While I couldn’t be less interested in getting in to long blog wars with the NUS leadership over my personal record (I think I’ve pretty conclusively demonstrated my record), the issue of left and right in NUS could stand to be clarified.

Stephen Brown says he’ll “dig out… old ‘A-Level’ politics textbooks” to attempt to understand why Education Not for Sale refer to the majority of the NUS executive, both Organised Independents and Labour Students, as right-wing.

Clearly, in the “real world” outside NUS, Stephen and chums don’t represent the right-wing; they’re pretty much soft-left Blairites. And clearly, as he says, right-wing isn’t defined solely by your opinions on the governance review. But it’s also clear that within NUS, OIs and Labour Students do represent the right; defined against socialists and others who wish to see a fighting, democratic union that actually does things and who genuinely stand for (that’s actively for) free education, international solidarity, campaigning unity with the trade union movement, and mass participation in the national union, who want to take on this government, not try and get jobs in it.

The NUS right-wing can say it’s for those things til it’s blue in the face but when was the last time they organised for any of it? And besides, the evidence contradicts even their claims – witness NUS’ five demands to Gordon Brown which fail to mention free education; the failure of the NEC majority to oppose the war in Lebanon; the shameful episode 2007 NUS conference which saw leading OIs and Labour Students claiming the (small, not very political) NUS demo in 2006 as their finest hour, then voting for a motion which claimed demos where not only not a good tactic, but ultimately counter-productive; the weak position on the lecturers’ dispute, supporting them on one hand whilst condemning their tactics to right-wing sabbaticals on the other; their support for the FE bill; and these are just a few incidents from the past two years.

ENS doesn’t throw around "slurs", calling people right-wing as a personal attack – it’s a political criticism, and, as this blog shows, a pretty accurate one. And if NEC members don’t like it, perhaps they might try actually being left-wing. Just a suggestion….

Oh, and again for the record (if you haven’t already read it here), I read the entire white paper (and in fact wrote about it) before I voted on it. Nice try, though.

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