I’ve left the NUS and you should too

Imagine: journalists, public figures, and academics condemned for voicing opinions leaders disagree with, open and honest discussion stomped down in the name of our ‘liberation’, newspapers and artists are singled out as offensive and kept away from us for our ‘protection’.

Where is this? 1930s Germany? Communist China? The Voldemort-era Ministry of Magic? Well, all of them, but also here, permeating our uni institutions, our debate halls, and our campuses. The insidious nature of self-righteousness concealed under a guise of protection is choking our student population.

In my four years as a student, the NUS has: failed to condemn ISIS through fear of Islamophobia, banned or stopped academics and public figures from speaking on campuses and, most recently, passed motions to encourage LGBT groups to drop the position that represents gay men, because they are no longer ‘oppressed’ enough within the LGBT+ community.

How can I, a gay student, with any conviction, remain part of an institution contingent on quasi-fascist tendencies of silencing those who they don’t agree with, relying on the apathy of the majority of its members to further the political agendas of a few.

At March’s NUS LGBT+ Conference, a motion was so kindly passed titled ‘Peter Thatchell is not no-platformed’. Do we really need a motion to decide whether a man who has fought for LGBT rights for four decades should be allowed to speak on university campuses?

The NUS website states it “does not have any committee places solely reserved for men, this is because we recognise that the LGBT+ community is far wider than just men.” I don’t recall any suggestion that the LGBT+ community wasn’t more than just men, however, by their own admission men represent a substantial portion of the LGBT+ community, so why do they want to drop the position that ensures they remain represented?

The response that gay men are allowed to run for any executive position is inadequate: across the country there will be some societies where gay men may well run for these positions – and lose. Then what? They are left with zero representation. This motion is a regressive action toward a minority group in wider society.

This is all the NUS represents anymore: the whims of holier-than-thou students who form a supreme-overlord-executive committee with an inflated sense of self-importance. There’s nothing progressive about an institution that believes ‘safe spaces are vital to liberation’.

We all know bigotry and racism is bad. There is no coming wave of fascism that the NUS must valiantly defend us from.

The NUS has become an ultra-left wing institution that stifles debate, opposes open discussion, and spends their time (and our money) debating motions like Motion 212, due to be debated at next month’s NUS Conference, that resolves that the NUS should ‘demand…mandatory re-selection of Labour candidates’.

Why are the NUS involving themselves in political party issues?

The NUS is an inward-looking, self-absorbed institution that does not fight for the real problems faced by the members it claims to represent, or issues in wider society. No average student is struggling because of the arcane problems they consider most crucial, yet pious executives with asinine axes to grind misrepresent each and every one of us when they consistently present irrelevant issues as the chief concerns of the student population.

The NUS is vacuous. It taints the wider public perception of the student body as nothing more than whining adolescents who want to hide in ‘safe spaces’, refuse to engage in academic discussion, and no-platform anybody that doesn’t conform to their outlandish worldview.

A Telegraph article posted a poll with the question ‘Have students become censorious and intolerant?’. The results: at present 96% of almost 25,000 voters agreed with the statement ‘there is an accusatory atmosphere’ on university campuses. It isn’t individual students that are leading the wider public to these beliefs; it’s the actions of the NUS.

Everybody hates us

It is true, at the management levels of our educational institutions, students are seen as little more than cash cows to be milked for every penny, but is the motion offering individuals’ opinions on internal Labour Party policy or their request that finalists refuse to complete the National Student Survey really combating that?

The NUS that represents us now is nothing more than an ultra-left university society on steroids, with its unrelenting pursuit for campuses so heavily no-platformed, it’d be difficult for Stephen Fry to speak at a debate. He did, after all, make a joke about his friend being dressed like a ‘bag lady’ at the BAFTAs: pretty outrageous and offensive stuff.

The ability to speak freely and openly on university campuses overrides all other causes that the NUS ’fight’ for.

That is why I have made a formal request to the NUS to either remove me as a registered member, or have it voiced in explicit terms I am being forced to remain a member – and I suggest you do the same.