By Sofie Buckland, National Union of Students Executive Committee (pc)
On the announcement of Brown's effective coronation as the new Prime Minister, the NUS leadership immediately released a set of five demands for students upon the new government. All worthy in themselves, these were: free prescriptions (shouldn’t everyone get these anyway?); concessionary bus travel; to keep interest on student loans pegged to inflation (we’d rather have grants); to extend entitlement to free level 3 qualifications for all; and to enact an equal minimum wage (at a level we can live on?).
Even the least political amongst the student movement were left aghast at NUS once again missing the elephant in the room — free education.
Of course, the bureacrats’ responses to this criticism were simply: “we always go on about it, no one takes us seriously”. The logic is that if they ask Brown nicely for reasonable things, they might win something (showing right-wing anti-NUS sabbatical officers that NUS isn’t a bunch of raving lefties). When the National Union of Students fails to stand up for even its own, weakly worded, free education policy, there is, more starkly than ever, something very rotten in the leadership of our movement.
Firstly, the high-profile press release was exactly that, not a private memo to the Brown government — press coverage meant NUS had the opportunity to reach far more students than government ministers with their propaganda. But once again the NUS leadership was more interested in sucking up to power in the vain hope of reforms, than it was in educating a new layer of activists and drawing them in to the fight for free education. Their vision of change is from the top down.
As we saw with the recent Further Education Bill, in which one friendly clause led NUS to lobby to pass a bill 99% concerned with privatising FE, doing deals in back rooms of Parliament only works when the government are willing to concede, or want to shut us up.
Secondly, it yet again highlights the unwillingness of the Blairites to fight — after 2004’s defeat on top-up fees, NUS pretends that militant campaigning has been tried, failed, and must be replaced by more “reasonable” tactics. Not only ahistorical (remember the last time the student movement took to the streets in any numbers, with coherent political leadership?) but conciliatory to the right-wing of NUS who want to see no political campaigning at all, this view was born out at NUS Conference 2007 — we passed text claiming “the current NUS policy to fight for Free Education makes our National Union seem out of date, unreasonable, unrealistic and renders our campaigns ineffective.”
NUS’s policy in favour of free education is now paper-thin, and with the unwillingness of the leadership to argue for it at all, almost certainly soon to be overturned.
Thirdly, and perhaps with deeper implications for the structure of NUS, the National Executive Committee (NEC) weren’t consulted at all during the formulation of the demands. The Senior Management Team (SMT), consisting of six full-time members of the NEC, plus three managerial staff, claim to have culled the demands from conference policy. As conference passed policy on a huge range of topics including solidarity with students and workers in Iran, ultra vires law and the environment, it’s patently not true that no political control was exercised. NEC meetings have increasingly become opportunities for us to rubber-stamp decisions pre-made by the SMT — after gutting democracy at a grassroots level, it seems the next stage is to cut the elected Executive out of all but the most trivial of decisions.
It’s clearer than ever that we need a real, grassroots fightback against NUS’s pathetically docile leadership — if we don’t stand up for free education now, we’ll be letting those who label it “unrealistic” and “unreasonable” win. Education Not for Sale refused to settle for last year’s apolitical national demo, staging our own week of action including an occupation at Cambridge Uni, actions at Sussex, York, Essex and Sheffield, and a “tax the rich” intervention at the NUS demonstration. We continue to argue for radical politics amongst students, and we’ve come up with our own demands.
How about asking Gordon Brown for: free, universal, high-quality education at every level, funded by taxing the rich; a living, non-means-tested grant for all students in FE and HE; a minimum wage you can actually live on, with no exemptions for age (try £8.50/hour, at the very least); an end to privatisation of education and campus services — students and workers can organise their own campuses; a block grant for every students’ union — a students’ union in every school, college and university.
If you’d like to get involved in the real, active student movement, or have your own ideas for demands, email info@free-education.org.uk, visit www.free-education.org.uk or phone 07815 490 837.
