These Exec campaign bans are absolutely pointless

With the Exec campaigning week well under way, besides all the sweets and colourful campaigners dotted around campus, I have found myself disgruntled in regards to the mind numbing amount of campaign bans over the last four days.

Before the week had even properly begun, Luke Thomson, running for VP Sport, received a social media ban after he accidentally revealed his campaign theme before the allotted time. This was followed by Esther Malkinson‘s social media ban, after the Disney Society posted a link to her Facebook campaign page for the VP Societies position. Both Jack Mynott who is also running for VP Sport and James Rowe, who is running for EO Finance and Commercial services, breached rule 4.7 of the candidates’ pack by failing to declare campaigning material, that being a beanstalk and a projector, so they too received campaign bans.

The exec campaigns week is meant to be fun, for the campaigners and for the rest of the student body as it brightens up our dull, February campus and it makes a change from the usual mundane festivities. But these bans are just making this perfect example of positive student cohesion into a legalities-ridden mess. Understandably, if the campaigners break a rule there should be consequences, but those should be of more serious natures such as flashing college students or say, I don’t know, slapping a girl around the face.

James Rowe was banned for use of a projector

We are a university, famous for our sporting achievements whereby sports personnel use cunning and whitty sports play to get to the top of their category. So, why can’t we let the exec candidates do the same? If one of them mid-week decides to use a clever means of publicity, why not let them? Let them prove that they can be leaders and take control.

The university fails to realise that by publicly releasing the bans, they give the punished students a leg up as this will give them another platform to be advertised from. If students cannot have others groups on Facebook sharing their campaign page, then why should the university be allowed to publicise the naughty, rule-breaking campaigners? Especially at the beginning of the week, when no students were even aware of what the campaigners were about, or who they even were, Thomson’s ban gave him a massive boost in the running for his position. So it’s no wonder that Mynot decided to break a rule so he could potentially receive more publicity and become more equally publicised to his competitor. But then Thomson got Sky News to announce that we should vote for him, so it was game over from there really.

This reminds me of being at school, where the badly behaved children were always the ones most known to the teachers, and the ones that they made the biggest effort with. At university you wouldn’t expect such idiotic behaviour from the people who run and organise these campaign weeks – you would have thought they would have had some brains.

All that has come of these bans is more publicity for Thomson, Malkinson, Mynot and Rowe, therefore giving them an unfair leg up in the competition. Does anyone even know if Malkinson or Rowe have contenders? Probably not, and no one cares now as their minds have already been made up on who they are going to vote for as they’re the only ones they can even remember.