Paula's Place

Paula's Place

Friday 29 March 2013

Captain Kirk

I saw this story in the good ol' Huffington Post, at first I will admit that I thought it was quite funny.   Students tend to take themselves and their politics far too seriously, but on further contemplation I do think that this actually raises a couple of quite interesting questions.

There is of course the financial one of just how many officers are supported by any group of funders, after all we have that debate running nationally with the Houses of Parliament at the moment.   This Students Union is a reflection of National Politics in that with less and less members bothering to vote more and more power gets concentrated with the activists.

Another issue that struck me is, in order to represent an interest group properly, does the representative need to be a member of that group? No, Seriously, do you need to be a Woman to represent Women's issues? After all MPs represent many groups they are not members of, for example battered wives.

And finally (you know when the Vicar says this that there will only be another 20 minutes of the sermon to go), doesn't equality mean that there should not be Women's Issues only Issues, or if you prefer Equality Issues.   There are many minority groups who may feel under represented, but at what point do organisations such as Student Unions stop having special sections.  Race? Gender? Sexuality? Gender Identification? Faith?   I understand that I am now in several minority groups so in a situation like this I might have the Christian Representative (if a conservative) saying the exact opposite of what the trans representative might be saying, the women's representative could have a totally different third point of view and the white European (yes there are places where we are a minority) might not care at all.   Then of course because of my disabilities I would need extra representation but would they be able to understand that because of my age I need different representation to a twenty year old.

So in the end we are all people, we should all be treated with equal respect and given equal rights and opportunities of work, participation in society, happiness and expression.

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