In which there were no run-ins with the police, no compromises and No Sweat.

For five days prior to the NEC on the 6th, I had been in Scotland at the G8 protests. I spent most of my time building the profile of No Sweat and its recently-launched student wing, Students Against Sweatshops.

I’m not really into the sort of nonsense that people like Geldof spout about how it’s necessary to be part of mobilisations like this for their so-called “historic” nature, as if building up a bank of stories to tell the grandkids is the most important thing. The best activists in Scotland were the ones who went for explicitly political reasons, not just “to be part of it.”

No Sweat – to which some of you might know the NUS is affiliated – stands out in the Make Poverty History, social justice-type milieu because it’s one of only a handful of organisations that has something to say not only about the abstract need to make poverty history, but about which social forces are capable of bringing this about. MPH’s leaders and Geldof look to middle-class do-gooders and “people of goodwill” to bring about change in society; No Sweat looks to the organised working-class. History is on the side of No Sweat’s analysis in terms of who brings about the most radical and fundamental social change.

The way in which No Sweat and Students Against Sweatshops became something of a point of reference for many of the activists dissatisfied with the mealy-mouthed political vagueness of MPH’s middle-class leadership was pretty encouraging.

At the G8 Alternatives Summit in Edinburgh, I attended a workshop organised by Scottish Socialist Youth (the youth section of the Scottish Socialist Party). Its focus was “the effects of globalisation on young people,” and the meeting spent most of its time discussing ways to fight back against various attacks that young people face as students and workers. It was fairly enthusing to be in a meeting packed with young socialists seriously discussing ways to engage with the day-to-day struggles of students and young workers, but at the same time it was depressing to remember that the areas of overlap and engagement between those sorts of activists (and the radical wing of the social justice milieu more generally) and the official student movement are practically non-existent. The three days I spent at the People & Planet summer festival in Stirling didn’t do much to alleviate this depression. It’s very obvious that the situation that existed twenty or even ten years ago – in which NUS’ structures were the first point of engagement for politically conscious students and activists – no longer exists, and the vast bulk of student activists are operating in a milieu that is either indifferent or positively hostile to involvement in the organised student movement.

As most of my comrades braved the brisk Scottish dawn to set off at 5:00 AM to walk to the demonstration at Gleneagles, I slept in until 10:00 before heading off to London – via Stirling and Edinburgh – for an Emergency NEC to discuss the ongoing inquiries into anti-Semitism in the student movement. I was disappointed not to be going to Gleneagles, but like I said – I’m not in politics to fill up photo-albums and it’s not as if discussing racism in our movement is a minor issue which can be compromised on.

A lot of what was discussed at the meeting is still confidential so I can’t go into it in very much detail here. I can say that an independent inquiry into anti-Semitism in the student movement is now underway. My personal view on the situation is that the we’ve got to go beyond the current situation and move to a one where we’re organising meetings, producing literature and providing training and education for activists on this issue. In other words, a political, campaigning response to anti-Semitism.

Motions, inquiries and investigations will only take you so far – political campaigns are necessary and a political analysis also needs to be conducted. The simple truth is that a political atmosphere exists in which a student organisation – or individuals around a student organisation – felt confident enough to display openly racist literature on their stall at Conference. You can’t get to the bottom of how such an atmosphere came to exist or hope to combat it unless you combined inquiries and investigations with a bottom-up political orientation.

The discussions at the NEC were definitely a far cry from the dynamism and energy of the mobilisation in Scotland. Faced, therefore, with a situation in which a milieu that mobilises hundreds of thousands of students on explicitly political issues is totally disengaged from the structures of the official student movement, it’s possible to draw one of two conclusions.

You can either conclude that the activists who say “getting involved with NUS is pointless” are right. After all, they’ve got some good points. It’s structures are pretty bureaucratic, there are serious shortfalls in terms of internal democracy, and while more and more students are forces into low-paid, hyper-exploited jobs, the NUS wants to charge them money for a discount card. Maybe People & Planet or No Sweat-type activism is where it’s at these days.

The other possible conclusion is to set out to make the gap between the student activists and the official student movement a lot smaller. It’s to try and take the enthusiasm, the dynamism and the determination of the activist milieu and inject them into NUS’ structures, using them to flush out the people who are more interested in talking about Hollyoaks than a proper campaign for free education or linking up with the labour movement to fight for students’ rights at work. It is, simply, to work to make the NUS a proper union – a democratic, fighting union that isn’t just a service-provider but a weapon in the hands of its members.

(I’ll take a brief break now so you can all stand up in front of your computer screens and applaud.)

Obviously, those tasks aren’t easy. There are plenty of organisational and political battles to be won on both the activist and organised wings of the student movement before that sort of reconciliation can take place. Much of the activist milieu, for example, has no conception of class politics. It can be equally clueless as to how to fight for students’ rights as workers as some NUS bureaucrats. Political education is needed on both sides. It’s clearly going to be a lot of hard work, but if the activist milieu wants a vehicle that can properly connect it to literally millions of students and provide it with resources it doesn’t currently have access to, and if we in the NUS want our union not only to survive but to become the first point of engagement for student activists again, it’s work that needs to be done.

Activists and campaigners who want to do that work came together in the run-up to NUS Conference 2005 under the tag of Education Not for Sale. If you want help us continue it, join us! Check out www.free-education.org, or contact me at daniel.randall@nus.org.uk or ring 07961040618.

In solidarity –

Daniel Randall
NUS NEC

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