NUS’s £100,000 waste scandal

Posted on April 6, 2006
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Over the last two years, one aspect of the right-wing consensus which dominates the National Union of Students has been support for money-saving “reforms ”. The “reforms ” have been anti-democratic through and through: cutting the size and length of National Conference, slashing the travel budget of part-time National Executive Committee members and, outrageously, cancelling NUS’s national education funding demonstration this year. Some more radical “reformers ” want to go further, for instance by abolishing the part-time section of the NEC entirely - as has been proposed by some motions and amendments to this conference.

Yet it is these same “reformers ” who have presided over an obscene spending scandal during the past year.

These items alone contain around £100,000 of wasted spending. There can be little doubt that the NUS budget contains a great deal more waste in other areas. Even using a high estimate of how much a national demonstration might cost, £100,000 is two demonstrations' worth. Using a more reasonable estimate, it is enough for FOUR demonstrations. The money could also be used to restore the cuts made to National Conference, restore NEC travel budgets and/or provide full-time staff for each of the Liberation Campaigns.

The right in NUS says that we need to save money, but it has no intention of cutting bureaucracy and glitzy fripperies. ENS wants the opposite - less money for bureaucracy and more for democratic representation and campaigning. We want a total shake up of what NUS spends its money on. The “reformers ” present themselves as non-political, disinterested “independents ”, whose concern for NUS is somehow above politics. In fact they represent a classic right-wing hostility to NUS actually doing any campaigning.

When ENS opposed the decision to cancel the national demonstration, we did so on an explicitly political basis - because we believe that the purpose of a union is to fight aggressively for its members’ interests. Those engineered the demo’s cancellation hid behind financial arguments rather than being honest and up-front about their opposition to militant campaigning. Now it is clearer than ever that those financial arguments were nonsense.

Everyone wants to “save the union ”, but slashing NUS’s democracy and campaigning undermines the entire purpose of having a national union. If the “reformers” continue to hold sway, there will eventually be nothing left to save. ENS will continue to fight for a total overhaul of NUS finances so that its money is spent on representing and campaigning for students, not bureaucratic nonsense that effects no one but the NUS elite.