3 Days of Purgatory: NUS Conference 2009

Whilst radicalism in Britain was seeing a revival around the G20 protests, some poor sods on the left drew the short straw and had to make the annual trek up to Blackpool for the NUS Annual Conference.


However, the conference started off with a pleasant surprise for me – it only took us 3 hours from Bangor to get there - it usually takes me that long to get to Manchester if I’m lucky!
The conference reflected the situation that NUS finds itself in at present – the vast majority of the motions were fairly pointless and without substance. Most of the motions with any substance had been proposed by groups and students unions on the left which tried to bring into conference the voice of the energetic movements that had developed. Unsuprisingly, amendments of free education, supporting the gaza occupations, recognising the success of those occupations etc. all got voted down. The only motion that did get passed was an amendment by Sussex against Ultra-vires that saw Wes Streeting speak for it (we believe he was deliberately baiting the Organised Independents).
Conference also featured some of the worst chairing I’ve ever seen with some NEC members blatantly deciding to ignore delegates wishes. We also saw a motion of censure being passed against Hind Hassan and Rob Owen.

The left was noticeably weaker than the last time I had gone to NUS conference. Another Education is Possible (SWP) were a lot smaller than the last time I’d seen them they maybe around 40 delegates. Education Not For Sale were also smaller – with around 10-12 delegates. Our delegation was very small – however, we’d have been around the same size as ENS if we hadn’t sent people down to the G20 protests instead of NUS Conference – our delegation of 5 was holding the ‘fort’.

Another presence at the conference was Communist Students – but it wasn’t Communist Students that’s associated with the CPGB – instead it was the CPB attempting to reclaim the name. Whilst they didn’t have any delegates they did run a stall and put on a fringe meeting which they asked us to speak at about the No2EU campaign. Indeed they were very friendly to us through the whole conference – allowing us to put copies of my election leaflet on their stall.

The CPB fringe meeting was small but very interesting – due to the smallness of it I was able to quiz the guest speaker, a consul from the Venezuelan Ambassy, about crime and criminal justice in Venezuela (post coming shortly!). We also had a brief discussion on how the No2EU election campaign was developing. I also went to two fringe meeting organised by the SWP – the first was a debate between Rob Owen and Wes Streeting which went over most of the same old ground. The second was the SWSS fringe on ‘How Can Palestine Be Free?’ There were two speakers – a SWSS student who talked about Zionism – unfortunately most of his contribution was stuff to do with the guy who came up with it rather than an actual analysis of its development and influence today. The second contribution was that of Michael Lavalatte who spoke about how we can solve the conflict there – a contribution which was good in some ways – stressing the need for socialism and opposing the Hamas tactic of firing rockets into Israel – but was still vague. Unlike the SWP fringe I went to three years ago, this time they allowed a handful of contributions from the floor (although they ignored Dan Randall of ENS who had his hand up first) and another Socialist Students member came into the discussion pointing out the inverse relation of the strength of Zionist ideas to the strength of the working class in relation to Russia and Germany before commenting further on the working class being the force for socialist change in the Middle East, including in Israel. The SWP seemed to have clearly prepared for us to come in on this point as they began attacking the very idea that the Israeli working class could be a force for change saying that the official labour movement is tied to Zionism and excludes Arabs (but that doesn’t stop Israeli workers organising outside that, like we are doing with NUS). The SWSS speaker then also started replying to stuff we’d never said – one memorable point he tried to make was that the Palestinian working class (which we hadn’t mentioned) is very small – he said around 20% of the population (but the working class were only 5% of the population when the Bolsheviks took power in Russia!)

For me, the struggles of students mostly lay outside that conference. But compared to the expected weakness of our intervention we made a good intervention into the conference, making several good speeches (including mine for the block of 15 – I didn’t get elected by the way). We also did a mildly successful stall in Blackpool on the Wednesday lunchtime. But I guess the best moment for the left in the conference was when Dan Randall (ENS) got elected onto the new trustee board with the highest number of first preference votes running on a anti-trustee board platform. (the appointees to the board include the Sheffield Uni vice-chancellor who threatened his own student with court action and a director of Lloyds TSB bank – which says it all about the board). James Haywood (AEP) was elected to the block of 15 and Dan Swain (AEP) was elected to the democratic procedures committee.

A Necessary Hell? NUS Extraordinary Conference

A short interlude from reports back from Socialism 2008 - yes, I was unfortunate enough to get elected to NUS Extraordinary Conference yesterday.
Just for people's information we don't actually have cross campus ballot elections for NUS Conference anyway - we have elections at our Student Union general meetings. For this conference however, we elected delegates at our student senate (last year we didn't have any elections - they just delegated the same people as for National Conference). I managed to get 7 first preference votes, which isn't bad when you consider that other people who were elected got none (they beat RON on second preference). We really should have got someone else to stand but pretty much everyone was off home during reading week.
So I got the 7 o'clock train from Bangor with the rest of the Bangor delegation (all pro-governance review) and got to Wolverhampton and eventually found the conference. Socialist Students nationally didn't have a huge delegation, which was hampered somewhat by our members from Northumbria not being able to come to the conference because their student union couldn't afford it.
Anyway - I eventually got seated and we heard NUS President (and apparently not Labour Students chair), Wes Streeting speak (for the first of many times) saying that the NUS leadership had compromised with this new version of the constitution (yes, on secondary issues though!) and that people needed to vote for the governance review because NUS needs change (yes, NUS needs change, but not the kind of change that Wes is proposing).
And then we got to what was perhaps the most surreal bit - we had NUS Australia President Angus MacFarlane speaking - he didn't seem particularly left wing but what he described had happened in Australia seemed like a vision for NUS UK's future. He described how tuition fees had been brought in 20 or so years ago by the then Labor government in Australia and how the Howard government had increased fees by 25%, and had brought in variable fees for different courses as well as slashing government grants. In 2000 they brought in legislation that allowed universities to charge whatever they liked if they waived entry tests.
The Howard governments also introduced voluntary student unionism in 2005. This made union membership opt-in, banned collections of fees and banned contributions from Universities such as block grants. You'd be suprised to hear that 1/3 of all SU's in Australia collapsed as a result of this. The only bright thing he pointed out was that Labor had abolished some full fee places since it had got back in and that we should all vote against neo-liberalism.
Anyway - after that was lunch and a chance to catch up with some comrades from elsewhere in the country before back into the furnace. What I thought were some good motions from Sussex in particular got voted down and basically their premises trampled on by conference - the motions from Sussex advocated:
1) That the more representative annual conference (with at least 500-650 more delegates present) should have the deciding say on the constitution - basically stopping them calling more extraordinary conferences
2) That we should bring back a properly organised winter conference instead of continually not getting enough stuff passed through annual conference and instead of the ever continuing extraordinary conferences
3) That there should not be external trustees on the board of NUS as they are unnecessary

There were some truly weird moments - like the conference documents containing the word 'udders' instead of 'used' (I reckon whoever typed the document up was having a laugh) or the person from Warwick SU who in the debate on cross-campus votes for NUS delegates argued against it likening this to voting for the Home Secretary or other government figures (well some of them are elected MP's but it's not really such a bad thing going the whole hog either).

There were some good speeches from the no campaign - Lee Vernon's (Sussex SU Finance Officer and Socialist Students) speech (his second) on the Winter Conference motion was really good and I thought Daniel Randall's closing speech against the new constitution was very good too. I thought Rob Owen varied a hell of a lot and most of his weren't so good (there was a really good one at one point though) - but I wasn't impressed with the amount of times people waved his speech to him - if it would have been possible for this conference to have a close vote then this wouldn't be such a good tactic when the NUS leadership is trying to portray the new constitution as being of the students rather than their little baby. Indeed rather than saying we only need a 1/3 surely it would have been better to talk more like Lee Vernon and Daniel Randall did about the need for a campaigning strategy. Of course - it was never going to be close and that was the whole point of rushing the thing through an extraordinary conference at very short notice - to completely shut out as best as possible real ordinary students in favour of what NUS refer to as ordinary students (namely SU sabbatical officers, trustees or people who have been one or the other).
For those who don't already know the NUS leaderhsip got a big majority 614 YES, 142 No and 8 abstentions - hardly suprising. Despite Wes Streeting trying to distance himself from calling another extraordinary conference - I think he wants this as he doesn't want to chance the far more representative annual conference - but its so undemocratic that he doesn't want to associate itself with himself so he can say that 'ordinary students' called for it.

PS. - On the way back I heard some news to do with the SU at Glyndwr Uni in Wrexham is not getting some or all of it's block grant because Glyndwr Uni had lots of money invested in Icelandic banks - not sure how accurate that is, it needs checking, but Universities will feel able to do this with impunity becuase of the toothlessness of many Student Unions.

Scrap This Broken Fees System

A discussion document for Bangor University Socialist Students.

At the beginning of September NUS launched their latest report into higher education funding, entitled ‘Broke and Broken’. Inside it sets out a quite damning critique of the top-up fees system that was created by the 2004 Higher Education Act and of the governments plans to lift the cap they set on top-up fees.

The document starts out by noting that by lifting the cap would raise student debts to unprecedented levels – a student paying £7000 a year in fees and claiming maximum living expenses in London would owe about £37,000 by the time they graduated (and some universities are pushing for the new cap to be higher than that!). They also point out that students would need to be earning over £25,000 to begin paying off just the annual interest of a debt of £25,000 – they note that an Association of Graduate Recruiters survey found that £24,500 was the average starting salary for a graduate position, but the report points out “many graduates do not take jobs designated as ‘graduate’ jobs, so the true average of all post-graduation salaries is likely to lower than this figure.”(pg.6)

Top-up fees were also supposed to widen access to universities, but the report shows that students going to the prestigious Russell Group universities are more likely to be from higher socio-economic groups and have gone to private schools. Furthermore, there is also an inequality in the bursaries that universities can provide to poorer students (another key plank of the 2004 reforms). As the report points out, “institutions at the top end of the market of prestige are able to give large needs-based bursaries to their relatively sparse population of students from low income backgrounds…The low end of the market of prestige has far more students from low income backgrounds, and these institutions cannot afford to provide as much support to individuals.”(pg.4)

The report in conclusion comes out with no clear recommendations, with instead NUS President, Wes Streeting’s introduction to the report saying “our next duty is to produce a rigorous alternative policy, and we will do so in the coming months.”(pg.1) and also uses his introduction to take a swipe at campaigning for free education, arguing “…I know the debate has moved on and we won’t tin by dredging up the old arguments.”(pg1)

In truth, Streeting and the NUS leadership have already made up their minds as to what they want. As Streeting details in the debate between himself and Matt Dobson in the latest issue of the Student Socialist, NUS are arguing for a graduate tax to fund higher education. But such a tax will mean a similar drain on graduate students resources as paying off a student debt, with the added problem that it won’t be written off after 25 years. How will low paid graduates (for example those who go into some public or voluntary sector work) be able to buy a house and afford increased living costs as the coming recession hits? It doesn’t really solve the problem at all.

The Broke and Broken document also makes a big play of the fact that the businesses that benefit from the education students get hardly contribute anything to it, they simply reap the rewards. But a graduate tax proposal doesn’t change any of this, instead, as Socialist Students argue, the cuts in corporation tax should be reversed, tax loopholes should be closed to bring in more revenue and fundamentally the biggest companies in the economy should be taken into public ownership so their wealth can be used for public need rather than private profit.
NUS also has announced that they will be holding local days of action on student debt. About time too! Socialist Students organised the first Campaign to Defeat Fees (CDF) day of action over a year and a half ago and have been calling on NUS to organise action even before then. Whilst we will support NUS’s ‘Students in the Red’ day on November 5th, we will use that and the CDF day of action on the 16th October to call for the NUS to also organise National Action that goes further than the mere lobbying of parliament NUS proposes. Socialist Students will also continue calling for local Students Unions to back the CDF, including at the referendum being held in October at Bangor University.

Bangor University students union fees referendum

From this weeks Socialist. An Article and a letter.

Over the last year Socialist Students and the Campaign to Defeat Fees (CDF) have been tirelessly campaigning for our students union to take a campaigning approach to the question of tuition fees.
April last year saw us hold a small protest to accompany the handing in of a 250+ strong petition calling on the students union to organise a referendum on whether the union should adopt the CDF demands on free education as its own. In the last few weeks the students union have finally got back to us with a proposed date for the referendum - Thursday 16 October, which coincidentally is the same date as the next CDF day of action.
In addition to this we have been informed that the national NUS leadership would like to come down and take part in the referendum. It has even been suggested that they would form the main opposition to our proposals. Although, based on their failure to campaign effectively against fees, we find it unsurprising that the current leadership of the National Union of Students is opposed to the CDF.
Surely the NUS's resources would be better spent on doing something about the ridiculous amount of debt just about every student gets into (of which fees are one part of), rather than using bully-boy tactics against students who don't want to accept the poverty we have to endure.

Letter: New broom needed

Increasing evidence of the growing levels of student debt has evoked an interesting response from Wes Streeting, president of the National Union of Students (NUS). In an NUS survey he describes students as “sleepwalking” into financial crises. But as the official leader of those ‘sleepwalkers’ shouldn’t he be doing something to rouse them?
His answer is to provide more information and advice to students about coping with debt. But students would probably not be in such a predicament if the NUS leadership didn’t keep squandering opportunities to build a mass campaign against fees and for the replacement of loans with a living grant. The Campaign to Defeat Fees was set up because of the failures of those like Streeting in the leadership of NUS. Part of the fight for a free education must be to sweep our student unions and NUS clear of these miserable creatures.