The NUS Santa, in his immeasurable generosity, had granted us a motions only NEC on the 15th, so that meant that the meeting on the 14th was business only. I’m in favour of discussing business but usually it’s still dry as a bone. This meeting, however, contained some pretty interesting stuff.

The MORI research, commissioned to facilitate NUS’s “Year of Change” has now come back. Just to remind people, the “Year of Change” was the somewhat arbitrarily established time-period, called as a response to the general sentiment from various conferences that, well, things aren’t too great and should probably be different.

Don’t get me wrong - I know NUS needs to “change”. But there are, I think, some key points that separate someone like me (who believes in ‘change’) to someone like, say, Will Page (ex-NEC member and now full-time Lib Dem organiser, who also believes in ‘change’) or any of the NEC members who voted to cancel the national demonstration. I say “change” and mean “change.” They say “change” and mean “cuts.”

It’s a question of whether we’re just reforming for reform’s sake or because we want to make NUS a more combative, more militant and more democratic union. Another bone of contention is the question of whether it was a good idea to spend £50,000 of the union’s money on commissioning research from an unelected body of people disconnected from the student movement to tell us what exactly it is we need to change.

Yes, you read it correctly. £50,000. That’s one or maybe two national demos. That’s almost enough to pay for three full-time liberation campaign staff. It is, in other words, a fuck of a lot of money.

And what’s actually in the document? Kvetching from student offiers and union general managers about how the NUS is stuck in the 60s or 70s and needs to break with the “[19]70s language of collectivism” and generally abandon the “1970s trade union model.” There were also some truly bizarre and depressing statements from people who think NUS is “just like the BBC” and think that it needs to seek corporate sponsorship from Coca-Cola, as well as some patronising garbage about how students today don’t have the “rebellious hormones” of students from the 60s

There was a lot wrong with the trade unions in the 1970s. A lot. They were bureaucratic and, in most places, dominated by white, middle-aged men. But they also organised enormous waves of industrial militancy and brought down a Tory government. If the NUS behaved like a trade union from the 1970s it’d be a bit of a step forward. And if we were to recapture some of the “rebellious hormones” from the 1960s…well…who knows what might happen?

What do people mean when they talk about the “1970s” “language of collectivism” anyway? The language of organising together to fight for our collective interests? The language of actual politics and not apolitical platitudes? The language of militancy and struggle instead of acquiescence and capitulation? The language of aggressive defence of its members’ rights? The NUS needs to use more of that language in a much louder voice more of the time; not less.

If some of our members have a problem with that then we should have the argument out within our movement and win them round. We shouldn’t pay £50,000 to establish that some sabbs and GMs have some hang-ups about the 1970s.

We had a brief Priority Campaign update, and it appears that the minimal headway that I thought we were making with the Education campaign seems to have ground to a halt. The activists’ training days (hastily organised, hastily publicised, hastily cancelled) have not been rescheduled and there currently appear to be no plan to do so. Julian Nichold’s “grand coalition” between the NUS and key trade unions still only exists on paper and I’m no closer to understanding how this very worthy and potentially very useful coalition will function on the ground. The campaign also seems to have retreated somewhat from some of the more radical proposals that emerged from past planning meetings, such as the idea that students’ unions should apply to join their local Trades Council and generally situate themselves within the wider labour movement. A lot of hot air is talked about the “20:20 Vision” document but it’s still unclear as to when this will be available and whether it will be robust free-education propaganda or vacuous rhetoric. The update left many more questions than it gave answers.

There was time for a quick discussion on the NUS’s proposed move to Manchester, which now seems to have stalled somewhat. Frankly this is no bad thing – I reckon the entire project was rushed into and ill thought out from the start. Hopefully this unforeseen delay will give the union a chance to reconsider.

We also made some progress on the “There is Power in a Union” project that myself and Stephen Brown have initiated. We agreed to convene a meeting of all NUS officers interested in consolidating our work on trade unions and inputting into the pamphlet. Hopefully some practical steps forward will emerge from that meeting (rather than further circuitous discussion), which looks set to take place early in the new year. It’d be great to have some rank-and-file input into that meeting, so if you’re an NUS member who works (whether you’re in a trade union or not) and you want to discuss how NUS could help you fight for your rights in your workplace, drop me an email on daniel.randall@nus.org.uk I’ll send you the details of the meeting and hopefully you can come along.

Much of the rest of the meeting was given over to reprimanding – with varying degrees of severity – National Treasurer Joe Rukin for his involvement with a recent press-release issued by Sam Rozati. For those who don’t know, Sam Rozati is the ex-chair of NUS Finance Committee and was rumoured to be angling for the Conservative Future presidential candidacy for NUS President (it is now likely to be Dan Large, Kat Fletcher’s pet Tory - http://www.free-education.org.uk/?p=29#more-29). The press release nonsensically and hysterically claimed that NUS was totally bankrupt and about to go under any second now. It was unquestionably totally stupid for Joe to have anything to do with this self-promoting Tory opportunist, but the response from NUS central leadership was worrying; a statement was placed on Officer Online from National Director Andy “unelected, unaccountable” Grant (he likes Billy Bragg, though, so hats off to him on that front). Unelected NUS staff members issuing public statements criticising elected NUS officers sets a very worrying precedent indeed.

The whole debate missed the point anyway; while we were bickering about whether Joe Rukin had behaved stupidly, really stupidly or whether he had entirely jettisoned conventional logic and rationality, the fact that £50,000 had just been spent on a piece of research whose practical use is yet to become apparent to me. Joe Rukin – or Sam Rozati, for that matter – talking fictitious bollocks about NUS’s finances isn’t a scandal, it’s just laughable. NUS spending loads of money on things like the MORI research or white-wine campaign launches at the same time as we’re told that there’s no money for demonstrations or extra days on conference – that’s the real scandal.

So I wasn’t in the best of moods. However, in a brilliant and unexpected stroke of Yuletide good-fortune, it turned out that ESIB (the student movement equivalent of the ETUC – i.e. the European umbrella body for all student unions in the continent) was hosting some kind of obscure and possibly quite bureaucratic event paid for by some arm of the state in London that same evening. So once the meeting finished it was over to Tower Hill for “dinner with the Europeans.”

It has long been a tactic of the leadership of unions to ply militants and dissidents with fine foods and wines in order to co-opt them into the bureaucratic machinery. So a part of me was a bit reticent about going. But in the end I concluded that wasting some of the British ruling-classes’ money could only be a good thing, and if I was still a Bolshevik in the morning then there was probably no harm done.

In the event, it was actually very enjoyable and even quite useful occasion. I’d been told by various people that ESIB is pretty much an apolitical and bureaucratic rump. My hopes weren’t high, but as it turned out I met an ex-USI full-timer who was a labour movement activist and a left-winger in the Irish Labour Party. I also met a member of the Ligue Communiste Revolutionnaire, which is one of two large French Trotskyist organisations that absolutely shit all over practically everything the British left has managed to produce in the last 10 years.

So “salutations fraternelles” to both of them, and thanks to Dan Chilcott, the loveable posho himself, for his hand in organising the whole thing. And thanks, too, to the DFES. Arm of the state though it may be, it did inadvertently fund and facilitate a very interesting discussion between a couple of European Trotskyists. So maybe I’ve been wrong about Bill Rammell. Perhaps he is a friend of the NUS after all.

In solidarity –

Daniel Randall

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