Linking the union to the everyday
By Sofie Buckland, NUS National Executive (personal capacity) To most of its 5,200,000 paper members, the National Union of Students’ annual conference, which takes place on 27-29 March means nothing. Most will not even know that it is taking place. It means even less to ordinary NUS members than, say, Unison’s conference does to its rank-and-file members. Decades of political mis-leadership and anti-democratic structural reform have led to a huge crisis of disengagement between NUS’s structures and the political activity — let alone the actual day-to-day struggles — of its membership. For...