The recent Guild Council of Thursday, 29th October, and the preceding Guild Officer Group (GOG) meeting of Wednesday, 20th October brought up a number of matters for concern to both the LGBTQ students I represent, students in general, and the bureaucratic and democratic infrastructures of the Guild.

Guild Officer Group

This is the first such meeting of the year, and included newly elected Postgraduate and Mature Students Officer, Simon Fairbanks, and International Students Officer, Ahmed Ibrahim. There was also pizza.

The meeting allowed the new exec to clarify motions procedures, discuss any burning issues and make recommendations on Guild Council motions. A quick summary (including GC outcomes):

The Blood Donation Policy

I brought this up in in a previous post when Johnny originally put the motion together. GOG gave us the opportunity to clarify why this was put in place again, in light of what happened during the great controversial year of the Guild, and more importantly why myself and the LGBTQ Association are supporting it.

I am well aware that there's a feeling, amongst some LGBTQ students (hopefully not too many), that I and the LGBTQ are essentially giving up on Donation Not Discrimination and even supporting the blood ban by co-operating with the NBS. Quite frankly, this is a grossly oversimplified, rather pretentious view based on the fact that we had a stall next to the blood van and I resent it, but knew it was inevitable. And although the motion passed with a large majority vote at GC, I was personally hoping that I'd get a little more speech time in to explain and reaffirm our position to council. Sadly, the best I could do was a point of information that demonstrated how bad I still am with public speaking. More practice is needed.

In respect to the Donation Not Discrimination campaign run by the NUS LGBT, there was a public meeting on Tuesday(27th October) as part of it's review into the donation policy. We submitted the 300 signatures we collected during my "Give Blood Because We Can't" Welcome Week campaign, which contributed to the 9,000 signatures sent. Although I have yet to hear anything official from the NUS LGBT delegates, I've collated a few articles from a diverse variety of parties; one or two showing clear bias one way or another.

Just to clarify; I'm aware that the last article is quite controversial but did come up as one of the top news results. I was obviously quite disgusted with it - not just because it was clearly against gay men giving blood (in fact, homosexuality in general) - but because the owners of that site certainly don't represent the views of all Christians. We had tremendous support from the University Chaplaincy with "Give Blood Because We Can't" and we are continuing to work with them on their offer of discussing issues of faith and sexuality. I have no intention of inciting my readers and constituents against all Christians by posting this link here.

An "eventful" Guild Council

The events of last night's Guild Council are no secret, nor are the circumstances leading up to it. It's also no secret that myself and two of the other non-sabbs feel quite strongly on the issue of Edd Bauer's vote of censure.

Earler in the evening the HSO and the Women's Officer were automatically censured for not submitting a blog entry. The HSO was censured again by vote initiated by his predecessor from the 2008/09 exec, on the basis that he had done absolute nothing for his constituents in his three months as an officer. I might add that both are still in office...meaning that there's potential for home students and women students to suffer another two months of this negligence AT LEAST before they're removed from office. And why? Because the Guild for some reason doesn't believe in implementing a no-confidence voting mechanism to summarily remove clearly negligent officers; it's "negative" and "undemocratic".

Edd's outburst at the independant chairs may have been out of order and excessive, and I agree there should have been consequences. However, the Guild has been getting away with ongoing instances of democratic abuse and bereaucratic incompetence (see Edd's blog and my comment at the bottom). He was censured by a majority vote for this behaviour in Guild Council just because he refused to stand by and let these problems continue.

My problem with the censure is that it brings the most diligent, dedicated and passionate non-sabbatical officer we have down to the level of the other two officers. Officers that stood for election to represent a group of students only to utterly disappoint them by doing absolutely nothing. So we have a double standard by which the Guild does everything in it's power to tolerate negligent officers, then condemns an overly enthusiastic officer who shouts out in Guild Council because it's the only way he can do his job. What the hell?!

Fine, Edd is a colleague and a friend I've been working alongside for three months. For most of that time we were the only two functioning non-sabbs. I know that for a fact that he works his ass off - to the point where I wonder if he even does a degree anymore - which probably biases my view of the whole thing. It's definitely part of the reason myself and Anna were pining to give a speech against his censure. However I maintain that perpetuating this kind of double standard is wrong and the Guild should seriously rethink it's "slap on the wrist" policy.