In which someone needs to get their eyes checked…

Regional Conferences go like this; the NEC gets split into two - an ‘Eastside’ and a ‘Westside’. One group of NEC members attend the Regional Conferences on the east side of the country, the other the west (can you tell which group goes to which? There’s a clue in the name). So far, so reasonably democratic, so reasonably accountable. But woah there, cowboy. Don’t get ahead of yourself. These are NUS structures, remember? So real democracy and genuine accountability are pretty hard to come by.

Because, ya see, Regional Conferences aren’t really conferences at all. No motions are submitted, no policy is decided, nothing happens. The first set of Regionals (that take place in early November) elect National Council delegates but this is about as democratic as it gets; one mechanism of sham-democracy ‘democratically’ electing delegates to attend another mechanism of sham-democracy.

So what, you might ask, is actually the point of these expensive exercises?

Keep reading, by all means, but you ain’t gonna find an answer to that question in this blog.

In theory, there’s nothing wrong with regional forums at which local NUS members can quiz the national leadership about what exactly it is they have – or haven’t – been up to recently. Face-to-face accountability is usually more effective than over-the-internet accountability. But the session as Regional Conferences at which delegates are actually allowed to directly hold the NEC to account is a brief questions-and-answers knockabout at the end, and is necessarily limited because the whole thing is framed as a response to the ‘Report and Plan’ – the bizarre document that apparently tells you lot (the ‘rank-and-file’ as I like to call you) what us lot (the leadership/bureaucrats/self-serving careerists -take your pick) have been up to, but which most NUS members have probably never even heard of, let alone seen or read.

The bulk of Regional Conferences is given over to a series of Power Point presentations on a variety of issues – namely the NUS Extra project, the MORI report, the co-operative housing project and the progress of NUS’s ‘priority campaigns.’ As a staunch ideological opponent of two of these projects (Xtra and the whole MORI thing) and as an unrelenting critic of the timidity and lack of militancy displayed by NUS’s campaigns, having to sit through these reports every day for a week was more uncomfortable than enduring dental torture at the hands of a team of drill-wielding stone masons.

I can only imagine what it must have been like for the delegates. As an NEC member, I have had the dubious pleasure of having seen certain aspects of emergence of the MORI report at reasonably close regard, but the whole thing has been so far removed from the vast, vast majority of our members that it must have seemed completely meaningless to the majority of delegates.

As far as the actual content of these presentations went, it was the usual fare. Charging students we ourselves admit are impoverished £10 for a discount card that shackles them to high-street corporations is a good idea and the best – nay, only way – to save our union from imminent financial meltdown. Spending £50,000 on superficial research conducted by an unaccountable company was not only a good idea, but returned some really exciting results, which told us that the NUS needs to behave less like a union and more like a business, helping to market products to the “student market”! (You can see how these things all fit together now, yeah?)

Phrases like “value for money”, statements about how NUS needs to “compete credibly as a business” and calls for “business-like project management” were never far from Gemma’s (for it was to Gemma that responsibility for delivering the presentation fell) lips. The offensive of the idea of the NUS being a vehicle for bureaucratic, apolitical service-provision against the idea of it being a vehicle for collective organisation and militant campaigning intensifies.

It wasn’t, I must add, all bad. I got to visit unions and meet members I would not otherwise have done, and I am genuinely grateful for that opportunity. I also got to witness the delegates from the North West – the trial region for the NUS Extra card – giving the project’s supporters on the NEC a reasonably thorough grilling. At every subsequent conference, there were at least a few delegates who expressed serious doubts about the card, which somewhat undermines its supporters’ attempts to present it as the sole and unanimously accepted way to resolve the union’s financial troubles.

Visiting the West Midlands is also always a pleasure, because unions there…well, they do stuff, due in no small part to an Area NUS that gives leadership and co-ordination when the national union invariably does not. The West Midlands is the only regional that will make any meaningful noise during NUS’s ‘Week of Action’ – the only thing even vaguely resembling any kind of actual campaigning to have come out of our shockingly misnamed education priority ‘campaign.’ (Misnamed because it’s clearly not a campaign.)

There were also some absolutely diamond moments, including Julian Nicholds’ consistent inability to remember the details of ‘Coalition 2010’, the shiny bureaucratic front he himself has helped put together. He was particularly blighted by this at the West Midlands Regional Conference, where he had to refer directly to the campaign materials (which consist of a stack of tiny business-card-like leaflets, if you’re wondering) in order to remember its aim and values. (Which, if you’re wondering about that too, is “to maximise the number of students able to access their right to education by placing the student movement at the heart of the debate on education.” So – just about as radical as you’d expect from an NUS campaign.)

Better even than this was the exchange between Gemma Tumelty and a delegate in the West Midlands on the merits of the NUS Extra card. Gemma was attempting to argue that the project was justified because it offers discounts at companies previously unavailable on the ordinary NUS card – such, she claimed, as Specsavers opticians.

“You’re sure that Specsavers isn’t available on the ordinary NUS card?” the delegate asked.

“Yes. Absolutely. 100% sure.”

Read that last line again, folks. Now reach for your ‘ordinary’ NUS card. You know, the one you didn’t have to shell out £10 for. Turn it over. What’s that on the back? Surely not a…Specsavers logo?

Oh dear, Gemma. Looks like someone needs their eyes testing.

Speaking of which, here are my final thoughts about Regional Conferences; anyone who can look at a series of events that offer no real channels of accountability that could not be provided by email or telephone calls and the combined cost of which would cover the restoration of a genuinely democratic Winter Conference and claim either that these events are worthwhile or that NUS’s democracy and accountability is in anything like a healthy condition, well….as the ads say, they shoulda gone to Specsavers.

In solidarity –

Daniel Randall

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