The AWL are pushing for a new student’s union now they can no longer play ball in NUS- but could only get 12 people to a meeting. Ben Lewis reports…

The Alliance for Workers’ Liberty student group, like the organisation more generally, appears to be somewhat at a loose end. Their chauvinistic rightism on the question of Israel and ‘Zionism’ is accompanied by increasingly irrational lurches to the ‘left’ – not least in terms of the debacle around the ‘British jobs for British workers’ – where the group seemed to adopt more positions than many have had hot dinners.

Take the National Union of Students, where the Brownite ‘governance review’ recently passed led the AWL to call a meeting to discuss the future of the NUS. Their statement declares that the review allows for “almost no possibility of serious control from below by its members”.

AWL: Oh dear

So “Student union officers and student activists who are appalled by this stitch-up and oppose NUS’s disastrous trajectory need to discuss the way forward.” Not that the pre-governance-review NUS offered much by way of “serious control from below”, mind – but it did allow small Trotskyist groups to manipulate the bureaucracy and gain this or that position of influence in certain committees or local union structures (the whole history of the AWL’s recruitment amongst students).

Doubtless to underline the new, radical, fresh thinking that the comrades are looking to imbue the student movement with, they invited a “speaker who was involved in the late 80s and early 90s”, who turned out (Quelle surprise!) to be no other than leading AWLer Mark “Israel has a point” Osborn – someone steeled in the AWL’s policy of manoeuvring within the ‘left’ of the NUS bureaucracy over the last 30 years.

Apparently he spoke of the ‘good old days’ in Manchester, but I presume he did not talk about the ‘clerical fascism’ of the impressive Manchester student occupations in solidarity with Gaza … According to one comrade present at the meeting, some AWLers were even bemoaning the fact that the Gaza occupations, whilst showing how students can organise, had in a sense distracted from some of the ‘class struggle’ issues students should be fighting around, like fees.

Not that many people were listening, mind. A grand total of 12 people turned up – five AWLers (over an hour late apparently!), five members of Revolution and two others. None of the left bureaucrats the AWL cherishes so dearly bothered to turn up. And who can blame them? This is not exactly much of a basis for disaffiliation and forming a new “organising centre”. Unsurprisingly, neither the AWL nor Revo have reported the meeting.