There’s probably a neat metaphor floating in the ether somewhere about Blackpool pleasure beach and roller-coasters and ups and downs and some other nonsense like that. But, to be totally honest, I really can’t be bothered to think of it. My motivation for thinking of neat figurative openings to blogs is rapidly on the wane.

It was no-one’s fault that NUS’s 2006 conference took place on the same day as a near-general strike in France and the biggest single piece of industrial action in Britain since 1926. That couldn’t really have been helped. The test was whether those examples of genuinely significant student and labour movement militancy would find any real reflection inside conference. They didn’t.

And that is why, while French students occupied and blockaded their campuses in an explicitly class-based struggle, and while British workers struck to defend their pensions, our union took two more big steps towards total business-unionism by first deciding to charge our members £10 for a Trojan-horse discount card and then, shockingly, abandoning NUS’s commitment to universal living grant by passing Labour Students’ policy in favour of targeted grants.

The reintroduction of the targeted grants policy is almost entirely a product of the triumph of apoliticism and bureaucracy in the NUS; every cut-back, every anti-democratic “reform” and every demonstration moved or cancelled has been a blow to activism and political culture in the union. After pre-conference hype about how this year’s event would be the biggest ever, it struggled to match even last year’s disappointingly low levels. It was a conference that was – politically and sometimes literally – asleep. That is why Labour Students won. Their victory was clearly not the result of some big ideological struggle inside the union, and were it not for some appalling chairing and extremely dubious shenanigans when it came to re-counts (all three of them) they might not have won at all.

I’m not going to go into much more detail than that here. A full report of conference will appear on the Education Not for Sale website (www.free-education.org.uk) shortly, so if you’re after a comprehensive dissection and analysis of what went on, check that out. I’ll finish here by extending my congratulations to Sofie Buckland and Joe Rooney – ENS supporters who’ve both been elected to next year’s NUS National Executive Committee. Doubling our representation on the NEC is no small feat given we’ve only properly existed since September 2005, and a union that has begun a process of chipping away at its free education policy needs as many radical left-wing officers as it can get.

After such a conference, the prospect of another, longer trip to France was definitely something to look forward to. And, even thought by the time we arrived the movement was definitely on the wane, what our French comrades have accomplished in conditions not entirely unlike our own shows that another student movement is possible.

Two Wednesdays after NUS Conference, myself and seven other British student and labour movement activists were ‘Observateurs non-mandatés’ at the Ile-de-France Regional Co-ordination; the democratic gathering of delegates from universities and colleges right across the region that meets as regularly as it is able to decide how the movement is going to proceed. It was a manic and intensely politically charged affair at which anarchists, Trotskyists and social democrats fought for political influence and argued for their ideas. Elections took place and decisions about the next steps for the movement were taken. The French movement is far from perfect and it’s sadly true that it now seems to be declining, but if NUS’s events looked a bit more like that Regional Co-ordination then we’d certainly be moving in the right direction.

In Lille, where we attended a demonstration and then visited one of the city’s three universities as it debated whether to renew its occupation. When we first briefly visited the campus on Tuesday evening, we attended a political discussion forum about violence, attended by around fifty students. Comparing that level of political culture – where fifty-plus students attended political and philosophical discussion forums – to our own makes it difficult to decide whether to be enthusiastic about what’s possible or depressed at our own current circumstance.

Along the way, we met dozens of student and worker activists from across the political spectrum who gave us their take on where things were going and what needed to happen next – further reminders, as if any were needed, that a movement that fights breeds activists who know what they’re talking about. In NUS, we try to train activists through costly, apolitical “Student Learner Programmes”. French activists get their training through struggle. One approach has led to a movement that has challenged the legitimacy and power of a government. The other has led to a dreary conference in Blackpool. Draw your own conclusions about which is better.

Like I say, “le mouvement” isn’t perfect but even in what could be its last phase it throws into very, very sharp relief how much work we need to do before we have a movement that can do what everyone in NUS claims to want to do, and “win for students”.

The most serious aspects of that work – the work that socialists, radicals and anti-capitalists in the student movement need to do - won’t take place on the floor of NUS conference. It’ll take place through the sort of campaigns I’ve been writing about all year in this blog. It’ll take place at events like the one ENS is helping to organise on the 27th May at Falmer House, University of Sussex. But if that work is done properly next year, it will reflect itself at NUS Conference 2007. Maybe we’ll even have a few strikes and occupations of our own to talk about.

In solidarity –

Daniel Randall

For more on the French struggle, check out:

www.lcr-rouge.org (French)

www.lutte-ouvriere.org (French)

www.libcom.org/blog/ (English)

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/272238.aspx