Anyway, I don’t dispute your assessment of student politics, you’re absolutely right in many regards. I bridled at a few of your comments, which seemed needlessly sectarian. Though, in fairness, you are a Lib-Dem.

You’re right about engaging students; where I was poking sticks was that you didn’t really engage with the deeper issues surrounding exactly that problem. But if you’re not interested, so be it. We all move on – no doubt in five years I’ll not give a toss about the NUS either.

Do I hang out with lefty student hacks? Lord, no. I’m in my thirties; what kind of a nonce do you take me for? Nor do I claim any advanced knowledge about student politics today, other than that it looks remarkably similar to student politics 10 years ago – i.e. crammed with self-serving egotists.

My main argument on my own blog, which you carefully don’t refute, is that the student reputation in NUS does not even vaguely resemble the political views of the student population, and that that is the main problem with democracy in NUS. I’m not opposed to any current moves to so-called “democratise” NUS, not least of all because I don’t have the faintest idea of what they are, but you could have the world’s most democratic conference and the world’s most NEC and you still wouldn’t be democratic if only the smallest proportion of students actually bothered to engage with it.

That may not interest you. To be quite honest, having moved on a long time ago, it doesn’t really interest me either (this being the only blog post I’ve written about NUS and likely to be the only one I write for another decade). But I do continue to insist that for NUS to matter, that is the problem it must crack.

When I was a student, the only thing NUS offered the main student population was cheap beer. Has this really changed so much? At least Caesar offered bread and circuses.