In what newly-elected Oxford NUS delegate David Klemperer called “a spectacular triumph for student apathy”, last week’s Oxford University Student Union (OUSU) elections culminated in success for all four candidates running on the ‘Oh Well, Alright Then’ slate, on a ticket against the “jumped up” NUS.

Absent from CUSU elections, ‘slates’ – groups of like-minded candidates working together who run for various positions – are a key feature of student union elections in Oxford.

Surprisingly, however, the ‘Oh Well, Alright Then’ slate comprised candidates from across the entire Oxford student political spectrum, uniting the co-chair of the Oxford University Labour Club, the senior co-chair and secretary of the Oxford University Liberal Democrats and the ex-social secretary of the Oxford University Conservative Association.

What brought the disparate group of candidates – all running for a position as one of the university’s six NUS delegates – into a grand coalition was what Harry Samuels described in a Students of Oxford video as a belief that the NUS “does nothing for students.”

Samuels went on to say that the ‘Oh Well, Alright Then’ candidates – now elected and making up a majority of Oxford’s six-person NUS delegation – intend to “vote against candidates who want to do pointless shit” and “vote against motions that are pointless”.

‘Oh Well, Alright Then’ were not the only slate running in the OUSU elections, however.

Indeed, the majority of candidates running both sabbatical and part-time executive positions belonged to slates, the ‘BackJack’ and ‘Welfair’ slates being the largest, each with six candidates.

Newly elected OUSU President for the 2016-17 academic year, Jack Hampton, headed up the ‘BackJack’ slate, which focused primarily on mental health and, alongside the OUSU presidency, also took a vice-presidential position as well as two further executive posts.

Groups of candidates campaigning on a shared platform briefly became a feature of CUSU elections from 2007, when a group of left-wing candidates campaigned under the banner of ‘A Little Less Conversation’. They were followed by the ‘Change We Can Believe In’ slate in 2008, though both had limited success.

The high point of slates in Cambridge came in 2009, when Tom Chigbo, Clare Tyson and Joe Farish, calling themselves ‘Vision, Ideas and Experiences’, took the positions of President, Coordinator and Access Officer respectively, despite claiming to have “no shared ideology”.

Slates were removed from the Cambridge electoral process in 2010, in an attempt to enhance “equality and opportunity”. CUSU’s 2015 election rules explicitly stated that “candidates may not campaign for each other, nor may they run together on slates.”