It was Prime Minister-in-waiting Andy Burnham’s first big speech this week. Much of it was pretty bleak.
He described a country in which people have lost control over the basics of life. He pointed to families spending too much on housing, energy, water and transport, young people being pushed through an education system that does not give enough value to technical routes, and workers and communities being left exposed by industrial decline.
He spoke of residents in towns, coastal areas and rural places seeing services, high streets and transport links deteriorate around them. He pointed out injustices – not only that living standards vary sharply by postcode, but that people are often expected to cope with those inequalities while the real power to change them remains concentrated in Westminster and Whitehall.
It wasn’t all doom and gloom. Part of the response was a politics of agency – shifting power out of Whitehall, giving towns, cities and regions the tools to shape their own futures, and rebuilding the everyday foundations people rely on.
His answer was not just more money, but more control – over housing, transport, skills, energy, water, high streets and local growth. The promise running through the speech was that people should not have to lower their expectations or wait for Westminster to notice them.
With stronger mayors, better local powers and a more active state, communities could start to see practical improvements in the cost and quality of daily life.
This was the week that was
This was also the week that “intro the team” or “we’re your students’ union” videos and posts started popping up in my feed for the 2026 season.
I know the format by now. A warm welcome, a row of smiling faces, a big list of all the things to get involved in, and a soundtrack that builds gently towards the words “we’re here for you” or “it’’s your union”.
They are pretty much interchangeable. We’re amplifying student voices and making the experience the best it can be. I’m your president, I’m your vice president education, I’m your vice president welfare. We’re students just like you, and you elected us to amplify your voices at the highest levels of the university.
Wherever you are and whoever you are, you are a member, we’re led by and for students, and we’re here for you.
They are friendly, they are polished, they are impeccably produced. But read any of them back, and there’s an emptiness – they describe a body whose reason for existing is to change things for students, but rarely mention a single thing that needs changing.
The closest the scripts get to the actual realities of student life – money, housing, the grind of assessment – arrives in a sentence about the advice function. If your life is hard, come and see us. The problems are real enough to staff an advice centre for, but never real enough to speak of.
The genre is the message. And the message, almost everywhere, is representation described in theory – the structures, the scale, the charitable status, the sheer number of reps – while the practice of representation, the bit where you say out loud what is wrong and who is going to fix it, left carefully off-camera.
Everything below the waterline
Why does it keep happening? Part of it is iceberg theory. Issues only get addressed once they break the surface, and a welcome post is engineered to keep everything submerged – calm, generic, on-brand. Nothing is allowed to poke up far enough to look like a position.
Part of it is borrowed power. The script leans on the organisation – the charity, the officers, the venues, the opportunities – rather than on a mandate. It’s like officers have become guest presenters on a panel show. The same videos proudly tell you that you elect new people every single year. If the message is identical whoever wins, what was the election for? The authority is borrowed from the building, not made from a manifesto.
Part of it is a lost opportunity. Welcome is the one moment in the calendar when a students’ union has a fresh, enormous, attentive audience. Yet the ask is “come and find us” rather than “here is the live fight, here is how you get involved, here is the thing we need ten thousand of you angry about by November”.
Part of it is a strange fixation on representation as a process to be admired rather than a means to an end. We have built an entire aesthetic around the machinery of voice – councils, reps, feedback loops, governance – and somewhere along the way the machinery became the point. Representation stopped being the route to a named change for named people and became a thing you have, like a logo.
But mostly it is that the post is about the union, not about students. Every penny goes back to students. It funnels attention and power inwards. Bring us your problems – a few officers and reps will gather them up, funnel them through committees or appointments and press them on a handful of senior decision-makers on your behalf. The power to act sits at the top, in the officer team and the meeting room. And in a sector this short of money and this fixated on recruitment, the funnel jams constantly. When it jams, nothing comes out of the bottom at all.
The alternative is a shower head. Instead of funnelling power up, you spray rights and power out – to thousands of students who each know what they are entitled to and can go and assert it for themselves. One jammed funnel stops everything. A shower head has hundreds of outlets, and you only need a fraction of them to flow.
It is, near enough, what Martin Lewis does. He rarely describes his organisation. He names the thing that is wrong, tells you exactly what to do about it, and puts money back in your pocket by the end of the segment. He shows people how to fix their own lives. The welcome post points them at the front desk.
Imagine if Burnham spoke like a students’ union
We could return to the speech this all started with. Imagine it had been handed to the same instincts that produce the welcome video.
“Hi, I’m Andy, and I’m your mayor. Greater Manchester has been amplifying residents’ voices for over a decade. We represent you at the highest levels through a network of councillors, a combined authority and a directly elected mayoralty.
“We’re residents just like you. If you’ve got a worry about housing, energy or transport, our advice service is confidential, non-judgemental and free – just come and see us.
“We’re a registered combined authority, so every penny goes back into our services. From the day you move here to the day you leave, we’re your local government, and we’re here for you.
Nobody would have reported it, and nobody would have called him a prime minister in waiting, because the actual speech did the opposite. It named the things – rip-off rents, energy and water bills, buses that do not turn up, high streets hollowing out, an education system that sneers at technical routes, a postcode lottery in which your life chances are decided by where you happen to live.
And it named a change – hope, collective agency, power dragged out of Whitehall and handed to the places that have to live with the consequences. He did not say “come and see us if there is a problem with your bus”. He said the buses are the problem, and here is what we are taking back. In the welcome video, “we” means the people at the union. In Burnham’s speech, “we” means us – the citizens he leads.
One version describes a structure that exists to help. The other picks a fight on your behalf and tells you how to join it.
So before you hit post
None of this means scrapping the warm welcome, the explanations of opportunities or the row of friendly faces. It means refusing to let the welcome post be the place where representation goes to be described in theory instead of done in practice.
It\’s a challenge for every officer, every voice team and every comms team staring at a half-finished “meet your team” edit this week. Before it goes out, make it answer five questions.
What is actually not good enough right now for the students you represent? Not in general – this year, this campus, this cohort.
What is the representation function honestly hoping to deliver over the next twelve months? If you can’t say it in a sentence, your members certainly can’t.
Which issues need an airing – named, out loud, in public – rather than triaged at the advice desk one student at a time?
Which decision makers need to be set a challenge, by name, with a deadline, that students can actually watch unfold?
And why are the real things students experience – the rent, the timetable, the assessment regime, the support plans that fall through – only ever given a public airing during election week, before being filed back under “come and see us if there’s a problem”?
Burnham’s promise was that people should not have to lower their expectations or wait for Westminster to notice them – power pushed out to the many, not hoarded up by the few. A students’ union could make exactly that promise, and mean it, in the first week of term.
Not “here is our structure, here is our scale, here is our charitable status”. But here is who we are, here is what we go through, here is what we are going to change, and here is how to join in.
