Empire Strikes Back – PRC mobilises to overturn Tibet motion

Friends, Hacks, Students – Come to the UGM!!

Those of you who saw the leafletters on Houghton St would know what is coming this Thursday: a PRC counterattack on last week’s Tibet motion, which passed by 4 votes. We have received unverified information that they are mobilising via Facebook. If true, this would be the greatest showdown in the Old Theatre since Palestine. At least both sides involved are lot more civilised about this…

Whether you’re pro or against the motion, we would encourage you to come and participate. It is of monumental importance to the direction this Union will take, and could impact us as powerfully as Palestine. It’s also an awesome debate: diversity and conflict of opinions are the cornerstones of every democracy and it is great to see it in action.

UGM Report: Tibet, Penguin and Anti-Semitism

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Tibet Motion: PRC brigade turned up en masse, as expected. Strangely enough, people don’t seem to participate in UGMs unless something somehow related to them is being discussed. In this case it’s clearly nationalism. Great tactics guys, thanks for making UGM quorate and the narrowly passed motion valid instead of having us do the ratification shenanigans again. After the motion passed (by just 4 votes), the PRC promptly shuffled out towards the exits before the other motions were discussed, with the shout of “Look, the PRC are leaving!” by one of the audience. So much for getting involved with the union…

Penguin: the rumour mills have it that Kings stole it. We are not 100% convinced, but does it matter? Casus belli aren’t based on truth: did it matter that Saddam Hussein had no WMDs, for instance? We now count on the leadership of our Dear Leader Aled ‘Jong Il’ Fischer and the glorious, vodka-fuelled People’s AU army to extract vengeance from the perfidious Strand Polytech. Za Rodina, comrades, to arms!!

Anti-Semitism: Great motion. This one was hammered out carefully with input from both the Israelis and Palsoc. Some concerns about terminology, legitimate criticisms and implications for future protest actions but these were dealt with swiftly. We’re very glad it passed.

*(Image courtesy of CrystalXP)

UGM

Hi guys,UGM is coming up tomorrow. Please do show up as three incredibly important and interesting motions are in stall: Free Tibet (again), the Penguin and anti-Semitism on campus.

For the first, we’d encourage you to look past the fact that it’s a McGee motion examine it for what it’s worth. The second motion mourns the loss of our avian friend and mandates Emperor Aled to appropriate just retribution with the AU army against the perfidious KCL, who (apparently) stole the penguin.

The third notes the rise in anti-Semitic incidents on Campus and would mandate the SU to adopt measures to combat it in conjunction with the school. Particularly admirable is the proposers’ acknowledgement that “Legitimate criticism of the Israeli government and its actions are not inherently anti-Semitic.” It’ll definitely get our vote.

Election Results

In case you missed them, here are the winners of the 2009 Lent Term elections:

• General-Secretary: Aled Fisher (again)
• Treasurer: George Wetz
• EdWelfare: Emmanuel Akpan-Inwang (again)
• Comms: Robin Low
• Societies: Chris Westgarth
• Mature & Part-Time: Vladimir Unkovski-Korica
• Disabilities: Luke Moore
• Residences: Andrew Wright
• LGBT: Kimia Pezeshki
• Anti-Racism: Ben Jones
• Women’s: Jessie Robinson
• International: Suraj Girijashankar
• Environment & Ethics: Hero Austin
• C&S: Mubbien Hayat, Michael Lok, Kate Strivens, Natalie Osafo, Sofia Zabocotsikh. 2 positions are unfilled, since the other candidates were beaten by RON.
• F&S: Aliabbas Virani, Valerie Khoo, Hinal Shah, Arjun Madhavan

Congrats to all. Now, we can finally return to sanity.

Dirty Elections

I don’t know about you, but I feel that this year’s elections have been even dirtier than usual. Over the past week, we’ve witnessed character assasination, flagrant breaches of election rules, and shameless electioneering (remember RAG week?). And we’re not talking about sending out one e-mail over the limit either – we’re talking about e-mailing LSE teaching departments, vicious attacks from behind an anonymous facade (even if by proxy), opposition posters deliberately ripped down. We’re not even sure that we can hold confidence in these elections

On the bright side, we were pleasently surprised by the relatively high voter turnout – we pushed past 2000 total votes! I would insert another insightful comment here, but the Anticitizen must return to his lovely booze now *hic* (the Comrade doesn’t look too good unfortunately). See ya in the morning…if I can overcome the impending hangover..

Polling Opens..Soon

Polling is finally opening at 10am on Wednesday, and closes at 7pm on Thursday. You can vote online by heading over to the VoteSU voting page (but you need to be within the LSE network for some strange reason, check the IT services page for the VPN guide if you, like us, live in your own place). Alternatively, you can still vote the old fashion way in the Quad, with ballot papers and X marked in boxes. Incidentally, we wonder – has no Environment Officer yet kicked up a fuss about the massive amount of paper wasted in an election? Just count the cost to the planet’s trees through our democracy – posters, flyers, ballot papers, acres of Beaver printed with vacuous slogans and the empty promises of candidates….

Despite the Election Jedi Master’s pleas for a clean election, this hasn’t deterred several candidates from pushing the rules as far as they’d go (e-mailing departments, campaigning while actively working for the SU, funny poster business, manipulation through a blog etc). The irony is, of course, that student apathy appears to be at a decade high according to a Hack Attack 2 straw poll. Still, it’s not as bad as the ULU elections – I overheard one ULU election campaigner canvassing to a student in C120 today, they were greeted with the dreaded refrain, “What’s ULU?” Man, they are soooooo screwed.

Another interesting tidbit that a birdie told us – a certain society is said to have turned down Wetz’s request for an endorsement based primarily on our exposé of his clandestine blogging activities (whether directly or via proxy). I’m sure other societies must be thinking along similar lines….

Finally, for you apathetic students, fear not – the end of the wankfest is in sight!

HA2: Policing the election – charges to be brought

Ossie-Wan is still curled up in bed, but the HA2 crew stays up to catch the wrongdoers attempting to cheat in the elections. After we tipped Ossie off to the fact that George ‘57 Varieties of Lies’ Wetz was using HA1, or else allowing others, to use the site they control to anonymously promote himself and snipe at his opponents (Smokey being the most obvious example, with Seph suffering as well). The blog has since been slapped down by the Wizard of Oz.

Now, however, someone has tried to use our blog to cheat by posting their censored articles in the comments section in the hope that it would escape the Returning Officer’s purview. Think again, buddy. We have your IP address (it’s 158.143.162.177 to be precise), we know it’s from the LSE network, and we know that the same fixed-line connection has been used previously to comment before on numerous occasions, precluding random use of public computers or wireless laptops. Now, it’s just a simple task of forwarding the address and the time of the act to our friend in the IT department. If all goes well, we will demonstrate that cheating does not pay. If this can be irrefutably linked to an election campaign, we will certainly push for disqualification, which we feel would be well in order.

UPDATE: In response to concerns raised regarding our publishing of the IP address, we would like to reassure our commentators and informants that we regard your anonymity as incredibly important. We will not normally publish an IP address unless we feel that to do otherwise would be to break the law or skew the results of an election. In this case the decision concerns the latter: the comments posted clearly contravene the election rules on online campaigning (Facebook and solicited emails only) and was an attempt to circumvent the Returning Officer’s ban on the posted items. It showed utter contempt for our democratic process.

Due to the fact that the posted items have remained on HA1 for half the election period, and that some candidates, namely James Bacon and Seph Brown, have suffered under their blatant character attacks, we doubt whether the results would still be valid under the Education Act and whether the Union should pay its enormous salary to sabb candidates who may have used HA1’s rule breaking to their advantage.

Campaigning Begins…

…and no one really seems to care. Through unusual circumstances, neither of us were able to attend and report upon the hustings that took place at last Thursday’s UGM. Fortunately for us, eyewitnesses reported that the hustings took the form of “an epic hour-long snooze-fest” with the same old tired political machinations of old hacks and plucky upstarts alike, promising us “a better SU, change, yadayada”. We would have pasted quotes from them here, but I don’t think WordPress want their servers polluted with such nonsensical crap.

Onto other election news now, the inimitable Smokey Bacon has ditched on his second election this year for some reason – probably something to do with “a shit SU” and “pork-barrel politics” (30 grand on a SU website ring any bells? Annual fund guys, are you fricking insane?). DJ Sheldon-Squarepants, meanwhile, will be shortly trading his Comms post for editor-in-chief of Hack Attack. The Anticitizen hopes that he’ll be able to inject a good dose of humour and wit into the venerable blog, instead of the profanity and attacks we’ve witnessed over the past year.

Speaking of Hack Attack 1, we’d now like to present our “Comment of the week”:

Hack Attack 1 are clearly trying to manipulate the course of these elections. It is completely unfair that controller of the blog, George Wetz is using it to attack his his two opponents. This is clearly a breach of the election rules, as his self confessed link to the blog, raises the immense likelihood that i- he is writing the material, or ii the person who is writing the material is campaigning on his behalf. WAKE UP OSSIE- STOP BEING SUCH A WIMP– AND ENFORCE THR RULES.

As the Wet has decidedly cheated, or else allow others to cheat on his behalf, it seems only fair that he is subject to public critique- someone who smiles to your face, and viciously rips into his political rivals on the blog shielded by anonymity. So a fake and a coward. Not sure those are qualities we want in someone who looks after SU finances.

Well guys, straight from the blog-reading horse’s mouth! It’s been a bit of an open secret amongst the hacks that Wetz has been the chief blogger this year, but now that it’s all out in the open in the initial stages of his treasurer campaign, questions are bound to be raised over his conduct.

For certain, the Anticitizen will be sending his Treasurer vote to GLA commander-in-chief Aladdin Salad.

Allegations…

Dear Readers,

One of our minions has met the sabbs on our behalf today. They met our agent in good faith and were reported to have denied breaching the staff-student protocol and leaking confidential information. Furthermore, they believe that we have been deliberately and maliciously misled by the anonymous emailer. Having examined their POV, considered the fact that we have no way of verifying the truth of the allegations and in the spirit of fairness we have decided to pull the post, at least until we have clearer facts over the events.

Furthermore, we would appreciate any information regarding the identity of the anonymous emailer and the ‘former GenSec’ who was involved. The e-mail was sent from anonymouslsestudent@googlemail.com (clearly set up as an anonymous e-mail account of course) at 5.38pm last Saturday.

Yours,

Anticitizen One and Comrade Cake

The Elections Begin…

Last week, we witnessed the rumour mill swing into high gear as to who would run for election, coupled with a mass RAGfest with many potential candidates doing various things for charity (a certain smoked candidate even made a rather disturbing Britney Spears video, but we shall speak no more of this dark monstrosity – even if it made hundreds for charity).

Many predictions were spot-on, such as Al Fishmaster re-running for his position, and Helen ‘Melon’ Roberts (finally!) running for EdWelfare, alongside Ruby Buckley. Some surprises were thrown up though – DJ Sheldon decided NOT to re-run for Comms, despite announcing his intentions previously, and Smokey Bacon has appeared to have jumped tack, running for Treasurer instead of GenSec for reasons unknown. Biggest LOL here though is the EdWelfare position – after the E-Man clinched last year’s election simply by bothering to put his name down, we now have a total of 5 contenders this time around. Maybe they thought they could repeat last year’s pushover win…

Other names that catch our eye:

• Michael Deas – Senior Beaver guy. Additionally, many sabb candidates apparently have links to the Beaver.
• Chris Gully – Bartender at Bankside, and the Tuns. Could he be serving more than just pints to the masses?
• Seph “Aladdin Salad” Brown – Chief of the Gaza Liberation Army. Could easily mobilise the PalSoc army in a large-scale raid on the Treasurer position.
• George Wetz – State of the Union presenter on pUlSe/PuLsE/whatever, and erstwhile Hack Attack blogger (obviously, he won’t be blogging now).
• “Comrade” Vladimir Unkovski-Korica – the born-again Lenin of the LSE. Also a Pravda Beaver columnist.
• Priscilla Abishegam – Current C&S member. Famous for going ape-shit at the paper-gunning AU mob at a recent UGM, to general applause.
• Ben Jones – RAG guy with waaay too long hair. But he’s run RAG very well this year.
• Suraj Girijashanker – the likeable Aussie guy. Much more likeable than a certain other Aussie anyway…
• AliABBAs Virani – Current C&S member. Despite the name, not likely to be Dancing Queen.

Finally, you’ll notice that there are only 5 C&S candidates, leaving 2 vacancies left to be filled. Also, there is the Returning Officer position, with crowd favourite RON set to gain this position. Election master Ossie-Wan is expected to re-open nominations for these soon.

Good luck to all candidates!

Election Candidate List