At a National Union of Students extraordinary conference yesterday, the NUS leadership got what they have been wanting for some time. They have gutted NUS of the bulk of its already pitifully cramped internal democracy; after the passing of the governance review by a two-thirds majority at a previous extraordinary conference on November 12 2008, this constitutional change has now won the second two-thirds majority it needed to be ratified. These extraordinary conferences are a particularly undemocratic affair.  With the overwhelming majority of students in NUS not even knowing about them, it is easy for the bureaucrats to fill the majority of delegate places themselves. Holding this conference in the middle of the exam period didn’t exactly help grassroots participation either.

The governance review had already been passed once before, at an extraordinary conference on December 4 2007. Rather than calling a further extraordinary conference that year they sought to win its ratification at the, only slightly more democratic, full NUS conference in April 2008. That time around the bureaucrats plans were narrowly thwarted when the left was just able to stop them winning the two-thirds majority they needed. This was only achieved because a number of delegates including those from Communist Students refused to follow undemocratically imposed mandates. However, the bureaucrats – then under the leadership of Gemma Tumelty – had won a simple majority and were bound to return to the offensive as soon as they had licked their wounds. While Communist Students sought to warn and forearm the movement of this, the Socialist Workers Party, and their leading student Rob Owen, instilled complacency amongst students through gloating that the NUS bureaucrats would be “demoralised and reeling.”

Just as disarmingly the SWP never set their sights beyond defending the current state of NUS democracy. In contrast we insist that the NUS has always been a bureaucratic machine acting as a conveyor belt for those wishing to make a ‘career’ in politics and the labour bureaucracy – whether of a ‘left’ or ‘right’ hue. Whilst the left has been able to win some democratic space and influence at times, and it has been correct to try to do so, we must set our sights higher. Crucially, this involves the Marxist left overcoming its narrow, insular outlook and articulating a political alternative that can inspire and cohere the mass of students – the Marxist programme of radical democracy. With this latest victory of the bureaucrats this question has been posed more sharply.