At the end of last week and over the weekend, blogosphere and messageboards have contained speculation and leaks of internal e-mails inside NUS concerning action I took last week to prevent Bell Ribeiro-Addy from circulating a political campaign statement to staff in students' unions and NUS. To put an end to speculation and clarify events, I have decided to blog my e-mail to Bell below, so that you can better hold us to account...

Wes

Dear Bell,

Having now had time to properly reflect on the events of Thursday and Friday, I am now writing to respond to both of your e-mails in turn. I will write to you again shortly regarding your other e-mail concerning the Equality Impact Assessment (EqIA) process and the statement you have circulated from the campaign.

On Thursday afternoon, I was made aware that you were circulating your statement on NUS reform to students’ unions. This did not surprise me and I considered your action a legitimate campaigning tactic, even if I disagreed with the content. At around 4.30pm, however, I received complaints that your statement had also been circulated to staff in students’ unions and the staff of NUS. This, I believe, was entirely inappropriate given our own commitment to protecting staff from the politics of NUS and the similar commitments of students’ unions to their own staff.

Therefore, I contacted IT services to temporarily suspend your access to the NUS global address book and e-mail account to prevent you from spamming any more staff and reactivated your access the following morning when we spoke.

Having now had time to reflect calmly on the events of Thursday afternoon and Friday morning, I would like to apologise for any offence or upset caused by the disabling of access to your e-mail account on Thursday evening and Friday morning. It was not my intention to stop you from circulating your statement altogether or prevent you from undertaking your duties as an elected officer. It was my intention to ensure that students’ union staff and NUS staff were not (further) involved.

However I accept that I should have contacted you first when the problem first arose and I am sorry that I did not do so. You have my assurance that, as in the past, I will contact you directly whenever problems arise in the future.

Finally, I would like to reassure you that my response was not sent to any delegate lists for either the last extraordinary conference, or the forthcoming extraordinary conference. As discussed, you are of course free to circulate your statements to student officers and BSC campaign lists regarding the forthcoming extraordinary conference or any other BSC issues and I am grateful for your assurance that you will not e-mail staff with campaign statements again.

Wes

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