Students' Union in pointless partisan debate shocker!

I had a lovely lunch with Myn at the Cornerhouse today. Then I decided to go to the Students' Union meeting, where there were some votes I wanted to take part in - about the Students' Union making ethical decisions (stuff like the Nestle boycott, that sort of thing) and something about the World Bank. I did deliberate about this, as I'm pretty busy and any time spent in SU meetings is time I can't spend watching ER. However, principles are principles and if you don't vote, you acn't complain when they do what you don't want them to.

However, proceedings descended into farce. There was a motion put forward which said that:

1. The US is bad
2. The US supports Israel
3. Some Latin American countries are doing pretty cool lefty things right next door to the US
4. We should twin with universities in Palestine and Venezuela.

Amendements were put forward by someone from the Jewish Society saying that we should twin with the Hebrew University in Jerusalem which apparently has Palestinian and Israeli students and removing a line which says that Israel is a client state of the US.

This required about 4 recounts. Yes, 4. Plus, the person chairing (I think this was their first time) was unsure on the procedures and kept getting the amendments mixed up. It wasn't good. Absolute chaos and it had descended into partisan politics - Socialist workers/Respect/Islamic soc (I think) against Jewish soc.

Because the first amendment was accepted, apparently this means that the Jewish Soc guy owns the whole amendment! So he accepts the second resolution and then proceeds to argue that he wants to take out the line that said that Israel is the single biggest recipient of foreign aid. He said it wasn't. Socialist guy said it was if you count military aid. In the end, the whole thing was really stupid - we were being asked to vote on something factual when we didn't know if this was true or not. I have no idea if it passed or not.

Then we voted on whether we wanted to go straight to voting on the whole motion. Everyone did - half the recounts had been because people kept leaving during the votes before, with the chair not really having any control over the proceedings.

Then, finally we voted on the motion. Because the amendments had changed the whole spirit of the motion, pretty much everyone who had set out to support it voted agianst it and everyone who had set out to oppose it voted for it. The whole thing was ridiculous. And because it failed, we wasted a whole load of time to achieve nothing.

Marvellous.