Sussex should join with other universities and disaffiliate from the NUS

In the last few weeks, students at the universities of Lincoln, Newcastle and Hull have voted to disaffiliate from the National Union of Students. The University of Oxford is set to have a referendum on the matter in just a few days’ time. It’s time Sussex students were given the chance to disaffiliate from the NUS through a referendum.

Over the past few years the NUS has shown itself to be an organisation which is undemocratic, unrepresentative and downright barmy.

Sussex has a proud history of standing up to authority

Some may have read that at last month’s NUS conference delegates decided to vote down a motion put forward by delegates from York calling for a One Member, One Vote system for electing the NUS president and vice-presidents. What you may not know is that such a proposal has now been rejected or dismissed several times in the last few years.

As a result, it remains the case that a union which claims to represent seven million students (and incessantly boasts about how democratic it is) has a leadership which has been voted upon by only about 700 student delegates. As one student has pointed out, the absence of a One Member, One Vote system means that the new president of the NUS has been elected by 0.0005 per cent of NUS members.

Unite, Unison, the National Union of Journalism, the National Union of Teachers and the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport all have One Member, One Vote systems, so why does the NUS seem so dead set against it? Why does it lack the democratic instinct to allow its members to vote for its leadership directly?

We can do just fine without the NUS

The most obvious answer is that the NUS knows that its views are unrepresentative of the student body as a whole, often acting more like a bizarre ideological clique. If One Member, One Vote were enacted as the system of voting, it would radically change the face of the NUS and more accurately reflect students’ views.

I strongly doubt you would have conferences at which people are told not to clap at a conference because it might be “triggering” to some or have a motion passed encouraging SUs to ban any student society event which dares to permit cross-dressing. But they don’t want this to happen because they quite like this anti-democratic status quo, whereby they can pass motions trying to control students’ behaviour from on high, with little fear that they’ll be taken to task for their illiberal actions. As one student put it, “the NUS has shown it doesn’t trust the very students it claims to represent”.

In light of this, the election of Malia Bouattia as president of the organisation has merely been, as one campaigner said, the straw which broke the camel’s back; proving that the NUS has gone beyond the pale.

Malia has been under fire ever since the beginning of her election campaign

In case you’ve missed what’s been reported about the new NUS president, in a speech on Israel/Palestine Malia Bouattia blamed “mainstream Zionist-led media outlets” for presenting “resistance […] as an act of terrorism” – language which connotes the anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that Jews control the press.

Worse, when the current president Megan Dunn said the NUS “would not work with Cage”, an organisation which sympathises with Islamic extremism and whose Research Director, when asked if he opposed stoning for adultery, FGM, and the right of a man to beat his wife, said “I am not a theologian”, Malia Bouattia denounced her words as “baseless Islamophobic smears”.

The election of Ms Bouattia is symptomatic of just how out of touch the NUS has become. Sussex, as a university which has a progressive tradition, should part ways from what has become a deeply regressive organisation. Our Student Union, as a body committed to democracy, should give us the chance to decide whether we wish to disaffiliate or not via a referendum.

If you wish to have a referendum on whether Sussex should disaffiliate with the NUS, please sign the petition for one here.