Warwick votes YES to NUS

Ladies and gents, the results are in. After a bitter battle which saw Warwick’s Sabbatical team divide up, the students have spoken and Warwick has voted to remain in the NUS.

It was a relatively close call with 63.4% voting “Yes” to continuing the affiliation with the NUS and  34.9% voted “No”. The remaining 1.7% abstained for some reason.

For those of you who’ve been too busy burying your head in a book on Floor 5 of the library, or only get your news updates from YikYak, the NUS has been in pretty hot water recently.The election of Malia Bouattia as president, and the accusations of her anti-Semitism which followed, first brought the NUS to the attention of students. Before that you’d have been forgiven for only affiliating the NUS with a 10% discount at Forever 21. However, following Bouattia’s victory, students around the country actually began to ask themselves, what’s the point in the NUS?

It certainly has its flaws. So far it has failed to adequately protect students against rising tuition fees, and made questionable decisions such as campaigning for students to reject Liberal Democrat MPs, political movements that some argue go beyond its acting role as a student’s union.Campaigners for Warwick’s ‘Say YES to NUS’ don’t deny the NUS has structural problems, but they’ll be happy to hear from today’s results that the union can be reformed from the inside.

So what does this mean you may be asking? Sadly, no, it doesn’t mean Term 3 exams are off, but it does mean Warwick remains a key member in the largest and most influential national student representative body. With the government recently proposing further inflation to university fees to add to student debt, now more than ever its vital Warwick keeps its national voice and remains a part of a group with sufficient lobbying power. What’s more, its estimated that the NUS has already saved students in the UK £52 million over the last year, around £54 per student, that equates to 36 pints of Purple at Pop.

It may not be Brexit, and you probably can’t reference it in that Politics final coming up, but it’s pretty big news for Warwick as a student body.