Studying Politics doesn’t make you a politician

Maybe we’d all pay more attention if SUs focused on stuff we actually care about

| UPDATED

The problem with student politics is that it’s made up of student politicians. They’re idealistic and they think they know best. As a student, students’ unions are supposed to represent you and your interests. It’s an important role to be had, communicating students’ needs to universities, but what these second-rate Nick Cleggs have in fact done is reduce SUs to little more than talking shops.

Between scoffing port and reading chapters of Das Kapital for fun these people, in their loafers and tweed, have hijacked our SUs. They’re much more interested in bringing about a dictatorship of the proletariat than getting on with their studies or even enjoying university. They have seen to it that SUs have become echo chambers concerned more with banning sombreros, speakers and student newspapers than actually doing what would actually benefit students. Student politics is predictable and pointless.

Me in typical student politician garb

Students come to university to get wasted and occasionally do some work. They don’t come to university to waste their time voting on ideological bullshit that doesn’t affect them. For the most part, students just want to be left alone to enjoy the university experience. SUs should be there to make that easier for us but instead student politics is the sport of the campus anorak. A certain type of person likes to get involved and that would be fine if they weren’t so self-indulgent. They’re more concerned with save-the-world policies that have very little to do with students and when they are relevant, they more often than not screw over sections of campus.

Student politicians’ weird fetish for the BDS “movement”, for instance, does much to alienate Jewish students. Bans on speakers and societies too, surprise surprise, just show how SUs actually don’t really care about students. So when I hear complaints about low turnout in SU elections and votes I can’t help, like most students, but not give a shit. Low turnout isn’t because the SU mascot isn’t fluffy enough, it’s not because SU aren’t on social media, it’s because students don’t care and why would we?

Why would we waste our time voting on policies inspired by Russell Brand when we could spend it more productively like watching Netflix, sleeping or just starring into space?

If student politicians’ cared more for their peers they would propose policies that actually benefit students. Indeed some of them do at least have token ideas: lecture capture, 24 hour libraries, more study space – these are all fairly decent policies and though they rarely ever happen, the sentiment is nice. Students actually care about this kind of stuff. Some actually vote on this kind of stuff. Take All Student Meeting, or referenda, votes at Warwick. The motion for a 24-hour library had a turnout of around 1,200 people – as far as I’m aware that’s the highest recorded and almost double this year’s vote on “defining free education” to include a “decolonised curriculum”, which totalled around 700. This is in a university of 23,000.

That turnout is shockingly bad but it’s not depressing. You can’t expect students to vote if you’re only giving them rubbish to vote on. The 24-hour library is a start, but will it get anywhere? Possibly. I do know that university administrators are a lot more understanding of practical polices like that than ones that were inspired by a chapter on ecologism in an A-level politics textbook.

Doing a politics degree doesn’t make you a good politician. Sure, I bet you’ve read all of The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists and understand the toil of the working man in 1910, but that doesn’t mean you understand the toil of the modern student.