In which there are traffic lights.

In his “Inside NUS” column in London Student, my fellow NEC member Jamal El-Shayyal attacked myself and the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty for what he saw as our hypocritical approach to politics. Why, he wondered, are we so happy to attack Kat Fletcher for alleged “sell outs” even though I had never attended an Education Priority Campaign Planning Meeting and attempted to actually influence the direction of NUS’s free education campaigning?

It’s not an unreasonable question, but it’s not as if I’ve been spending the last few months lying around trying to get a suntan. I hadn’t been to any Planning Meetings until now because I’ve been maniacally busy. I’ve been to seven freshers’ fayres and countless other meetings, mainly in order to build for the anti-sweatshop week of action that NUS is backing in February 2006. NUS’s Campaign Planning Meetings are not, thankfully, the be-all and end-all of student activism.

But Jamal still has a point. If I’m willing to criticise the Education Priority Campaign, then I should also be willing to engage with its processes and try and influence its direction. So I took myself along to the Planning Meeting on 6th October to see what was what.

What I found largely confirmed my general assessment of the Campaign – that it contains some kernels of potential buried under a decidedly bureaucratic and much less than militant overall perspective.

The meeting yielded some interesting practical details. I found out, for example, that the Priority Campaigns Launch (for more on that, see here: www.officeronline.co.uk/blogs/danielrandall/271325.aspx) cost no less than £20,000 – a figure that came directly out of the Campaigns budget of £95,000. I leave it to NUS’s members to judge whether such an event was a worthy use of nearly 25% of the overall budget.

There were a number of positive aspects to the meeting. February 22nd – 3rd March was agreed upon as the dates for a Campaign Week of Action, which is going to include a mass national “lobby” of Parliament. It falls well short of a properly organised national demonstration, but in terms of what could practically be salvaged from the miserable wreckage of that particular debate it’s better than nothing at all.

Better still was the agreement to organise three days for student officers and activists in late November, essentially aimed at sharing campaigning experience, relearning the arguments for free education and generally “rallying the troops.” NUS trainer Jim Dickinson said that it was necessary to take what he rather flatteringly called “the Daniel approach” to these events, and make sure that they were events for activists with an explicitly activist focus.

LGBT Officer James-J Walsh suggested that we needed a high-profile free education advocate to do for our cause what Jamie Oliver had done for the issue of school meals. “We need a pop celebrity,” he said, and that this person should be the keynote speaker at the activist events in November.

I think this is a fundamentally mistaken perspective, and suggested that instead the lead speakers should be people like Katie Shaw (site president at Rolle College (University of Plymouth), whose union is conducting an inspiring campaign against campus closure), or someone from a dispute such as the London Metropolitan lecturers’ strike, who could explain the need for students to unite with campus workers in order to fight privatisation in education.

Fortunately, the meeting generally agreed with such a perspective and VP Education Julian Nicholds once again affirmed his oft-stated belief that NUS’s key partner in this campaign must be the labour movement. Constructing a “coalition” to fight for free education is a central aspect of this Campaign, and unfortunately the agenda item on this subject fell off as the meeting overran. It remains to be seen whether Julian envisages NUS’s “partnership” with the workers’ movement to consist of genuine fighting unity or simply a row of logos on letters to Vice Chancellors.

Another integral aspect of the Campaign is the production of a document called “20:20 Vision,” which aims to outline NUS’s positive vision for how education should be organised in 2020. This sort of attitude is a step-forward: the NUS must go on the offensive in arguing for a radical reorganisation of the education system, and not just function reactively and defensively as the government deals blow after blow to our members. It is less encouraging that the goal of free education is something that has been so concretely put off for 2020, rather than it being something to fight for now.

However, if free education activists within NUS are able to contribute to the document’s content and make it genuinely radical, then perhaps it will serve to inspire and mobilise a layer of students to fight for and win meaningful gains a lot sooner than 2020.

The final discussion of the meeting centred around branding for the campaign. The theme of traffic lights and road signs (to chime in with the Campaign’s name – ‘On Course for a Fair Future?’) has been chosen, with road signs pointing in every direction and all three lights illuminated to represent the uncertain future of education.

Two things struck me about this. Firstly, that the future of education is far from uncertain; the trends clearly point towards increasing privatisation and a massive encroachment of the values of the market into our schools, universities and colleges. We know that we’re not ‘on course for a fair future,’ so it’s now a question of what we’re going to do get things changed.

Secondly, it struck me that the set of traffic lights with all three lights illuminated is a rather handy metaphor for the Campaign itself. All at once it tells students not to be militant and radical, but rather focus on low-level “lobbying” of Vice Chancellors and bureaucratic institutions, while also telling them to carry out small-scale campaigning on their campuses, while simultaneously lurching towards more positive initiatives such as “activist training days” and national “weeks of action.”

It’s not the future of education that’s a mysterious uncertainty: we can see clearly where that’s going if we don’t act to stop it. The real mystery is the future of NUS’s free education campaigning. Will it be backwards to capitulation and retreats into small-time, low-level campus based activity, or forward to militancy on a national scale and practical link-ups with radicals and militants within trade unions representing workers on our campuses?

Maybe it’s too early to tell, but if every Campaign Planning Meeting from now on agrees to organise activist training days and national weeks of action we’ll be moving the right direction.

In solidarity –

Daniel Randall

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