In which the NUS gets its priorities badly wrong.

It has come to my attention that I spend a lot of time in these blogs being critical and denunciatory. To remedy this, I would like to begin this report with some words of praise.

The 2005/2006 Priority Campaigns Launch – consisting of a daytime event and then an evening reception, held at the TUC’s Congress Centre – was a slick, well-managed and very well put-together event. Logistically it was very impressive; speakers, by and large, began and finished on time and the whole thing ticked over very nicely. The food was also of an exceptionally high quality, with breaded tiger-prawns, thai fish cakes with sweet chilli sauce, barbecue chicken-wings and filo-pastry parcels of Mediterranean vegetables all in abundant evidence. It certainly made a welcome change from the shite I usually eat.

The event obviously took a lot of organising in terms of sorting the catering, the welcome-packs, the sponsors, the stalls, the invitees, the venue and so on and so on (though goodness knows what the workers were paid and whether they were unionised - to my shame, it didn't occur to me at the time). I understand that a lot of this work was undertaken by NUS National Secretary Gemma Tumelty and to be fair to her she seemed to have done a very competent job.

The full-time officers presenting the Priority Campaigns also said some reasonable things. Joe Rukin in particular gave a couple of very decent speeches in which he affirmed his commitment to being a “campaigning treasurer.” Even Kat Fletcher talked the talk well: “NUS,” she said,” “must be about more than Topshop and cheap drinks.” Quite so, Kat.

It is here, unfortunately, that the praise ends. Overall, the day was, as one attendee put it, “a victory for style over substance.” The former was in abundance but the latter was sadly lacking. A number of aspects of the event can be highlighted as evidence for this.

First, there were a series of superficial factors that raised questions in my mind about quite what the perspective of the event was. For example, NEC members had been asked to dress formally for the occasion. Apparently our name-badges were not sufficient identification and we had to be further differentiated from the students we represent by establishing some sort of attire-based hierarchy in which the attendees came in jeans, shorts, sandals and t-shirts while the NEC was suited and booted up to its eyeballs. Personally I felt like a Christmas turkey. I didn’t own a pair of formal trousers that fitted me until Tuesday and I still don’t really understand why it was necessary for me to buy some.

The second aspect of the event that set alarm bells ringing was the Priority Campaigns stall. It would not be unreasonable to assume that at the Priority Campaigns Launch, the Priority Campaigns stall would be the one with the most material and the most officers staffing it. If you did assume this, however, you would be mistaken. The Priority Campaigns stall had nothing on it except copies of Ellie Russell’s FE Survey and a pile of badges. It was left to two NEC members (neither of whom were Campaign Convenors) to sit behind the stall and try and explain away the absence of a greater quantity of meaningful and useful material.

The issues of NEC members’ clothing and materials on a stall are, as I say, in themselves minor and superficial. But they reveal something broader and deeper about the event and about the political perspectives of the Fletcher leadership. Take any ordinary, working-class student from any affiliated institution (particularly from the FE sector – once again massively under-represented) and plonk them in the middle of the Priority Campaigns Launch. Let them take a look around at the expensive wine, fancy food and the bureaucrats from obscure organisations with bizarre acronyms that are in attendance. Then ask them if they see the NUS as a weapon in their hands with which to fight for their rights and I don’t think anyone on the NEC would be happy with the answer. A fetishisation of tokenistic gestures like formal dress couples with a lack of materials on stalls belie a perspective that it is very concerned with impressing the right people, but much less concerned with rolling the sleeves up and having a fight. Things did not improve when the day’s first speaker took to the podium. I forget his exact title but he was essentially some London-based bureaucrat who’d been involved with the 2012 Olympic bid and also held some position within the Metropolitan Police. If anyone can tell me exactly what this man has to do with fighting for free education or the rights of students I will be mightily impressed. He spoke for almost an hour on how the 2012 Olympics were won and only in the last minutes of his speech did he make any reference to NUS’ role or its work. Interesting though it was to get an insight into the mechanics of an Olympic bid, I couldn’t help feeling that this wasn’t really what the launch of NUS’ main political campaigns for the year should be about. The second speaker, later in the day, was from human rights organisation Liberty and although I personally found his speech vague and incoherent, he was a figure with at least some notional ties to an activist movement whose speech had direct relevance to NUS’ work.

When Gemma Tumelty introduced “Participate,” one of the two Priority Campaigns, she mentioned that, for many students, “a summer spent picking fruit has become a weekday spent stacking shelves." This was a good point well made, so why didn’t we have a trade union militant with experience of organising low-paid retail workers speaking at this event instead of a pompous pen-pusher from the Metropolitan Police?

The questions and answers sessions after the Campaigns themselves had been presented focused largely on the decision taken at the August 22nd NEC to organise a national demonstration this year. Many in the audience – which seemed to be made up in large part of right-wing sabbatical officers – were positively outraged at the notion that the NUS should actually do any campaigning. The old chestnut of the ‘financial crisis’ reared its head again and the phrase “how dare you waste our money on things like this?” was heard.

(Incidentally, this got me thinking about how much the Launch itself had cost. I asked a couple of people and the figure £15,000 was mentioned. I don’t know how authentic this figure is but it’s certainly thought provoking. If it turns out that, in 2005/2006, the NUS manages to organise a posh, wine-and-dine reception at the Congress Centre but fails to organise a national demonstration, the question “how dare you waste our money on things like this?” will become distinctly more pertinent.)

Kat Fletcher was positively apologetic about the NEC’s decision to commit the union to organising a demo, and promised that the debate would be re-had at the next NEC. She could have used the opportunity to lay out the positive arguments for having a national demonstration. She could have told the assembled student unionists that a national demo could be a pivot around which to re-mobilise a demoralised layer of activists. She could have explained that a national demo could play an integral role in engaging thousands of rank-and-file students with NUS structures and campaigning in a way that has been so abjectly lacking of late. She could have said that the NUS would seek partnership from within the labour movement (given that the issues on which the demonstration would be called effect campus workers as well as students) and that an agreement over financing the demo would be reached with these partners. But Kat missed the opportunity to make these arguments and instead wilted under pressure from people who would perhaps prefer it if NUS were “just about Topshop and cheap drinks.”

Eventually the daytime event came to an end, and the crowd of assorted sabbaticals and student union officers filed out to be replaced by the attendees for the evening reception. I will mention only one of these, because I believe his presence and prominence at the event gives a cold and sobering reflection of exactly where the focus and perspectives of some in the NUS leadership lie.

The person in question is Bill Rammell – Minister of State for Higher Education and arch-Blairite. We are not talking here about a respect-worthy Labour MP – a John McDonnell or a Jeremy Corbyn. We are not even talking about a fluffy Liberal who might have an ostensibly progressive position on education funding. We are talking about someone who not only believes wholeheartedly in, but has been at the forefront of perpetrating, the rape of education by market values. We are talking about a man who should be NUS’ arch-nemesis, about someone who should tremble with fear at the idea of what a fighting NUS might do to his plans to steadily privatise education in this country. NUS’ Priority Campaigns should be (and on one level, actually are) about fighting Blairites like Bill Rammell and their anti-democratic, anti-working class, pro-market agenda for education.

Instead he is wined, dined, given a platform and allowed to dismiss his irreconcilable antagonism to everything that the NUS’ free education policy stands for as a mere “disagreement,” which is made up for by lots of “common ground” between him and Kat Fletcher. This is, of course, the same Kat Fletcher who, mere hours before had been proudly laying out her conception of NUS as a fighting union that would never compromise on the principle of universal free education. There is something seriously wrong with a National President who can say all that in the early afternoon and then get chummy with the man actually responsible for helping to administer the deathblows to free education before the sun’s gone down.

Unsurpisingly, the Education Priority Campaign document launched at this event had almost nothing critical to say about top-up fees or the Government. The only thing I could find was this: "NUS believes variable fees, coupled with a lack of opportunity to study the course they wish to locally, may deter students from accessing further and higher education at all." About as radical and militant as a dead sheep

When talking about the treacherous, collaborationist, totalitarian politics of the Stalinists during the fight against fascism in the 1930s, Leon Trotsky asked, “is there no end to the fall?” Five years ago, Kat Fletcher herself – then a revolutionary socialist and union militant - might well have been asking that question of the sell-out leadership of the day. It gives me no pleasure whatsoever to ask it of her now.

In (mournful) solidarity –

Daniel Randall

The Blogs on this site represent the individual views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the policies or practices of the National Union of Students.

All links in blogs will open in a new browser window.

The permanent URL for this specific blog entry is: http://www.officeronline.co.uk/blogs/danielrandall/271325.aspx