As is wholly conventional at this time of year in Cambridge, the starting pistol was fired yesterday on one of the shortest (and probably dullest) races around.

For those of us who are now seeing the CUSU Presidential election for the nth time, the excitement really does begin to wear thin. Somehow it lacks the thrill of going to the polling station for the first time to vote in a general election, and this year’s candidates don’t even seem to be offering jam sandwiches to win our attention and/or votes. Boo, hiss.

Gimmicks aside, very little changes from year to year when it comes to the campaigns run by the prospective CUSU Presidents. Each will (though presumably not in the same words as their rivals) call for ‘more engagement’, ‘more representation,’ ‘more transparency’, and maybe even ‘more power.’

This is not to suggest that successive CUSU Presidents have failed to deliver material change – indeed, CUSU’s constitution has been amended with surprising frequency in recent years in order to accommodate various changes. Instead, this is perhaps indicative of a certain lack of imagination among the candidates, and among the student body as a whole. Can we find nothing else to moan about? Is there really nothing else about the nature of our representation at a university level which we would rather seek to change?

Clearly not, it would seem; the idea that the candidates with the most fundamentally radical policy ideas (or at least as radical as CUSU ever gets) tend to fall by the wayside does not strike us as being particularly surprising.

This is, of course, a rather cynical view to take of the whole process, and it is one which will not be shared by those among us who get fired up by, or even involved in, the various competing campaigns. If only the rest of us could break through our general indifference towards student politics without the assistance of edible stimuli...

What does all of this mean for the current elections? To use what surely now constitutes a Cambridge cliché when it comes to talking about CUSU, we are apathetic. Just as the word ‘apathy’ is horrendously overused at this particular juncture in the Cambridge year, so too are the words which we’ve already picked up on – ‘engagement’, ‘representation’, and ‘transparency’ – words which will, in all likelihood, feature in some capacity in the manifesto of the eventual victor.

Our apathy is, it seems, as much a reaction to the emptily platitudinous way in which such words are used, as it is to their actual content. Everyone would like to see better student representation – the goal is wholly uncontroversial – but the problem is exactly that: everyone wants to see better student representation. When seeking election, populism of this sort is, to a certain extent, inevitable: what is an election but a form of popularity contest?

This does not, however, excuse mindless drivel. As the Labour Party found out at the last general election, high talk with little concrete planning behind it will not win over the average pragmatic voter. If candidates are going to use these words to describe their goals, they have to mean them, understand them (and their implications), and give a sense of how they could be achieved. Until a candidate can show us that such meaning resides in their words, forgive me if I don’t endorse one of them – as if you care what I think anyway!