They just can’t help themselves, can they? Barely a year after the Remembrance Day scandal which made national news, after CUSU rejected a motion promoting the commemoration of British war veterans, they are at it again: this time banning military organisations from Freshers’ Fair.
A motion proposed by the Welfare and Rights Officer, Stella Swain, the same genius behind the condemnation of Remembrance Day as ‘imperialist propaganda’, argued that the presence of military organisations and firearms at Freshers’ Fair could be ‘triggering’ for some students. Whilst appearing to be a right-wing parody of your stereotypical student leftie views – not even we could have written that she would actually say ‘triggering’ – the motion is also deeply dishonest. I can think of not one single person in Cambridge, or indeed the country, whose ‘anxiety’ would actually be ‘triggered’ by the presence of military personnel, and, quite frankly, if it is, they need to get over it and grow up. Nor was any evidence provided that adverse effects were suffered by any students at all. When you add in to this the fact that Stella Swain, in proposing the motion, referenced the Territorial Army, an organisation which hasn’t even existed since 2014, one gets the distinct sense that she doesn’t have a clue what she is talking about, and that other reasons for the ban are at play. This is indeed a perfect example of a classic leftie trick: using the unfounded, convenient excuses of ‘anxiety’ and ‘student comfort’ to disguise their disgraceful anti-British sentiment as a moral virtue. Moreover, the assumptions made throughout the motion are quite extraordinary, and point to the extreme dogma which is infecting CUSU right to its core. It states, for example, that having members of the military carrying weapons indicates ‘implicit approval of their use’ – who knew that the idea of having a military, which may occasionally need to fire a gun, was such a controversial proposition?
It would be one thing if this was simply a lone nutter, as we all wish it was. But the truth is that this anti-British, anti-military sentiment has infiltrated the CUSU establishment at the most fundamental level. During the 2018 Remembrance Day scandal, all but one of the voting CUSU members voted against commemorations. Have they learned their lesson after the nation’s rightful outrage? Absolutely not, for 75% of the same group has just voted for this ridiculous, pathetic – and completely unnecessary – motion. It is not just that they are oblivious to the views of real students and the outside world, existing in this weird, self-selecting bubble of a tedious far-left cabal. It is that they have their bubble burst, only to reconstruct it in an almost deranged manner, and have it burst yet again as they continually fail to realise that the things they say and do (supposedly in our name) naturally have very real consequences. One of the reasons CUSU can’t leave our troops alone is because it is a child of an organisation which simply cannot be told to grow up.
This strange obsession with the armed forces also has another reason behind it, beyond standard far-left dogma. Continuously condemning them and doing them down, in defiance of what the vast majority of students want, is another way to stick two fingers up to all of us, and the country at large. They sit there play-acting in Mill Lane, imagining that they are sitting in some post-revolutionary Downing Street, with their weird public social media accounts (as if anyone actually cares what they have to say) and student-funded salaries of over twenty grand a year, whilst 80% of us are too busy – or not sad enough – to vote them there in the first place. The very existence of CUSU means we artificially elevate the worst elements of the student left into pseudo-powerful positions, thus inflating their already huge (and completely undeserved) egos and apparently giving them licence to spout their anti-British bile in our name.
Why do we go along with this? Why do we pay people like Miss Swain over £20,000 a year to actively make us as Cambridge students look bad, and to condemn our troops despite that being the polar opposite of what the vast majority of the sane student populace want? To end with another question, the one we must all be asking ourselves as CUSU fails us yet again: for how much longer are we going to put up with this?