NUS Trustee Board: hammering in the final nails…
Posted on December 14, 2009
Filed Under Inside NUS, News
ENS supporter and NUS Trustee Board member Daniel Randall reports on the latest goings-on on what is inarguably the most politically-significant and looked-to committee anywhere in the UK student movement and possibly the world. In a strictly personal capacity. Obviously.
I missed the last Trustee Board meeting through illness (don’t fret, it’s not serious), but if the last couple of have been anything to go by then I won’t have been missing much. As I reported after the very first Board meeting, meetings basically consist of nodding through and “approving” whatever phase the NUS Senior Management Team’s scheme to turn NUS into a commercial charity (with a small campaigning arm) is at.
As meetings sometimes include discussions of commensurate changes and restructurings of NUS infrastructure to go along with the glorious onward march towards the new “corporate governance model” of the future, the Board’s External members - who are, universally, managers and bosses of various kinds from various sectors - are given the opportunity to crow about how ruthless they were when undergoing similar restructurings and with what swift efficiency they allowed the axe to fall. It is a small comfort that the Board has not seen fit to exercise its potential power and exists solely as a rubber-stamp for SMT’s plans. But it is no coincidence (and, indeed, rather a chilling indication of their political perspective) that it is these people - corporate bureaucrats, job-cutting bosses, managers, businesspeople - that the SMT has chosen to give a veener of sham-democratic approval to its schemes. We were told, in the debates that took place before the Board was created, that it would be peopled by education sector trade unionists, NGOists and other such unobjectionable types. The reality is somewhat different but frankly preferable; it can leave NUS members under no illusion as to the real role of the Board and the interests it must inevitably represent.
Papers for the latest meeting include a report proposing the introduction of an NUS Graduate Card - a paid-for benefits and discount card akin to the ill-feted NUS Extra card, which continues to wheeze along in not particularly good financial shape and which the SMT is now, scandalously, considering increasing the price of by £1 or £2. It is probably worth pointing out that this fact was released in the ‘reserved business’ section of the Board’s papers; I am technically in breach of the Board’s confidentiality protocol by telling you this, and could in fact risk expulsion from the Board, but I think that when the Senior Management Team of your national union is considering proposals that could not only further entrench the seemingly unshakeable commercial/service-provision culture in NUS but could also directly hit students in the pocket, your right to know is more important that the exigencies of NUS’s “business secrets”. Suffice it to say that a politically and organisationally healthier NUS would never have established the Extra card scheme in the first place, so considering whether to make it more expensive - or to introduce a Graduate equivalent alongside it - would not even arise. These are discussions which belong firmly to the commercial, business-oriented, anti-political NUS which exists as a “union” only in name.
Arguably the most politically-significant, and depressing, item of business in the Board’s papers was the report on the progress of the new “corporate governance model”. For those who haven’t heard, or those who read my last Trustee Board report but chose to expunge it from their memories, the SMT has taken advantage of the post-Governance Review NUS (gutted of all significant channels of democracy and accountability and effectively walled-off from any kind of membership control or even scrutiny) to put into motion a three-way merger between NUS, NUS Services Ltd. (NUS’s existing commercial trading arm) and AMSU, the professional association representing managerial staff in SUs. The idea is to create a single, conglomerated commercial body with charitable status of which the NUS we now know would become the tiny, shrivelled “campaigning arm”. Sometimes the SMT hides behind legislative excuses for this plan - they claim that changes to the Charities Law may limit or restrict the functioning of student movement bodies not registered with charitable status - but most of the time they are more upfront; times have changed, the landscape is different, political-campaigning-activist student unionism is a thing of the past, NUS must adapt.
The drive to “adapt” in this direction is nothing new; in 2005/6, when I sat on NUS’s National Executive Committee (which exists now in a bowdlerised form as the National Executive Council and with greatly reduced powers and responsibilities), NUS spent £50,000 commissioning a MORI research project about the ways in which SU officers and general managers wished NUS to change. I wrote about it at the time in the following way:
“[So] what’s actually in the document? Kvetching from student offiers and union general managers about how the NUS is stuck in the 60s or 70s and needs to break with the “[19]70s language of collectivism” and generally abandon the “1970s trade union model.” There were also some truly bizarre and depressing statements from people who think NUS is “just like the BBC” and think that it needs to seek corporate sponsorship from Coca-Cola, as well as some patronising garbage about how students today don’t have the “rebellious hormones” of students from the 60s.”
(You can read the rest of the blog from which that quote is taken here.)
Successive NUS leaderships (all of them various shades of New Labour supporters) and the unelected, unaccountable management figures with whom they have maintained a foul, mutually-sustaining symbiosis, have dreamed of effectively abolishing NUS as a campaigning, democratic force and turning it into an organisation that can slot more comfortably into the middle-class, Blair-Brownite, NGOish model of politics they all passionately believe in and in which they hope to secure careers. From the political point of view of this current, it is to current president Wes Streeting’s lasting credit that it is under his stewardship that the dream finally looks like becoming a reality. With mass participation eroded by years of defeat and attacks on democracy and, now, more-or-less prevented entirely by the introduction of the new constitution, what channels can we - that is, those of us who have a vision of a national federation of SUs that acts as a radical, fighting body - possibly hope to use in order to mobilise opposition to the hammering-in of this most final of final nails into the coffin of our existing national union?
My position as an effectively lone dissenting voice on a Board which should not exist anyway is certainly not one such channels. Where such channels do exist in any form - such as the massively limited but still just about extant opportunities for intervention at annual conference - the left should use them. But our priority cannot be fighting a desperate, 300 Spartans-style struggle for the soul of NUS that we cannot hope to win. Our priority must be aiding the develop of the ongoing campaigns on increasing numbers of campuses against cuts and fees, helping them develop an anti-capitalist political logic and doing whatever we can to link up those SUs that support them into a new national coordination that can act independently of NUS to pull together the kind of national fightback we know is necessary but which NUS will not - and, when the new “corporate governance model” comes into place, will not be able to - lead.
Those interested in that work should not concern themselves to greatly with the goings-on on the NUS Trustee Board. They should concern themselves very greatly and immediately with initiatives like the National Convention Against Fees and Cuts on February 6. The NUS Senior Management Team has made clear its vision for the future of the student movement; now we must fight for ours.
