Student Elections and Lessons for Tories.

In perhaps the most meaningless, tedious and underwhelming process ever conceived, student "officers" have been elected to various posts at the University, where they will perhaps decide crucial policy, will possibly represent the Union, and will probably just give inarticulate comments to the meaningless, tedious and underwhelming student press whenever a similarly dry student issue makes the front page.

Aside from the obvious advantage of culling a significant number of the bloated student population, as scores of young adults find themselves unable to expose themselves to further campaigning leap to their death from the top of the library, what is the point of this process? Well, disillusioned voter, let me enlighten you:

The answer is, of course, that they provide a lesson for nationwide political processes. Instead of spending millions on "genocidal ghoul" photoshop fiascos, power hungry megalomaniacal politicians should create little cardboard-and-sellotape signs saying "Brown: poo" and "Clegg: more strong than egg", and other signs of the same intellectual calibre as university students. I don't simply say this because of the potential goldmine of negative advertising (I reckon Lab/LibDems could rhyme "Cameron" with "moron"), but because these awful, inadequate signs which would make a drunk, illiterate hobo blush, are patently the future of politics, both at the student and national level. They provide the personal touch, they show that election nominees aren't any better than "real" people (quite the opposite, in fact), and they are useful in justifying the average (non)voter's (ir?)rational hatred of politics and politicians.

The risk is that these signs will have the same effect on national politics as they do on student politics: no one will give a solitary shit what the outcome is, and all the candidates will fade into a pointless, grey blur. But that would surely be an improvement on the current state of affairs, no?

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p.s. I'm allowed to be critical, because I voted. I may have had little idea who each of the candidates were, and I may have simply voted for them based on their hair and the literary coherence of their campaigns, but I still fulfilled my democratic duty.