So a few weeks ago at NUS LGBT Conference in Nottingham we won an award at their NUS LGBT Awards Night and finally thought it was about time we posted some photos  of the momentous occasion. FYI, it was the NUS LGBT Awards and The University of Birmingham was awarded the coveted ‘Campaign of the Year Award’ for Emma O Dwyer’s excellant ‘Homophobia in Halls’ intiative. Have a look at the pics…

Your ‘gorgeous’ committee… completely sober.

 

The lovely, and “obviously very expensive”, award.

Now let’s celebrate! (aka – drink)

You know what? Let’s just have a little lie down…

Lovely.

 

 

 

So today is the vote. Countless times I have raised the question ‘have you voted?’ (or any other grammatical form using whatever tense of said question) to my peers and associates. And on countless occassions I have received the response ‘what vote?’ (or some other form of monosyllabic interrogation indicating nonchalence) and, [conference], I am shocked and appalled. Just, what’s with it? After explaining, or, in the situations in which my conversee knew of said vote, the most used response was yet another indication of apathy – ‘oh I don’t care’, or ‘oh that’s not gonna affect me’; ‘oh i can’t be bothered’ or just a neanderthal grunt.

Ok, so I know the government as it currently stands is at best shoddy, and…. well, don’t get me started on at worst. But that is not the point. I also know we live in a democracy, and yes one could even argue ‘oh what difference is one more cross going to make’. But democracy is more than the individual action, surely? It’s the embodiment of a concept. A concept which needs the individual within the group, seguramente?  And finally, the majority of these people I spoke with today were women. Now I hate more than more singling out someone on account of their sex/gender but women come on. Less than 100 years ago the sufferagettes were giving up their lives for us to exercise our democratic right and belong, as an individual, to the body of power and influence. How would they feel to hear of the modern female student who can’t be arsed to walk 10 minutes down the road to mark a cross on a piece of paper??

Well, I could ramble and continue my procrastination, but I feel the above text has sufficed both in distration and venting. So I’ll put the question to you: should we vote? is it any more important for one individual to vote over another? should students be more politically involved? and how can one successfully make that happen?

That’s all folks.