Kraft launched a hostile bid to take over Cadbury's

We all love chocolate don’t we, and what’s the best chocolate around? That, of course, would be anything made by Cadbury’s. Other than the chocolate they produce, the other great thing about the Cadbury’s is that it is British. But for how much longer? About half way through last year the evil overarching company from America, Kraft, lumbered over to our little island and again tried to close its greedy fist around yet another company they did nothing to make a success.

It’s a sad state of affairs when companies can’t even be successful without fear of a bigger boy coming and stealing their lunch money. Being a six-foot-tall 12-year-old amongst your four-foot classmates is all well and good until the new boy shows up and he just so happens to be a 30-year-old with paranoid schizophrenia and a large machete for an arm. America, by the way, is the 30-year-old in this metaphor.

In July Kraft came over and made a multimillion dollar bid for the chocolate company, which was deftly rejected. Now they are at it again, determined to get the company ‘on the cheap’. Now, I don’t know how much Kraft’s buying of Cadbury’s would affect the industry, or the product itself. For all I know, not a single little thing would change. But that’s not the point. The point is that the super powers moving in and trying to dip their fingers in as many honey pots as they possibly can isn’t fair.

Imagine if you will, the elderly couple down the street. They open a little sweet shop where the shelves are lined with jars of sweets and piles of chocolate; they do it not for the money but to see the smiling faces on the little children who come in every day after school. They become so popular, in fact, that they gain the notice of a mainstream confectionary distributor who immediately buys them out with their millions of pounds and replaces them with a  brand-name money-spinner.

While Cadbury’s isn’t really the equivalent to an old couple running a shop, it is small potatoes compared to some of the companies out there, and we should try our hardest to reject the forced bids of American multimillion dollar companies who are just trying to squeeze some more money out of us.

Image by Kelliann Smith

Most people at this University would be forgiven for not knowing the meaning behind the acronyms GOAT and GOAL. They are, after all, two of those strategies that are apparently needed but best not to be seen, and so it would be surprising if anyone not involved in the Union knew of their existence.

At their purest level – a place where these strategies should stay – GOAT and GOAL stand for ‘Go out and talk’ and ‘Go out and listen’, respectively. This means the sabbatical team, since September, have been aiming to engage the student body in a two-way flow of communication to highlight the importance of their positions and draw attention to the issues we face.

By their own admission, the executive team see that this is not something that has been particularly successful. VP Internal Affairs Sohail Afsar told the Union Council that the team were still working on a formal strategy. But perhaps it is this striving for a strategy that becomes the self-defeating reason that GOAT and GOAL have never taken off.

At its most fundamental level, the idea of the sabbatical team talking to the students who elected them is one which needs to be whole-heartedly supported and embraced by all concerned. These sabbatical officers are remunerated to the tune of £16k each a year, so it only makes sense to put them to some good use.

What is baffling, however, is that the art of conversation, presumably for the purposes of monitoring, is being reduced to a science, in which some officers seem more concerned about what to ask than to just ask.

The team is working on an issue calendar that will see them approach students on a different, pre-defined issue every fortnight. While there is no questioning the logic of organisation, there is room to question its necessity in this setting. As VP Sports and Societies Haydn ‘Tank’ Stead converses with hundreds of students daily, in the iZone, and as VP Education and Welfare Haneef Rashid keeps in near-constant contact with his team of course and school representatives, are the aims of these strategies not already being fulfilled?

What’s more, as the team embark upon around four new campaigns this term – from September 2009 we have seen just one hit the campus – will the team be more concerned with telling us what the issues are and how they intend to fight them rather than asking us what’s going on?