Though Cowards Flinch

The article I wrote earlier critiquing some approaches to NUS reform has recieved a reply from one of the texts it linked to: from Quaequam blog. You have to scroll down to the end of the article to read the reply as it has been pencilled in as an edit to the main body of text. Apart from some odd homophony, I like it; I’m described as “an anti-NOLSie Leninist who happens to be a card carrying Labour Party member.” Well, you’ve gotta love that right?

Quaequam’s reply (for I do not know the chap’s real name) centres around a discussion of what democracy is. He complains that all too often, the left are concerned only with votes. According to Quaequam, the general consensus in the NUS left is that participation in the democratic institutions is all that matters and everything else can go hang. I wonder if Quaequam actually hangs out with any of the people this blog would call left?

Needless to say I am not part of the purported general consensus among the NUS left. Of course democracy goes beyond just having votes – and I don’t think even the student hacks are that narrow minded. They may be secretly glad that they can walk into paid sabbatical positions in uncontested elections, but give the shit-bag careerists their due, they do occasionally try to consider ways of making student politics relevant.

I’m a student hack, by some reckonings. Spread over three universities, I’ve held about eight different positions at class level, faculty level, college level and university SU level. Apparently being elected doesn’t qualify me to represent students. In a somewhat holier-than-thou moment, Quaequam makes clear that engaging with clubs and societies, “the lifeblood of student unions,” is a more worthy pursuit than student politics.

Well, I have bad news for Quaequam on that score. I was a keen shot at CounterStrike in the QUB Dragonslayers Club and I was Vice President of the QUB Model UN Club. At Oxford, I was a keen member of the OU Secular Society, famed for my jokes and for getting outrageously drunk (as we paddies are expected to do). In fact, I usually attended SecSoc gatherings rather than go to Labour Club meets when the two conflicted.

If that list doesn’t make me a confirmed geek I don’t know what will. Anyway, I think my point here is that whatever the general consensus of the NUS left (whichever groups come under that umbrella!) I don’t conform to it. I have always been interested in getting clubs and societies to take an interest in their student unions. What I think this does show, however is Quaequam’s ignorance as to the diversity of set ups in SUs across the UK.

At Oxford, Clubs and Societies have their own committee in OUSU. At QUB, they had a Sabbatical Officer (a very effective one too, when I was there). At different universities, the students unions each have various sabbatical officers, part-time officers and committees set up to cater to the entire student body, however they self define. Certainly student unions and the people involved with them are not solely concerned with engaging with political hacks.

Many people find the overtly political nature of SUs off-putting; indeed at Oxford, during the Michaelmas 2007 elections, one chap ran on a slate demanding that OUSU be abolished! Does the hackery of Labour Students and their various Conservative and Liberal hack friends turn people off SUs? Absolutely. Does that mean all of us are merely interested in networking with our hack colleagues? Far from it. Ask the Sabs I was closest to last year at OUSU – Helen Bagshaw and Jamie Frew. They’ll tell you what regard I have for political hacks.

While this clearly establishes my own credentials in regard to hackery, it doesn’t answer the question as to what democracy is. That onus shouldn’t be mine however. If, as Quaequam asserts, in order to be democratic, one has to be engaged much more regularly with the “lifeblood of Student Unions” such as clubs and societies, I’d be interested to know what he or she regards as democracy. I’ve already outlined the myriad ways in which the institutions are set up to engage with just those things.

Some of the fault for the decline of the organic connection between Student Unions and the NUS belongs with the actual left, though not entirely. From the sects to the genuine Labour left, the very fact that we’re constantly fighting a rear-guard action means a lot of our time is spent in internecine feuds with other student politicians. Yet to give up on those fights would mean surrendering NUS and our SUs for the present. It would be unconscionable to say that left activists should spend more of their time being social and non-political when it means risking what little democratic accountability remains in the NUS.

So, in all seriousness Quaequam, what would you suggest? You openly acknowledge that you aren’t interested in re-democratising the NUS, and you assert that the reason is that most NUS leftists see democracy as synonymous with election. What is your alternative? Do you not, perhaps, acknowledge, that this synonymity is a result of the atrophy of interest in Student Unions as collective institutions of representation?

That atrophy cannot merely be ascribed to the anti-democratic cliques which networking amongst the NUS elite create, nor can it merely be ascribed to the collapse of student activism and the ‘postmodern’ decline of left-right paradigms. The two exist (not the postmodern rubbish, the other bit) in a dialectical relationship, feeding off each other. I’ve already mentioned that, within the NUS, I think breaking it is nigh on impossible.

Potentially, the Left would be better recalibrating itself to think about the future of national student representation, building a grassroots movement to establish a new NUS., one in which participation is seen as relevant to the lives of modern students. I’m sure many on the left will denounce me for my ‘infantile disorder’ but sometimes one has to look facts in the face. It doesn’t mean we should give up on the current NUS; holding on to that national platform for as long as possible, before it languishes into NOLS obscurantism, is a must. Anyway, I have rambled on sufficiently. Over to you Quaequam.