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Vote Rigging at the Oxford Union

Someone seems to have rather missed the point here:

A member of the Rothschild banking dynasty is at the centre of a row over alleged vote rigging at the Oxford Union.

Vote rigging is what the whole thing is for. It\’s so that the young shavers can try out the methods which will serve them well if they should go into real politics. Been going on for decades: I know of at least one senior civil servant who cut his teeth in such elections.

This is also most amusing:

The claims against him centre on a meeting held at Magdalen College on the evening before the election, which was supposedly an illegal "slate party".

This is a practice where candidates run for positions in the Union in groups, promoting each other as they ask people to vote for them.

Alex Priest, returning officer of the Union, said, "[Slates] are bad for the Union because they mean the wealthy and the popular but not necessarily hard-working get ahead… they\’re inherently unfair."

So on the one hand we have party politics being described as inherently unfair and in the adult world, we\’re told that we must pay for it at gunpoint, via the tax system.

 

 

2 thoughts on “Vote Rigging at the Oxford Union”

  1. Stories about vote rigging in the Oxford Union come up periodically but I can’t see the problem with popular people getting ahead. Popular people get voted in because they are popular. That’s life.

  2. I must say that I did think that myself when I was a student there: the point of a “slate” was to group people of generally similar prejudices: it was very well known which hacks were broadly labour in persuasion and which were tories.

    But, regardless of political persuasion, EVERYONE knew they were ALL hacks – that was a valuable lesson to the rest of us…

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