Last night was the union council meeting to look at what motions should make it to the referendum or not. Myself, Norm, Nicola, Moz and Gijsbert turned up to support motion 4 and while it’s probably a good job we did, it didn’t do us much good.
I have written a more in depth article for Leeds Student (and anyone else who wants to run it) which we’ll be sending in along with all our other articles in the hope some of it will make it to the next issue, but I will briefly summarise things here.
First of all, amendment 4 passed which removed “this union resolves” part 1, which was to stop stocking Halal and Kosher meat. From a motion to remove Halal and Kosher meat from the union. There is no way that is constitutional! The union council rules state they cannot pass amendments that “significantly alter the nature of the motion.” How could you ever, ever come up with a less appropriate amendment? How could you change it’s nature any more than that?
The amount of open descrimination against the atheist community was also quite clear. It didn’t seem to matter how many times union council members had gone on and on about how this is about whether motions should go forward to referendum, not about the politics of each issue, union council members repeatedly voiced their own opinions and yet hardly any of them mentioned the core issue here - animal welfare.
Finally it would seem important in what is aiming to be a democractic process that union council members are free to vote how they wish. It is interesting then that when Barry abstained from voting on the motion (not even voted for it but simply abstained) he was ridiculed by the chair and asked to give reasons for his decisions.
All of this amounts to showing the clear descrimination that goes on, on campus against the atheist community.
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This entry was posted on Friday, November 7th, 2008 at 8:58 am and is filed under Politics, Secular Potal, University. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
November 9th, 2008 at 10:05 pm
To be fair on the people concerned, perhaps the University Union is terrified of provoking an Islamic backlash, especially in a city like Leeds with a large Muslim population. Whether this constitutes caution or cowardice is open to debate.
In the far-off days when I studied at Leeds University, although there was an Islamic Students Association it had a very low profile. The University Union was dominated by radical leftists who despised religion and would have been only too happy to side with atheist students. How things change with the passage of time.