National Union of Students (UK) to consider huge constitutional changes

The National Union of Students of the United Kingdom, one of the world's largest national student organisations, will be holding an Extraordinary Conference on December 4, 2007 to vote on a motion to radically amend the group's constitution.

The process that led to this special meeting started when NUS Annual Conference voted to conduct a wide-ranging Governance Review. The Review was conducted by a panel that included both NUS executives and external staff, including a top staffer from NCVO (National Council for Voluntary Organisations). A Green Paper [PDF] was produced and consultation was invited from everyone involved in NUS. The panel received feedback from hundreds of students' union executives, staff, and subsidiary bodies, and held 12 consultation events across the country. This eventually led to the production of an 86-page White Paper [PDF].

The White Paper put forward a wide variety of recommendations, often drawing on existing work in the wider voluntary sector on 'Good Governance' (the Institute on Governance being the best Canadian example of this). It recommended concepts such as developing formal links with national student organisations that are not students' unions, per se*, and incorporating the organization (as NUS is currently unincorporated). All in all, very interesting ideas.

The most radical recommendation in the Report is the proposal to develop a bi-cameral governance structure. Currently, while the Annual Conference is the sovereign policy-making body of NUS, day-to-day decision-making lies in the hands of the National Executive Committee, an entirely elected body. The White Report recommends that this be split into two distinct bodies:

• a Senate, which would be the political leadership body of the organisation, and
• a Board of Trustees, which would have control over the finances of the organisations, and be responsible for hiring and controlling the staff

Furthermore, the White Paper recommends that a minority of the members of the Board of Trustees should be non-student professionals appointed for their expertise in legal matters, finances, human resources, etc., just like the Board of Directors of a corporation.

In any event, the recommendations of the White Paper were overwhelmingly approved by the National Executive Committee, and the Facebook group established to rally support for the Extraordinary Conference shows that most National Executive Committee members and local students' union officers are supportive of the reforms.

However, there is considerable opposition to these reforms from the student far-left, who believe that these reforms are anti-democratic and that they will only lead to the further corporatization of NUS. Education Not for Sale (ENS), a far-left student organisation loosely affiliated with the Trotskyist group Alliance for Workers Liberty, has launched a "Campaign for NUS Democracy" in an attempt to derail the proposed constitutional amendments. This campaign included a conference attended by 50 student activists and a campaign website. The campaign is not completely united however; ENS noted that Student RESPECT activists at the campaign launch conference voted down nominations from Communist Students and Socialist Students to the steering committee of the ad-hoc coalition to stop the governance reforms. (Communist Students has also put a statement on their website on the "Fight for NUS democracy," and Socialist Students has also released an official policy statement.)

P.S.: Have a look at this interesting tidbit from a Conservative student who attended the last NUS Conference. Amazingly enough, NUS National President Gemma Tumelty actually said (as part of her opening speech, arguing the need for the governance review) that "NUS has failed"!

* Canadian examples of these would include the Canadian Federation of Medical Students, the Canadian Federation of Engineering Students, and the National Educational Association of Disabled Students.