I woke up on the morning of 30th January from a bizarre dream; I dreamt that, in mid-December, there’d been a motions-only NEC with an incredibly high-level of political debate that passed a lot of worthwhile policy. As I shook myself awake, I realised how ridiculous such a notion was and began looking forward to a day that would remind me what NEC meetings are supposed to be like.

This NEC started badly, took an unexpected upturn around 10:00, stalled at around midday and then began a catastrophic decline that wasn’t arrested until the meeting ended at 5:30pm.

The delegation meeting began with a shock because, despite having had the amendments I submitted circulated by the NEC clerk and despite them having been printed and distributed at the meeting itself, I was told that, as they were received after the deadline, they could not be discussed.

Fair enough – if I missed the deadline I missed the deadline, but I was left wondering why I wasn’t told this before they were circulated and distributed.

It was a shame, as it turned out, because some radical left-wing text would have at least made the discussion a bit more interesting. In the Education Zone, typical text from Peter Leary (which, despite being an improvement on the mealy-mouthed bureaucratic rhetoric he submitted to the last delegation meeting, still could not bring itself to use radical slogans like ‘tax the rich’, instead opting for a demand for “progressive taxation on the 1% earning over £100,000 annually.”) was pitted against even worse text from Julian Nicholds and Ellie Russell, whose ‘resolves’ include “Meet the Ministers demanding that lifting the cap will not pre-empt the review.” Hmmm…militant.

Peter was late, so in his absence I spoke for his text, pointing out that while it was inadequate, it was clearer and sharper than the alternative. Only Dan Chilcott agreed, and Ellie and Julian’s text passed.

In the Strong and Active Unions Zone, text from Kat and Gemma that proposed the abolition of the current NEC responsibility teams, and their concentration into five ‘sub-committees’ based on conference policy zones, was the only submission. I voted against it on the basis that it seemed like little more than a politically vaguer replication of the current system, but I was a lone voice and it passed overwhelmingly.

The Welfare Zone saw text from Sian Davies and Veronica King on mental health pass ahead of text from Jamal El-Shayyal on having soft drinks at NUS events. I voted for the mental health text; the provision of soft drinks at our events is something I’m in favour of, but as it was made clear that Jamal’s amendments was being submitted by a CM elsewhere, I felt it was reasonable to pass the more general mental health text that was probably more relevant to a greater number of our members.

In Society & Citizenship, we went through the motions of a ‘parts’ debate on Suzie Wylie’s text that offered the usual motherhood-and-apple-pie condemnations of the military adventures of the British and American governments in the Middle East, but in the end it was all academic as a different (and actually quite good) motion from Jamal on civil liberties and detention without trial was passed instead.

Without text from the NEC’s resident hard-left sectarian to spice things up, the whole thing was a bit of a formality and we were done by around ten o’clock, with a full two hours to go before the start of the NEC proper.

Having a coffee, sandwich and newspaper in the Costa Coffee in the basement of the Waterstones across from ULU was easily the highlight of my day. From there, things only got worse.

The business items of the agenda left me as depressed as usual. Joe Rukin informed us all of the admittedly very grave crisis facing us in terms of non-payment of affiliation fees. Several unions essentially face the axe if they don’t pay up by 1st February, and there was a lot of discontentment amongst the NEC at this slightly clinical approach. Joe agreed to approach smaller unions sensitively and to take into consideration the fact that recklessly disaffiliating paper (i.e. non-existent) unions in FE colleges would completely alienate an entire student population from a national union they’ve never had any meaningful engagement with in the first place.

If your union is on the ‘hit-list’, you should have heard from NUS by now. If you haven’t and you’re worried you might be behind on payments, drop me an email at daniel.randall@nus.org.uk, let me know where you’re from and I’ll try and help out.

The National Director’s presentation – the usual fare about the future of NUS and its finances – did not do much to lift the spirits. Among the more worrying suggestions for the future of our union is that we seek funding from “trusts” and “businesses” such as Sainsbury’s. He also talked worryingly about “getting into the FE market”, as if 66% of our membership is simply a “market” to be exploited for financial gain.

I think this is pretty clear evidence of what me and my political co-thinkers have been talking about for years; that seeing everything through the spectrum of the financial and making that your primary concern necessarily warps your perspective and can even make you forget what a union is for.

Even a benign looking “trust” like Sainsbury’s – not ostensibly meaningfully linked to the evil corporate monster – is going to put big stipulations on what an organisation can and can’t do with the money it gives them. Do we really want a future for this union in which a large chunk of its funding comes with such restrictive strings?

A union is for its members, our members are (in the first instance) students’ unions, and our money should come from them. Joe and the National Director’s presentations made it clearer to me than ever that we need to convince rank-and-file students on the campuses of Constituent Members – especially those behind on their affiliation fees – that membership of a national union is worth paying for. To convince them of that, we need to make sure it is.

(Actually, maybe that whole corporate-sponsorship and getting funding from businesses thing isn’t such a bad idea; we could adopt their slogans… ‘NUS: Taste the difference.’ ‘NUS: Because we’re worth it.’ Wow, the possibilities are endless…)

After seemingly perpetual postponement, we eventually got round to discussing the education white paper and my motion on it (that’s been on the NEC table since October – read it here: http://www.free-education.org.uk/?page_id=57). After Pete Leary’s intervention at the last meeting ensured that my motion was not discussed, I was looking forward to finally getting to pass some policy on what is unquestionably an absolutely central development for anyone involved in education.

In this meeting, as in the last, Wes Streeting was given the opportunity to pre-empt the discussion around the motion under the pretext of giving a “report”, which he unsurprisingly used to attack various aspects of the motion. I argued that, given that he’d done this, it was only right to discuss the motion immediately rather than where it had initially been placed on the agenda; as the penultimate item, along with all the other motions.

The NOLSies set about proposing parts that led to a farcical series of arguments. Firstly, any reference to “religion” was removed from the ‘resolves’ on the basis that, as NUS has policy in favour of faith schools, it is unconstitutional for the NEC to pass policy that supersedes that of conference.

Next, they went after the ‘believes’ that stated that the Blair government is “going further than the Tories ever dared” with this project. Their instinct of loyalty to the government, even when it led them to fly in the face of reality (David Cameron himself has commented that Blair’s plans are merely an extension of Thatcher’s late-80’s project for Grant Maintained Schools) was on clear display. Unfortunately, unlike in the last meeting, they were successful, and, as in the last meeting, “left” candidate for the NUS Presidency Pav Akhtar voted with them.

Then came an attack on the very idea that any of this had anything to do with ‘privatisation’ as Mel Ward proposed the removal of the word from the ‘notes.’ Luckily, the meeting wasn’t convinced that a project that involved selling off schools to business and private trusts has “nothing to do with privatisation” and the parts remained.

Julian Nicholds took his turn, removing the part that resolved to “incorporate campaigning against these moves into our “On Course…” priority campaign” on the basis that “this is a bigger issue than one priority campaign.” Fair enough – but “On Course…” is, unfortunately, the only education campaign we’ve got right now so if we’re not going to incorporate this issue into that then where is it going to go?

Jamal El-Shayyal also weighed in and proposed the removal of the entirety of ‘notes 1’ on the primary basis that “I’m sure that’s not really the government’s intention,” and also because it is implicitly condemnatory of religious education (despite actually being a ‘notes’ and therefore a statement of objective fact). He lost, but a NOLSie proposal to remove any reference to the “break up” of the state school system was successful, so ‘notes 1’ was broken up anyway.

Eventually, the motion passed. It’s good that we’ve finally got policy on this but we could probably have done without the ridiculous, interminable discussion about, amongst other things, whether it’s right for us to speculate as to government “intention”. Read the motion as passed online soon.

Next came a series of some of the most bizarre agenda items I’ve ever encountered at any meeting. First, Gemma presented ‘The Democratic Act,’ the work of one cranky pensioner with no connection to the student movement whatsoever. For information, ‘TDA’ is basically a load of inchoate ramblings, riddled with conspiracy-theory nonsense and latent quasi-fascist anti-Semitism. Apparently, this guy’s been harassing Gemma and “demanded” that she submit it to the next NEC. While I do genuinely sympathise with the predicament of anyone facing harassment, I don’t really understand why Gemma felt obliged to acquiesce to this bloke’s “demands”. The discussion of motions at an NEC meeting is a rare thing indeed, so pointless agenda items that serve no purpose other than to waste time are more than a little frustrating.

After that, Jamal made a statement about “accuracy.” It concerned an argument he’d had with me at the 1st December delegation meeting at which he lambasted one of my motions as “offensive” because it equated Islamic law with attacks on women’s and LGBT rights. At that meeting, said that no-one’s beliefs – religious or otherwise – were above criticism and that no-one had a perfect right not to be offended by such criticism.

In his statement, he explained that he had “no problem with people criticising religion”, but that it should be done by referring to evidence and not in an offensive way. Jamal then left the meeting.

I was, to say the least, a bit puzzled. Firstly, I have already discussed this issue at some length with Jamal and considered the matter settled (or at least to the extent that it’s possible to ‘settle’ a matter between two people with irreconcilably different political views). Secondly, despite prompting, he has not replied to any of the blogs in which I’ve directly criticised some aspect of his politics. Surely his blog – which is in the public domain and available for the entire membership to read – is a better forum for making statements than in an NEC meeting open only to NEC members and observers? Thirdly, I wasn’t aware that NEC members had a right to demand that an item was put on the agenda allowing them to make a statement about their views on a certain issue. As I said in the meeting, if we do have such a right I’ll certainly be taking advantage of it in future.

Finally, we had a brief discussion around another item added to the agenda at Jamal’s behest. In his absence, Wes explained that Jamal advocates rearranging NEC seating at conference to place the NEC back on the stage, “where people can see us and where we’re more accountable.”

My basic attitude to this issue is twofold; firstly, I don’t think it merits an agenda item at an NEC meeting. It could easily have been discussed by email, especially because it’s now too close to annual conference to actually make such alterations. Secondly, I’m all in favour of greater NEC accountability, but we should think about doing the simple stuff before we get onto such grand notions as where we sit at conference.

For example, and without wanting to blow my own trumpet, I publish all the motions I submit to each NEC on the internet and then report on how the discussions went and how I voted in my blog. Maybe other NEC members could think about doing the same? Maybe minutes from each NEC meeting could be published online? Currently, the most recent set of minutes is from September.

One of the arguments that crops up time and time again on campuses amongst students hostile to the NUS is that it’s lead by a bunch of unaccountable bureaucrats who meet once a month to talk about themselves. Before we start worrying about where we sit in Blackpool, we should make sure that this widely-held impression is unfounded.

The meeting ended abruptly at 5:30, and there was only time to vote £2,000 to Pav to pay for the production of some anti-Islamaphobia materials. No other motions were discussed, which disappointed me somewhat as I was looking forward to seeing how the Mayor of London’s “socialist” cheerleaders on the NEC (yes, all two of them) would react when forced to choose between their beloved Ken and striking workers (see here: www.free-education.org.uk/?page_id=143).

I left Birkbeck in something less than a good mood; after the last NEC, I said that – by the time the next one came round – the idea of a motions only NEC would seem like a distant dream. As it turns out, it’s worse than that. It seems like a myth.

Fortunately, back in the real world, there are some inspiring struggles going on to keep cynics like me from dropping out entirely. If you’re around on 1st February, come to King’s College Students’ Union at 3pm to discuss building a London-wide campaign against canteen privatisation, building on the inspiring example of Lambeth College SU (check it out: www.free-education.org.uk/?p=148#more-148).

This blog’s a bit long. Putting in an attempt at a punchy, witty conclusion would be pretty futile and elongate it yet further.

In solidarity –

Daniel Randall

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