The National Union of Students conference to be held in Blackpool from April 1-3 will probably be the last before the implementation of the NUS leadership’s anti-democratic governance review and thus the shutting down of national conference and the national executive committee. After being voted through almost three to one at an extraordinary conference on December 4, the governance review’s changes to the NUS constitution will be set in stone if the leadership again wins a majority of two-thirds or greater.

The changes were supported by a significant majority of the NUS leadership, with only the Socialist Workers Party’s Rob Owen and the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty’s Sofie Buckland consistently voting against. These groups initiated the apparently short-lived Defend NUS Democracy campaign (www.nusdemocracy.org.uk), which also gave NUS black students officer Ruqayyah Collector a prominent role. Collector, a member of Socialist Action’s front, Student Broad Left (SBL), had not in fact reliably voted against the leadership’s reforms, and furthermore had served on the consultation group supervising the governance review without feeling the need to tell other left activists what was going on in the meetings. Unfortunately, at the Defend NUS Democracy meeting at Birkbeck College in London in November, the SWP used its votes to get two SBL representatives on the committee but shut out Socialist Students, the student wing of the Socialist Party in England and Wales, along with Communist Students. Not very ‘democratic’, comrades.

Nevertheless, talk of unity was in the air. Coming off the back of the Defend NUS Democracy campaign, Student Broad Left, the SWP-dominated Student Respect and the loose Education Not for Sale faction built around the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty entered discussions around running a joint slate of candidates for the NUS conference’s full-time officer elections. This was, of course, ‘unity’ only of a sort - from day one it was clear that the united slate would be drawn up around coffee shop tables by a couple of the leading figures from each organisation.

Coffee shop tables - well, if you must, but in which coffee shop? (I hear that Costa at Waterloo station is lovely at this time of year). And when? Given Education Not for Sale’s manifesto call for “the activists and organisations of the student left [to] unite - maximum unity in action, free and open debate about our differences and disagreements”, we might have hoped that its NEC representative, Sofie Buckland, or perhaps AWL student organiser Sacha Ismail, would tell Communist Students the details of the January 13 unity meeting. This proved impossible. Given their organisation’s commitment to ‘free and open debate’, it was most unfortunate that the comrades’ mobile phones were simultaneously beset by gremlins and neither was able to reply to messages left by CS …

Aside from such efforts to limit the scope of ‘left unity’, the comrades on all sides found it difficult to come up with a workable basis for united campaigning, needing as they did both a joint slate statement and manifestos for individual candidates. Unsurprisingly, the answer leapt upon by the AWL, SWP and SBL was to fudge, smoothing over differences rather than opening up discussion among their memberships and other organisations to work out a joint programme representative of left activists as a whole.

Notable here was the issue of the occupation of Iraq and the threat of war against Iran, for which the AWL had written a proposal. Remarkably, the AWL, which has long refused to demand an immediate withdrawal of troops from Iraq, did not put up a fight over the question, but instead appealed to the opportunism of the SWP by inserting the slogan ‘Troops out’. After all, at last year’s NUS conference Student Respect candidates had called for ‘Troops out’ rather than ‘Troops out now’ and the AWL was happy to accept the former timeless slogan.

Similarly, aware that its putative allies were opposed to solidarity with the Iranian labour movement, the AWL’s proposed joint text included only a brief, weakly worded and ambiguous reference to the fact that an invasion would “undermine” workers, women and democratic forces in Iran.

The question of positive solidarity with these forces in the here and now was not posed at all, the AWL seemingly willing to drop the issue, given that the SWP was not forcing through the slogan ‘Troops out now’. Yet in his article for the AWL fortnightly Solidarity, Sacha Ismail exalted “progress which would have been unthinkable a year ago … persuading the SWP, and through them SBL, that the programme for a slate would need to include a clear statement of solidarity with workers’ and other democratic movements in Iraq and Iran”.

Not only were the big political issues not argued out in the talks between the groups, but the fudge was meant to extend to individual candidates’ manifestos. Rob Owen made great play of the idea not only that the organisations should avoid criticising each other’s politics - whether explicitly or by implication - in their speeches and leaflets, but also that they should vet each other’s materials in advance in order to make sure no-one said anything too ‘controversial’.

Obviously the intention was to shut down debate and to present the left as homogenous, but it appears that SBL would not have been under the same control as the other groups. Ample evidence of the sect’s lack of democratic accountability was the fashion in which Ruqayyah Collector had some months ago simply announced that she would be running for the NUS presidency, prior to any consultation with potential left allies, and was then backed by Student Respect.

Despite its hostility towards SBL and the ‘Stalinist’ Socialist Action clique in Ken Livingstone’s office, the AWL was pressurised by SBL’s manoeuvre into entertaining the idea of backing Collector, while the SWP was only too happy to support its Unite Against Fascism and the Stop the War Coalition ally.

None of the political issues dividing the different organisations, or even the lack of democracy in the whole process of organising a joint slate, were obstacles to the drive for unity. Where the slate ultimately fell down was fighting over how many of the six full-time candidates should go to each faction.

The SWP wanted Student Respect to have three candidates, SBL to have two (including Collector for president) and one place reserved for Education Not for Sale’s candidate for the non-portfolio ‘block of 12’ election, Heather Shaw. The AWL was not happy to get a worse deal than the (apparently more narrowly based) Student Broad Left, whilst SWPer Colin Smith’s proposals at the final unity meeting on January 28, which would have seen a slate of just five candidates and the left competing against each other in the sixth election, was rejected out of hand by SBL. Bizarrely, it seemed that the argument over the number of candidates was not just a cipher for political disagreement. Rather that political principles could be dropped, but not organisational plans.

The slate is now dead in the water and, while Student Respect will still support Ruqayyah Collector for the presidency, she now looks likely to be opposed by the AWL’s Daniel Randall. Yet ‘unity’ between the three groups seemed more likely for 2008 than any other occasion in the last five years, and not only because of the Defend NUS Democracy campaign.

The AWL’s attempts to reach a political compromise - and produce joint propaganda - with the SWP appear to be part of its current ‘turn to Respect’, a manoeuvre which has been the subject of much rancour within the AWL. In an effort to engage with the SWP now that Galloway has jumped ship, Sacha Ismail has joined Respect (SWP version, obviously), and in the last issue of Solidarity enthused about how much has changed: “Whatever the outcome, [NUS slate talks] have proved that the SWP post-Galloway is a somewhat different creature from what it was before - and that revolutionaries should not duck the vital task of engaging it to help re-educate its membership about what Marxism is and is not” (January 24).

Marxists should indeed engage with the SWP membership and win them over to principled working class politics. But this cannot be done on the basis of feigned agreement and playing down differences, pretending that the SWP’s leaders have had a ‘road to Damascus’ moment of epiphany, or accepting a political regime which closes down free discussion. Sacha Ismail and his comrades made each of these mistakes in the bid for a joint slate, at a time when it is vital to be posing sharp arguments about the role of the SWP’s bureaucratic caste in the group’s opportunism and popular frontist political degeneration.

Such issues as these were never raised in the desperation to get a joint slate for NUS and in the never-ending search for fake unity. But round-table discussions are a travesty of unity where a self-selected group of functionaries make all the decisions. In such circumstances the basis for agreement can never be principled politics, but only horse-trading, backroom deals and fudge.

Left unity can only be secured on the basis of unfettered debate, in which left activists can participate and argue for their politics in the open, and are always free to disagree without the risk of bureaucratic exclusion.