Stay of execution comes to an end: NUS democracy abolished

Posted on January 21, 2009
Filed Under Inside NUS, News

By Daniel Randall, University of Sheffield delegate to Extraordinary Conference (pc).

Yesterday’s NUS Extraordinary Conference finally ended the stay of execution that the left had won for the union’s democracy by pushing back ratification of the new constitution at Annual Conference 2008. The constitution comes into immediate effect, and this March’s Annual Conference will elect members to the new National Executive Council and the Trustee Board. For a report of the first Extraordinary Conference, click here, and for ENS’s criticisms of the original “Green Paper” on Governance that launched the process that culminated yesterday, click here. For ENS’s leaflet to the 12th November Extraordinary Conference, click here.

The conference itself was a deeply depressing affair for activists; having been called in the middle of most university’s exam periods, the delegates were overwhelmingly comprised of full-time officers or SU hacks. The tone of some pro-constitution speeches was sickeningly right-wing, going on the offensive not just against democratic, activist conceptions of union organisation but against principles like free education too.

A caucus of ENS supporters, Socialist Students members and independent activists at lunchtime mainly discussed how to respond if the constitution passed, with activists expressing a range of views. No-one disagreed, though, that it would very much not be “business as usual” in a post-Governance Review NUS.

Unfortunately, many of the prominent anti-constitution speeches were taken by SWPers and others in their periphery, who rather crudely attempted to turn almost every speech into one about Israel’s attack on Gaza. The comrades commitment to activism on this issue is admirable, but the ill-judgment of their approach was epitomised in their decision to disrupt conference by storming the stage to hold a protest about Palestine. This meant that around 30 leftist delegates were not on Conference floor when the final vote was taken, making the opposition look even more minuscule than it was. No count was taken, but the opposition vote couldn’t have been more than 50 people in a conference of around 800.

For the few independent, critically-minded delegates at Extraordinary Conference, who could’ve been won not only to voting ‘no’ on the day but potentially to permanent identification with the activist left in the student movement, the Palestine protest will have made it appear as if the left only cares about international issues rather than the nuts-and-bolts of student movement organisation. While no experienced activist would “prefer” negotiating student movement bureaucracy to direct action against imperialist war, we have to have as comprehensive a programme for how the student movement in the UK might organise as we do for conflicts in the Middle East.

The task for activists in the student movement now is to cohere a critical minority of SUs, activist networks and individuals with the perspective of breaking from NUS on a concerted basis and establishing a new student organising centre. Although NUS right-wingers will obviously paint any such initiative as petulant leftists throwing our toys out of the pram after we “lost” a “democratic” debate, for us the tactical assessment is clear; in a post-Governance Review NUS, individuals and SUs committed to radical, activist politics will have no room to maneuver and no meaningful hope of getting the NUS nationally to adopt those perspectives. We can spend the next period mired bureaucracy and a struggle to reverse these changes - that could necessarily only progress by inches - or we can make a clean break and establish something new.

Already, SUs like Bradford and Sussex are calling affiliation referendums. Individual SUs disaffiliating one-by-one may not take us forward, but if even a small number of unions make a concerted break at roughly the same time, the momentum generated could go a long way to establishing a new organisation. Activists from Sussex have already called a meeting at SOAS in London on Saturday 7th March to discuss the way forward. Click here for details.