Random Variable

Everything you need to know about the future careers of the NUS executive:

On Friday, Jeff Krinkle and Alberto Toscano gave a talk on cognitive mapping in The Wire.*

As someone commented, one of the ideals Simon and Burns hint towards, is a return to bobbies doing the beat, getting to know their communities.

Isn’t it odd, that this is exactly what is being suggested be done in Afghanistan and Pakistan by the International Crisis Group? Is there some sort of relationship between the “failed city,” the “failed state,” and intervention?

* Shouldn’t Alberto just get a blog instead of posting through IT?

Wednesday will see a good turnout from a broad cross-section of the Left (from liberals to hard-lefts). Small, but isolated damage to property. Some occupations. Heavy police presence will contain everything else.

No thousands-strong armies of disaffected youth. Not enough time has elapsed in the financial crisis for anarchist social movements to scale their size. British groups in the Left are historically unable to come together, due to the dominance of some major sectarian organisations. Without the emergence of actors than can broker or arbitrate between various groups, you will not see a larger movement. Put People First might be one such actor, but not right now.

This week, election results came in and I’ve been re-elected for another year as a General Representative Council. Thank you to all those who voted.

On Wednesday, myself and Trevor Dallimore-Wright (Disabled Students Officer) met with a representative from Birkbeck East, Stratford Campus to have a look at provisions for students.

On Thursday, myself, Sean Rillo (Chair of Council) and Rob Park (Caring Responsibilities Officer & Student Governor) met with Mousa Baraka from London Citizens concerning getting ULU to sign up to the London Living Wage.

On Saturday, I joined a few students and staff on the Put People First! rally.

I'll leave it to the reader to decide if I agree with the final line...

A memoranda to the IUSS Select Committee hearing on Students and Universities is currently being written, and we hope to make a final copy available later this week.

On our mailing lists, I’ve been quite interested in voting systems, after some calls to switch back from Single Transferable Vote to First-Past-the-Post, a move I would consider rather short-sighted and disastrous in the long run.

A couple of months ago, Peter Levine asked just how representative the NUS (UK National Union of Students) actually is. The answer, is not very much.

Having spent a day compositing in the Drafting Commissions, it has become clear to me that the NUS is run by careerists from a bunch of factions – mainly in line with New Labour or to its right.

Very few members of the National Executive Committee seem to understand that they have been elected, and paid, to represent students, not their ideological position, or their ladder up political party leadership.

Birkbeck lost the right to speak on most of its motions, either having them shoved to the end of the zones where they wont get discussed, or having our motions radically altered by partisan members of the NEC.

In addition, the NEC refuses to have genuine debates on topics of interest, instead keeping trivial, consensual motions high on the agenda in order to preserve the status quo, and make it look like they’ve been doing actual work this year. Some of the NEC’s motions have more research going into them than the amount they’ve conducted all year.

The tactics used by the partisan members of the NEC in Labour Students and Organised Independents bordered on outright bullying. They do not seem to understand that we reach the final motions through consensus, not through swinging all our partisan proxies around.

We were told that we don’t need the NUS to help us since we have the University of London Union (which has a zero campaigning budget), and we have not been invited to take part in the Campaigning Alliance for Lifelong Learning, despite Birkbeck College being one of the country’s largest lifelong learning institutions. When NUS president Wes Streeting was speaking at a government select committee in February, the chair turned to our representative and said “this is a full-time debate, isn’t it? We’re not talking about part-time students.” Afterwards, an MP quietly asked us if we were members of the NUS, to which we informed them we were founding members. With the lack of action from NUS on Equivalent and Lower Qualification (ELQ) cuts, we’re left wondering whether or not there’s been a tacit agreement with the government not to discuss the disastrous funding cuts for mature students.

So why does Birkbeck actually pay £11,000 a year (going up to £17,000 from this year), when we will have even less representation on conference floor from next year.

For now, roll on Annual Conference.

On Wednesday 18 March, the governors of Birkbeck College, University of London unanimously agreed to adopt the full GLA London Living Wage for all contracted staff. This ends a long campaign by Unison, joined by the Students Union, UCU and Unite.

Our campaign was supported by John McDonnell MP, sci-fi author China Mieville,  and director Ken Loach.

By March 2009, it was untenable that the college could continue not to adopt the Living Wage, and the debate turned to which form. Birkbeck’s Finance and General Purposes Committee decided to recommend the lower 2006 IPPR rate of £6.50. This is despite the fact that the IPPR itself pays its cleaning staff the Living Wage. A counter-proposal, developed by Unison, Unite, UCU and the Student Union outlined the necessity of paying a living wage.

This victory marks the triumph of an alliance of unions striving to create a better workplace for all.

In addition, the Students Union, recently reformed as a charity, abolishing the position of a president, and electing five sabbatical trustees, improving representation and campaign efforts were key in this victory. Rob Park and Tami Peterson, student governors were instrumental in Wednesday’s result. Our student union is a reminder to other student unions that the current round of governance reviews, that threaten to strip the voice of students is harmful to the life of universities.

However, Birkbeck cannot yet claim to be a Living Wage campus. The University of London Union (ULU) manage the George Birkbeck Bar on behalf of the college and SU, and have not yet adopted the Living Wage. This will be the next key battleground for the Birkbeck Living Wage Campaign.

ULU should be a central hub for the ongoing success of the campaign across all London colleges, and Birkbeck intends to lead the way. We call on all Student Unions to adopt Living Wage as a first step to seeing our colleges become ethical employers.

Not being on Google Reader all that much recently, I didn’t realise Graham Harman’s blog had died and been born again due to snarky comments from around the unproductive blogosphere (I like the term).

Well, he’s back, which is all the better for everyone else.

Like everyone else in London, I was at the Idea of Communism conference, and it was a largely mixed bag. I missed Friday since I was at work, though I did manage to get to the hall to hear a rant from Avakian’s followers. On Saturday, I was half-asleep due to a late night screening of the utterly disappointing Watchmen, so managed to miss most of what Badiou was saying. That said, I only paid a concessionary rate – not sure if it was worth a full £100.

Via the Complex Terrain Laboratory comes news that political scientist, Samuel P. Huntington, died on 24th December 2008.

He will be best remembered, for the Foreign Affairs essay (PDF), and book of the same title, The Clash of Civilisations.

Update: David Park summarises his long career:

“He taught at Harvard for 58 years and the author, co-author, or editor of 17 books and 90 scholarly articles. His intellectual breadth was truly amazing. Read more about his personal and intellectual life on Harvard’s website.”

Brad Delong laments why can’t America be run by people like Gordon Brown. The PM announced a plan last Wednesday and started implementing it today, and is now being praised as the world’s saviour. A number of theories:

1. Ideology.
   • John Quiggin wonders if New Labour can at least remember their old-skool social democracy days. William Davies instead points out that New Labour has significant experience with PFI, which are like the proposed nationalisation plans in reverse. Also, the government is keen to point out that these are temporary measures, not a return to British socialism.
2. State institutional design
   • Executive branch is too weak, and the legislature, in the form of Congress is too strong. Even so, Congress gave Paulson the power to emulate Brown’s approach even when he didn’t ask for it.
   • The US state is simply too ineffectual at dealing with disaster in a timely fashion, alá Katrina. Krugman suggests that perhaps the government’s all FEMA’d out.
   • If William Davies is right, then perhaps the federal government is too abstracted away from being knowledgeable about US PFI equivalents.
3. No one had a solution any earlier
   • Unlikely, as Krugman, amongst others, had said that banks were undercapitalised at least as early as the third week of September.

The Register’s Andrew Orlowski tried to make the point that the initial failure of the Paulson Plan in Congress was a sign that democracy works, whilst also taking a snipe at the venerable OpenDemocracy. In retrospect, the article will be remembered for being typical of libertarian wingnuttery. However, there is something to be said about the way democracy worked in the US. In the UK, Brown didn’t need to pass emergency measures before parliament, but the US struggled to find a solution that would pass Congress. There was a wholesale failure of framing, and ideological blinkers clearly prevented the right plan coming about. How can we make democracy function better? In that it allows voters to account the government whilst also being informed about issues. Don’t think there’s an easy answer.

Finally, since the 42 days law was defeated in the House of Lords, there is hope about the health of the UK’s democracy.

Perhaps the best news today is that Princeton economist and NYT columnist Paul Krugman took the Nobel Prize for Economics this year.

Apart from being generally right on the financial crisis, he’s done some great work on international trade and economic geography – which one day – I’ll read.