Motions to NUS NEC, 3 August

Keep our NHS public!
Support student nurses
Stop the war on Lebanon

NUS conference 2006: the facts

This dossier was written by supporters of ENS who were delegates to NUS Conference 2006.

We invite and welcome comment and discussion; if you disagree with some part of our analysis of what went on at conference, email us at info@free-education.org.uk

ENS’s dossier on NUS Conference 2005 is available here.

Contents
Introduction
1. Summary
2. NUS Policy
3. Steering Committee: “banning-happy”
4. Elections
5. Lessons
6. Relevant websites
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ENS gathering, 27th May 2006

The second Education Not for Sale activist gathering on 27 May saw sixty or seventy student campaigners converge on the University of Sussex Students’ Union to discuss issues ranging from top-up fees to the demand for a living wage. In an era when even much of the student left doesn’t bother to organise open, grassroots-focused activist events, ENS’s commitment to doing so can help establish it as a forum for student radicals interested in doing more than r-r-revolutionary sloganeering or bureaucratic hackery.
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Greek students demand free education

At this year’s NUS conference, despite the left’s invocation of the militant student struggles in France, the right-wing of the union succeeded in overturning NUS’s policy on education funding and introduced a policy in favour of means-tested grants.

In contrast to the British student movement’s failure to understand the lessons of the anti-CPE struggle, Greek students spent May and June fighting against the privatisation of their education. When the Greek student assembly declared “we’re going to do what they did in France”, they meant it.
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Means-testing and “targeted grants”

In March 2006, policy supporting “targeted grants” (i.e. means-testing) was passed at a small and largely apolitical NUS Conference, bringing an end to 5 years of NUS commitment to universal free education and living grants for all.

Labour Students - the prime movers behind the policy - justified it by sending speaker after speaker to the podium to tell conference how middle-class they were and how they really didn’t need a grant.

On the face of it, it’s a convincing argument; why should rich, middle-class Blairites get a state grant to pay for the entirety of their education when they’re clearly wealthy enough to pay for it themselves?
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Stonewall was a riot - LGBT Conference,16-18th June

In which I decide this italicised line business has got to go

I’d like to start my NUS blogging with a definitive break from the style of my political predecessor, but, sadly, I can’t. There’s a reason Education Not for Sale blogs have read like cynical, bitter indictments of student politics - because that’s exactly what telling the truth about the state of our movement, with the aim of building something better, involves.
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