Bristol votes to remain with the NUS

Today the results came in for the referendum regarding Bristol University’s membership with the NUS.

Remain and the YES2NUS  has won as students voted to continue to be represented by the National Union of Students.

Remain won by a margin of 67% to 33% with YES getting 2409 votes and BONUS getting 1186.

Bristol has followed in the footsteps of universities such as Oxford, Cambridge and York by holding a referendum that resulted in the student body voting to stay with the NUS.

There have been several weeks of campaigning with the groups Bristol Out of the NUS (or BONUS) and Yes to the NUS spearheading the campaigns for each side of the debate, including videos outlining their campaigns and reasons for taking their respective stances.

3595 votes were cast in the referendum making it one of the biggest democratic events in the university’s recent history.

James Heale, one of the leaders of the BONUS campaign, said,’ congratulations to the Yes campaign. Their leaflets claimed the NUS is ‘willing to reform’. Let’s see if that’s the case.’

He said that he felt the Yes campaign had used ‘comparisons with Brexit to their advantage’ and argued that ‘if we’d had the referendum in May when it was triggered, a lot of the associations with Brexit would not have been evoked.’