No to the Governance Review! For grass-roots reform of NUS, no to a second Extraordinary Conference!
Posted on November 12, 2008
Filed Under ENS Statements, Inside NUS, News
Education Not for Sale’s leaflet to the NUS Extraordinary Conference (Wednesday 12 2008).
RUN, DELEGATES: YOUR LEADERSHIP IS BEHIND YOU!
Fight for the future of NUS: vote against the new constitution.
After having its first new constitution, the result of a thoroughly undemocratic “Governance Review”, fail to achieve the two-thirds majority required for ratification at the 2008 Annual Conference, the NUS leadership is back for another go. Although they will tell you that the new proposals have “taken criticisms onboard”, there is no qualatative difference between the constitution you are being asked to vote for today and the one rejected in April 2008. This constitution, if passed, would represent the final nail in the coffin of NUS as anything like a fighting, democratic union – or even as an organisation with the potential to become a fighting, democratic union. Passing this constitution will mean the end of democracy in the official national student movement.
A few reasons why you should vote against the constitution:
ZONE CONFERENCES
Under the pretext of opening up National Conference and creating specific spaces for “political” debate, the new constitution will create seperate “Zone Conferences” for each of NUS’s four policy “zones.” However, these conferences will not have any formal policy making power and each Constituent Member union of NUS will only be allowed to send one delegate to each of them (they can send more if they want; but only if they can afford it…) In effect, this means sweeping discussion of some of the most contentious political issues facing the union under the proverbial carpet, into undemocratic conferences that have no power to decide anything anyway!
THE NEW LOOK NEC
The current leadership are pushing their constitution hard on the basis that the proposed “Block of 15” will be a more democratic and active body than the existing “Block of 12”. Whatever problems exist with the Block (and there are plenty), it is at least a minimal guarantor of political and geographical diversity on the existing NEC. Replacing it with a Block of 15, whose members would be entitled to even less benefits than the meagre sums the Block of 12 receive, would be a recipe for less activism, not more. Moreover, the new constitution wants the NEC to meet less than once every two months (5 times a year). That doesn’t bode well for the NEC’s ability to keep up with political debate in the movement, or to be accountable to its membership.
THE BOARD OF TRUSTEES
This one’s a real beauty. The new constitution would establish a ‘Board of Trustees’, which would have responsibility for “financial” and “legal” matters. It would have the power to overrule decisions that the NEC (and supposedly autonomous liberation campaigns) made on financial and legal grounds and, as if this in itself wasn’t bad enough, the Board will be an obscenely undemocratic body. Four of its members would be from outside the student movement, and NUS President Wes Streeting informs us that they’ll probably include “people with HR or legal backgrounds, and maybe a former trade union general secretary”; in other words, professional bureaucrats and managers. Apparently we need this because, without such people, students aren’t capable of running a big organisation like NUS with a large financial turnover – but as activists from a whole host of SUs up and down the country will tell you, external Trustees with power over the union’s finances invariably leads to attacks on democracy and the undermining of ordinary SU members from meaningfulyl controlling the running of their union.
WHAT KIND OF UNION DO YOU WANT?
Fundmentally, this debate is about what a union should be and who it should be run by. The new constitution is based on a model of “unionism” in which the NUS looks far more like a charity, an NGO or a lobbying group than a fighting union. How many ordinary members of your SU know what’s in the new constitution, or even that this Extraordinary Conference is taking place? Passing this constitution will cement, potentially irreversably, the complete disengement of NUS and its structures from the mass of NUS members. Following the government’s slashing of the already risible levels of student grants, and in the run-up to the 2009 review that could see the £3,000 cap on top-up fees raised or scrapped altogether, we need a militant organisation more than ever. An undemocratic lobby group won’t get the goods; we need NUS to be a weapon in our hands that we can use to take on university bosses and the government. To have any chance of winning that kind of organisation, we need to not only mobilise against the new constitution but go on the offensive for a democratic revolution within NUS to recreate it as a mass, rank-and-file organisation run from below by its members, for its members. Defeating the new constitution today will be a start, but the real battles will take place in grassroots activist campaigns across the country. So – vote against the new constitution today, and then go back to your campuses and prepare to fight!
FOR MORE INFO ON ANTI-CAPITALIST ACTIVISM WITHIN THE STUDENT MOVEMENT, VISIT WWW.FREE-EDUCATION.ORG.UK OR EMAIL EDUCATION.NOT.FOR.SALE@GMAIL.COM.
