Top-up fees rhetoric shows NUS is out-dated
Simon Davis on why York should pull out of a backward and bureaucratic National Union
Top-up fees are going to be introduced in England. As we speak the proposals are worming their way through Westminster, and preparations are being made to introduce the charges elsewhere in the UK. They are an historical inevitability.
However, our representative body is not prepared to give up the ghost, behaving like a doctor who cannot allow a terminally ill patient to die peacefully. Constantly barraging him with electronic shocks, numerous drugs and several million pounds worth of life support equipment.
We march time and time again, protesting for fees not to be applied. Pouring vast quantities of time and money into protests in London and Cardiff, yet few people actually bother to attend.
Not out of student apathy, but rather because we know we’ve made our point. But yet the NUS keep banging on about it. Only last term York Students’ Union was encouraged to subsidise trips to the march to Cardiff, and pour money into advertising it. This simply did not work, people did not attend. Surely if the student body know when it’s time to stop fighting so should the NUS itself. Why can’t our representatives find something else to focus their attentions on?
Perhaps it’s their frenzied administration, which seems to cycle round and round, but never gets anywhere. The NUS office in London in fact representing something more akin to a chaotic stream of staff flowing in and out, rather than a cohesive collected group.
Or maybe it’s their disastrously outdated constitution, which requires hundreds of delegates to vote on the smallest of policies, but yet still don’t seem to encourage change nor dare I say it, innovation. The union seems swamped by a preponderance of bureaucracy, which has gathered like dust since the
1920s.
Yet, undoubtedly it is their finances which provide the most enticing reason why the NUS are so obsessed with fees. Essentially because they can’t pay their own. Deflecting fears of their ridiculous debt onto a nation of poverty stricken students. Masking their own spiralling finances, with concerns about everyone else’s.
The question what does the NUS mean to students looks like a sham. Because the NUS to most students, from that bright-eyed first year, to the aged face of a third year, means 10% discount.
A free 10% discount that is set to disappear, because a survey conducted and paid for by our dutiful union has found that we’re more than happy to pay £10.41 for a discount card. So in order to recover from their crippling debt, destitute students are asked to bail them out. So that they would then be able to continue to fruitlessly campaign to alleviate our financial strain.
Well quite frankly it’s not worth paying the price. As prominent universities drop like flies out of the cosy pockets of the NUS, question marks are raised over whether our affiliation fee is worth the cost. Why should our Students’ Union fund an organisation, which seems more geared to protest than success?
Call me a cynic if you will, but I don’t feel represented. Rather, I feel disappointed and betrayed by my union. NUS affiliation should mean more than a discount card, but it doesn’t. It should mean a method of voicing student issues and concerns, but it doesn’t. Instead we are asked to continue to fund a CD track of issues stuck on repeat.
No more.
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