The E&E campaign hasn’t really had much of a life so far this year. That’s not really anyone’s fault but for various reasons, it hasn’t really had a chance to get going.

It was good, therefore, to see around 60 delegates (mostly E&E officers) attend its 2005 conference at ULU. And generally, the whole thing was pretty encouraging.

No-one who has anything at all to do with the student movement can deny that there are thousands of students who are serious about campaigning on “environmental” and “ethical” issues; climate change, sweatshops, social justice and a whole lot more. But if you know anything about the student movement, you’ll also know that these people often don’t have very much to do with their union and its structures. Reconciling that fracture is the central aspect of the E&E campaign’s job, and this conference was a start.

However, there’s still a long way to go. The recent shenanigans around NUSSL and Coke (see the motion I’ve submitted to the 15th December NEC meeting here – www.free-education.org.uk/nus/shtml) manifested themselves clearly at this conference, with confusion abounding due to competing workshops being run by the British labour movement’s two “anti-Coke” campaigns; the TUC-backed Justice for Colombia and the more radical Colombia Solidarity Campaign. It’s good that speakers from these campaigns were invited to the conference, but the issues around the ‘boycott Coke’ campaign should have been debated openly in front of everyone and not tucked away into separate workshops.

The demographics of the conference also show room for improvement. The delegates were almost exclusively white, which hardly reflects the diversity of the student movement or even the social justice movement to which the E&E campaign must orientate itself.

For the NUS to facilitate events where E&E officers can get together, network, share skills and debates political ideas is a step forward. But it remains true that a significant proportion of students active on E&E issues don’t have a meaningful engagement with their union. They might not even know who their E&E officer is. That’s something the NUS needs to help change.

Nottingham University SU provides a decent model; the union runs ‘SEEN’, the Student Ethical and Environmental Network. It acts as a coordinating body to facilitate discussion, collaboration and skills-sharing between all activist groups on campus, from People & Planet to STAR and beyond. It shows that unions at a campus level can take issues like this seriously and mobilise students on them.

But Nottingham is fairly rare in doing this. The facture between the student movement’s official structures and its activist base is solidifying. If the NUS is serious about resolving that fracture, then the E&E campaign is going to play an increasingly important role in the coming years. It’s got a long way to go, but a conference of 60 students about real campaigning on issues of genuine international importance is a pretty good start.

In solidarity –

Daniel Randall

PS: A particular personal highlight of the day was a conversation I had with a prominent SWP member during one of the breaks. It was explained to me that it was wrong to oppose religious-sectarian militias in Iraq because “we’ve got to expect Iraqis to resist under the leadership of religious radicals. They’re Muslims - it’s just part of their culture.” I paraphrase, but this was the sentiment.

So – that’s the SWP’s proud anti-imperialist credentials on display again, or yet another example of their offensive relativism that sees Iraqis as incapable of developing anything beyond a religious or nationalist consciousness? Make up your own mind.

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