Politicians and ‘anti-politicians’ alike are giving pretty politician-y interviews in the lead up to this term’s Union elections. They all have those predictable hallmarks of Union discourse. The performative awkward unease. The pledge for more ‘accessibility’. The idea of the perennially problematic institution where the problems are often unstated and the demands for reform are reliably vague.
This term’s elections will come and each of these people may be elected or maybe they won’t but I doubt it will matter and I doubt you should care. Indeed, most of us don’t care. We know the Union brings in speakers and puts on debates and produces, at a metronomic rate, putative scandals that we might sometimes hear a few details about. Yet a lot of us don’t know much more than that.
This three-part series aims to provide a beginner’s crash course in how it works. I have been told a lot of these things in the form of specific details and specific names. But for want of not being nasty, and for want of not being sued (as some of these people are wont to threaten), that will not be the focus. Besides, it doesn’t seem necessary. The names change each year but not much else does.
The students of the Union are divided into five groups: the President, the Officers, Standing Committee, Secretary’s Committee and Appointed Committee. Appointed Committee are, as you guessed, appointed. Everyone else is elected. Someone can make a grand entrance into standing or even officership from a senior appointed role, but most who make it to the big elected roles start off on Secretary’s Committee—seccies.
One becomes a seccie by being scouted. As you know, in October each year, thousands of freshers unpack their bags, survey their new landscape and try to figure out its grooves. For most of us, that beginning period is about just getting by. But while under the deluge of new faces and names, there are Union eyes picking out those who seem most at ease.
As you probably know, as a general rule, the key to electoral success for senior Union positions is a good ‘slate’. A slate is a group of people running for various positions who call themselves a pallid name like ‘Open’ or ‘Reach’ (a slate accused of attempting a recent surprise coup was called ‘Connect’) and line votes to each other. ‘Pod families’ are assigned, which are made up of one candidate for standing and two candidates for seccies. The seccies tell people to vote for their paternal standing figure, as well as their slate’s nominees for officerships and president.
So, in truth, it doesn’t matter much which slate seccies are on. In return for all their lining of votes, they get the endorsement of one candidate for standing, and really they just have to rely on their ‘PV’—personal vote. One of the many sayings that Union people, often after only one or two terms being involved, deliver like age-old truisms is that seccie success is all about PV and ‘getting out your college’. Success on standing is about ‘managing your pod’.
This is why freshers are being scouted. The higher-ups are looking to construct a slate for elections in the second half of term, and they want seccie candidates with the highest potential PV. This, as you can imagine, is not a recruitment process that meets the diversity and inclusion requirements of modern organisations. The question is essentially who is the best at working a room. Seccie candidates are scouted from college JCRs, OUCA, OULC, parties and clubs. It’s not abnormal for Union people to discuss which fresher looked like they had electoral potential at Bridge last night.
At least to begin with, this is a selection pressure that singles out those who come to Oxford with a ready ambition to, from the start, do more than just study and make friends; people who are not overwhelmed by their new environment but rather already seek control over it. That this tends to skew the demographics towards those from private schools and more comfortable backgrounds is unsurprising. That is without mentioning the talk of Westminster kids in sixth form being plumped up by their Oxford peers for immediate Union involvement.
The Union does partly recognise the opacity of their selection process. It is genuinely admirable that they recently put out a reasonably informative ‘how to get involved’ handbook, not that you would have seen it. But of course, all the same dynamics remain in place.
It is worth mentioning that this is talk most relevant to Michaelmas. Michaelmas seccies are a slightly different breed to their Hilary and Trinity counterparts. They understandably tend to be the most driven, cutthroat and ambitious variant of Union hack because they started their career as soon as they could. As the other terms roll around, presidential candidates become more and more desperate for seccie candidates and start scraping the barrel a bit, trying to entice someone who went to Port and Policy twice or made one point at Beer and Bickering. The reduced determination of these later candidates may explain why you may receive an especially high volume of hack messages in Michaelmas each year, compared to the other terms.
To ask someone to be on your slate, it is common courtesy to ‘coffee’ them. Coffee dates are the lifeblood of Union politicking. If decaf didn’t exist, we would have senior hacks bouncing off the walls. They are going for coffees all the time. Hi. How nice to see you. What college are you at, again? Oh yes, very nice. And how’s 2nd week treating you? Ah, yes, yes. They get round to the point and, assuming their coffee interlocutor is not completely clueless, they have come because they would—yes, thank you so much—like to be on your slate. Now they are, as they say, ‘locked in’.
Coffees, however, are not always for a positive transaction. All good senior hacks have to master the art of ‘binning’. To be put in the bin is to be moved, in some way, from relevance to irrelevance. For example, someone who lost an election could be considered in the bin. When it comes to binning—the verb—there can be two courses of action at play.
In one case, it’s friendly fire. You have been considering two people for your slate but, alas, they went to the same school or they go to the same societies. The overlap of voters is unwanted, so you coffee the less charismatic one. Hi, how’s it’s going, very good, I have a suggestion for you. The master binner gently guides the young fresher towards a start in an appointed role. You know, to learn the ropes. They come away with a sense of satisfaction of a necessary job well done.
The other case is more nefarious. This is a job you might call in the big guns for. An ex-president perhaps, with the credibility that brings. They talk to a fresher being encouraged onto a rival slate and tell them with great solemnity about the obstacles and trials they face. They intimidate them away from running. And, in so doing, put them in the bin.
The final part of constructing a slate involves making the nominations official. To run for election, a candidate must have given a certain number of debate speeches on the Union floor. If you have ever attended a Union debate, you will have heard the announcement at the end that the floor is open to anyone to give a post-debate speech. Basically everyone filters out of the room at this point and you wonder who bothers to speak to the remaining empty benches. Those are, in fact, almost exclusively wannabe candidates, bumping up their speech numbers.
Once slates are locked in, it is time to hack. It seems that many hacks consider this an art form and the successful ones can’t help but look smug when recounting their techniques. There is talk of 1000-name ‘hack lists’ and personalised messages and making people feel like you truly care (there are also complaints of unfair play e.g. accusations of ‘horizontal hacking’ of opinion leaders—an intimate practice—which, in truth, I doubt happens very much and is probably an accusation primarily driven by misogyny).
There’s of course a limit to the sincerity with which hacking can be done. It is a numbers game. If you message five people, and ‘ping’ them, and ping them again, one of them might find that sufficient impetus to put you on their ballot.
It seems like this is the key factor. I am unconvinced that the style matters too much. Those who do well in the Union vary in how ‘genuine’ they make their hack messages, but they all share the necessary lack of shame to send messages to hundreds of people they spoke to once. It is a lack of shame borne of wanting to not be half-arsed in this goal they’ve signed up for, and.. air enough. It’s the only way to win.
It does, however, colour people’s view of you, and rightly so. To be a hack is to, at least for a few weeks a term, go around with an undeniable ulterior motive. You can’t be an ‘anti-politician’ because in a campaign, that itself can only be a political pose.
When one has their first taste of hacking, it is an invitation into a new world of transactional relationships, which only compounds as you progress through the Union and spend more and more money on coffee. It is a step into a role that if taken seriously, will inevitably impact who you are. But they do it, often not with the presidency in mind, but on the basis that there are perks to be had, and that this is a new dimension on which to ‘succeed’ in Oxford life, alongside the lauded triumvirate of academics, sport and romance.
It should be said that being a good hack is not everything in these elections. Increasingly, people in the Union talk (with a light sense of derision among those disadvantaged by this) of ‘optics’ and ‘narrative’, especially when it comes to the presidency. It helps if you come from some kind of adversity. There’s also scandal. Scandal that always appears in the two days before voting opens.
That will be returned to. For now, consider the day after election day, as the dust settles and the morning light streams through the glass on St Michael’s Street. Phones start ringing. The process begins again. The candidates who won the most votes see their schedules pile up with coffees. And there is work to do, a society to be run, and careers to progress and transactions to be made. The fresh seccies may not know it, but this is about to become a larger part of their life than they probably guessed.