Chris Strafford reports on an artistic and engaging campaign

Cat Rylance

Communist Students stood two candidates in last week’s elections to the University of Manchester student union: Cat Rylance for general secretary and Robi Folkard for academic affairs. Cat won 17% of the vote on a communist platform which stressed democracy – within the student movement, the university and wider society. We also dealt with issues such as crèche facilities, education cuts and funding, and student-worker unity. Robi received about 18% of the vote on a narrower platform focusing on education cuts.

We laid down conditions on candidates that we would actively back, which included internationalism, anti-imperialism, socialism, anti-cuts, free education, women’s liberation and LGBT rights. We supported and campaigned for Socialist Workers Party candidates Steve Rolf, who was standing for campaigns, and Siobhan Brown, who stood for communications officer. We also backed Ste Monaghan from the Anarchist Federation, who was running for welfare officer. No left candidate won a major position and socialist representation on the executive was reduced from one to zero. All the left candidates got around the same level of support, which demonstrated that there is very little to gain by hiding your politics.

We also critically backed members of Manchester Labour Students who were openly against education cuts. The social democratic students around Andrew Campbell have dragged MLS to the left over recent months – they even attended pickets with us last year! We called for a vote for four of their candidates and because of their Labour Party membership Robi and Cat both received backing from Labour Students.

Overall I think it was a good result. We ran a really artistic and engaging campaign. Cat’s posters were a take on Roy Lichtenstein’s works with heavy and explicit communist politics. We spoke to thousands of students and this does stand us in good stead in forming and leading the anti-cuts group at UMSU, as well as teaching the left a much needed lesson on how opportunism fails.

Photos from the campaign