“Rich Doughty…hopes that we can all move on together without anymore division.”

Facebook is becoming the only window into current affairs for many, and at Essex University the status of the re-elected President is seeminlgy an attempt to call for unity of the members of a union after a hard-fought and emotional campaign for the top positions of the Union executive.

The calls for unity have been there in the past however, and from the same people that were part of the clique that have long dominated the Union and produced the candidature of President Doughty in the first place. In the past however, the disalusionment with the Union was a response to the fact that active conservatives, whose ideology have done so much damage to Unions in recent history, were some of the ones behind these calls. Now the left is wondering whether real unity can be achieved and where the power will be in the executive both within the sabbatical officers and after the rest of the executive is elected in March.

The division itself was long thought of to be necessary to expose the difference between those that prescribed to the clique and those that saw the union as unabitious and needing to engage with solidarity in the power struggles that devastate so many lives.

Richard Doughty, the current president, who’s personal politics have been mixed, vague and unclear to many, was re-elected on an otherwise phenominal result for the left-wing students at the university who have been building a fighting force to reclaim a ‘lost’ union. It is fairly commonly known that the University has a radical history, with student rallies a common feature and politcally active students to the point that furniture was thrown out of the windows of the famous towers after the news of Margaret Thatcher’s General Election victory.

While no-one is predicting that more furniture is to follow, the days of apathy seem to be over as the students have elected candidates who propose “a union for all” and a move to educate on the big political issues in the world outside of the phenomenon of the campus ‘bubble’. The team decided not to label themselves as anti-capitalist, but for the politcally aware their politics were clear from their manifesto pledges to provide a non-corporate social space, free and non-privatised education at all levels, the commitment to support the unionisation of student workers and the implimentition of “a leadership which is ideologically committed to resurrecting the true nature of a Union.”

The political rhetoric was one of widening towards an open and involved union, but many simply saw this as a way of reaching out to international students rather than towards a political vision, but while both may be true, those that know the candidates have laughed off the accusations that they are the same careerist politicians but with a message tailored to a certain popular political point of view. The evidence pointed to is that not only is the political position certainly not necessarily the majority one at the University, but that the left's natural strategy would surely use the campaign to send out the messages of the need for change in a wider sense, rather than the easy option of using the confusing and cynical rhetoric of previous years’ campaigns by the Union clique, which centred around university life, facilities and experience. The emergence of experience was in fact a small feature of the campaign, and lead to a high vote still for the team representing the incumbents, but the overwhelming campaign theme was change, and was even adopted by all teams, with the incumbents deciding to call themselves the ‘Transformers’, both for popular appeal and in attempt to diffuse the support for ViVA ESSEX, who have been all about transforming the Union themselves for the years they have been building for these elections.

Local student and Colchester activist Andy Abbott, himself the feature of occasional Colchester media coverage over anti-war demonstrations, seized the opportunity of the elections to call a ‘Where now for the Essex left’ open forum, where the discussions are likely to be around the degree of achievement made, the fact that the arguably most political active member of the team, Dominic Kavakeb, failed to win his bid for presidency, the fact that the campaign was potentially not as overtly political as it could have been and that the views of those in the original left leaning group at the University, who thought that the road to social change lay in abandoning the Students’ Union altogether were now needed again to test whether the years in building were worth it on a wider scale.

Despite the setbacks though, the overwhelming opinion was one of victory for the left and following similar victories at SOAS and in Manchester, the hope that it will inspire other left-wing students to unite and reclaim their unions too. The road may seem long and besieged by obstacles, but one thing that is never lost in the face of all the poverty, wars, privatisation, inequailty, racism, biased media and corruption, and that is the need to try, something that is no longer lost at Essex University.