Business-as-expected for NUS Trustee Board

Posted on September 11, 2009
Filed Under Inside NUS, News

NUS Trustee and ENS supporter Daniel Randall reports on the first meeting of NUS’s Trustee Board (in a strictly personal capacity).

My inclination to write verbose, pontificating reports about the internal politics of the National Union of Students is very much a thing of the past, so I’ll keep all of the following as succinct and blunt as possible. Nothing that took place at the first formal meeting of NUS’s newly created Trustee Board did anything to shake my conviction that the very existence of the Board is an affront to the notion of union democracy and that its creation is part of the much advanced (and, in all likelihood, irreversible) process of transforming NUS from something that at least resembled a union into something like an amalgam of a commercial service provider and a charitable lobbying group.

The meeting didn’t discuss anything especially controversial (not, at least, in the sense of anything that one would now not expect from a post-Governance Review NUS), but almost every item of business (the approval of budgets, discussion of NUS’s finances, discussion of the emphasis to be placed on products and services like NUS Extra) threw into very sharp relief the inherent and irreconcilable contradiction at the heart of the Trustee Board model; it exist, notionally, to deal with “non-political” matters like finances and organisational infrastructure. But, as everyone who’s ever been involved with a union or union-type organisation knows, there are few matters that are more political. The Trustee Board was sold to NUS members on the basis that it would be a body of individuals equipped with particular expertise and oversee/scrutinise decisions made through the existing politico-democratic channels of the union to make sure they were financially and legally sound; but now we are told that the Board is “not just for rubber stamping” and that we’re expected to “give a steer” on issues like “corporate governance.” As those of us who opposed the creation of the Board (and the anti-democratic constitution of which its creation was a part) predicted from day one, it appears that the Board is to have rather a significant and potentially decisive role in how NUS is going to be organised and run.

And how is NUS going to be organised and run? The meeting was dominated by discussion of new “corporate governance” models for the union, whereby the Senior Management Team is proposing a radical restructuring of NUS organisation and its relationship with bodies such as NUSSL (NUS Services Ltd., currently NUS’s commercial buying consortium) and AMSU (the professional association for managerial staff in Students Unions). The proposal is effectively for these two bodies (NUSSL and AMSU) to merge to create a large commercial/charitable entity. One given reason for this is that this would give NUS access to income streams its current lack of charitable status denies it. Another is the fear that a future Tory government will go on the attack against NUS on the basis that SUs (which are charities) paying affiliation fees to NUS (which isn’t) is technically illegal. Having SUs pay their fees to this new body would avoid this problem, and the model cited is the National Council for Voluntary Organisations’s relationship with its member bodies. (A lot of this stuff is already semi-public, and the particularly keen amongst you can read some of the political background in NUS CEO Matt Hyde’s speech to AMSU’s 2009 conference - http://www.amsu.net/pageassets/events/conference09/AMSU-Speech-2009.doc.)

From a strictly commercial/business point of view there’s no doubt that this proposal make a certain sort of sense; it would undoubtedly contribute significantly to a drastic improvement in NUS’s historically woeful finances. But from a political point of view - and particularly from the point of view of politics which see NUS as something more than a commercial service provider or a charity - the proposals are extremely worrying. The clear potential result (arguably the inevitable result, in fact) is that rather than being a union with a commercial arm, NUS would become a large, well-funded commercial charity with a small, under-resourced political/campaigning arm. Some of us have argued that this model has in fact been the desired outcome of the entire reform process up to this point.

I won’t be able to do anything to effectively fight or resist these proposals from the Trustee Board (the makeup of which guarantees an inbuilt predilection for this sort of approach); the best I can hope to do is make people aware of them. If they are to be fought, they will be fought through what remains of NUS’s democratic structures and, where those structures prevent such a fight, they will be fought be SUs with a different vision of what the student movement is for and how it should be run organising independently of NUS.