We need Malia, now more than ever, as a bold, principled leader – Aliya Yule
The year is 2009. The financial crisis looms large. Students are already at the razor edge of falling living standards, with Educational Maintenance Allowance to be decimated and tuition fees tripled. Students will soon become one of the groups worst-affected by austerity. Meanwhile, the National Union of Students abandons its free education policy, and openly criticises precarious academics on strike against pay cuts. It seems strange now to tell this story. Amid attacks on the ‘radical’ and ‘out-of-touch’ NUS, it’s easily forgotten that not so long ago, the NUS was not at the heart of a vibrant student movement. Instead it was an active opponent of student activism. It was then that Malia Bouattia and many others decided to organise and fight for a movement that stands up for all of us, as she narrates in her recent video.
We must not give up that fight now. This year, the NUS has been unapologetically bold, articulating students’ vision of the future when it is under threat. The Liber8 Campaign, launched by Malia, links up eight issues as broad as mental health, curriculum reform, and defending international students, to show how our institutions could provide a real, free, liberated education. And it has not just been all talk—I participated in workshops in the politics department this year using NUS resources, where we discussed how to rethink our stale pale male curricula. Oxford Migrant Solidarity organised a walk-out to stand up for migrants for #OneDayWithoutUs, an initiative supported and widely publicised by the NUS.
Last month, I attended a cross-sector national summit called ‘Trump, Brexit, and Beyond’, organised by Malia, to co-ordinate our struggles across and beyond the education sector. I went to workshops on combating anti-Semitism—held by UJS—to talking about gender oppression with organisers of the Women’s Strike and pro-choice campaigners in Ireland. Just after Malia won the election, I spoke on a Preventing PREVENT panel in Oxford with academics, trade unionists, anti-racist organisers, and NUS officials. We discussed how to oppose academic surveillance, which overwhelmingly targets Muslim students, and threatens our academic freedoms.
The previous NUS President, Meghan Dunn, was lukewarm in her opposition to PREVENT. Now, the NUS now leads the charge against it. After a campaign that emphasised the vital role a strong student movement must play in a world increasingly dominated by the right, Oxford overwhelmingly said Yes to NUS. There is still much work to be done to unite all of us, but this can only be done behind a bold vision for the future. And this last year has demonstrated a Malia-led NUS will empower students to make change from the ground up.
In the coming year, Brexit will threaten so much that we hold dear, from research funding to the security of international students. The choice couldn’t be clearer: it’s no to Brexiter Tom Harwood, who has no vision for our movement other than to trash it, and yes to anti-racism, free education, and student power. That’s why I’ll be voting to #ReElectMalia at this year’s NUS Conference.
Tom Harwood will focus on concrete issues and stay relevant – Daniel Villar
If you’re like the average student, you have not noticed that the National Union of Students, the body that is supposed to be representing all of you, is in the throes of an election for its presidency. Not only that, but that the election is between two dramatically opposed views as to the role of the NUS, between the scandal-plagued left-wing candidate Malia Bouattia, and the more conservative Tom Harwood.
Sadly it’s too late for the average student to have a say in the presidency of the NUS, since elections for the delegates who actually elect the NUS president occurred months ago. However, that shouldn’t stop all Oxonians from contacting their NUS delegates, and urging them to vote for Tom Harwood. At the beginning of this article I mentioned that Tom Harwood is the more conservative candidate: he did support Brexit after all, and is well known to frequent more right wing student Facebook groups like the Young Liberal Society. However, though I disagree with Harwood’s positions on most national political issues,I believe that he is absolutely right about the fact that for far too long the NUS has been controlled by a small cabal of activists who do not care about concrete student issues, and instead use our student union as a platform to grandstand about world events.
Perhaps the clearest example of the tendency of the NUS to focus on issues that do not pertain to students comes with its attitude towards Israel. Again and again the NUS has hounded the sole democracy in the Middle East, with many of its leading members, including Malia Bouattia, using the term Zionist as an insult. This has created a culture in the NUS which at the very least tolerates anti-Semitism, as the numerous scandals where Malia Bouattia has expressed anti-Semitic views has shown. That alone should be enough to disqualify her from getting the vote of anyone opposed to bigotry, but under Malia’s leadership the NUS has made itself even more irrelevant by focusing on issues like clapping at meetings and opposing police presence at pride marches, as opposed to concrete student issues. In addition to the fact that Harwood, unlike Bouattia, seems to want the NUS to focus primarily on its actual purpose, protecting student interests, and doesn’t have an history of antisemitism, he has the advantage of actually being a student.
That’s right: Malia Bouattia, the current president of the National Union of Students, isn’t a student. Indeed, she has been out of university education for nearly a decade; how she has managed to remain in the student movement well after leaving the period of her life where she is a student is a mystery to me, but it seems almost commonsensical that the leadership of the National Union of Students should be made up of students, and Harwood is the sole current student standing for the presidency of the NUS. I have my problems with Tom Harwood: he is not the ideal candidate. But at the moment he is the sole candidate standing that has the ability to shock the NUS into a semblance of relevance, and make it do its job, representing the interests of all students, not just a small cabal of activists who alienate the vast majority of students in the UK.
