NUS Conference at Blackpool NUS Conterence at Blackpool No challenge to the Broad Left

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As reported in last week's 'Socialist Press', the Broad. Left have retained their bureaucratic hold over NUS, despite mounting and increasingly militant opposition from students who are attempting to defend their unions and fight the education cuts.

The problem • which militant students now have to confront, is the task of building a principled alternative leadership to that of these Stalinists and reformists who are determined to allow the state to crush independent student unions and dismantle the education system.

The IMG-dominated Socialist Students Alliance, and the Socialist. Worker Student Organisation (student wing of the SWP) have both showed that, despite their "far left" posturing, they are incapable of leading a principled fight' against the Broad Left.

Their political bankruptcy was most clearly revealed in the debate on "Human Rights", , which the Broad Left had decided to stage to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the UN Declaration of Human Rights.

The Stalinists put forward a resolution with which President Carter or Thatcher would have found it hard to disagree.

Full of abstract calls for freedom of speech, freedom from slavery, etc., it offered no class analysis of the state 'and no perspective of mobilising the working class to defend and extend its hard-won democratic gains.

Above politics Furthermore, it offered the capitalist class a handy stick with which to beat the Soviet Union and other workers' states, by condemning violations of "human rights" wherever they occur, but posing bourgeois democracy and not workers' democracy as the alternative.

Speaker after speaker from the Broad Left stood up to declare that this debate was "above politics" and one on which "all sides" of the student movement could be united.

What was the alternative posed by the "Trotskyist"

Capitulated

Did they call for defence of the Soviet Union and other workers' states from ideological . military attack from capitalist the 'states?

Did rights in Did they call for a political revolution in these states to overthrow the parasitic bureaucracy and establish workers' democracy on the basis of soviets?

they place the for democratic the car vitalist coun tries in' the context of mobilising the working class and its allies in the struggle for socialism?

Did they call for disbandment of the bourgeoisie's police, or the army, or attack the law courts as instruments of class repression?

Did they hell!

None of these Marxist positions were to be found states, and declaring that they are not socialist, but capitalist countries.

The militancy of students was particularly evident in the crucial Student Union Finance debate, during which Trevor Phillips, NUS President, came very close to being removed from his responsibility for this area of NUS work.

He was censured over his handling of the Student Union autonomy issue and for the Broad Left's failure adequately to protect student unions from the current government attacks.

The actual vote was taken over a rather confused objection to a letter which Phillips had written to a delegate from Dorset, who claimed he had been insulted by the President.

However, the significance of this vote goes beyond a few personal insults and points to more generai dissatisfaction with the The Broad Left's proposals on a new system of negotiation over Student Union fees were eventually accepted, despite the setback back of the censure of Phillips and their defeat at the previous week's emergency conference.

NUS is now committed to a disastrous policy of national negotiations over general fee levels through a council composed of NUS, the local education authorities, and the DES.

The council will operate and its decisions "will be final".

In other words they will be imposed on college unions by the national union leadership.

The conference ended with the ""formal" proce dure of adopting the Executive keport as a whole.

A WSL delegate got up to argue for a rejection of the report.

He argued that the Executive had throughout the conference exposed themselves as both unwilling and incapable of giving their members a lead on any of the important issues facing the student movement.

On youth unemployment they had given support to the government's cosmetic measures, on hall fee increases, they had refused to coordinate the rent strikes; on grants and cuts they had organised stupid publicity stunts instead of mobilising their membership; on student union autonomy they had capitulated to the government's demand for public accountability.

The response to the call for rejection of the report was warm on the part of the conference, and nervous on the part of the Executive.

However, few people were prepared to take a step which would have been tantamount to calling for the resignation of the whole Executive.

The task for the student movement now is to make that possible by building the necessary , revolutionary alternative to the Broad Left.