On the 31st of October the Union hosted a debate on Britain’s place in the EU.

Before the main debate commenced, the emergency debate had been centred on how best to prepare for a zombie apocalypse. Little did we know this hypothetical scenario was about to become a reality.

The chamber doors opened and the room was flooded with Deloitte employees and corporate guests. Before the debate commenced, the President thanked those outside the chamber watching in the over-spill rooms who were unable to take part in the discussion. The reason so many missed out was because every other bench in the chamber and a portion of the balcony seating was reserved for Deloitte’s corporate guests.

On the 31st we were presented with the new ugly and shameful face of the Union or as it is now called ‘the Cambridge Union Society in collaboration with Deloitte’. Proceedings were interrupted on numerous occasions by tipsy employees and guests of the professional services firm who chatted noisily over speeches in between gulps of wine and glances at their glossy bound information booklets. The Union now has its sponsors to please, with paying students members forced out of the chamber or given a back seat.

The Union have been strangely cagey about the precise details of their pact with Deloitte. Whether what happened during Week Four’s debate will become a regular occurrence is yet unknown. The Union may still be about free speech, but it is no longer about transparency. Its student members deserve to know the precise details of the contract and what it will mean in terms of what the Union delivers. This is about more than just a change of name and an extra bit of embroidery on Union Committee members’ T-shirts. The Union’s website boasts that it ‘is more than just a private members club’. But on the 31st October it couldn’t have felt more like a private members’ club if it had tried; it’s now a private members’ club not just for paying student members, but for Deloitte’s employees and guests.

There is assumption that sponsorship deals such as this are always additive and positive. The Union will receive much-needed funds to repair its building and Deloitte gets the status of having its name attached to that of our University. Everybody wins. However, the Union is not completely unchanged by this misguided and fundamentally wrong decision. It is now a completely different creature. How can it continue as a bastion of student free speech when an international professional services firm is involved in its affairs? How can it be right that a student society allows corporate guests to dominate and disrupt its events, whilst paying student members are forced to miss out?

It is truly shaming that we have let part of the corporate world into our university’s most distinctive and respected student society - a society which is also a registered charity. It is a tragedy that Deloitte’s name appears next to our University’s shield, and that its name and adverts now appear in the Union’s Termcard.

There is an increasing trend for sponsorship in this country, but surely there must remain some things which are inherently unsellable. The Union should have been one of those things. The Union is now no more special than the O2 Arena or the Emerites Air Line cable car; it’s just another billboard for a large company. For a registered charity and student-run society to have started such a relationship with Deloitte is grossly inappropriate. The Union was something special, something of which this University could be extremely proud. Now, it is something that should repulse us. Whilst it exists ‘in collaboration with Deloitte’ it is a great embarrassment to this University.

You can read Varsity's original coverage of the Union's announcement and their statment on the matter, here