NU-Waste?

I recently returned from the 3-day National Union of Students (NUS) annual conference at Blackpool's Winter Gardens. Elections for these were supposed to be by cross-campus ballot last October/November, at the time of the referendum on the Guild constitution, but only myself and Mustafa, the sabbatical Diversity & Development Officer stood for the five places available so we were duly elected without a contest.

Conference began on Tuesday afternoon and ended on Thursday afternoon, and in the evenings stretched until 11pm. Agenda items included the dull but important stuff on constitutional ratificationand change, how conference works and the various formal deadlines, committees and terms of reference. There were also elections for the NUS sabbatical team, and the 'block of 12' - a part-time team of twelve students who serve as an executive committee for the NUS. The finance report committee included the headline figure that NUS is £1.1 million pounds in debt! How an organization can be so badly and chronically mis-budgeted I don't know.

The interesting stuff, and what took up the biggest chunk of time were the policy motions. The first set were those to do with education - funding, the call for 'free education', international students services and life, assessment and achivement methods. The second were those on welfare issues, where there was a big kerfuffle around on a motion on antiracism, which found its way into debate around the right to wear a veil for Muslim women, and a definition of anti-Semitism.

The third set of motions, around the tagline of 'strong and active unions', focused first on a governance review that the NUS is conducting into how its democratic structures work and could be reviewed. A motion on opening the door to external trustees for how individual unions are governed was passed, as was one approving the NUS Extra card rollout, although there was an amendment passed to it to the effect that discounts that have been traditionally available on the regular NUS card should not be transferred to the £10 NUS Extra card. The NUS Extra benefits apply little to life in Aberystwyth so it is something that the Guild hasn't really pushed much this year, although the income earned covered much of the costs to send 70+ students to London for the Admission:Impossible fees and funding demonstration in London last October. Unfortunately motions to approve a mature students' and international students' officer for the NUS did not get debate time.

So with all this, and constantly pushing back the schedule, there was all of fifteen minutes to debate a dozen motions in the 'society and citizenship' zone - climate change, international development, Darfur and the Iraq war. Only one motion, with one non-contentious amendment was eventually passed as conference time squeezed to a close, on climate change, to the effect of promoting the Stop Climate Chaos coalition (see the links on the sidebar) and to move NUS towards publishing its environmental impacts. I (woo hoo) delivered the 30-sec summation for this motion - the last substantive speech of conference 2007 (and, might I add, the only member of our delegation to speak on conference floor).

Much of what stood out in conference for me was the big political split between Labour-affiliated students and student members of Respect (in the George Galloway sense), who were constantly at each other in just about every debate possible. Much of this furore was over tactics, with the Respect students advocating campus occupations and activist speaker tours, while the Labour students saying that big demonstrations were not the way to go, which struck me as a bit odd given their role in organizing the October national demonstration. I was also continually frustrated by the lack of genuinely substantive debate - most speeches consisted of 'this motion will change our lives, it stands for democracy and accountability and advocates the kind of thing that we all want to see' with barely any mention of HOW the motion was going to achieve those aims.

In the specific context of my interests and the specialized knowledge that I bring , it was disappointing for the lack of discussion and prominence of green issues but if anything, this has reinforced my determination to get something out of the NUS for next year. The NUS has been virtually silent on climate change, is not affiliated to the Stop Climate Chaos coalition, and has done barely, if any, work on greening its and university operations - working with the Carbon Trust or the Environmental Association of Universities and Colleges or People and Planet, the lead organisations on the issue. Towards the end of conference a dozen delegates brought sackfuls of paper waste (from all the documents and leaflets that had been shoved in our hands throughout conference) that had been strewn across conference floor and dumped them in front of the National Executive Committee - only to be shut down by the NEC and the chair and prevented from expressing their reasons and rationale for their protest.

But at the end of the day the NUS reaches into the vast majority of universities and FE colleges across the country and provides a base with which to change environmental attitudes and behaviour and that is something that I cannot ignore, even if conference was not the most inspiring event.