Seachain an duine a bhíonn ina thost

I didn't want to stir up too much trouble in Seren, and I didn't want to discuss the affiliation/disaffiliation issue there because I'm still not entirely certain what I believe. And probably how I feel is different to how everyone else feels because it's a bit more personal for me.

The fact that the nutty hard-left hijacked the governance review so successfully has upset me. How on earth did they manage to persuade people that this was some kind of New Labour plot? Certainly the new constitution contains some big reforms, and yes those reforms are probably loosely connected with New Labour in that they have presided over national governance changes: British constitutional reform, the new Charities Act, that kind of thing. New Labour have forced a shift in culture because they are in government: yes, NUS could ignore the way the government operates, but it wouldn't get very far.

So if that's what they mean by the governance review being very New Labour then yes, it is. But if they mean that New Labour somehow had some actual say in the governance review and that it was designed to benefit NOLS, then that's not true at all.

I can't speak for other members of the review group, but I was solely driven by a desire to make NUS more accessible to normal students. I think Zone Conferences would be great for students who otherwise wouldn't make it to Annual Conference because it's too big and scary and deals with lots of topics that individual student might not be interested in. With Zone Conferences you can send along people who are actually interested in that zone, so people from our Welfare Committee could go to the Welfare Zone Conference. What's wrong with that idea? It would mean we'd actually get to discuss more than a couple of hours' worth of motions.

I also think a Board is a really good idea. NUS is filled with activists, and activists are just not good at or interested in finances, in staffing, in anything to do with legal obligations. It disgusts me how people throw around suggestions with absolutely no thought whatsoever about their implementation, their cost, the implications of their suggestions. That's why there needs to be a board separate from the political structures. And maybe I'm naive but I actually don't think that being on a board automatically makes people evil-doers hell-bent on the destruction of NUS and all that it stands for.

So I'm very disappointed the reforms didn't go through. Very disappointed because I gave up fighting against NUS affiliation because I was convinced that I should try to effect change from the inside, and I really really did try, and NUS really let me get involved.

But it didn't work. It didn't work because 1/3 of the people who turn up to Conference fundamentally disagree with what I think NUS should be like. That 1/3 can stop ANY major change, because you need a 2/3 majority for constitutional changes to be passed. I just can't really see a way out of that situation and I wonder whether we need two national unions: one for the hard-left fight-them-on-the-streets (that's an infamous Sofie Buckland quote) posse who are into students activism, not student politics. Then one for the 2/3rds who want NUS to campaign on stuff that affects students, perhaps encouraging students to engage with wider issues but not trying to lead on that because that's not their remit. That's the one I want to be part of.

But realistically, who's going to start that union? Cos I'm not. I'm leaving student politics in three months and I'm going to leave this problem to others. I don't really like student politics all that much: there's some things I feel quite passionately about but I'm not prepared to attack those who oppose me, I'm not prepared to just make passionate speeches and ignore the actual questions people have about what I'm proposing, and I'm not prepared to shout down anyone who disagrees with the accepted wisdom on topics such as abortion and the BNP.

So good luck to the new officers, both in Bangor and on the NEC. I hope we don't leave NUS, I hope NUS can improve, but I don't feel very confident that that's going to happen. Here's to being proven wrong.