I found it fitting that my last few months in office at NUS were defined politically by a dual struggle around the AUT/NATFHE (now UCU) dispute; a struggle, on the one hand, to win our membership to a basic position of support for the dispute and, on the other, a struggle against the majority of the NUS leadership whose trajectory was to chip away at and retreat from the stance of support that NUS as a whole had taken.

However, as you may have guessed from the almost exclusively bitter tone of most of these blogs, the left in NUS is divided, politically muddleheaded and weak, and we were unable to stop the gross spectacles of SUs in places like Northumbria and Liverpool positively supporting the docking of striking workers’ pay and demonstrating in opposition to a live industrial dispute. We were also unable to prevent NUS’s leadership from caving into this tide of reaction, and it eventually took its trajectory to its full conclusion when it basically demanded that AUT members boycotting assessment get back to work immediately.

(I would have liked to report on the debate on this issue which took place at the 30th May NUS National Council, but as the meeting was declared inquorate and consequently disbanded I am unable to do so. That particular journey to Loughborough served little purpose other than to vindicate what I’ve said about National Council all year – that it’s a mechanism of sham democracy that even its own members don’t take seriously.)

Now, as UCU members go to ballot on a basic offer that is not 1% improved from the offer that was conclusively rejected some time ago, it looks as if the dispute may result in a defeat snatched from the jaws of victory. Its lessons are the lessons of every experience I’ve had during my year as a revolutionary socialist on the NUS NEC, re-emphasising the need for uncompromising militancy in the labour movement and the need for an NUS that sees itself – politically and organisationally – as part of that labour movement. The struggle to win both is very much ongoing.

It is traditional for those retiring from this union’s leadership committee to reel off a long-list of ‘thank-yous’, mostly aimed at people who they hope might employ them once their time as a bureaucrat in the student movement is done. It’s not a practise I’m particularly fond of, so I’ll keep this next bit brief;

I am grateful to every activist I’ve met – from sabbatical officers at big HE unions to ordinary students at local FE colleges – who knows that this union should not be about discount cards, tiger prawns and shaking hands with Bill Rammell. Without such people it would be meaningless, pointless and indeed impossible for people such as me to stand for and be elected to the NUS NEC. I am indebted to them, therefore, not only for keeping in (part-time) employment over the past year but also for consistently reminding me of why I’m doing this in the first place.

I won’t name individuals, but campaigns at various institutions (whether organised through the structures of the union there or independently of it) do deserve a mention – notably the anti-closure campaign at Rolle College, anti-cuts campaigns at Lambeth College and the University of Sussex and living wage campaigns at Queen Mary’s, LSE and Oxford. Special mention must also go to the officers and constituent members of West Midlands Area NUS, for reasons I hope I’ve made clear in several blogs throughout the year.

Contrary to another tradition to which most retiring NEC members adhere, I’m not going to subject anyone to a self-righteous exposition of my political principles; if my blogs (and, more importantly, the work on which the blogs report) haven’t made them obvious then I’m a crap communicator. I will say that I’m as proud as ever to be a revolutionary socialist, a Marxist, a communist, a Trotskyist, a Bolshevik-Leninist (and other scare-words people like Dan Large might want to throw around) and a member of the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty. I’m also hugely proud of the way Education Not for Sale has grown from being little more than a tag used by student members of the AWL (along with a few close contacts) at NUS Conference 2005 to an independent organisation with its own life that, a year later, was capable of standing a near-full slate and getting two people (including one non-AWL member) elected to the NEC.

But anyway, all of this gushing, pretentious nonsense is deeply premature. This is not a leaving speech. I have no intention of abandoning the project of turning NUS into a democratic, fighting, rank-and-file led organisation now that I’m off the NUS NEC. Indeed, being a “rank-and-file member” again (at Sheffield University) will probably see me better placed and more able to carry it out.

During my year on the NUS NEC, I’ve been to over 50 universities and colleges across 3 countries, helped organise 2 national speaker tours with speakers from Argentina and the USA, attended around 20 demonstrations and lobbies and stood on 3 picket lines in disputes organised by 3 different trade unions.

I hope it’s been worthwhile. I hope I’ve been of some use to NUS members who want a different kind of student movement and a different kind of NUS. I hope I was able to play some role in the campaigns I mentioned before, even if it was only to write about them here and bring them to the attention of people who may not otherwise have heard about them.

On July 1st, 2006, my time as an NUS National Executive Member will come to an end. But, once again, this is not a leaving speech.

See you around.

In solidarity –

Daniel Randall

NUS NEC, 1/6/2005-1/6/2006

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