December

Well of course the first thing to kick off December was the National Demo in Wales. One of the things you notice on the NEC is if you are the first person to get somewhere, word gets round and everyone starts asking you for directions. The Urrd Centre in Cardiff was NUSs first blast using youth hostels instead of hotels, and it went well. It quite obviously wasn’t a youth hostel, but some sort of teaching retreat, with plastic chairs in the common room about a foot tall. The only thing that bothered me was Lloydes snoring, but there wasn’t all round approval for lodging in a place which lacked a bar.

The demo itself was great fun, well they always are! Its always good to see different unions come together for the movement and show a bit of solidarity standing up for students. And it’s always good from my point of view when I get my hands on a megaphone, so a big up to the sabbs from LSU (John Moores) for letting me have theirs, and thanks to Cardiff for a nice supply of T-Shirts.

Next was a truly momumentous NEC meeting, where after an inordinate amount of time wasting to make sure it wouldn’t get discussed, both at previous NEC meetings and National Council, the Tariq Ramandan issue was finally laid to bed, but only afte after the meeting had been officially closed and an emergency meeting requested just to discuss the issue. As this would of course had cost NUS a packet, the guillotine was overturned and the decision on Ramadam finally overturned officially.

Things of course then started winding down for the holidays, with a few nice jaunts out of the office to the University of Derby to help out in getting mature students recruited so they could say what support they wanted and a trip to City College Nottingham to sit in on the training for one of their many site exec teams.

Shamefully, I missed a strategy team meeting because I had been fitting new kitchen work surfaces the night before. Everything had gone well, but then putting the sink back in, I managed to break a pipe, meaning until the shops opened on Monday morning and I could go and get a replacement, the house would have no water.

And to round things up for December, we had a Mature Students National Committee meeting to sort out a few things, we will be producing a poster, shamefully plagiarised from the University of Derby and we talked about a few other issues, including what to do next with the campaign to get the 55 age bar on student loans lifted.

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