Here’s the start of a joke for you: a posh Tory idiot, a Blairite minister and a supine Lib Dem moron go into a bar together. Well, okay – it wasn’t a bar, it was a committee room in the Houses of Parliament, but indulge me. The Tory does his usual “affable idiot” act, the Lib Dem says nothing of substance and the Blairite minister behaves exactly as Blairite ministers are meant to.

So what’s the punchline?

The punchline is this; that sorry scene, that sorry trade-off between three bourgeois politicians of absolutely the worst kind, in which no seriously radical questions were asked and in which nothing of meaning happened, was the highlight of NUS’s national lobby of parliament, the only piece of national “action” (if one can even call it that) for free education that this union has managed to organise this year. And that, my friends, is a joke.

NUS’s staff probably worked very hard to organise the lobby and make sure it all ran smoothly. They did a good job. But the idea that such a lobby (centred around a series of meetings addressed by speakers from organisations such as the Young Women’s Christian Association) can come even close to playing the role that a national demonstration would have played in terms of mobilising students and gaining publicity is laughable.

People were moving in and out all the time so it was difficult to get a handle on numbers for this event. At a very liberal estimate it was a few hundred. Even small NUS demos generally regarded as unsuccessful managed to mobilise several thousand. The attendees here were, for the vast majority, not what someone who shared my politics might call “rank-and-file” members of NUS, but sabbatical officers. And most of them were wearing suits. Suits. Any event that requires you to wear a suit immediately arouses my suspicion.

Unfortunately, the mini-demonstration called by Student Respect and Student Broad Left and backed by Education Not for Sale didn’t take place, which meant that nothing resembling actual activity happened all day – unless, that is, you count asking MPs if they’ll sign up to a largely uncontroversial “coalition” against the lifting of the £3,000 top-up fees cap in 2009 as “activity”, and to be honest, I don’t.

Back in the real world, NATFHE and the AUT were preparing for a massive strike – an issue that was only represented at the lobby by good but all too short contributions from a couple of NATFHE and AUT bureaucrats.

It was all deeply depressing – a woeful way to spend a Wednesday. And it was especially saddening because Tuesday had gone so well; WMANUS had organised a successful free education demonstration in Birmingham with some presidential hustings to follow. Worthwhile, enjoyable, democratic and grassroots-focused; everything that the lobby wasn’t.

The activist spirit of the WMANUS demo was so pervasive that it even elicited a genuinely left-wing speech from Kat Fletcher on the NATFHE/AUT strike – she’s still got it in her, somewhere.

All the ingredients were there; radical chants, banners that said things like ‘grants not fees,’ representatives from a wide range of unions. Once again, it was illustrative of how an efficient Area structure can step in when the national union fails to do its job.

And the presidential hustings was a good laugh, too, even if some of the questions were a bit facile (“if the NUS you envision was a cake, what type of cake would it be?” Please).

Tuesday was a demo, activism and debate. Wednesday was a dire, inactive dead-end. Which direction do you want your union to go in?

In solidarity –

Daniel Randall

PS: I don’t like the habit that some of my fellow NEC members have of posting quotes from other NECers that were made outside of the context of meetings or other democratic events, but I’m gonna do it just this once because a) the quotes come from an explicitly political discussion, b) the person concerned did say they were happy to be quoted and c) the quotes are just diamond, so here goes…

A quick quiz: which NUS presidential candidate said the following things:

“It’s about time someone stood up to the RMT [the union representing London Underground workers].”

“If your motion about supporting the RMT had been discussed at the last NEC, me and Peter would have given you a good hiding.”

“If I didn’t agree with a strike, I’d happily cross a picket line.”

Could it possibly be the so-called “left” candidate for president that my fellow revolutionaries in the SWP are supporting?

Answers on a London Underground Travelcard, please…

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