A new day is dawning at the University of Oxford, it seems. In the University’s recent Student Union elections a chap named LJ Trup was elected president in a landslide victory. Why is that worthy of note? Because this is LJ Trup.
Trup’s policies included double beds for all, world peace and a monorail to two of Oxford’s most distant colleges. ‘So he was a joke candidate then?’ I hear you cry. Well, that’s a difficult question really, with a complicated answer. Perhaps the fairest way to describe Trup would be as an anti-establishment candidate, and in that regard many of the sillier aspects of his campaign actually become much less silly. One of Trup’s campaign videos ends with the sobering slogan “Behind the fun is a serious message”, and framed in the context of OUSA (Oxford University Student Union) being consistently rated as the least popular Student Union in the country, you can start to get a sense of how and why Trup was able to achieve his victory.
Everything Trup did during his campaign seemed to represent the antithesis of conventional student politics. From his wacky clothing choices to clips of him doing shots and dancing with friends in an Oxford nightclub during a campaign video, every element stressed how different he was from the over serious and relentlessly partisan bores who traditionally dominate student politics. He hammered this message home with an eloquent, impassioned and sincere explanation of his reasons for running in The Oxford Student, which ultimately seems to have swung the polls in his favour.
Trup won by making himself a vehicle for the frustration and anger felt by Oxford students towards their Union. He gave the impression that this was what student politicians were supposed to be, people like us. People who like to laugh and drink too much and dress like a plonker because they can. When compared, it’s a no brainer as to who better represents the average student, Trup or the collection of aspiring think tank directors and future left-of-centre MP’s that traditionally make up the system he so vehemently opposes.
What’s perhaps most interesting about Trup’s victory is that it seems to be indicative of something wider. In a country where the National Student Survey found that only three out of 127 Student Unions had a higher satisfaction rating than their corresponding HE institution, there is a strange sort of student political movement building, represented by Trup and several other recent student political candidates. It’s an odd coalition, granted, but the core message is broadly the same.
It seems that the feeling amongst this movement – to the extent that it is a unified and coherent movement, which it isn’t – is that student politicians have been left for far too long to play at politics on a lofty high. That they wield their authority almost completely unchallenged, getting their mandates from pitifully turned out elections in which only people who share the student politician mindset possess the will to run, and held to account only by a tiny minority of niche interest groups and activists who, by virtue of shouting the loudest, use the hopelessly broken status quo for their own ends.
There’s a belief that student politicians have become painfully detached from their job descriptions, viewing student politics as a sort of game, a small taste of the real thing as yet to come, and so they muck about with the deluded idea that they wield any actual political weight or lobbying power, and therefore neglecting their basic role, to represent the views and opinions of the student body at large. As one man in Trup’s video opines “I’m sick of OUSU taking positions on issues that aren’t relevant to us as students”.
What it seems to boil down to is an idea that student politics need to be reminded of what it is it does, and more importantly, who it serves. It is not the prerogative of a Student Union leader to lobby for national political causes, or to try and gain influence with the upper echelons of the Labour Party through its cadet branch, The NUS, now increasingly farcical and transparently political in a nasty “clap the death of a demented old woman” kind of way. The logic follows that the average student cares more about the price of beer in the SU bar than the Israel-Palestine conflict, and that student politics should therefore ultimately reflect that. This was recently shown at the University of Bristol, when NUS Delegate candidate Jennifer Salisbury-Jones was elected by a huge margin after pledging to campaign for the University’s withdrawal from the National Union and to spend the £50,000 saved on booze, which may be rubbished as mere stereotypical nihilistic student joke politics, but it just isn’t. It’s a show of sentiment, an idea that students would rather have a few free drinks on the Union than NUS membership, that that’s the sort of representation students really want. Which at Bristol at least, seems to have proven a correct analysis.
Our own Union under Kallum Taylor has, to its credit, been far from one of the worst offenders, but they, along with every other student leader up and down the country, would be wise to take some heed from these developments in Oxford and Bristol and the growing feeling that has permeated numerous other universities across the land. Ultimately, they shouldn’t get too comfortable, because it’s clear that there is a growing demand for new, radical change to student politics, and they would do well to recognise that.
Oh, and just as a quick afterthought, here is a link to Mr Trup’s campaign video which I’ve referred to throughout. Do give it a watch, it really is fantastic.
Fantastic article