The days immediately preceding this meeting had been pretty hectic for me. I got back from a week on Ireland on Wednesday, got my A-Level results on Thursday and then had to immediately pack up all my stuff to move to London. I managed to nick a weekend in Cornwall in the midst of all of that and didn’t pack any sun block, so I turned up to the NEC on Monday totally shattered and closely resembling a hairy tomato. It wasn’t the best preparation for a meeting in which over half of the 10+ motions submitted were from me and over which I anticipated a pretty serious debate. I am, however, a big fan of a good argument so I was looking forward to the whole thing. Sadly I was to be disappointed.

After six hours in the Council Chamber of Camden Town Hall, a grand total of…zero motions were discussed and voted on. The NUS NEC managed to meet for a whole six hours and not discuss or vote on a single one. I was, naturally, overjoyed.

The first chunk of the meeting was given over to discussing the International Students’ Festival proposed by the Council of International Students. The discussion focused on the precise nature of NUS’ relationship to this event, and in the course of the discussion it emerged that International Students’ Officer Benson Osawe had gone over the heads of students’ unions and written directly to Vice Chancellors asking for sponsorship for the event. This was either a bad breakdown in communication or a pretty dodgy bureaucratic manoeuvre on Benson’s part; either way, it managed to suck up several hours of discussion.

Next it was on to discussing the year’s Priority Campaigns. Fair enough, you might think. What is the NUS NEC for if not for actually discussing and planning out proper, fighting campaigns ? Well, on the evidence of this meeting it’s actually for deciding whether to decide to campaign, then deciding whether we’re in favour of the abstract principle of campaigning, and then deciding whether we’re actually in favour of campaigning. And then taking votes on all of those things over and over again.

I’m exaggerating here. But only a bit. The discussion on the Education Priority Campaign degenerated into a farcical mess in which the following votes were taken (and when I say ‘taken,’ I mean that Kat Fletcher from the Chair announced that they were to be taken):

1) Should we vote on whether or not to have a national demonstration at some point during the next academic year now or should we remit this decision to the Campaigns Team [made up of NUS staff members], allow them to provide us with more information and then take a vote by email?

The meeting decided to actually take a vote there and then, so we then moved on to…

2) Are we in favour - in principle - of having a national demonstration at some point during the next academic year?

We were all in favour of that - who wouldn’t be? - so then it was time for…

3) Are we actually going to have a national demonstration at some point during the next academic year?

Amazingly, some of the people who were in favour of having a demonstration in principle changed their vote when it came to actually deciding whether or not to have one. This was a painfully circuitous and exhausting process but it did highlight rather well the general perspectives of some people on the NEC; in favour of fighting campaigns ‘in principle,’ but when it comes to actually deciding to organise things they’re not so keen. Fortunately, they were in a minority.

It’s obviously the case that national demonstrations are not the be-all and end-all of campaigning. But the official Priority Campaigns Launch is on September 1st, and the NUS can now use that event to announce that a national demonstration will definitely be organised. If some on the NEC had got their way, we would have been using the Launch to announce to people that we’re generally in favour of the principle of having a demonstration. It’s hardly an inspiring, enthusing or motivating message to send to student activists. The decision to organise a national demo was one of the few genuinely positive things to come out of the meeting.

(It’s worth mentioning some of the content of the Priority Campaigns at this point. Neither the Education nor the Student Activities campaigns have been finalised as yet, but from what I’ve seen of the drafts they’re both pretty inoffensive, and the Education campaign has some fairly reasonable content about free education and fighting course closures. Where both campaigns have potential weaknesses is in their somewhat top-down focus, which places a lot of emphasis on relating to bureaucratic institutions such as Universities UK. Engaging with UUK might have some value, but it’ll hardly place you on the frontline of the day-to-day struggles facing students. If the Priority Campaigns are to be successful, we - i.e. the NUS - will have to mobilise student activists en masse on campuses to give the campaigns a fighting, grassroots character.)

By the time the (not illegitimate) hoo-hah about Benson had subsided, the Priority Campaigns had been discussed at sufficient length and we’d finally decided that we were actually going to have a demonstration, it was about 5:00pm - just one hour left. Wes Streeting and Veronica King were given some time to move innocuous and fluffy project proposals which both passed unopposed.

With about forty odd minutes to go, Kat decided it was time to discuss the sensitive issue of the Blair government’s proposed ban on Hizb-Ut-Tahrir. Apparently people from the press have been badgering her about NUS’ attitude and she’s tired of saying ‘no comment.’ So that must mean it was time to rush into deciding a line without a proper discussion!

The fact that one motion (from me, incidentally) that set out a very clear attitude to this issue had been submitted to the meeting was wholly ignored. The discussion on the matter was a bit depressing; the NOLSies were all in favour of the ban, and those who were opposed to it - notably SBL’s Pete Leary and ex-FOSIS man Jamal El-Shayyal - put a lot of emphasis in their contributions onto the fact that Hizb are a "peaceful" organisation who "don’t incite violence."

Supporting state-bans means having confidence in the ability of the capitalist state to deal with problems that capitalism itself creates. It also means giving the ruling-class free-reign to roll out pieces of legislation which, while used against Islamists today, could be used against Marxists or even free-education campaigners tomorrow. The Blairite ban is also a clear attempt by the government to stoke up anti-Muslim sentiment to cohere people behind its reactionary "War on Terror."

For all these reasons, it’s important to oppose state-bans on far-right organisations. But people like Pete Leary don’t seem to be coming from this angle; he’s in favour, for example, of a state-ban on the BNP. He made it clear in the meeting that he "doesn’t agree" with Hizb’s politics, but he simply doesn’t seem to think that Hizb is as bad enough to be banned.

The hurriedly written text that the meeting decided upon came very much from the Leary end of the spectrum of thinking about this issue. It opposed the ban, and opposed the ban’s exclusive focus on Muslim organisations. This implies that if the ban had included non-Muslim organisations too - such as the BNP - then it would be supportable. I don’t think it would. Also, instead of reaffirming our basic opposition to Hizb’s ultra-reactionary politics in the name of universal human rights and liberation, the text simply said that we advocate those who incite hatred to be prosecuted under existing law. It was, in short, bland, flaky and neutered. But if you have a setup in which decisions are made on the basis of thirty-minute discussions at the end of six-hour meetings, and the text voted on doesn’t come from pre-submitted motions but is written at the end of the aforementioned thirty-minute discussion, you’re probably not going to end up with anything that has very much political clarity or sharpness.

By the time we’d finished with Hizb and the ban, we had to leave. The meeting was another victory for bureaucratic apoliticism in the student movement. I plan to resubmit the motions to the next NEC, where hopefully they won’t fall off the agenda and we can strike a few blows for the activist wing of the student movement.

Until then, maybe I’ll see some of you at the ENS/SAS/UELSU training day on the 3rd September, where we can hopefully learn a few tricks to use against the people in our movement who’d be perfectly happy if no politics were ever discussed at any NEC meeting ever…

In (slightly frustrated) solidarity -

Daniel Randall

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