No to NUS
Most of you will be wanting to know why joining the NUS is bad for Glasgow?
First and foremost, whilst they give us discounts, the NUS will also charge us £50,000 for membership. That money will come straight out of our student services.
But the discounts aren’t that good. Your Glasgow matriculation card gets you the same as an NUS card. The big difference is that the Glasgow card doesn’t cost £10 and make money for the NUS. What is the point in paying for something you can already get for free?
And Glasgow University Council (SRC) has already shown what it can do for us.
When it came out with a clear stance in favour of our students during the lecturers’ strike earlier this year, it ran successful blockades of the University, getting coverage in national papers and on the BBC, ITN, Channel 4 and SKY News.
What did NUS do? In a 3-hour executive meeting dominated by Non-Student issues, they spent 7 minutes discussing the strikes. Now lets think about this; 7 minutes about an issue that prevents thousands of students from graduating? Any organisation that doesn’t put students first, doesn’t deserve our money or our support.
But most concerning is that it isn’t the students or even University Unions who NUS reps are accountable to. Iinstead they’re accountable to the political factions that dominate the NUS and get these people elected. It is through these factions that people keep power so why do they need to listen to students? The answer is that they don’t.
This factionalism is so bad that in 2001 four members of the NUS executive were banned from NUS Head Quarters for holding different views about budget cuts. Is this the sort of organisation that we really want to be part of?
We’re much better off on our own with representatives who are directly accountable to us. Student’s representation shouldn’t be dominated by party politics or infighting. And we shouldn’t be duped into thinking that the only way we can get discounts is to pay for a card we don’t need.
Everything that NUS offers to students at Glasgow we get already just by being a students. Most importantly we get it better.
The Glasgow University SRC do a great job, as do the Unions, joining the NUS will do nothing more than disrupt a system that serves first and foremost the students of Glasgow.
Our students have it so much better than NUS members. so on November 15th, remember: Vote for Glasgow, Vote No!