Last night’s battle of the bands final not only showcased the diverse talent of our students, but also proved that £2 can buy you much more than a pack of Haribo and a Dairylea dunker.

The Graduate was the setting for the evening’s festivities and cheap tins of Tuborg the tipple favoured by many of the chequered-shirt sporting punters. Opening act Rag-Tags decided to kick things off with a folksy set of covers, including violin-soaked takes on well… Aha’s ‘take on me’, Britney Spears’s ‘toxic’ and Linkin Park’s ‘numb’ to name a few. Playing songs familiar enough to keep everyone singing along, but sufficiently tweaked to prevent them from sounding stale, Rag-Tags set the tone for the evening, which was interpreted by most as get pissed and have a great time. And who’s going to argue with that?

Follow-ups White County Line unleashed their visceral breed of two-piece rock fanfare, dryly jesting that their band would be bigger if they had more friends…aww! However, it soon became glaringly obvious that their small size didn’t restrict their sound, as the two quickly commenced hurling tornadoes of distorted guitar and crashing drums into the audiences’ faces. A beast comprised of grungey vocals, intricate riffage and pounding rhythms, White County Line didn’t so much warm up the crowd as smother it in hot sauce.

Other notable performances included that of the disturbingly named Joss, Owen and the Dirt Brown Cowboys. This cracking five-piece reminded everyone that blues isn’t just an old man’s game and provided a stellar performance consisting of both classic covers and original material. Impressively tight considering this was only their second performance, (the first being the previous heat) these ‘cowboys’ would be better described as shit-hot rather than dirt-brown. Delivering a toe-tapping set dripping with colourful licks and soulful kicks, …the Dirt Brown Cowboys ensured that spirits were high enough to graze that awful decor hanging from the ceiling.

It was from blues to jazz thereon with the talented ZSQ taking the stage, which from what my tattered notebook can tell me were ‘awesome’. Although, if memory serves it was not until the subsequent two bands brought on the funk that the student population really started pulling shapes. I am of course referring to TC’s Funky Nuts and previous winners Funk Regulators, both of which came, saw and slapped bass. After a climatic, albeit cheesy rendition of Will Smith’s Wild Wild West, some thought the …Regulators had done it again, but no! What’s this? The Rag-Tags have scooped first place, with the filthy-arse whadjamacallits a close second?! Crikey. Now where’s that last Tuborg…

Ashley Martin

Looking at this photograph, with a swastika spray-painted on the window and the obvious sprayed on the floor, you would assume that this article is about something in the distant past. In actuality it happened just under a week ago in Staffordshire.

Some local students, with rumoured ties to the British National Party (BNP) and English Defence League (EDL), began a smear campaign against the sitting President, Assed Baig, handing in one hundred signatures as a vote of no confidence, which led to a referendum on Baig’s position.

The ploy was two months in the works from the group of students and, upon handing in the signatures, the graffiti work shown in the picture appeared overnight on the Students’ Union building on campus.

Baig beat the referendum back, telling all students that he would not let it affect the Union’s day-to-day life, as they have tried and they have failed. Now it is back to business.

The University of Huddersfield Students’ Union (UHSU) have said that they completely back Baig in his bid to combat racism on Staffordshire’s campus, and will offer any and all support that they can.

Personally, I cannot believe that, in this day and age, there are people, especially people studying in Higher Education, that are so closed minded. To some extent, I expect it from the ill-educated, ‘on-benefits’ waster who thinks that “immigrants are taking our jobs” – but a student? There just literally aren’t enough words.

Huddersfield student radio station RadioHudd will elect their controller next year instead of taking it to SU general election

RadioHudd have won at least half of their battle to ensure the continuity of the station after its current managers, the team who set it up, graduate this July.

Matt Christie, Head of Programming at the Huddersfield student station, voiced concerns that, if the new position of Radio station controller was elected from the student body, someone with little experience may run the station into the ground.

Christie, with a group of current RadioHudd DJs, took the issue to the Students’ Union Council meeting on 1 February, just nine days before nominations for elections open.

Adam Findlay, a first year student who hosts a show on RadioHudd, spoke of how it was important to keep the decision of who took over the top job amongst those currently working on the station.

Students’ Union President Junaid Ejaz backed the move, praising Christie for the hard work he had put into making the four-month-old student radio station a success.

Just a quick note to say that the Huddersfield Student website will once again be undergoing a facelift.

Thanks to a little help from our Fashion Editor we’ve managed to locate someone who knows what he’s doing when it comes to websites.

I’m pleased to announce that, towards the end of this academic year – date TBC – we will be launching, in time for September 2010, a brand new look to the website.

The initial designs are looking very promising. Think simple but structured.

It’ll also give the team, for the remainder of this year and heading to next, a lot more control over categories and display – I’m excited.

Stay tuned for more information and, perhaps, a few sneak peaks at the blueprints.

In my never-ending quest to stay objective and call contemporary politics as I see it, combined with the modern culture of social-networking, a while back I became a fan of the ‘Conservatives’, ‘the Labour Party’ and the ‘Liberal Democrats’ fan pages, to get up to date news in my Facebook news feed from each of the parties. Granted the news is always biased, but I like to know what the parties think about issues that crop up, whether they think that policies that they announce are going well, and in the process you get nuggets of actual fact about what the parties are up to.

Today, the Conservatives’ fan page announced that you could submit questions to David Cameron’s new and hip ‘webcast’ on education, and rate other suggested questions. So as a student activist, whose primary concern and focus is our education, I thought that I should do my part. I proposed a question regarding what Cameron and the Conservatives intend to do about the HE cuts which are happening across the country – Leeds University recently announced a £35m cut – and how he will ensure every students right to Higher Education.

After submitting my question, I decided to rate the other questions – some of which were pretty much just a question asking why he is such an elitist bell-end – and inevitably came across a question that I thought was just irrelevant. You have three choices when rating a question, a tick – whereby a window tells you that are saying “Yes” to the question – a cross, where the window tells you that you are saying “No” – and finally a choice to skip the question. As I hovered the mouse over the skip button, the windowed switched to “meh…” (as shown in the image) and I realised that this tactic is typical Cameron: all style and no substance.

First of all, the Tories are utilising facebook, a modern and hip website, to induce interactivity in a new and hip ‘webcast’ which will discuss education, when facebook has a phenomenal student population online. Will my question even be considered? No. Will any of the questions even be considered? No. The Conservative party are just playing at being the cool and hip party, but really they will ask the questions that they have prepped for and answer in riddles that will not amount to any real policy.

Who to vote for, Brown or Cameron?

It’s the start of a new decade, and in the political realm it is the year where we are going to have the first general election that the majority of you reading this will be able to vote in.

So what are the choices? Well, we’ve got the choice of voting Labour and keeping in a party who saw us go through the recession worse off than the majority of the other countries of our economic calibre, whilst being constantly told that we would be better off than said countries. Or, we can vote Conservative, who are promising that they will be reducing the size of government – and therefore reducing the number of people employed by the government when we have unemployment already at a ludicrously high level – as well as budget cuts to the fundamentals of our modern welfare state.

What to do, what to do… well I suppose we will always have the abstention vote that is the Liberal Democrats, but is that enough? The party elected in the election will be in power during our first few years of being in the real world; this will massively affect each and every single one of the current students studying right now.

Obviously, each of you have to make up your own mind at some point, but right now I can honestly say that with all of the facts in front of me, I am actually scared of what a Conservative government would do to this country – to us as students and to us as future members of the job-market. Yes, Labour have absolutely messed up in various areas, but the Conservatives are intending to reduce the safety nets that allow me to sleep somewhat safe at night. Should our degrees lead to nothing job-wise, in an economy which is watching graduates join the unemployment lines en masse, the safety nets are all that make me think “it might be ok after I graduate”. Do I want to be on the dole? Do I hell, but I’d like to know that I’m definitely going to be covered should everything go completely wrong.

Granted, my opinion may well change before the election is called and I could well be chanting “go Tories” at some point – anything could happen – but right now, I’m afraid it’s time to steal the American chant of “four more years! four more years!” and pray that the party sacks off Brown, before he has a stroke from the stress of being hated by the public as much as he is, and just get down to business and save all of our sorry behinds.

An image of players of Hitler, the drinking game

Two Huddersfield students were yesterday facing the glare of the national media as a game they created was said to mock the Holocaust.

Nicholas Rowley and Anthony Pike’s “Hitler” drinking game involves references to World War II and the Holocaust which veterans have described as an insult.

The story has since been picked up by BBC, Sky News and news websites in India and Australia.

A Facebook group has been created in support of the two Huddersfield students, claiming that the media have misrepresented the pair.

The drinking game group, joined by around 12,000 members has seemingly been removed from Facebook.

Both students told the Huddersfield Examiner that they were sorry and had never meant to cause any offence.

Pike said: “I’ve spoken to Nick and we both want to say that we are sincerely sorry.

“It was only ever intended to be a game and has clearly gone beyond a joke. We will be removing the group from Facebook immediately.

“We never expected this to reach the press and feel some of the coverage was inaccurate.

“It was made clear on the site that we in no way sympathise with Hitler or Nazi ideals.

“We were very concerned about some of the photos which were posted but were copied by the press before we had a chance to take them down.

“Obviously we realise that a large number of people sacrificed themselves for this country and this was never an attack on them.”

Huddersfield Student Union President, Junaid Ejaz, told the Examiner: “The University of Huddersfield Students’ Union is shocked by and condemns those involved in ‘Hitler the Drinking Game’.

“To trivialise and play games based on Nazism, which killed so many millions of innocent people from all communities, is disgraceful and disrespectful.

“Any allegations against students will be investigated and appropriate action will be taken.”

Though the January issue of the newspaper is receiving good feedback from all who have spoken to me, and though I am happy that it is looking good and starting to contain more news and features that our readers have asked for, there are a number of errors in the edition that need to be addressed.

In an editorial confusion, the penultimate draft of the newspaper was sent to print meaning that there were a few tweaks that were done  (and one massive change to an article) that did not go to print.

• On the front page, lead story, Sorcha Johnson is referred to as a second year Transport and Logistics student
• In the headline of the ‘Fears of over-stretching’ article at the bottom of page five. This headline should read, as the article says, that there are actually nine planned campaigns.
• Union Council advert on page 17 contains an earlier version of their logo and is of a poorer quality than the one intended for the final draft

The largest omitted alteration, and the biggest apology needed, can be found on pages 6 and 7. The content of some of the boxes in Jordan Walmsley’s ‘Decade of British politics’ article are repeated under incorrect headings. This error was made in the lay-up process and had been corrected in the final draft of the newspaper, which wasn’t sent to print.

I’d like to send a massive apology to Jordan, whose full article will appear on this website in the following days.

I would also like to apologise to any readers and, though the majority of the mistakes were noticed by the team immediately after printing, thank those readers who have came to us to let us know.

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.