NUS Trustee Board: whose “team”?

Posted on April 23, 2010
Filed Under Inside NUS, News

Yes, it’s another controversial Trustee Board report from Daniel “shouldn’t he have moved on from NUS by now?” Randall, raising the red banner of revolutionary socialism on a committee he doesn’t think should exist in a union he doesn’t really believe is a union any more and which hardly anyone pays any attention to anyway. I can feel the foundations of capitalism shaking: can you?

Going to Trustee Board meetings is becoming an increasingly surreal experience for me. When I was on the NUS NEC, no matter how frustrated I got with where things were going politically I always felt that, on some level, NUS was an organisation that I had some kind of residual connection and affinity with. I recognised it as a union; sure, a bureaucratic one with political positions I disagreed with, but recognisably a union. I know things have changed a lot in those four or five years. I knew being the Trustee Board was always going to feel very different from being on the political leadership committee of the NUS. But despite everything I’m not sure I was prepared for quite how alien it would feel. It’s exactly like what I imagine sitting on the board of a big company is like.

Where else would you get a report on a new project, jointly funded by HEFCE (that’s the government-run Higher Education Funding Council for England, by the way – you know, the people driving through all those cuts we’re fighting against…) and another organisation (of whom more later) to develop a “student ambassadors” scheme around the 2012 Olympics? Should a union be taking money - even without ostensible strings attached - off the very government body driving through cuts that directly negatively impact on its own members?

Should a union be actively promoting Trustee Board-based models of governance, as someone (I actually forget who) suggested at the meeting? They argued that NUS should be equipping existing student trustees who sit on the boards of affiliated SUs to go on to be trustees elsewhere in the “charity sector” once they leave the student movement; an argument that is predicated entirely on abandoning any sort of conception of NUS as a union (rather than a charity or NGO-type organisation) altogether.

(Oh, and by the way, that other organisation who, along with HEFCE, the NUS is taking money off to fund its “student ambassadors” scheme? It’s Coca-Cola. They’ll be funding the programme to the tune of £300,000. The funding is not linked to NUS’s contract with Coke through NUSSL but apparently it is all part of NUS’s strategy of ongoing “constructive engagement” with Coke, which is basically about asking Coke bosses to be a bit nicer through events like this one where NUS officers share platforms with Coca-Cola’s “Global Director of Labour Relations”. I don’t quite see how NUS taking £300,000 from Coke - or whatever portion of that total Coke is contributing - to run a volunteering scheme around the London Olympics is going to do much to help support the struggles of Coke workers or local community activists over whose rights Coke has consistently trampled, but then again I’m not a businessman so maybe I’m missing something.)

Another jaw-dropping moment came when, in a report from the Trustee Board’s Audit, Risk and Remuneration sub-committee we learnt that ARR had discussed the recent episode at Durham University. For anyone not in the know about this, the Durham Union Society (the posh debating club with more famous equivalents at Oxford and Cambridge) invited fascists to speak at one of its meetings. NUS’s Black Students Officer Bell Addy and one of the LGBT officers Daf Adley began campaigning around this, and while their campaigning was independent of NUS it was clearly in defence of the “no platform” policies that both their own campaigns and NUS nationally hold. Durham was outraged and initiated an affiliation referendum and Bell was subsequently censured at this month’s national conference (Daf escape censure by a few votes). That censure was disgraceful, and while ARR has not taken a position on the matter the fact that it considers that issue worthy of discussion as a “risk” is very worrying indeed. The “risk register” by which it assesses what does and does not constitute a risk to NUS’s finance, legal integrity or “reputation” is totally ambiguous; as I said when the “register” was discussed on the Board, “some liberation campaigns have radically different policy to the union nationally on education funding. Their campaigning around this issue, and its “contradiction” with the union’s national policy, could lead the organisation into all sorts of “reputational” and even legal hot-water. Would the Board step in? Wouldn’t that represent a significant affront not only to the autonomy of the liberation campaigns but to the very idea of union democracy?” I was told at the time that the Board’s powers of veto would only be used “in extreme cases”, and it must be said that ARR has not intervened directly in the Durham case. But what’s to stop it from intervening the next time something like this happens? Who decides what constitutes “an extreme case”? I think this throws the potential for the Trustee Board’s profoundly undemocratic role into extremely sharp relief.

The ‘any other business’ section of the meeting contained only two items – both of which related directly to my conduct as a Trustee. Outgoing NUS president Wes Streeting and NUS CEO Matt Hyde gave me a verbal ticking off for publishing this report, in which I leaked the fact that NUS was planning to appoint a “Group Finance Director” on a five-figure salary. I openly admitted at the time that I was fully aware that leaking this information breached both the Trustee Board’s confidentiality protocol and NUS’s staff protocol; Matt and Wes told me that I’d “let the staff down” by reporting this information before they’d been officially informed.

I will say nothing of the fact that nearly a month passed between the meeting taking place and me publishing my report (surely enough time for NUS to inform its staff about the appointment), but I feel I should comment on and (re)-justify my decision to breach the staff protocol.

I’m aware why the staff protocol exists; it’s to protect people who aren’t part of NUS’s democratic and political life from being drawn into it. It was drawn up in conjunction with the staff trade union and it is, in general, well-intentioned. But it has frequently been used as a political tool to stymie legitimate organisational criticisms of NUS. At NUS conference 2006 (or possibly 2007; they tend to blur into one nowadays), an ENS leaflet that criticised the fact that top NUS managers (unelected and unaccountable, remember) earn extremely high wages was banned by Steering Committee (as was) for “breaching the staff protocol.” At the Trustee Board, Wes announced his intention to seek an official statement of disapproval (effectively a censure) from the NEC for my latest breach (he said that he was only refraining from moving to have me kicked off altogether because he didn’t want to give me the opportunity to present myself as a martyr).

I have no doubt that the NEC will back Wes up but I do not regret what I did. I have absolutely no desire to offend NUS workers but NUS is, on paper at least, still a union and that means the members come first. And I believe that the right of NUS members to know that their union is about to appoint yet another unelected, unaccountable managerial official on a five-figure salary takes precedent over the right of NUS staff to learn about that appointment through “official channels”. If that belief puts me in breach of the staff protocol then so be it.

My fellow student trustee and occasional fellow dissenter Sean Rillo-Raczka joined in the criticism, citing an analogous case where, as a member of the Board of Governors at his college, he’d been a part of confidential discussions about massively increasing international student fees. He’d opposed the proposal at the time, he said, but once it passed he respected the Board’s confidentiality and waited until the information was public before mounting a campaign to reverse it in his capacity as an SU activist. Sorry Sean, but I think you should’ve blown the whistle. Sometimes principles have got to come first.

In the same agenda point, External Trustee Kate Davies raised a complaint about various things I’d written about her (here and here), which have made her “very pissed off” with me (her words). Her specific complaint was that I referred to her as a Tory, which she apparently isn’t. Fair enough – my mistake. For the record I was basing this on information I’d seen elsewhere rather than just making it up for the sake of it. But okay, fine. She’s not a Tory. I apologised for the error and promised to correct it.

But Kate also seemed to object more generally to my criticisms of her role, as a boss at Notting Hill Housing, in an ongoing industrial dispute. For those who don’t know, I have been very public about my belief that people who are straightforwardly part of the boss class and whose workers obviously feel under attack from (95% of them have voted to strike) should not be on any committee of an organisation that considers itself broadly part of the union movement (even if I think the committee in question shouldn’t exist in the first place!). Kate said that I’d breached and damaged bonds of “respect” and “trust” that she felt members of the Trustee Board should have for one another. Hopefully most people who read these reports will appreciate that my criticisms are not motivated by any personal antipathy to Kate Davies any more than my general hostility and opposition to capitalism is motivated by personal antipathy towards individual capitalists. Kate said that if I “wanted to get involved with the strike” I should’ve “picked up the phone” and spoken to her. Well, sorry Kate, but if I thought that making polite phone-calls to the boss was a useful way to support workers in struggle then I wouldn’t have wasted the last eight years of my life one the militant far-left of the labour movement.

Kate also said, “I know you’ve got a certain set of politics; I had similar ones when I was your age. But there comes a point at which you have to move beyond that to do what’s necessary to work as part of the team.” (I should point out that I’m paraphrasing here, but I think that’s a fair reflection of what was said.) I can’t really think of a better way to finish this report than by repeating what I said in the meeting; I wasn’t elected to the Trustee Board to “work as part of the team.” I fundamentally object to and oppose the very existence of “the team”, and its “work” is to carry out a project that will move the National Union of Students in a direction which is irreconcilably different from the one I believe it needs to go in. I made those beliefs clear when I was elected, and I promised to do whatever I could to subvert and disrupt that project from within. As long as I am a member of the Trustee Board I will continue to do that.

So to Wes, Kate, David (Fletcher, the other External Trustee who’s come in for some stick on this site and elsewhere) and any other management-types I’ve “pissed off” during the course of my time on the Trustee Board, I’ll say this: It’s really nothing personal, but at the end of the day we’re just not on the same “team” at all. When it comes down to it – as Kate’s employees (whose dispute I fully support) know, and as I guess David knew when, as registrar of Sheffield University, he initiated court proceedings against myself and other students involved in an occupation in solidarity with the Palestinian people – we’re actually on opposing sides.