Hands up who’s been to NUS compositing. Oh come on – someone must have been. Anyone? No. Okay then, hands up who knows what NUS compositing is? No-one. Looks like I’m gonna have to provide some background.

Lots of text gets submitted to NUS conference, both as motions and mini-motions (or ‘amendments’ as they’re somewhat confusingly known). Some of it is on pretty similar stuff, so to try and keep the amount of text that goes onto conference floor down to a sensible level, everyone who’s submitted text has to meet up to chop everything up and try and stick some of the similar stuff together. It’s a messy process – both figuratively and literally – but it’s just about the best system there is within the current framework. The problem is that “the current framework” is one in which the mass of NUS members are so disengaged from our structures that hardly anyone even knows what compositing is, much less when it’s taking place or what goes on there. Consequently it basically always turns into a factional bun-fight. As you might imagine, I have no problem with this, but I can understand how some people might find it off-putting.

In all honesty, it’s probably not worth me writing a blog about compositing. I spent all day in the Education debate so can only report on what happened in one of the four policy zones. And I cannot even begin to deliver anything like a comprehensive report of the intricacies of the debates that took place during the day. But some of the arguments I encountered were so gobsmacking that I needed to get them off my chest.

My main concern was getting clear demands for the taxation of rich and business as high up as possible, if not in the main motion then in a prominent amendment. When it became clear that getting such demands into the main motion was a fantasy, I tried to work on building a sharp, radical amendment with some comrades from the SWP that would be placed as the first amendment. We did a pretty good job until Peter Leary of SBL saw it, announced that it had been agreed that the first amendment would essentially be made up of their text, and set about dismantling it. Out came most of the criticism of the government. Out came explicit demands about taxing the rich. Out came references to government spending on war. Out came all criticism of the NUS leadership for failing to even advocate, let alone campaign around, NUS’s funding policy. In went bland-beyond-bland SBL text that included a verbatim regurgitation of Liberal Democrat policy on increasing the top-rate of income tax to 50% on earnings over £100,000.

The justification for all of this went as follows; this, SBL told me, is the year in which Labour Students will attempt to overturn NUS’s current funding policy. The key thing, therefore, is defending the existing policy and anything too left-wing or radical will alienate people who would otherwise support simple, broad text reaffirming the existing policy. (I’m not making the “too left-wing” thing up, by the way. SBL’s Vice-President Education candidate George Woods eventually, somewhat reluctantly, admitted that he did think the text I’d suggested was “too left-wing” to go into the first amendment.)

More shocking still was the revelation that, in the composite for the main motion, it had been the SBL members (and not the OI Julian Nicholds or even the NOLSie Wes Streeting, both ostensibly to the right of SBL) who had successfully argued for the removal of any reference to progressive taxation, preferring to relegate it to an amendment (and even then only to mention it in the mealy-mouthed, Lib Dem-type fashion as mentioned above).

My suggestion that this entire approach – defensive, rather than going on the offensive and not arguing quietly forr slight policy shifts like small tax increases but arguing aggressively for a radical reorganisation of society – would put us exactly where the Blairites in NUS want us (i.e. on the back foot) fell on very deaf, very reformist, not very radical and not particularly left ears. They were similarly uninterested in my suggestion that failing to criticise NUS’s leadership for refusing to campaign on our funding policy should be an intrinsic part of any attempt to defend the policy, and when I suggested that this would be tantamount to letting the leadership off the hook, Peter’s only response was a not very convincing “not it’s not.”

Overhearing this exchange between myself and the SBL ‘comrades’, senior NOLSie Wes Streeting jokingly remarked that he fully supported SBL’s “pragmatism”, “willingness to engage” and refusal to engage in “ultra-left posturing”. Like I say, he was joking – but only just. The typical reformist opportunism and accommodation to lowest-common-denominator politics of SBL in this debate left the Blairites in Labour Students laughing.

So the sharp amendment I had wanted was cobbled together as another amendment to appear lower down the paper. This, I thought, was something. At least the text we’d put together would, if passed, commit NUS to using “tax the rich to fund free education” and “scrap all fees, for a living grant for all” as its main slogans next year. And the SWP members I was working with didn’t seem to have a problem, so it seemed like I might have salvaged something from the wreckage after all.

But it wasn’t to be. Suzie Wylie saw the words “tax the rich” and declared that the SWP/Student Respect was opposed to that slogan as well. She made a weak argument about the journalistic merits of the slogan and seemed to agree with Peter when he said it was “crass”. She also said that NUS Conference was about “making policy, not sloganeering”. She preferred SWP text, which referred to “progressive taxation and increasing corporation tax.”

In the end, I was completely isolated and ended up submitting text on the taxation of the rich and business as a stand-alone amendment.

When two of the three main left factions in NUS don’t understand why the explicit demand for the taxation of the rich and business is better than either a demand for “progressive taxation and increasing corporation tax” or the Lib Dem policy that SBL parroted, then something’s quite badly wrong.

The point, as I became weary of making during the debate, is that the demand for the taxation of the rich and business isn’t just a demand for a slight policy shift that even a Brownite or Lib Dem government might make. It’s a clear indication of a political perspective that wants to reorganise the whole of society on the basis of human need, not private profit. Yes, that’s a radical idea. Yes, it’s a left-wing idea. Yes, it’s an implicitly anti-capitalist and socialist idea. But I am an anti-capitalist and a socialist and, unlike SBL and the SWP, I don’t think that socialist ideas are something it’s okay to hold in private but should never be discussed on NUS Conference floor.

There are probably a few people reading this and tutting about inter-left squabbling. But whatever you think about factions in NUS, you can’t claim that this argument has just been contrived for the sake of it; there is a political issue at stake here.

I’m fully in favour of left unity and my faction’s been in favour of left unity since our inception. I’d like nothing more than to sit down with SBL, SWSS/Student Respect and any other left faction that cared to contribute and discuss ways in which the student left could practically collaborate, both at NUS Conference and elsewhere. I’m still in favour of that unity even while massive political differences exist between these organisations, but I’m not in favour a unity that pretends these differences don’t exist or that ignores the need to argue them out thoroughly.

This is not about a minor difference over the journalistic merits of a certain slogan or form of words; it’s about a fundamental political perspective. There has to be a line drawn between those who want to go to NUS Conference and argue for explicit demands and radical policy and those that want to accommodate, compromise and carve out anything that looks too left-wing. It’s unfortunate that a lot of the organised student left looks like it’s going to end up on the wrong side of that line.

And now for something completely different…

THE REAL WORLD REPORT

Believe it or not, there is a world outside of NUS. I know, it sounds like a crazy idea, but apparently it’s true. Apparently what happens at compositing is not only not the most important thing in the history of human society but in fact has reasonably little impact on much at all. For example, while you’ve probably all been busy going through your motions documents in preparation for conference, quite a bit of stuff’s happened.

For example, lots of campus workers went on strike. Read about it here How was it for you? Were there picket lines at your campus? Did you go? Email me and tell me and, if you’re okay with it, reports of what happened on your campus will go up online at www.free-education.org.uk

Also, loads of students at Sussex occupied their library. They’re fighting against a belligerent university management that’s pushing an agenda of cuts (including the threatened closure of the chemistry department), and the occupation was one in a series of actions they’ve organised against it. Read more about that here

Students at Swansea did something similar a few weeks back, and you can read about that here

Over in France, thousands of students at dozens of universities have rediscovered the spirit of ’68 and have demonstrated, occupied and even erected barricades at some universities. Read more about that here

In New York, post-graduate teaching staff at NYU are still on strike, and have been since the end of August. They’re protesting against the summary cancellation of their contracts by a particularly hawkish university president (the American equivalent of a VC). Given that I unfortunately happened to be visiting my family on the day of the NATFHE/AUT dispute, I stood on a picket line in New York with those striking workers instead and felt like I’d done something worthwhile. You can read more about their dispute online at http://www.virtualmind.info/nyustrike/strike.htm

Those are just a few of the many reminders of the fact that, outside the warped world of the National Union of Students bureaucracy, incredibly inspiring examples of student activism and student-worker solidarity do exist. We’ve got to work to make sure NUS is part of that “real world”, and that it adopts something of the spirit of NATFHE/AUT, of the Swansea and Sussex occupations, of the French students and of the NYU post-grads. We’ve got to make NUS part of a world in which somewhere, far outside a cold room in ULU filled with scraps of paper, scissors and prit-sticks, the politics of activism, militancy and campaigning are succeeding. That’s the NUS I believe in, and it’s that vision that the HE funding text I was representing in the Education composite was trying to express. And if that vision is “too left-wing” for some people then, frankly, that’s tough.

In solidarity –

Daniel Randall

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