Dear Ben,

Thanks for taking the time to write to me with regards your viewpoint on discussing international issues as a national union of students. I welcome this opportunity to engage in the discussion, as it is clearly an area of concern for many constituent members.

In the specific instance of the Israel Lebanon debate, the length of these discussions, at a guess, only took around 45 minutes. The political fallout took up a great deal more officer time, but then again so does any contentious decision. The reality is, as a movement, we are always going to discuss international issues, as there will always be some form of political will to do so.

The problem we face is with the limited amount of time that we have in any one political forum and that when some motions are discussed others are not. Within NUS democratic structures there is a great deal of duplication of motions and debate and too much reliance upon a democratic process that generates decisions that are polar in their view point - good or bad/ for or against. In the coming years NUS needs to under go a change process that is critical to its future running and I believe governance should be at the heart of this.

There is an opportunity for constituent members to lead these conversations through national council and regional conferences and to begin to set the agenda at national conference. I have no clear picture in my mind what an NUS with reformed democratic structures would look like, but I can say with some certainty that if we set up NUS again tomorrow it would look a good deal different to what we have today. We can look to new models of governance in projects like the London Student Assembly for stronger more representative practices, but there is no one size fits all solution to the mammoth task of running a national membership organisation on the scale of NUS.

Let me stress though, it is critical that we do take big decisions and when we do this we speak with one voice. Any new democratic structure must have the capacity to do so, not only on the domestic but international issues as well. I have been talking openly about governance reform with officers and staff of the national union, and I hope to engage more students and student officers on this topic also. I would be keen to here comments from officers on the subject of governance reform, with particular focus on modern representative models and on the topic of trusteeship.

Kind regards

Dave Charlesworth

Executive Member, National Unions of Students

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