Show Me The Money

To my mind, one of the biggest problems with the Students’ Union is its financial opacity. If anyone is interested in how the Union spends its money – entirely reasonable given each student indirectly pays the Union hundreds of pounds per year – then prepare to be disappointed. The most recent accounts available on the LSESU website are four years out of date. Even the data from 2014 are devoid of meaningful details, like the costs of individual campaigns. Just imagine how the 2017 general election would have looked, if neither politicians nor voters knew how the government had spent its money in the last 4 years! It’s utterly farcical to elect students to SU positions without any financial accountability. As far as I’m concerned, the Union will never be a successful democracy until it publishes accurate, detailed, and up to date accounts. If it did, election turnout would surely rise, because people care about their own money more than they care about food waste procedures or the nuances of sexual identity. Candidates would stop churning out endless lists of new ideas, and pay attention to the cost effectiveness of what already exists, thus acknowledging trade-offs and prioritising what students really care about. In any case, the Union has no problem with paperwork and regulation when it comes to societies, and it certainly has enough bureaucracy to cope. So why do they continue to obfuscate their own finances?