SOAS Socialist General Meeting ends in farce
Who’d have thought it, huh? I mean, it had such a reasonable and uncontroversial agenda. But, despite the balanced debate, it did indeed erupt in an orgy of whatever hijabi-wearing devouts erupt into.
The main set-piece confrontation was over the proposed suspension of the union’s anti-racism officer. The supposed offender ticked all the boxes of what a SOAS students would think an anti-racism officer should not be: White, American, and a Tory! He didn’t actually do anything wrong - he simply refused to involve himself in the politically-motivated accusations of racism levelled at two Conservative NUS delegates.
But, boy, did that not stop things kicking off when the UGM voted against disciplining him. One of his defenders, of Pakistani descent, was pushed around and called a ‘coconut’ by the cleared officer’s detractors (make them the anti-racism officers!). That is the state of democracy at our unions: if the left doesn’t get its way, the left gets its Stalinist Purge on.
Another of the respectable-and-not-at-all-illiberal motions, that to lobby for a nationwide ban on Scientology, added to the farce. The proposer wore a black balaclava throughout: intent, it seems, on not being identified by John Travolta’s secret agents. After finishing his speech, a rant against the myriad rightly-levelled objections to the cult, he returned to the back of the room, from where he yelled that the above “all applied to the Roman Catholic Church” as well. As a humanist, I would agree, but do you want to ban Britons from being Catholics as well? That’s a 16th-century solution to a non-existent problem.
OK, so the good guys won at least two of the fights (I don’t know how the others went - I assume the Islamo-socialists won), but it’s pretty hopeless at SOAS generally. I mean, this is the university that voted to abolish Miss University of London on feminist grounds (and the niqab is not sexist… how?). Any idea how much it costs to hire a bulldozer for a university-sized job?
