Prime Minister’s Questions – 19th December

Image by Victoria Kettlewell

It seemed like some festive cheer was in the air this week as it took a good few minutes before the battle of statistics began – it even looked like Cameron and Miliband were just going to stand there agreeing with each other for a while as they talked about various military topics. We finally got a glimpse of what Cameron’s “Big Society” is when he shouted about the fantastic hard work thousands of volunteers are offering to food banks around the country; Miliband has now captioned the scheme as for “feeding hungry children in Britain”. Cameron seemed unable to defend himself against Miliband’s attacks on the Tory’s cuts calling them “out of touch” with families and saying that the richest were getting a tax reduction. According to Cameron, Miliband has nothing else to offer this Christmas. Other Labour MPs gifted the Tories with their own panto with some new Christmas movies – the Grinch Who Stole Christmas starring the Chancellor, the Muppets Christmas Carol starring the Lib Dems and It’s Not A Wonderful Life for the Poor starring Cameron. There was a shout of “can we have a vote?” from a Tory MP as one Labour MP gave his season’s greetings to the Speaker. One final attack from Labour saw a suicide note that blamed the Government’s reforms of the Disability Living Allowance. However, the impending end of the world never managed to make it onto their agenda. Let’s hope they’ve got a secret plan for the survivors up their sleeves.

Also published on Redbrick

Guild Receives NUS Zero-Tolerance Accreditation

A fantastic new policy was unveiled by the Guild of Students on Monday, setting out the Guild’s condemnation of harassment in any form on campus. The policy, accredited by the NUS, was launched by the Guild Vice President (Welfare) Katherine East, NUS Vice President (Welfare) Pete Mercer, Guild Women’s Officer for 2011 Kelly Rogers and Guild Ethnic Minority Students’ Officer, Sacha Hassan.

A key part of the legacy of last years’ Vice President (Welfare), Luke Reynolds, this initiative is a brilliant way of ensuring that students on campus are able to stand-up and resist harassment based on religion, sex, race, disability and sexual orientation.

Pete Mercer introduced the policy, legitimately arguing “we still have sexism in our welcome weeks, homophobia in our halls and racism on our campuses” and spoke about the recent piece of research conducted by the NUS entitled “No Place for Hate”. Horrifically, one in six respondents had experienced hate crime yet less than one in ten actually reported these incidents for fear of blame, worry of shame and discomfort with talking about it. This is the first UK-wide piece of research relating to hate crime and it is so vital and so beneficial.

An article by the Independent highlights how important this policy is as it talks through the misogynistic and sexist events that are organised as part of Welcome Weeks in universities across the country. The article mortified me – harassment has no place in our universities and Students’ Unions should be at the forefront of the fight against attitudes such as this, condemning actions of those who see it as acceptable.

Kelly Rogers stated “sexual and domestic violence does affect predominately female students” and referred to an experience with a women’s association protest against a beauty pageant in the previous academic year; she and other protestors received threats, homophobic and sexist comments, simply for disagreeing with sexual objectification, possibly one of the largest threats to women in the media.

Sacha Hassan, however, rightfully asked whether this policy was simply tokenism or a PR stunt, referring to a recent example of discriminatory behaviour by University of Birmingham students, saying the person in question “made a mistake and needs to face the consequences” and this was a perfect example of why zero-tolerance needs to be a policy that the Guild adopts.

Honestly, I am surprised this policy does not exist as standard policy on all university campuses, let alone our own Guild, based in one of the most multicultural cities in the UK. It is yet another progressive piece of policy that will be vastly important in the stepping stones to equality and tackling discrimination in wider society. Using this policy, I implore students like myself to use this policy to its full potential, challenging any form of action that can be classed as harassment. The best way to defeat discrimination is to challenge it, not to ignore it.