I’ll stretch the meaning of perspective here, purely for the aid of a more snappy title. Not only do our student officers lack the ability to judge the relative importance of issues, they also lack the ability to think of issues from multiple viewpoints.

I’ll take the second idea first, for no particular reason. It is a rare talent indeed to be able to see an issue from all possible directions, and extremely valuble if you have got it. I don’t. Neither do our officers. But at least I try to work around my lack of talent, by listening to what others say, not just jumping for the first thing I think of, and trying to consider other options. For example, I had a drunken yet very enlightening conversation with Dave Parry last year on the LEQ system, and students hacking into it. He pointed out that the real problem is with lecturers hacking it; after all, it’s their jobs that are on the line, they are the ones with a vested interest in the results. I totally hadn’t thought of that, but Dave was right in what he said. On the other hand, we have the suggested policy from Sen of an amnesty on all outstanding disposal of chemicals and other Health and Safety issues. He was unable to concieve, despite my best efforts, that this is a purely damaging idea – instead of encouraging people to act responsibly, this only benefits groups that have been maliciously hiding issues due to the cost of sorting them out. If you stumble across and issue, like we did with the chemicals, but this happens to be the week after the amnesty, then you will be (financially) punished. Good guys lose, bad guys win. But neither Sen nor any other member of Exec had worked that out, which is worrying. I had no duty to think the LEQ issue through thoroughly, but our officers absolutely must do so. Yet they don’t.

Instead, they continually make policy that they haven’t thought through properly. How many people realise that we will shortly be advertising for an election for the new DPSA, even though that’s what they voted to do. My hat goes off to Jude Baxter for being the only one to vote against our new policy against graduate taxes. Two issues with this – firstly, there are actually a lot of Imperial student who see graduate tax as the preferred way of solving the funding crises (and is similar to my preferred method); Council should be representing those views. That was Jude’s concern. My concern is that the Union is rapidly backing itself into a corner on the whole funding issue. Instead of trying to rate some ideas as good, some as better, and some worse, the Union is blanketly applying the "not acceptable" to almost every solution proposed. They don’t seem to realise that putting your fingers in your ears and saying ‘no’ all the time rapidly loses all credibility, with the students and with the government. But the paper they passed was written less than an hour before the meeting, and passed with a few seconds debate without anyone considering the full consequencies of their action.

With the relative importance issue, I’ll try to be brief. It’s probably the biggest bugbear of ordinary students, especially those not involved in clubs or other Union activities. Dealing with matters that affect all of the students, such as transport and housing, come a sorry second to the internal structure debates and bureacratic pernicities of a typical Union meeting. I worked for the Union over the summer, and nobody could say what we were doing for the vast majority of students we are supposed to represent that neither come to the bar nor join our clubs. Health and Safety issues – moving the chemicals was the least dangerous thing I’ve done this year. I am qualified to say that, as a trained chemist, yet our officers hear the words "Dangerous Chemicals", "pouring down the sink", and stick their oars in where it wasn’t necessary, and was counter productive. They don’t understand the risks, they have no experience of the matters, yet they make no effort to find out more to enable them to put things into perspective.

An observer at the last council was of the opinion that his paper on "Fair Trade" was more important than the censure, to the point where he repeatedly (and successfully) tried to stop the discussion, so that he instead could spend yet more time trying to advertise his newly formed working group. His point was that coucil had lost their sense of perspective on the importance of following the rules, but I would argue that his perspective on the importance of his paper was also lacking. But he’s far from the only person involved in the running of the Union who lacks perspective.

It is the policy of the Union, and rightly so, that the minutes of all the committee meetings be made available to the students. It is the policy of the Union that the minutes for all committee meetings held after October 2002 are made available on the Union website within 24 hours of the meeting. The Union President, Sen Ganesh, was disciplined in March 2002 for not ensuring that the minutes are made availible. Yet there is no public record of any of the following committees:

• Health & Safety Committee
• House Committee
• Retail Committee
• Services Committe
• Student Development Committee
• Trading Committee

In addition, there are no minutes of the Executive committee available for any of the meetings after April 2002 – it is now significantly beyond the 24 hour period allowed.

This lack of transparency is severly hurting the way that the Union is run. There are many, many people involved in union activities that have no interest in being on the committees, or attend them as observers. Minutes serve as a lasting record of the decisions made and issues addressed. It has been recently decided to take videos of some of the committees to record what goes on, which is daft. I’m not likely to watch hours and hours of boring meetings; I want an authoritative and easy to search summary of important points – i.e., minutes of the meetings.

Yet few of the officers seem to care about this – they go to the meetings, so if you’re interested, why don’t you? Of those officers who do care about the issue, none are prepared to do anything about it. Perhaps all of the sabbaticals and officers have a vested interest in ensuring that there is a lack of transparency surrounding the way they carry out there duties; this is the only plausible explanation, other than sheer incompetence, for this state of affairs.

All of our student officers are in some way responsible for the running of the Union, and the level of responsibility increases the further up the chain of command, peaking with the sabbaticals, and those students on Council and Exec. It’s a pity then, that so few of them act in a manner commesurate to their obligations.

One of the most obvious responsibilities is the duty to attend those meetings that you are required to attend. Yes, that seems a fairly obvious way of putting it, but at least one faculty president feels it unnecessary to turn up to many of the meetings. In which case, he should resign his post, or there should be some way to strip him of his position. Instead, a blind eye is turned, and my faculty remains unrepresented at the highest levels of the union. One excuse given is that it is up to the electorate to ensure that their representive is acting properly, but let’s face it, it’s neither the interest of the general student populace, nor our responsiblilty to monitor our representative’s attendence records. The sabbaticals and the committees themselves should take responsibility to ensure that the student officers are fulfilling their duties.

I talked to one of the members of the panel of my disciplinary on Monday evening, about a small issue that annoyed me at the end of the disciplinary. After the guilty verdicts for both me and Andrew Caisley were reached, most of the witnesses and defence team had left the room, but I remained. One of the panel turned round and asked the President (who was prosecuting) if, now that the disciplinary was over, he would buy each member of the panel a drink at the bar. Acting in that manner in a disciplinary environment is really not a good idea; there is a gravity and seriousness required of the situation, and to make comments like that was irresponsible. But that’s just one example of a trend of not acting in the appropriate manner for the job that you are being asked (and have in every case volunteered) to do. Over the years, I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve said to sabbaticals and officers "Just make sure you don’t say that in public"; the air of acting responsibly, especially behind closed doors, is badly lacking.

As far as I’m concerned, Council has two main areas of responsibility. Firstly, it is charged with the making of policy for the Union. Secondly, it is responsible for ensuring that sabbaticals are held to account for their actions. In the second instance, they seem to be sadly lacking. Katherine McGinn has been the only person to have enough guts to stand up and complain about a sabbatical officer in an official manner, yet everyone I talk to believes that the sabbaticals are to varying extends not fulfilling the requirements of their jobs. The next posting will describe one of the issues that needs dealing with, and despite already having been a disciplinary issue, has still not been sorted out. Yet Council seems more than willing to ignore their responsibility to repremand the sabbaticals. I’m not saying that official warnings or censures or motions of no confidence need to be brought; that is outright disciplinary proceedures, and are distinct from the idea of sabbatical scrutiny. A member of council agreed with me that on some specific points, the sabbaticals should be forced to take action, and pointed out that I was free to take a paper to Council demanding explanations. Which indeed I am free to do so; but it is the responsibility of the members of council to ensure that such things are done, not that of ordinary students.

One matter arising from my disciplinary was the issue of informing people of decisions made at Union committees. It seems fairly obvious that if a decision is made regarding an issue, then that decision would be communicated to any relevant people. For instance, telling me that I was no longer allowed to arrange disposal of the chemicals would have been a fairly obvious idea, but it wasn’t done. I then found out that this wasn’t a simple oversight, but on no matter is it deemed that a member of the committee is responsible for disseminating decisions. Which is ludicrous. It’s surely obvious that if a decision is made with regards to a club, then that club should be informed by the DPCS by default, unless another member of the committee is given the responsibility of informing them instead. But as it stands, after a decision is made, nobody on the committee has any duty to inform others of the decision. Which is a strange way to run a railroad; the onus is on ordinary students to check the records of every meeting in the union, to ensure they are aware of any decision affecting them. Which is a bit tricky, as I’ll shortly explain…