Ben Bawerk reports on the conference of the Education Activist Network

On Sunday November 1 around 400 students and lecturers (mainly the former) filled King’s College Strand campus to attend the Education Activist Network conference. EAN is the latest ‘broad front’ group of the Socialist Workers Party in the student movement following the short-lived experience of Another Education Is Possible and, before that, Student Respect.

The event was backed by the National Union of Students and a number of individual student unions. With students bussed in from around the country, the turnout was very encouraging, as was the fact that this conference could bring together the student left as a whole. The student movement suffers from the very same problems as its ‘adult’ organisations: sectarianism, a narrow and uninspiring vision and a near-criminal duplication of activist effort.

We now have five student ‘broad front’ campaigns with almost identical politics, activism and focus. The only thing that really distinguishes them from one another is the particular group or set of groups pulling the wires behind the scenes: EAN (SWP); Youth Fight for Jobs (Socialist Party in England and Wales); National Coalition Against Fees and Cuts (Workers Power and the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty), Progressive Students (Socialist Action) and the Coalition of Resistance (Counterfire).

Encouragingly, all the above groups were present, which allowed the possibility of a proper and frank discussion about how to, as a first step, get these campaigns together – even on the woefully poor politics they currently espouse. Yet a cursory glance at the timetable made clear that the SWP wished to preserve its sect interests, as opposed to that of the movement. As with previous such student ‘conferences’, we saw keynote speeches from ‘big name’ MPs, trade unionists, left academics and NUS officers. Then we were split up into ‘workshops’ before finally coming together again for an incredibly pinched session on the network’s actual politics and leadership.

The current rightward trend of the SWP is obvious from a quick look at EAN’s ‘Defend Education’ motion passed at the conference. It does not contain any demand for free education or grants set at a level for students to live decent lives. This reflects the fact that the SWP is currently doing ‘united front work’ with Labour Students and the NUS bureaucracy (ie, letting these forces write its programme). Now is the “wrong time” to argue for free education, apparently. In justifying the omission of such demands and opposition to the Communist Students motion calling for an open fight for socialism, one SWP activist even invoked the words of John Rees, the recently decamped SWP leader: “It’s not about what we in this room think, but the millions out there.” Yes, comrade, that approached really worked out well in Respect, didn’t it? The SWP want “the broadest possible unity” in the fight against “Tory cuts” – disappointed Lib Dem voters, Labourites and so on. This means pretending to have their politics – at least until they are behind closed doors or in SWP meetings …

A combination of this opportunism and sectarianism saw a farcical final session. In response to amendments from the NCAFC and the Coalition of Resistance regarding a merger of the existing campaigns, and different amendments from Communist Students and Workers Power talking about the need to convene an open, democratic conference in the new year, the SWP put forward its own spoiler amendment to the motion.

Desperate to justify not taking unity seriously, leading SWP students and lecturers alike insisted that what we need is a “network” open to as many forces as possible, that is. According to SWPer Sean Vernell, “It’s not about uniting the left – we need to get that idea out of our heads.”

It goes without saying that CS amendments on the need to unite around Marxist politics, to fight for free education and a living grant (at least £300 per week) and to combat the ideology of the capitalist cuts with our own socialist alternative were soundly defeated. However, an amendment from Simon Hardy of Workers Power committing EAN to supporting the “free education bloc” at the NUS/UCU demonstration on November 10 was passed. We will see whether the SWP actually bother with this though. Also encouraging was the fact that many of the comrades present from NCAFC voted for our amendment. The meeting finished with a very poor political statement and the continuation of a situation where the student left has competing campaigns all essentially singing from the same hymn sheet. The SWP are fully in control: all of ‘their people’ were elected onto the new steering committee, although with no open count and no publishing of the actual votes each candidate received, we cannot tell how some of the far-left candidates, like CS’s Callum Williamson, actually fared at all.

At the end leading SWP student Mark Bergfeld got very excited about “bringing France to Britain” and doing what they did in 1968. Either from the need to cover for the narrowness of the EAN statement, or simply through confusion, he then talked about the need for a “vision of an alternative education and society” – just what the CS amendment (admittedly somewhat more specifically) that he and his comrades voted down minutes earlier had proposed.