Good things, they say, come in twos. Or something. September 19th brought two Emergency NEC meetings but unfortunately, the saying did not hold true. Neither was very good.

The first discussed the day’s first review; the just-published document looking into the circumstances surrounding the resignations of Jewish students Luciana Berger, Mitch Simmons and Jonny Warren at National Conference 2005.

Compiled to the tune of £14,000 by Marco Henry, a man who openly describes himself as a “bureaucrat,” the review doesn’t exactly set out a programme for grassroots activism to combat anti-semitism and other forms of racism. In reality it doesn’t really do very much at all.

It contains some mild criticisms of NUS’ bureaucratic machinery and suggests we look into them with a view to…well…making them better. Spot on, Marco – but did we really need to shell out £14,000 to establish that NUS is a bureaucratic organisation that needs some democratic reform?

Some on the NEC were cock-a-hoop about the review’s overall conclusion that the NUS is not an institutionally anti-Semitic organisation. That’s fair enough - as a Jewish student myself I’ve certainly never perceived the NUS as institutionally anti-Semitic. For me, this was never the central issue. The issue was why a political culture in which Jewish students – rightly or wrongly – lost confidence in the ability of their national union to represent them had been allowed to develop.

By its nature, this top-down review cannot possibly look meaningfully into those issues. That sort of taking stock and self-analysis will have to be done by activists in NUS as part of the process of developing an alternative political culture that can combat all forms of racism effectively from the grassroots up. The review, while interesting, isn’t particularly helpful to that end.

The second Emergency NEC was a somewhat hastily convened affair. At the NEC of 22nd August, we voted in favour of having a national demonstration at some point during the academic year 2005/2006. At the subsequent Priority Campaigns Launch of 1st September, a number of sabbatical officers voiced their fervent opposition to this and under their pressure, Kat Fletcher agreed to take the issue to an Emergency NEC. So that was the day’s second review; was the decision from August’s NEC going to stand?

The debate was predictable. Regional observers brought a list of complaints from student unionists in their areas who seemed outraged that the NUS would even consider having a national demonstration on issues they considered ‘unwinnable’ with money they thought should be spent elsewhere. In the face of such complaints, some NEC members tried to present the policy reversal as some kind of noble democratic venture that showed how much the leadership listened to the members.

Personally, I find it slightly ironic that these same NEC members will happily refer to the 5,200,000 students that NUS “represents,” but when a handful of HE sabbaticals complain about a national demo, they react as if there’s been a massive groundswell of grassroots opposition to which we are democratically obliged to assent.

And that really is all we’re dealing with here; a handful of HE sabbaticals. The only opinions voiced were the opinions of those HE union execs who responded to the survey distributed by the NEC Regional Observers. (Interestingly, the only FE union that responded to the survey was strongly in favour of a demonstration.) This small layer of student officers is hardly representative of our entire movement.

This is not to say that the opinions of the sabbs who responded to the regional survey are invalid. If they remain unconvinced of the need for and usefulness of a national demo then that is the fault of the national union. A sharper Education Priority Campaign that contained clear strategies for action including a national demo on the broad principles of free education but also on the immediately winnable questions of opposing course cuts, campus closures and international students’ visa charges would unquestionably have given sabbatical officers (and students more generally) a clearer idea of what a national demonstration would be for and why it would be necessary.

However, our membership isn’t, as I said, limited to sabbatical officers and it’s important to keep remembering this. The pompous way in which phrases like “listen to the membership” are bandied about is particularly noxious when it comes from middle-class sabbs and ex-sabbs who either never knew or cannot remember what it was like being a student forced to work a shit job with crappy hours and rubbish pay in order to get by.

Our membership works in supermarkets, in fast food restaurants, in bars, and in retail for low wages because the government is privatising their education and many of them don’t even know who their sabbatical officers are. Our membership is disengaged from the national union and sees it as an irrelevance precisely because it constantly proves itself incapable of organising meaningful campaigns on their day-to-day issues. By not having a national demonstration we deprive ourselves of a tool that could have been used to bring those people into contact with the NUS and turn them from pissed off and angry people into pissed off, angry people with a weapon; a national union that fights.

The debate did much to highlight the shortcomings of the Education Priority Campaign. It is currently a frustrating mixture of bland statements and empty platitudes combined with some more reasonable and worthwhile content. Insofar as this content exists, the Campaign’s lack of a clear activist focus makes it difficult to see how it will be effective. If the Campaign is to be a useful in achieving the key task of re-engaging the mass of students in the fight for free education, it will have to be given a much clearer grassroots, activist focus than it currently has.

A number of misleading counter-positions (for example between localised, campus based actions and a national demonstration) were drawn, and a number of disingenuous accusations (for example that those in favour of the demonstration wanted it to be the sum total of NUS’s campaigning) were made. The very existence of a debate about whether or not the National Union of Students should have a national demonstration for free education is a sad reflection of the political state of affairs.

In defending his personal support for the demonstration, and the support of several activists in his region, the Regional Observer from the West Midlands said, “we’re NUS. Fighting for free education – including through national demonstrations - is what we do.” I wish that were the case. Many on the NEC apparently disagreed.

No-one is or ever was suggesting that an A to B march through central London should constitute the entirety of NUS’s campaigning for the year. In fact, some of those opposed to demo would probably be quite happy if it was. A national demonstration could have been part of a programme of activism (both local and national) designed to re-engage students with the activity of the union and mobilise them to fight on the immediately winnable issues as well as re-mobilising a campaign for the more long term goal of universal free education.

Sadly, it is not to be. In the event, only myself and four other members of the NEC voted in favour of upholding the policy passed at the 22nd August meeting, with one abstaining. It wasn’t one of the most enthusing moments of my political life.

Underpinning this dramatic reversal was a clever piece of what was presumably intended as damage limitation from the NOLSies, who submitted a motion to the meeting setting out some concrete points of action for the Education Campaign building up to a large national demo in October 2006. The attempt to give the Education Campaign some clearer strategies for action is laudable, but when the proposals include such things as a “focus on Lib Dems and Tories to prevent internal changes…affecting their positions on HE funding,” then I’ve got reservations.

Their proposals passed, and ultimately it is, I suppose, better that the NEC committed itself at least to some concrete action, even if it comes from the NOLSies’ bizarre perspective in which influencing the policy of rightwing reactionaries in the Tory Party is an important aspect of free education campaigning. It was, though, still a little disappointing to see the NOLSies climb down so spectacularly after their principled stance at the last NEC.

This was my first NEC after the Education Not for Sale conference on the 3rd September. A full report of that event is available here: www.free-education.org.uk/conference.shtml

I will conclude by saying that I look forward to a time when National Executive Committee meetings more closely resemble the atmosphere of that event; one of rank-and-file mobilisation and grassroots activism underpinned by a spirit of democratic debate. Whether that will be achieved during my time on the NEC is another matter.

Despite what I know must be the generally downbeat tone of this report, it is not time to sound the funeral dirge just yet. No matter how many compromises this (or any subsequent) NEC is prepared to make, as long as networks like Education Not for Sale exist then the struggle for a national union that fights for free education effectively, relentlessly and using every tool available to it – yes, including national demonstrations – will go on.

In solidarity –

Daniel Randall

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