James Turley looks at the prospects for Education Not for Sale’s ‘Reclaim the Campus’ event:

Unlike the forced good cheer emanating from the Socialist Workers Party, the response of Education Not for Sale to the narrow defeat of the National Union of Students governance review has at least had a touch of sobriety: “The left should not kid itself,” reads an unsigned statement issued by ENS, the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty-run student group: “We won 35% of the vote, and the right wing totally dominated the rest of the conference.”¹

Now that the “real fight” is to begin, ENS has called an open conference (supposedly) of the student left for May 17, under the stirringly generic title, ‘Reclaim the Campus!’ Exactly what its goals are is something of an unknown quantity. A look at the draft agenda drawn up at a planning meeting on April 25 reveals a great deal of time allocated to discussions on what actions are required to proceed, but nothing on matters of programme.

There is to be a discussion on what has been contracted to “name/structure/statement of position”, and then an election to a new committee of ENS or some putative post-ENS organisation.  Although there was no time allocated for motions in that draft² (beyond 500-word “name/structure/statement of position” proposals, the mischievous implications of which will be discussed below), the ENS website now quietly concedes that motions are to be allowed.³

A bigger ENS?

So what are we looking at here? Most signs point towards an attempt to refound ENS on a ‘broader’ basis, attracting in ‘new layers’ of disorganised but angry students to fight the NUS right on its anti-democratic measures and abject cowardice in the face of the government/business squeeze on students’ living conditions. All those ‘workshops’ and the like could have come straight out of the laughably anti-democratic first conference of the SWP’s Student Respect.⁴

This is what the AWL would like to happen – we shall see how even the democratic sections of the agenda for Reclaim the Campus point towards this intention. Indeed, its purpose in setting up ENS in the first place was to organise the rump of the old anti-fees movement after the SWP and others had moved on to other priorities.

To read the rest of this article click here.