Last week’s ULU Council held some elections for more than half a dozen vacant posts on the ULU Exec. Imperial students, however, would have been hard-pressed to know anything about it.

The elections were held at ULU Council, with the close of nominations being at noon on Tuesday 1 October. The more observant among you will have noticed that this was the second weekday of the academic term at Imperial (and many non-Freshers would not have been in College at the time). Furthermore there was no publicity. No calling notice in London Student. Nothing on the ULU web site - despite a ‘Council Awareness’ policy being passed at the last meeting of last year calling for ULU Council business to be published on the web.

At the ULU Council Meeting, the Returning Officer felt this was a non-issue since it was advertised in the ULU Freshers’ Guide and, being by-elections, the hacks who attended last year’s last meeting should have known. The first reason seems a little shabby - the ULU Guide was only distributed to Imperial students at the ICU freshers fair after the nominations deadline has been passed (the ULU freshers’ fair was even later). As for the second reason, well it doesn’t sit comfortably with the ULU Exec’s stated desire of being more "inclusive".

The first meeting of ULU Council also took place on what was essentially the second Monday of the term at Imperial. This was, in itself, a problem since Imperial College Union (and others around London) did not have time to elect delegates. In ICU’s case, President Ganeshwaranthan "constitutionally interpreted" that the Deputy Presidents and ICSM SU President should attend since their "predecessors" had been mandated by Council to go. Curiously, for the sixth delegate he decided that I should attend (not my successor) as I was elected as a delegate last year – not something I was entirely comfortable with but agreed to do so in the interests of making sure IC was not under-represented.

Your correspondent felt it prudent to complain to the ULU President, Charlotte Dawkins.uk, by email last week. After all, it’s not unreasonable to ask the federal union to schedule its meetings and elections around the term-dates of all constituent colleges. So far there has been no reply.