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…

The first issue that I want to focus on is the cronic lack of respect ingrained in our student politics. A prime example of this surrounds Edwards Piggott’s outburst. I would think that most members of council, if they read the first two sentences of this paragraph, would jump to agree with me, but they would be jumping the gun. The true lack of respect in that incident was with Ed’s complaint being repeatedly ignored and brushed aside, until he could take no more. Ordinary students at ICU have as much right to have their issues addressed as any member of council, and should be treated with full respect. Automatically ignoring somebody (a widespread occurence when Ed was trying to speak) is an absolute disgrace.

The lack of respect was also shown with the repeated "Moves to Vote" called for during the disciplinary proceedings against the President. Imagine the High Court, where at the start of the defence lawyer calling witnesses, the jury decides that the proceedings should end and the defendant is guilty. I would have throttled someone if during my disciplinary, the panel interrupted my defence and said that they weren’t interested in what I had to say. There is undoubtably a need to ensure that any proceedings are not ‘filibusted’, but when there are so many people who feel that the issue has not been appropriately discussed, all members of council should respect this. Many points had yet to be raised, not least by me, and the right to discuss such an important issue needs to be respected.

These problems are overshadowed by a lack of respect so great that I still struggle to believe it. The students in charge of the Union have been treating the permanent staff with such extreme contempt as to defy description. Whilst neither the Union General Manager or Finance Manager were present, the students attempted to hire another member of staff, for dubious reasons, and set about restructuring the way that Bars and Ents are staffed at outlying campuses. Moreover, claims by the Union President Sen Ganesh that he had consulted Mandy Hurford (our UGM) were strongly denied by her when she came back. She even had to go so far as to take a paper to exec, "suggesting" that permanent staff are involved in decisions made regarding permanent staffing issues. That matters can come that far is an absolute disgrace. But it follows a well established pattern - Sen ignored the advice of all of his members of staff when deciding whether a certain disciplinary should be called; he also hired two people to do contract work on the Union webserver for the summer, and neglected to inform either Mandy or Dave Parry (FM), who then had to deal with Sen’s decisions in his abscence, without knowing what was going on. Multiple redesigns of the Union Website have been discussed, and only once has every member of staff been asked there opinion - by me, on my own initiative. Restructuring Bars and Ents management at Charing Cross Hospital campus was debated without the input of either the Bars manager or the Ents manager; only half way through a policy debate about "Fair Trade" sales within ICU did the Shop Manager speak up to inform Council that the shop already stocked Fair Trade items. Nobody had thought to enquire what the Shop Manager’s, and also the Catering Manager’s thoughts were before attempting to make policy.

So there are problems with due respect in the Union. I’ll be looking at other issues that should be addressed over the next few days, but I also have more important things to do. You may await my opinions with baited breath, do something about it, go to the pub, or whatever else takes your fancy. I will respect your decision, I promise.

So an introduction then. Last night I went along to a meeting of the Imperial College Union Council. I’ve been to a couple of others, and thought that they were pathetic and a waste of time. I’ve even publicly resigned from Union affairs, so why on earth did I want to go?

Let’s make it clear from the start, I don’t agree with a lot of the decisions that are continually being made at ICU. But I don’t want to set about making the "right" decisions prevail; I’ve stepped back from that sort of thing, and it’s not worth my time and effort. Instead, I went along through sheer curiousity. I don’t understand how many recent decisions have been made, and I wanted to see the process in action. I wanted to see what the reasoning and debating involves - just because I make my own decision on a matter, doesn’t mean that I’m not open to other points of view. I was hoping that by seeing things from a different perspective, I would somehow become enlightened, and achieve my goal of understanding the crazyness of the Union bureacracy.

Well, Mr Sharpe has been competing strongly in the weblog stakes, which his uber geeky series of weblog posts. Sitting outside a council meeting, reporting (almost) live action reports to the world, eh? That’s even more sad than I am.

But this weblog appears to be gaining in readership, as yet another senior member of the Student Union came to me last night to say that he’d stumbled across it, and wanted to talk further about some of the issues raised. Others approached me, wanting to know when I was going to publicly comment on what went on last night. There’s so many things that I want to talk (perhaps rant) about, that I’m going to take it slowly, and address one issue at a time.

On the issue of ranting, I’m glad to say that as my experience of union matters increases, I get significantly less worked up about the whole thing. I felt sorry for another observer at the council meeting, who lost his rag (more on which sometime later); I was less personally involved, and still getting irate. But it only took me a few minutes afterwards for the sheer anger of the situation to pass, which is encouraging - previous incidents have taken days for me to calm down. So in my newly discovered state of calm, I had an unusual experience - listening to someone else ranting to me for hours on end. But I know how it feels, and how important it is that someone will listen to you, so I didn’t mind.

Sam Sharpe announced today that he’s caved in, and started writing a weblog as well. With a similar reasoning and attitude to me, when I started last year. A chance, perhaps, to blow steam on the issues that are annoying, but I have the advantage over Sam, in that I’m not that annoyed with my course, whereas with Sam and his job, he unfortunately needs to tread carefully.

Eddie Brown also keeps a weblog, but he doesn’t ramble online as much as others - which is probably because he’s too busy giving his ramblings in student committees instead. Andrew Tierney’s log is a tricky one, since his website is about Urban Exploration rather than just a personal site. Sometimes the itching to make a point breaks through though, as has happened recently, and I wonder how the log will develop with the dichotomy.

Etienne Pollard was asking last week why I had a weblog, since he’d stumbled across it recently. I can’t really remember my reply (it was getting late in the bar), but I thought I’d see if he had one. He doesn’t seem to, but if he’s putting powerpoint slides online, he obviously isn’t too well versed in Internet shenanigans. Hehe.

Anyone else out there who has a website, weblog or online ramblings, I’d be interested in knowing about it