Bretts knew fruit and veg couldn’t happen
GEORGE LOWTHER
Lewis Bretts, YUSU Democracy and Services Officer, has been strongly criticised this week after stating that he still intends to establish a fruit and vegetables stall on campus, despite claims that he knows that it is not possible.
An email sent last year from a high ranking University official revealed that such a stall would be against campus health and safety regulations and would conflict with the commercial viability of Costcutter.
Despite this, Bretts stated as recently as last week that he was still working towards setting up the stall and hoped to have it open on campus before the end of term.
Sources close to Nouse suggested that Bretts was informed as early as his election campaign that the University would never allow him to set up a fresh fruit and vegetable stall on campus.
“Sadly, I’m human and fallible – and it’s possible that I may have made a genuine memory error.” Lewis Bretts, YUSU Democracy and Services Officer
Speaking to Nouse anonymously, a third-year student who has been in correspondence with a key University figure, strongly believes that Bretts was told in a “discussion” that the University would never allow the project to go ahead. Students have expressed their outrage at being misled by Bretts’ election campaign.
One second-year student stated: “It’s events like this that give YUSU such a bad rep across the University. YUSU are supposed to be an organisation that works to help the students, not manipulate and lie to them.” One third-year student claimed: “At this point, I don’t think anyone can even remember why they voted for Lewis Bretts in the first place.”
Despite obtaining this information last year, Bretts has continued to promote the vow as one of his key election promises throughout his time in office. When questioned directly about the issue, Bretts claimed that there “may have been a discussion” but that he “couldn’t really remember” and his “memory was vague”.
Bretts later gave a more specific statement: “My job is to cajole, persuade and pressure until I get the answer students want; without being given a specific allegation to respond to it’s difficult to comment.”
“But I honestly don’t remember having any conversation with the Director of Commercial Services where I was told (or indeed it was implied) that I wouldn’t be able to have stall on campus either before or since I’ve been elected.
“Sadly, I’m human and fallible – and it’s possible that I may have made a genuine memory error. I always feel though, that if a ‘no’ was where the YUSU Officers acting on behalf of the student population of York ended the discussion, we wouldn’t be a very effective Student Union: it took forty years of ‘no’ before we got a union bar – it would have been a shame if we’d have stopped campaigning in the 1960s.”
This revelation comes after Bretts also came under fire this week for supposedly stealing the idea of setting up a student market on campus from two third-year students, Matthew Freckleton and Scott Murphy, who initially came up with the business plan.
“Bretts never lived up to his promises.” Matthew Freckleton, co-founder of YSM
Freckleton told Nouse: “We set up our business of running a student market, where students could set up stalls and sell their own goods, last year, completely independent of YUSU and University…We were given full support and even an enterprise grant by the University.”
Freckleton continued to explain that after their initial success, the pair approached YUSU for help with publicity, booking rooms and bringing in outside businesses to rent stalls. He said: “Scott and I had a meeting with Lewis Bretts and a senior member of YUSU staff, where they agreed that for £50 per market, they would take care of all market publicity.”
Freckleton confirms, however, that despite their formal agreement with Bretts and the YUSU employee, “Bretts never lived up to his promise and we were forced to cancel the next market we had organised due to lack of publicity. We then discovered that Bretts had booked all these rooms for next term, under the guise of York Student Market (YSM). When we questioned him about it, he emailed back saying he thought our business had folded, and he was now running his own YUSU student markets, remarkably similar to ours. He has ignored all of our subsequent emails.”
When questioned about the future of their business, Freckleton stated: “We don’t feel we can run the markets anymore as we think Lewis Bretts would do anything in his power to stop them from being successful.”
Responding to this charge, Bretts commented: “I was delighted to be able to partner with YSM, we’ve worked to help student entrepreneurs in the past and we developed a plan to jointly publicise the events.
“As the deadline for room bookings requests was very close, I made a series of bookings on the basis that they could be used for similar events either independent of, or in conjunction with YSM; the bookings have been made, and I’m still happy with to work with YSM.”
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In all honesty, who gives a sh1t?
I know many students who, through hearing Brett’s policies, voted for him. I for one did, fruit and veg especially. The same feeling is shared amongst many as i previously stated.
Sadly, all Bretts does is constantly promote/bum the courtyard, and does f*ck all else.
You know, seeing a swearword spelled in its entirety isn’t really a problem for us adults – it’s more the fact that you can’t express yourselves adequately without invoking the sentiment.
This article is a joke. Why does Nouse feel the need to attack him so much all the time? I don’t know him that well personally, but I know that if YUSU sabbs went along with everything the University said, nothing would ever get done. Once upon a time the University said they couldn’t open an SU bar on campus and now we have the Courtyard.
Ok, maybe he shouldn’t have said it with so much certainty, but any manifesto promise can come up against problems and, as far as I know, he has been seriously trying to get this sorted, and fair play to him. At least he’s trying to do something slightly dynamic on campus. Isn’t it better to back down from big ambitions than to not have those ambitions in the first place?
Politics ain’t easy baby
Interestingly he was made an offer from Monks Cross for a mini bus service but didn’t think it was worth the effort.