More blunders from Kim Il Union

• UBU choose £50 winner for their failed selfie marketing campaign – the best friend of one of the VPs.
• Rob Griffiths reveals he’s loved “the lifestyle and the power” of presidency.
• Griffiths claims student satisfaction ratings are low because students ‘don’t understand’ what UBU is. UBU is here to ‘change society’, not provide ‘commercial services’ to students.
• Griffiths appears to openly endorse VP Imogen Palmer’s re-election.  

It’s been another disastrous week for UBU.

Yesterday the winner of their #UBUSelfie campaign was announced – Eli Lower, VP Imogen Palmer’s best friend.

Missed the campaign?  UBU stuck a few mirrors around campus and asked people to take selfies and tweet them with #UBUSelfie for the chance to win £50.  The idea was supposedly to get all students to ‘see the leader in yourself’ and engage with the elections.

Eli Lower’s winning selfie, chosen ‘at random’

The campaign totally bombed: only 15 people entered, including five of the six Full Time Officers, and other people working for/representing the Union.  They hastily picked a winner after we nagged them repeatedly to reveal the results of the campaign.

Eli is apparently the only entrant who doesn’t already work for or represent the UBU.  She also happens to be the best friend of Imogen Palmer, current VP Activities.

VP Sport Hannah Pollak was one of only 14 entrants the campaign could reach out to

Union reps are desperately trying to convince us that the competition wasn’t rigged, insisting “the winner was chosen at random” and refusing to say any more about the selection process.

But it seems like they were forced to pick Eli to avoid literally awarding the cash to themselves.

The £50 comes from student membership fees – and the Union are also refusing to reveal how much they spent buying, printing and installing the mirrors (presumably quite a lot).

VP Community Ellie Williams and VP Welfare Alessandra Berti try and win their own prize

Meanwhile, Rob Griffiths shot himself in the foot with a statement about his year as President, published as a public post on his Facebook page.  He said he was tempted to run for elections again because he’s grown attached to “factors like the lifestyle [and] the power”.

The power-hungry president even jokes: “There’s a chance quietly to name one of the rooms in the Richmond Building after me and hope nobody notices.”

In the same public Facebook post, he appeared to endorse VP Imogen Palmer’s campaign for re-election, despite his position on the Democratic Standards Committee forbidding him from doing so. He said ‘should it happen that the wonderful Imogen wishes to stand again and carry forward our team’s work, she knows she has my vote and I hope she has yours too’.

The first selfie was from President Rob Griffiths

He also tried to attribute the Union’s unpopularity to bad marketing, defending Union representatives.

He says: “The fact that most of you won’t believe Students’ Unions can change the world shows we could all probably invest a bit more in our marketing functions”.

In an online statement, Rob Griffiths claimed student satisfaction ratings are low because of a ‘perception gap’. He patronisingly attacks students who think ‘the Union’s shit’ because of poor bar facilities, accusing them of ignoring the Union ‘changing the world for the better’.

Other than being extremely condescending to students (and threatening independent newspaper editors with censorship), he’s whitewashing over some very unpopular moves by the UBU like the Role Review and major mistakes like Ellie Williams’s racially motivated tweets.

He also says he’s appointed a new marketing manager to convince students that the Union’s actually doing good work.

VP Activities Imo Palmer is best friends with winner Eli Lower

And proving that he really is the mini-Tony Blair we suspected, Griffiths is still trying to interfere with and control next year’s committee.

Before he goes, he’s going to “publish a few of my more radical ideas to make sure that they get an initial airing and make future teams’ lives easier…to take them to the AMM.”

Perhaps he’ll try and replace the University Vice-Chancellor next.