A motions only NUS NEC meeting. Whoever heard of such a thing? It was a veritable Christmas miracle. And what unbridled, joyous fun it was. And I’m not actually joking.

People who take an interest in these sorts of things sometimes remark that all the NUS NEC ever does is bitch, bicker and squabble amongst itself. They say the level of political culture in NEC meetings is depressingly low and that the mountains of bureaucratic “business” items on the agenda totally submerge and suffocate any political discussion. Usually, they’re right. But this meeting was different. It was refreshing to see that, given the opportunity, the NEC is actually capable of having sharp political debates that deal with real issues.

My motion on living wage for campus workers campaigns passed unanimously without much debate. My chum Pete Leary did ask who London Citizens (the rather amorphous organisation who co-ordinated the living wage campaign at QMUL) were, and I could only respond by expressing my surprise at the fact that he didn’t know, because London Citizens are in fact run by the GLA. (I don’t, by the way, think the fact that a GLA initiative has run a decent and worthwhile campaign illustrates the GLA’s progressive character. It’s more a case of a stopped clock being right twice a day).

Uncontentious motions on student loans and accessibility to NUS conference passed unanimously, before we got stuck into a real debate about Jess Kosmin’s motion on backing the Project Darfur campaign.

Pav Akhtar proposed the removal of parts to remove everything that referred to the conflict having a racially motivated dynamic. I don’t know enough about the Sudan to have a firm view, but Pav’s arguments did seem somewhat spurious. When I asked him what, if not racism, was the motivating dynamic between the inter-ethnic conflict, Pete Leary responded to comparing the hostility between Sudanese Arabs and Sudanese Africans to the inter-city rivalry of Omagh and Eniskillen. Like I say, I don’t know much about the Sudan but I don’t recall a militia from Omagh ever invading Eniskillen and killing loads of people.

I, however, had a different reason for opposing and proposing parts. The key plank of the Project Darfur Campaign is to lobby “Her Majesty’s Government” to advocate UN intervention into the Sudan. As a Marxist, this is something I can’t support; capitalist governments don’t stop acting in the interests of capital just because their soldiers wear blue helmets. I think the only popular solution for a crisis like that in Sudan is for the international labour movement to vigorously support African workers’ and other democratic movements to enable them to intervene into the conflict and build resistance to the conditions that generated the crisis in the first place.

That’s not an easy position to take and it’s not something that’s going to happen overnight – but it’s a million times more principled that putting your faith in bosses’ governments (whether through their UN club or not) to solve problems that their own system creates. In the vote to remove all parts that advocated UN intervention, only myself and Suzie Wylie voted for. Despite making a speech against UN intervention, Pete Leary abstained and Pav Akhtar – another so-called leftist on the NEC – voted against the proposal. The motion as a whole passed with the parts advocating UN intervention still in.

For my trouble, I got called “disgusting” and “morally reprehensible” by Wes Streeting. Stung to the very core of my being though I was by these biting remarks, I took them as a sign of the generally sharp and intense character of the political debate in the meeting (which was an excellent change from the norm) and let them slide. So no hard feelings, eh Wes?

Another uncontentious motion (in support of two students at Matthew Boulton college who’ve been arbitrarily suspended for the “crime” of distributing a newsletter they’d produced) also passed unanimously. The whole case shows the central importance for functioning, fighting students’ unions on FE campuses; anything more than a paper union at Matthew Boulton was never have given the college management the confidence to behave in such a belligerent manner. Matthew Boulton is in the West Midlands, and I hear that some bloke (www.wmanus.org/wmanuschat/viewforum.php?f=8) who works for the NUS down there is a general good egg, so hopefully he’ll get on the case.

Next up was Suzie’s perpetual anti-war motion, the purpose of which (apart from worthy opposition to the occupation of Iraq) seemed to now be to throw some retrospective sycophancy in the direction of the “International Peace Conference” organised by the Stop the War Coalition on December 10th.

Aside from the fact that this initiative is almost a classic popular-front (i.e. a cross-class alliance constructed against a single issue or threat), its billed speakers included representatives of some of the most reactionary political forces in Iraqi society (such as the Army of the Mahdi, responsible for harassing female students in Basra, massacring travellers’ camps, assaulting trade unionists) who aren’t even meaningfully opposed to the occupation (the Army of the Mahdi are staunch supporters of the United Iraqi Alliance, the main party in the occupation’s puppet government). Fortunately, my amendment to delete parts expressing support for future such “Peace Conferences” was successful. The motion as a whole passed, with the NOLSies, Derfel Owen and Jess Kosmin voting against and Julian Nicholds abstaining.

In the meeting on the 14th, we’d had a brief discussion on the government’s Schools White Paper. This was a frankly surreptitious attempt by the NOLSies to pre-empt the discussion on the issue and start advocating their position (which basically amounts to ‘come on, it’s got good bit in it too’) through the Trojan horse of Wes giving a “report” on the White Paper. The discussion around my actual motion – an opportunity to properly have the arguments out – was equally as unsatisfactory.

The NOLSies position on this question is appalling (If I was into hyperbole I’d even go as far as to call it “disgusting” and “morally reprehensible”.) Even a cursory reading of the White Paper makes it clear that the thrust of the Blairite project for secondary education is to smash up the comprehensive system and replace it with a market in which “businesses”, “voluntary organisations” and religious groups are given control of schools. The momentum of this project will totally saturate any of the (actually phantom) “good bits” that Wes keeps banging on about.

Mel Ward’s contribution was just as bad. She patronisingly accused supporters of the motion (or even the sentiments of the motion) of being ignorant, of not knowing what City Academies were, and of not having any understanding of the issues beyond what Wes called “headlines” and “rhetoric”.

The NOLSies have a peculiar double character on the NEC. Sometimes they function as leftists on the NEC, arguing for increased political campaigning against proposed cutbacks from the “Independents.” But on questions like this, their loyalty to Brownite and Blairite politics are clearly their first instinct.

The debate on the national demo in September was a classic exposition of this dual role – the NOLSies both led the charge on getting the demo called in the first place, then facilitated the capitulation and climb-down that succeeded in getting in called off.

Trying to guess which role they’ll play next is getting frustrating. They ought to make up their minds.

Eventually, despite this motion having been on the table for months and despite it having been written immediately after the White Paper was published, a proposal from Pete Leary to remit the motion to the next meeting (on the basis that we haven’t had enough time to “discuss the issues”) was passed.

After a month in which SBL supporters have attacked ENS’s candidates for next year’s NEC elections as “sectarian” for standing against their own (as yet unannounced) candidates, it was heart-warming to see Pete furthering the cause of left unity by making sure a socialist motion on comprehensive education didn’t get voted on.

Pete also played a similarly positive (and positively hilarious) role in the next debate; another one of my motions that’s been around for ages, this time on affiliation to Iraq Union Solidarity. Having dealt with Pete’s previous accusation that IUS is a “fake organisation that no-one’s affiliated to” by producing a list of the 24 trade union branches that are in fact affiliated to it, Pete changed tack.

He stood up to denounce IUS as “a bunch of people on the hard, socialist left of British politics making links with a bunch of people on the hard, socialist left of Iraqi politics.” This was funny for a number of reasons. Firstly, it’s patently untrue. IUS makes solidarity with all Iraqi workers’ organisations, regardless of the politics of their leadership. So, for example, IUS has done solidarity work with the Iraqi Federation of Oil Unions, whose leader (Hassan Juma’a) is a supporter of the Islamist cleric Ali al-Sistani and who spoke at the STWC Peace Conference I was attacking earlier. IUS makes solidarity with his organisation because it organises Iraqi workers in their workplaces against their bosses, not because his politics are brilliant.

Pete’s contribution was also funny because it came off as classic Stalinist Trot-baiting. His contemptuous references to “people on the hard, socialist left” smelt very strongly of the Communist Party of yesteryear that painted itself as moderate in counterposition to the “ultra-leftism” of the Trotskyists. But frankly, that shouldn’t be surprising. Pete is, after all, a member of Socialist Action, the shadowy Stalinist sect that lauds the North Korean regime and described the fall of the Berlin Wall as “the greatest defeat suffered by the working class since World War 2”.

It was definitely a day for people exposing their true colours.

Predictably, Pete’s advocacy of moderateness against my “hard socialism” won the meeting round, and the resolution to affiliate to IUS was removed. The motion as a whole did pass, however, so the NUS NEC now has policy to “reaffirm our solidarity with students and workers in Iraq fighting for democracy, secularism, liberation and an end to the occupation.” That’s definitely a step forward from either Suzie Wylie’s innocuous and empty anti-occupation statements and it’s certainly a world away from the ridiculous position expressed by the NOLSies in the debate, which is that, given the continuing support for the occupation from some sections of Iraqi society, it would be wrong and somehow anti-democratic for us to oppose it.

Despite not having contributed to the discussion in any way or exercising her democratic right to speak against the motion, Suzie Wylie voted against it. I found this baffling; if she thought the motion was bad or politically wrong, why didn’t she say so? I was certain Suzie had enough confidence in her own ideas to defend them in argument. Apparently not.

Uncontroversial motions on sexual health and defending students at Loughborough whose housing rights have been shockingly attacked passed unanimously, as did a motion on supporting the TUC’s Justice for Colombia campaign. There was some minimal debate around this motion; I pointed out that, unfortunately, two campaigns for solidarity with Colombian workers exist in Britain; JFC and the more radical, pro-Coke boycott Colombia Solidarity Campaign. I also pointed out that support for one in no way precluded support for the other. A more cynical man than me might speculate that Flick Cox (the convenor of the E&E campaign) submitted this motion to cover her left flank from criticism that the E&E campaign doesn’t do enough to support Colombian workers. An even more cynical man than that man might also suggest that it’s not a coincidence that the anti-boycott JFC was the only campaign mentioned in her motion. But I am far less cynical than either of those men and was happy to vote for a motion that I am sure was motivated by nothing more than Flick’s genuine desire to support democratic working-class struggles against exploitation in Colombia.

. Pete Leary’s next motion, a sycophantic ode to the progressive reforms carried out by Hugo Chavez’s government in Venezuela, attracted some debate. I’d submitted amendments that made the UNT trade union federation (rather than some state body) a focus for solidarity, and further amendments that recognised that, despite the impressive reforms his government has carried out, Chavez remains an authoritarian figure with links to some appalling anti-democratic regimes. Pete accepted the UNT amendment, and spoke against the other amendments apparently on the basis that his motion didn’t propose uncritical support for Chavez anyway, so amendments that clarified this were futile. Following a brief debate, droves of NEC members abstained and when the final vote was taken the motion passed with only Jess Kosmin against. Another Leary motion – against the Trident nuclear weaponry project – later passed unanimously.

The honour of proposing the meeting’s final motion fell to me, and it was my “NUSSL & Coke” motion, written by activists from the UK Students Against Coke campaign. Despite the commitment of that campaign (along with the commitment of my faction, ENS) to honouring Colombian trade unionists’ call for a boycott of Coca-Cola, the motion was not really about that issue. It was more centrally about the interference of NUS’s commercial subsidiary (NUSSL) into NUS’s democratic procedures. The response from sections of the NUS leadership to this has been confused to say the least; we are told that, on the one hand, NUSSL is effectively an external commercial company over which the NUS has no control. If that’s the case, then why is an external company being allowed to weigh into debates within the student movement? If Sony, IBM or indeed Coca-Cola started distributing propaganda and model motions to CMs we’d be rightly outraged. So there must be something different about NUSSL. We’re then told that it’s not an external company, but in fact an arm of the NUS, in which case one has to wonder why we’re letting an arm of our own organisation deviate so wildly from the clearly expressed and democratically ratified wishes of our membership.

Disappointingly, the majority of the NEC (excluding myself, Pav, Pete, Suzie and Dylan Williams who abstained) didn’t feel strongly enough opposed to NUSSL intervention into NUS democracy to vote for the motion and it consequently fell. At a time when reconnecting NUS’s leadership and its structures with our rank-and-file is such a key task, to flagrantly flout the policy of Conference 2005 and then to refuse to act when NUS democracy is severely compromised is an absolute disgrace.

Anti-Coke and Colombia solidarity activists have told me that if the NUS continues to behave in this way with regards to the Coke campaign, they will advocate disaffiliation in their unions. Obviously, this is a massively mistaken conclusion to draw and one that I’ve argued strongly against, but when attempting to engage with NUS’s structures and get their national union to take their campaign seriously (and even when successfully passing policy through Conference 2005) leads them absolutely nowhere, it’s not difficult to see how they’ve arrived at such a conclusion. If we don’t get ourselves in gear on this issue fast, we risk losing the engagement of a radical and dynamic group of activists. That is something that this union cannot afford to do.

Sadly, the meeting didn’t manage to discuss all the motions on the agenda and several fell off. They’ll probably reappear on the agenda for the next meeting in late January, by which time the notion of motions-only meetings and sharp political debate will seem like a distant dream. We’ll probably question whether this meeting ever took place or whether it was just some hallucinatory Dickensian Christmas vision we were led through by various ghosts and spirits. But until then, here’s to argument, debate, politics and all my comrades on the hard, socialist left in Iraq.

Merry Christmas.

In (secular, non-denominational) solidarity –

Daniel Randall

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