Just into December the wheels really started to come off the wagon. We all make mistakes, but all of a sudden the three –yes just three that I know about- came back to haunt me all at once. They’d all get as overblown as they possibly could, and just coincidentally it all happened the same week that I decided I would restand for election as National Treasurer.

The first wasn’t totally my fault, but “Someone has to take political responsibility”. It regarded Queen Mary, a union I have a great deal of empathy with. Last year I was the only NEC member to turn up at their crisis meeting, when the university was ready to take them over, though a week later for the demo there was a slightly better turnout from NUS. I have always strongly felt they were an unlucky union, much like my own had been when I was there, with incompetent management, a trigger happy institution and financial meltdown. But given all that, it was still very much a union that could be saved.

Anyway the problem was that this year they applied to finance committee for hardship. It was accepted, but because of a lack of minutes from finance committee and a need from the union to know, I decided to respond, but got the decision the wrong way round. It didn’t really make any difference in the big scheme of things. I told them the £15,000 they were willing to pay would clear their current 05-06 fee, because that is what they had applied for hardship about. It wouldn’t effect their arrears for affiliation fees. That was my mistake - it should have been the other way around. Finance Committee had decided to accept a payment regarding their arrears, the current fee –which was actually slightly less than the arrears- would still stand in full. In some ways, that wasn’t the problem.

The problem that upset the union was the fact that they didn’t know they had any arrears at all! This has been an ongoing theme throughout the year for me –along with the widespread number of “Dervish Discounts” dating back three years - that unions or NUS had no records at all about. The union wasn’t aware that they had arrears on their affiliation fees, but accepted it. They weren’t the problem. The problem was it could be shown that I had made a mistake. The fact I had got money out of a union which hadn’t paid anything for two years didn’t matter, neither did the fact that the union would actually be better off if the payment was made in respect to arrears. The fact that I had made a provable mistake. That was what mattered. I was restanding, and I was obviously incompetent. Even then we still didn’t have minutes for that Finance Committee meeting.

For the reason why those minutes were still missing, well the person you need to talk to is the then chair of the Committee, Sam Rozati, and the reason for my big crucifixion. I’d been trying to get hold of him for a while, and finally I did when he rang me. He said that he was going to resign as chair of the committee, and indeed resign from the committee full stop. He thought he could do more pissing in from the outside, and wanted to make public certain facts. ‘Facts’ like NUS was overdrawn, all the money from the sale of Holloway Road had been wasted and the National Union would be bust within twelve months. The problem I had with that was, well really all of it.

None of that was true, but Sam was adamant that he was going to go public with it in the Essex University (where he was a student) newspaper, The Rabbit. He rang to tell me what he was going to do, so of course I rebutted all of what he was saying, and tried to tell him that he could still make a difference without doing this and by remaining on Finance Committee. I couldn’t change his mind, and he was going to launch a new faction “The Campaign for Financial Reform”. So he said he’d give me right to reply and I spoke to him. As far as I was concerned, and as far as what he said, what I was saying would be going to his local union newspaper. Of course, I digressed slightly from simple rebuttal and spoke of many other things which were going on with the NUS finances, all of which we had spoken about at Finance Committee meetings.

The next day I was off up to NUSSL, before touring NUS Extra trial unions. Halfway up I got a call from Gemma. “Have you spoken to Sam Rozati?” I obviously said yes. “He’s quoted you in a press release he has sent to The Guardian, saying that NUS was overdrawn, all the money from the sale of Holloway Road had been spent and the National Union would be bust within twelve months.” Whoa Whoa Whoa, he’s done what? I thought “And you are quoted in the press release saying that members of the NEC haven’t taken the finances seriously and a load of other stuff that doesn’t look good”.

Bugger. Hook, Line and Sinker. Which now was going to lead to Hung, Drawn and Quartered. That’s what you get for trusting a Tory. Just as it happened, someone proudly touted as the National Presidents favourite Tory.

I did explain that that wasn’t at all what I expected from our conversation the night before. But it didn’t matter. Quickly my classification as the loose cannon and liability that should never have been elected was reasserted and I was cut out of the loop. When I got to NUSSL, a lengthy email of apology and explanation to the press department who had been dealing with the fallout ensued. Halfway through doing it Kat Fletcher rang me telling me to do exactly what I was doing. If I didn’t do it, she said ‘The Organisation’ would have no choice but to email everyone on the NUS email lists, distancing itself from what I had said. She, of course, pointed out what had happened would be interpreted by ‘The Movement’ that I was had been doing this purely as the opening salvo my campaign for re-election.

There was now a report in The Guardian. Even though it wasn’t ‘big’ enough to make it into the printed version, just the online one, it was enough. The thing was that, yes I was in the press release, but not in the article. Not quoted, not mentioned. But still I’d be hung out to dry. I apologised to the press team as I had promised I would, but that wouldn’t be good enough, it seemed.

The next day as I started my tour of NUS Extra trial unions, and sat at a computer at UCLAN I saw the front page of officeronline and what ‘The Organisation’ had decided the best course of action was. There was joint statement from Kat and a senior staff member, saying amongst other things that “The National Treasurer hadn’t got his figures right”. The windows in Bryn Davies office started to steam up as the smoke billowed from my ears.

That was just so wrong on so many different levels. The official website of an organisation opening criticising a named official –or if we’re going to look at this in a legal sense- an employee. And what’s this? OK, maybe at a push Kat can get away with that sort of thing, but for a staff member to be involved? Just exactly what is the point of the staff protocol? I don’t blame the individual, someone who was very new at the time, and wouldn’t realise just how wrong this is, especially if the President was saying it was right. In terms of me doing what was required to stop this from happening, well Kat had only said she wouldn’t email everyone slagging me off if I apologised. She said nothing about putting a statement on the front page of the website. Of course the truth of the matter is that that I didn’t actually quote any figures, just say that we had stopped Bensons budget as it was overspent, trying to show we were in control. What Sam had said was another matter. I hadn’t been given the opportunity to put my case at all. I could have been involved in a counter statement, and there were indeed any number of things that could happen, but when the sharks smell blood, they start circling.

”To Protect ‘The Organisation’” I was told was the reason for the ‘Official Response’. Well I’m not sure how breaking so much protocol and so many employment practices was “Protecting ‘The Organisation’”. If I felt as despondent as my depression was steering me, I might become the seventh NEC member to quit in a year at this point. Six in a year - what does that tell you about ‘The Organisation’??? I could also lose my election and become bitter and twisted. That might mean we all ended up at an Industrial Tribunal. If that happened, I believe “The Organisation”, after officially branding me incompetent, would be more exposed than the Chippendales.

But that wasn’t the end of it. Apparently soon –less than a couple of hours- after the article went online, a call came in from Manchester City Council. There had been a funding bid in for our new headquarters. There was no way we could afford it on our own. Now the random call had come in, and we’d been told the money wasn’t there.

Of course the bid was something as National Treasurer that I’d not been involved in at all. I mean why would the person whose constitutional reference (and therefore job description) was to “Be in the first instance responsible for the finances of the national union” have any business being involved, or even informed about a funding bid for millions of pounds? It was only a month earlier that we’d had our first Management Team meeting, in fact until then I hadn’t been (asked) to one for a year, since the day after the Wolverhampton Conference, despite officially being on the team since then. Having said all that, I did know something about the bid. There was at this point no written bid. No written bid for an application for 100% funding on a £3m project! Oh and the request from the Council to see our accounts had been quietly forgotten. And now they had decided to pull from offering anything. On the basis of a page worth of story on Guardian Unlimited. And it was my fault. Even though I wasn’t mentioned. Right.

Next week there was an NEC meeting where this would be brought up. Well dragged up. “I don’t know if there was any connection between the loss of the bid and the article.” No, but you had to mention it didn’t you? Well, there were enough politically wily people in the room to smell a rat and who could read between the lines, with Jo Salmon said that she had no wish “To take part in a Kangaroo Court”. It was great that she said that, especially as Kat had lobbied NOLS, amongst others no doubt, to call for my resignation. It had to be said there were very long pauses in the debate which I’ve been told were meant to be queues for that call to come. Despite Kat forgetting all you should know about impartially chairing a meeting and trying to lead everyone to her obvious conclusion, it didn’t happen. And she has the cheek to criticise me for the way I chair NUSSL Board!

So I had survived for now and it would be up to the grapevine to do all that it could for now to spread things around. The Kangaroo Court could wait until National Council!

I have to hold my hands up fully for the final mistake. There may have been undertones in the way it came to be public knowledge, but yes, I did it, all of it, it’s a fair cop. Chris Ford at Kingston University had been questioning why his union paid affiliation fees and what they got from it. I’d answered and of course sent him ‘Irreplaceable’, the briefing which outlines what NUS actually does for students’ unions. However, along with that, he’d also been complaining about other things. For example the fact that the dinner at an NSLP event had ‘Tasted like Dog Food’. This and other issues had been answered by other people within NUS, but still he was bringing them to me. I didn’t know what to do, and when I emailed the staff at NUSSL, updating them and of course asking for the unions benefit statement, which showed the considerable cash benefit to Kingston of being in NUS, I’d said that unions this year seemed quite cool, apart from Kingston, who seemed ‘Hostile and Awkward’.

Of course the reply came with the benefit statement attached, and then, like the fool we can all be sometimes, I forwarded the whole email conversation to the union. That was of course in October. Now in December they were complaining. They had a point, I did it, no getting away from it, it was my fault, I was banged to rights. Now of course the spin from those higher up was that the possible affiliation referendum which they had been threatening all year, if it happened would all be down to me, irrespective of all the other reasons Kingston had given for having one in the first place, which made me say what I said back in October.

All of the above in one week. It did strike me as odd that the Kingston thing, the email that had been sat with them for two whole months. It was October that I sent that email. Had it really taken two months for someone the scroll down? Why now, the week that I said I was restanding, had it became an issue? Odd that isn’t it?

Did I really want to put myself through all this again? Well it’s not all bad all the time and of course the thing that had maybe influenced both Martin Ings and James Lloyd in their decision not to restand would not be an issue for me. If it had been, my decision would have been different. Sadly in NUS you find that some people take great delight in exposing any failure or weakness but find it impossible to praise any success. In fact when success is achieved, it will be attributed to whoever else it can.

Which is why the Queen Mary thing would never come back into the public eye. Of course I wasn’t going to leave that up in the air. Graham Gaskell, the new chair of Finance Committee (thank God for small mercies!) and me went to QM to explain where we where. And well, with smiles all round, the new General Manager had actually managed to find money in the accounts that had “Always been attributed to NUS Affiliation fees” and after two years of paying nothing, they had paid. What more could you want?.

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/joerukin/272772.aspx