A Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year from Manchester Labour Students.

As the year draws to a close, I thought it would be a good time to reflect on the year Manchester Labour Students has had so far and to talk about the hard work that we plan to continue in the New Year.

The academic year began in fantastic fashion for Manchester Labour Students, with the most successful freshers week in our history. Thanks to the hard work of several members of the club, as well as the enthusiasm of many people to join our club, we managed to recruit a record number of members to the party over a 3 day period in early September. The freshers fair also saw the visit of Jamie Reed MP to the club, as he helped us in the drive to recruit new members.

Freshers week ended with one of the most successful events in Manchester Labour Club history when over 200 students turned up to see Ed Miliband MP visit the Students’ Union. The event saw lots of students taking the opportunity to engage a high profile cabinet minister in a Q & A session. The event received widespread coverage including an article in Student Direct. Due to the incredible success of this event, we are planning to bring more high profile speakers to the club next year.

Freshers week was an incredible success and we would like to thank all of those who helped out, signed up or came along to the event for proving that it is possible to engage young people in politics at a time when apathy is at a worrying high in the general population.

In October, Manchester Labour Students heard from another cabinet minister, this time we travelled out to Hyde to visit the constituency office of James Purnell MP, Secretary of State for Work & Pensions. James took the time out of his day to chat to our members and answer any questions they had of him. This is not the first time that he has shown his commitment to young people in the Labour Party and we are always grateful for that.

November was an extremely busy month for us. First and foremost, Manchester Labour Students twice took a large group of Scotland for the long drive to Glenrothes to campaign for the Labour Party in the by-election that was taking place there. Our presence, along with the insane amount of hard work from people the people who travelled from all around the country ensured a big victory for Labour in what was an extremely difficult climate. We are very proud of the hard work our activists put in and the victory made all the hard work worth it.

We also had a big victory for the Students’ Union in November, as Manchester Labour Students worked with many other groups on campus to pass “No Platform Policy” at the UMSU General Meeting, as well as passing reforms to the Students’ Union council which we believe will improve the union a great deal.

Further to this, we then held a joint event with the Manchester Jewish Society with John Mann MP who is the chair of the cross party group on anti-Semitism, where we discussed anti-Semitism on campus as well as his time involved in student politics when he was a student at the University of Manchester.

We topped off the month by travelling to North West Labour Party conference, where our very own chair Mike Joslin was elected to be the chair of North West Young Labour. Oh yeah, and Barack Obama was elected President of the USA too in case you hadn’t heard. This event held a special place in the hearts of Manchester Labour Students as Mike had spent the summer of 2007 working on Obama’s campaign over in the states.

It might have been coming up to Christmas, but we didn’t slow down in December and worked harder than ever to deliver for students in Manchester. We spent every minute we could campaigning for a “Yes” vote in the Manchester transport referendum, and although the result went against us, we were once again noticed as being some of the hardest working campaigners around and enhanced our record of campaigning for not only the Labour Party, but for the interests of the whole community.

Following this, Manchester Labour Students Executive Vice-Chair Richard Neudegg launched his new “Community First” campaign. The work is just beginning, but please support the campaign by joining the Facebook group which Richard set up.

So, it has been an extremely busy year for Manchester Labour Students so far and this is just a small sample of what we have been up to. On top of this we have also been building our already strong relationship with the city party and working very hard on Lucy Powell’s campaign in Manchester Withington. We will be continuing this work throughout the year and continuing to campaign for the party at all opportunities.

That’s about it for now, watch out for our upcoming events which we will be announcing soon and have a great New Year!

The Squirrel says "VOTE YES!"

Tomorrow, 10th December, is the last day you can post your vote in Manchester Transport Referendum!

If you leave it to the last day, the 11th, you’ll have to drop it off to the designated location for your local authority. If you live in the Manchester City Council area, this is the Town Hall – look for the giant Santa in the centre of town.

This vote will decide whether or not Manchester get £3billion in transport investment that we wouldn’t get otherwise and will make Manchester a greener and less congested city with a public transport network we can be proud of.

In return we will have a small congestion charge that only 10% of people will pay, only at peak times through the rings, capped at £5 per day that will only be brought in once 80% of the transport improvements have been made.

For students, this is a no-brainer - much faster journey times from Fallowfield into campus and capped bus prices in return for a congestion charge that we are highly unlikely to ever pay – even if you drive you would have to pass through a ring at rush hour.

Manchester Labour Students have been campaigning hard for a YES vote and we very much hope that if you haven’t already done so, you will post your ballot off tomorrow voting yes, being part of the biggest improvement to Manchester in years.

New Executive Committee

Last night the new Executive Committee of Manchester Labour Students were elected at the club’s Annual General Meeting.

Michael Joslin was re-elected as Chair and Richard Neudegg, previously Campaigns Officer, was elected Vice-Chair (Executive). Hannah Spector was elected Treasurer.

Our new campaigns team are Mel Haslam and Ash Singleton.

Our new events team are Andrew Campbell and Ruby Carr.

Our new membership team are John Gilchrist and Francesca Cane.

Congratulations to all members of the Exec.

All new members of the Executive will hopefully become authors of this blog so look out for interesting opinion pieces coming soon.

Full details of the Exec Committee are available on our website or click here.