No more hot air
In 2007, then YUSU President Anne-Marie Canning condemned the student bar crawl ‘Carnage’ as “unethical and disrespectful”, and the event organisers threatened legal action against the Students’ Union. In recent months, the NUS openly criticised the event for encouraging binge drinking. However, on the night that this newspaper went to press, Carnage was taking students on a drink-filled crawl through the city centre way into the small hours.
One has to beg the question, if the NUS and its affiliates are truly against such organised bar crawls, why then are they still travelling the country, selling students overpriced t-shirts and underpriced vodka. A Union exists to protect its members, and hot air is useless unless positive action is taken in the name of its cause. For almost two years YUSU and now the NUS have condemned Carnage and the havoc it wreaks both on students and in the local community. It’s high time they put their money where their mouth is and took action to protect their members as they should do.
It is a universal truth that students love a good deal, especially when it involves alcohol, and Carnage understands this better than anybody. If they chose to partake in these events and drink to excess, that is their choice. What is most important however, is to have a representative body that has unity between words and action. The NUS and students’ unions need to hold true to their statements and remember their primal function, to protect and represent the needs and rights of its members: students.
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