Monday 16-11-2015 - 16:30

After a week of voting, the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement (BDS) motion has been supported.



Over 1,000 of you cast your votes last week as part of the first ever preferendum held at the Guild. A preferendum is an all-student vote where there are three or more choices – allowing you to choose your favourite option, your top two or rank all three in order of preference. The voting system used a Modified Borda Count, which assigned points to each option based on the order of preference.



There were a total of 1,866 points in support of BDS, with 934 opposed to the motion and 1,479 points supporting the outcome of Summit as detailed in the manifesto.



Following the vote, the Guild will be meeting with both groups who have been campaigning on this motion. There will be further updates available soon about what this result means for you and the Guild.



This vote came about following an idea suggested through our Change It system last year. The idea was to make sure the Guild supports the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement. We put it to Guild Summit – a group of 50 randomly selected students chosen to reflect the student body – and they decided to not support the motion but encourage us to work with student groups to raise awareness of the issue and allow students to make individual decisions. Following Guild Summit, a group of students appealed this decision and asked for the matter to go to a preferendum.