Exclusive interview: George Whitworth

**How does it feel to be re-elected?**

Really good. Last year I was a lot more nervous and a little more shell-shocked.
This year I’m not.

**What are your plans, what is the first thing you’re going to do?**

It’ll be a fairly malleable process as I already largely work on a lot of the
stuff which I’ve got in my manifesto anyway because they’re things I’m very
interested in, so over the coming months I’ll be getting more and more involved
in what Stu (Stuart Stanley, Finance Officer) is doing at the moment and working
more and more with him so that, when it comes around to handover, we won’t
really need a handover because I’ll know what I’m doing.

**You’re planning to re-vamp the Copper Rooms, what specifically are you
planning?**

I want to speak to people in the tech services, all the guys who do the lighting
and the music, and I want to speak to the bar staff, basically I want to get a feel
from all the staff about what they would change. I obviously have my own ideas,
but my own ideas are largely pointless because that’s what I want, I want to
know what everyone else wants and I’ll be going speaking to students about
what they want as well. I’ll be getting a lot of professional opinion on it all. I was
speaking with one of the technicians last night about it, and working from there
basically. I obviously have my own ideas about putting more seating in, putting
some colour in, create a bit of atmosphere and character but exactly how that
will work out depends on what people think, it depends on money, it depends on
all sorts of things.

**You’ve said that going from Sports to Union Development Officer you’re
already involved with a lot of it already, how do you think you’ll be able to
put your personal stamp on it, the role of Union Development Officer?**

Obviously it’s a new name this year and I’ll be putting my personal stamp on it by
probably trying to get rid of the name and change it again.
**
What would you change it to?**

Personally I’d like to call it Ents and Outlets, because then it’s very obvious what
it is, but as a Sabb team when we were deciding what to call it we were very, very
divided on it; we had about ten options on the table, so we came up with Union
Development, which I personally don’t like and even this week I’ve had people
coming up to me asking ‘What does Union Development even do?’

**How would you define it?**

The name Union Development does actually make perfect sense, the problem
with it is that it only makes sense if you actually think about it briefly, whereas
most people will look at the name and immediately disengage with it, which I
think is a bit of a problem. Most people won’t stop and think about it.

**Being Sports Officer, do you think that you’ve gained skills this year that
you can transfer to next year?**

I do indeed. A lot of the Sabbs do joint teamwork so there’s a lot of stuff that is
directly transferable. A lot of the stuff I do at the moment has absolutely nothing
to do with sports and has a lot more to do with Union development than it has
to do with anything else. All seven of the Sabbs are elected to make the Union
to make it the best place it can be and we share a lot of the burden of a lot of the
stuff.

_This interview was transcribed by Katherine Price._