London baby, yeah! Gemma was relieved to wake up in her own bed for once and Wes woke up on her sofa for an early start at SOAS that morning.

Regular readers of our roadshow blogs will now be very familiar with our navigational ‘issues’, which we thought had been solved by our Sat Nav system (branded ‘Navman’ – how sexist!). Sadly we were let down trying to get to our parking space and a trip from one side of SOAS to the other took us past Leicester Square!!!

Armed with plenty of materials we arrived to meet SOAS co-president Claire Soloman though sadly there weren’t many students around to greet us :-( It was always going to be the case that we’d hit some campuses at the wrong time and we were sure this wouldn’t be the last. Still, since SOAS has a reputation as a campaigning union we were sure they’d cope without our ugly mugs!

We then drove round to LSE for a meeting of their infamous Union General Meeting, where Gemma was due to speak. LSE hold their UGM every week and regularly hit quorum with anything between 100 and 200 students regularly attending and if you ever attend you’ll see why… The meeting is more like a circus in some ways; speakers have paper thrown at them and at one point the chair had to intervene to stop someone throwing an entire telephone directory! Gemma performed very well to the bear pit and only had three small pieces of paper thrown at her and got the largest round of applause! So entertained was Wes by the atmosphere that he’s volunteered to speak there next term – what a masochist!!!*

Jimmy and Alexandra are leading a great campaign against students being used as ‘cash cows’ – a really good way of linking the marketisation of undergraduate fees with the outrageous situation faced by international students, who face unregulated, variable fees. Keep up the good work!

We then drove over to Reading, who seemed to be running a great campaign and had students signing up in droves. The sabb team there have had a difficult couple of weeks with one thing and another, so their tremendous success at demo sign-ups, NUS Extra sales and mobilising against a course closure was all the more impressive. Gemma also addressed the Women’s Group while she was there about the impressive work that is currently being led by our National Women’s Officer, Kat Stark. She left with plenty of fee fighting feminists behind the campaign!

Tired, drained and – in Gemma’s case – a little bit ill, we went home ready for Friday in the office and gearing up for King’s on Monday.
Gemma and Wes

* Since that meeting we were relieved to learn that the rules surrounding intimidation of speakers has changed. This is most welcome because whilst seasoned speakers like us might be used to a bit of heckling, it’s hardly a way to get students involved in democracy and is almost certainly in breach of equal opportunities legislation.

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