The Dark Horse Lashes Out

We wrote yesterday about the Beaver’s identifying postgrad Stephen Wall as among the candidate for GenSec in the upcoming elections. While some have a poor assessment of his chances of prevailing in the election, the candidate himself has gotten off to a quick start, penning a blistering opinion piece for C&A in this week’s Beaver assaulting both the sitting GenSec and one of his primary opponents for the election, Aled Fisher. All of this, of course, sneaks in under the impending ban on candidates submitting to C&A under their own names.

At the UGM yesterday Beaver editor Kevin Perry was asked about the propriety of publishing a story naming the four presumed candidates and he acknowledged that it might have run afoul of policies against promoting candidates, however he pointed to his editorial calling for fresh faces to run as attempting to bring some balance to the coverage. Nobody mentioned Wall’s opinion piece at the UGM.

So what does Wall say? Well, as he himself acknowledges, he begins with strong words, accusing the aforementioned SU officers of having ‘degraded and demeaned their offices’. But it’s not just those two individuals, but rather a ‘rot at the heart of the Students Union’ that he is bemoaning. He then carries on about three recent ‘fiasco’s’ that have sullied the SU, including the pair of Letters Scandals and Fisher’s assault in the Beaver of Peter Sutherland. He even has a go at the Beaver itself (and for this we admire his gumption), calling its reporting on Sutherland ‘insidious’, ‘horrendous’, ‘biased’ and ‘narrow-minded’, among other choice epithets.

One can only imagine that Wall was red in the face by the time he fired off this opinion to the Beaver’s C&A editor, and the question remains whether or not this tactic will pay off. Surely there are many students who are disillusioned with the ‘political playpen’ that Wall accuses the SU of having devolved into. The problem is that these students are often so disillusioned that they are unlikely to cast a vote, even if it were for a reform candidate such as Wall. Is his message of the failure of the Students Union to address concerns of ordinary students likely to strike a chord with the electorate? The problem he’ll likely face is that sympathetic students don’t attend UGMs, don’t vote in elections and (perhaps especially), don’t read the Beaver.