A while back, I was talking to someone who’d been on the NUS NEC in the late 1980s. Before that, he’d been an NUS Area Convenor. Misty-eyed and nostalgic, he told me how NUS Areas used to be key political units in the student movement. He explained how political factions in NUS would win first the loyalty and then the leadership of students in an Area. He talked about some of the campaigns he’d been involved in (the anti-government ‘Beat the Blues’ mobilisation at the Tory Party conference sounded particularly enthusing), and explained how NUS Areas had been the basic building blocks of mobilisation for such campaigns.

That age, sadly, is history. The decline of NUS’s Area structure has been intertwined with the decline of its entire regional structure – a structure that is only recently beginning to revive. But in amongst the smouldering rubble of the Areas are a few shoots of green. One of them covers a massive big of the country that starts somewhere around the Welsh borders and finishes in Oxfordshire – West Midlands Area NUS.

Their 2005 Winter Conference wasn’t particularly big, and not everyone there was an intensely political rank-and-file militant. But it’s clear that having structures in place to allow better communication and coordination of campaigns between unions is beneficial to the health of the student movement in that part of the world.

I was invited to lead a workshop on the ‘There is Power in a Union’ campaign I’m developing along with others on the NUS NEC. Having an Area structure in place means that students who want to contribute to that campaign will be much better placed to do so.

It’s true that I have what you might call a factional interest here (one of the WMANUS Convenors – Joe Rooney - is an ENS supporter and our candidate for National Secretary), but even if that connection didn’t exist, it’d be impossible to deny that the existence of an Area that can help connect students on their campuses to the structures of their unions is going to aid the development of activists.

Two more NUS Areas (SEANUS in the South East and ANGUS in East Anglia) have recently established themselves and are taking tentative steps forward. There are several light-years to go before we’ve got a situation anything like the ‘golden age’ I talked about earlier, but the work that WMANUS and other Areas are doing (along with the ongoing discussions around the review of NUS’s regional structures) are steps in the right direction.

In solidarity –

Daniel Randall

The Blogs on this site represent the individual views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the policies or practices of the National Union of Students.

All links in blogs will open in a new browser window.

The permanent URL for this specific blog entry is: http://www.officeronline.co.uk/blogs/danielrandall/271857.aspx