can get away with in order to achieve their aims. For another example just look at the sheer determination to force through their Officer Disciplinary Policy (the “new” one is really just the old one reworded totally ignoring the mandate to base it on Birkbeck’s) so that we get another year of officers who don’t toe the management’s line facing the threat of being removed undemocratically.

I don’t doubt that you have given a totally honest account of what happened here, but I think it would be very naive of you to not accept that certain people on the Trustee Board were dishonest to you and have shown they have no respect for you. I hope you can also understand why many students who want to campaign for a more democratic union (who want to “Reclaim the Guild,” as it were) do not feel that they can work with the current administration when they treat us as an enemy to be defeated, have no respect for us, are persistantly dishonest and manipulative and willing to use very immoral tactics in order to win.

I don’t expect you to reply to this as I accept I’m touching on sensitive issues, this is just a frank message that I’d like you to think about.

All the best.

This is precisely what officer blogs are supposed to do – up with this sort of thing!

If you still do want to find out more about the campaign, we’ve got a pretty good report on the website that covers things in detail, though if you’ve got any questions, you’re more than welcome to ask us via the widget on the website, our Facebook page, or our Twitter account.