A note of caution: no to control-freakery
Posted on November 8, 2007
Filed Under Inside NUS
Although ENS welcomes the launch of a united campaign against the Governance Review, we have some concerns about the behaviour of the SWP and their small number of allies at the launch meeting. Despite spending much of the day talking about the need for a broad campaign (as a defence of their position that the campaign should have no positive proposals for NUS democracy), the SWP-led majority voted down the nominations of Communist Students and Socialist Students comrades to the steering committee in a shockingly sectarian manoeuvre. (Their leadership also opposed the election of ENS supporter Daniel Randall, but many SWP members broke ranks and voted for him anyway.)
The justification of the SWP’s NEC member Rob Owen that such groups represent nothing in NUS (as well as being demonstrably false in the case of Socialist Students) is shown to be doubly spurious by their support for two members of the tiny, Stalinist Student Broad Left group being elected to the committee.
SBL only weakly oppose the review, failed to vote against the entire document on the NUS executive, and in the case of NUS Black Students’ Officer Ruqayyah Collector, who was a member of the Review board, failed to raise the alarm while it was being produced (a charge she notably failed to answer at the meeting). Do the SWP think them worth having on board because they too support the position of a purely defensive campaign, and because they will be a reliable ally against ENS, if not against the NUS right-wing? And wasn’t the exclusion of socialist opponents motivated purely by sectarian factional vitriol?
Despite repeated attempts by ENS representatives to meet with Rob Owen to discuss a democratic structure for the open meeting (which he had agreed at the ENS gathering on 21 October), Rob cancelled the planned meeting and blocked any discussion until two and half days before, when he sent out an agenda and proposed steering committee slate to ENS convenor Sofie Buckland and the Young Green’s Aled Dilwyn Fisher. The agenda had no ENS speaker in the planning session (later changed at the last minute after we protested) and no process for submitting motions, counter proposals or alternative nominations for the committee.
This lead to a farce towards the end of the meeting, with the SWP chair Alys Elica Zaerin claiming the ENS proposal to adopt our statement was counterposed to, rather than an addition to the SWP’s (bland but mostly acceptable) motion on the activity of the campaign, and that people couldn’t vote for both. After twenty minutes ridiculous wrangling over the order of voting and which proposals constituted amendments, the SWP successfully defeated both our amendments - for the steering committee to draft a motion agreeable to all rather than accepting the outdated and politically lacking one from “Respect” (ie the SWP), and for the ENS statement to be a political basis for the campaign.
Of course, it is not unreasonable for the majority of meeting to vote as they see fit; it is their procedural methods that we object to.
Perhaps worst of all was the process of elections for the committee, in which additions to Rob’s “take it or leave it” slate of ten had to gain a majority of the whole room to get elected - which is how the SWP were easily able to exclude Communist Students and Socialist Students, especially after five extra SWP members turned up right at the end of meeting purely in order to vote. Meanwhile ENS and other comrades who very politely asked SBL member Ruqayyah Collector to confirm her political affiliation when standing for the committee were accused of witch-hunting (!); we hope this isn’t an indication that the campaign will be closed to political honesty and debate.
ENS welcomes the launch of the campaign, and will continue to work within it, pushing positive demands as well as opposing the review. We raise these criticisms in the spirit of political openness, not as a sectarian attack, and we hope SWP comrades will respond. Meanwhile we argued for and won open steering meetings, where anyone can attend, speak and put proposals (though only the elected committee will vote), and hope that currents on the NUS left who were excluded from the committee will attend these meetings and continue to work within the campaign.
