All entries for Sunday 23 January 2005

Exclusive: The manifesto they tried to ban

One of the candidates for union presidency – Dave Zevige – has had his manifesto removed from the union's website. The election committee described it as "A threat to civilisation as we know it, quite possibly the most abhorent piece of piffle since Jeffrey Archer's Prison Diaries." In order to counteract this undemocratic act I am publishing Zevige's manifesto on my blog:

About Me

I am running for Union President because I believe I can do the best job for you, the good students of Warwick. I have much applicable experience:

• I have attended Union Council since my first year. However as I have never been elected they usually call security to "remove me from the premises".


• I am good at getting the root of a problem, when someone in our halls broke the oven and we got fined, I tortured them all until the culprit 'fessed up.

Reforming Union Democracy

Last term's referendum didn't go far enough, to quote one of the great thinkers of our time, "When will people learn? Democracy just doesn't work." I propose that all power should be handed to the sabbatical officers, who can rule the university with a reign of terror. If elected president I will make the following changes to the sabbatical roles:

• We will have a Re-education Officer in place of the current role of Education Officer. This is to ensure that any dissenters will not threaten our supremacy.


• Welfare and Equal Opportunities will be replaced by Warfare and Unequal Opportunities. Warwick ranks highly in university league tables, yet the emphasis remains on Oxford and Cambridge. This can be changed by hoping our university overtakes them, or we can take matters into our own hands and declare war on Oxbridge and crush them. Their puny punting boats would be no match for a fleet of mighty warships.


• Finance and Internal Affairs, will become Finance and Personal Gain. I intend to give myself and the other sabbatical officers a huge pay-rise.


• In place of a CDCO we will have a Propaganda Minister. This is to manipulate apathetic students into believing that any money they spend in the union goes back to them, rather than simply lining our pockets after the pay-rise.


• Warwick has a vast array of sports clubs, resulting in the average fitness level being 50% higher than the national average for students. This won't do at all, fit and healthy students pose a greater threat to the Sabbaticals totalitarian power. I propose we have a Blood Sports Officer. It will mean less students partaking in strenuous activity, solving the fitness problem. All you fox lovers out there don't worry though, we will be hunting maths students, its not like anyone likes them anyway.


• What the union currently lacks is a good torture chamber, I will build one and responsibility for torture will rest with the new position of Societies and Student Dismemberment Officer.

Other Aims

• Banning all students whose surname begins with a G, H, or D from the union and all societies and sports clubs. I've done some research and found the union's filing cabinet only has twenty-three slots. To combat this problem we must effectively reduce the alphabet to twenty-three letters. The only alternative is to purchase a new filing cabinet stretching already thin union resources.


• Pressure the university into giving the library more funding as it desparately lacks books on guerilla warfare.

Please only vote in the elections if you intend to vote for me, otherwise its just not worth it.

: 23 Jan 2005 11:39 |  Tags: University Warwick |  Comments (7) |  Close comments |  Report a problem