National Union of Students, still crazy after all these years

Jennifer Salisbury-Jones, a third year student at Bristol University, has written an amusing article about the recent NUS conference.

Jennifer got elected as a delegate after promising to spend the money Bristol give the union on something far more useful - namely alcohol.

The downside was she had to attend the conference - see The NUS don’t care about you and they are making your life worse (The Tab).

Anyway, it brought back memories of a similar episode when I was at university and editing a fiercely anti NUS publication called Campus.

Our candidate for NUS conference stood on the platform of 'Not Going'. Like Jennifer he got elected which suggests many students - then and now - have a far more healthy attitude to life than their po-faced political peers.

The funny thing was, all the other successful candidates expected him to go and were dumbstruck when he stuck to his manifesto and refused the kind offer of a weekend in Blackpool at taxpayers' expense.

One student politician took the decision very much to heart and was genuinely upset we could treat his beloved union in such a cavalier fashion. He didn't speak to us for weeks.

My other NUS story took place a few years later when we relaunched Campus as a national student magazine and sent someone to distribute several hundred copies to delegates attending the 1984 NUS conference.

Twenty years later the person concerned could be found working in a senior position at Conservative Central Office. In those days however he was a bit of a head case and utterly fearless - just the sort of person to send into enemy territory.

No-one, in my opinion, was more likely to find a way into the Winter Gardens in Blackpool without accreditation and I was right.

Not only did he slip past security via a back door, he managed to sneak on to the balcony where he is alleged to have dropped 200 copies of Campus on to the heads of the delegates below.

It so happened the relevant issue featured a full page cartoon in which a nuclear weapon (Willie Warhead) was seen shaking hands with a tampon. The caption read 'NATO guarantees peaceful periods' which we thought was quite funny.

Delegates thought otherwise and there were reports that Liberal students in particular were in tears.

Campus was subsequently banned by 40 humourless student unions, which forced us to sell it door-to-door, and our efforts even made the front page of National Student, the piss poor NUS newspaper.

I therefore take my hat off to Jennifer Salisbury-Jones and everyone who voted for her. To paraphrase Paul Simon ...

The National Union of Students, still crazy after all these years.