CHRIS MARKS #1 FOR

NATIONAL PRESIDENT
Fight against fees and cuts
WHY I’M STANDING
I am standing for President at this
year‘s national conference to help
student officers and activists build
a fighting alternative to the cur-
rent leadership of NUS, who have
trashed our national union’s
democracy to protect the Labour
government from a serious fight
back against cuts and fees.
As New Labour makes hundreds
of millions in cuts, and anti-cuts
and free education campaigns
blossom across the country, we
need an NUS that backs them
instead of standing in their way.
NUS’s education funding policy –
aimed entirely at tinkering
with the method of payment
rather than challenging fees
altogether – represents a betray-
al of students’ interests and a
capitulation to New Labour’s
Thatcherite ideology. I’m
standing in this election
because I want to reassert
basic working-class socialist
ideas in our movement – most
fundamentally, the idea that stu-
dents should unite with workers to
fight for a society that puts human
need before the ‘needs’ of profit.

MY RECORD
I am sabbatical Vice-President
(Education) at Hull University
Union – elected as a fighting,
socialist candidate in a
traditionally right-wing union
and helping to build an
activist culture here over
the last two years. I played
a central role in organising
last year’s national demon-
stration for free education in
London. I have been a social-
ist, anti-war and anti-fas-
cist activist since I was 16.
Before I went to university,
I was a UCU activist
and branch secretary at
Westminster College in
London. I am a member of
Education Not for Sale
and Workers’ Liberty, and
Northern co-convenor of
the new National Campaign
Against Fees and Cuts.
MY POLICIES
• Cuts are not inevitable: stu-
dents and workers should not pay
for the bosses’ crisis. For mass direct
action against cuts and fees.
Financial, organisational and polit-
ical support for local anti-cuts
campaigns. 100 percent support
for workers fighting back, in edu-
cation and beyond. Struggles like
Visteon, Vestas and Tower Hamlets
College show the way to win.
• No to higher fees, no to a grad-
uate tax! NUS must demand free
education and living grants for all,
in FE and HE. Stop the cuts, stop
privatisation - tax the rich to fund
education and public services.
• Education should be a right,
available to all as a public service
and controlled by students, work-
ers and communities, not a com-
modity churned out in education
factories to produce a profit and pli-
ant workers for exploitation.
• Support the National Campaign
Against Fees and Cuts.
• For a mass campaign to union-
ise students who work. Campaign
for a real living wage, without
exemptions or age differentials.
Fight to scrap the anti-union laws.
• For a democratic national
union. Scrap the new constitu-
tion and the plans to merge with
NUSSL. No to trustee boards;
fight for a longer, sovereign national
conference and a national execu-
tive that controls the union’s oper-
ations. Defend the autonomy of the
Liberation Campaigns.
• Fight sexism, homophobia,
disability discrimination and
all forms of racism. Neither
Islamophobia nor anti-semitism
is acceptable in the student move-
ment, on our campuses or in
society. Fight the government’s
attempts to turn universities into
police agencies spying on Muslim
students. Stand up to the reli-
gious bigots: for a woman’s right
to choose. Solidarity with asylum-
seekers’ and migrant workers’
struggles - no one is illegal! For
socialist policies that fight the fas-
cist BNP and the social decay on
which it feeds.
• Build campaigning links with
students’ and workers’ struggles
internationally.
• For an outward-looking, polit-
ical NUS that campaigns on issues
from fighting climate change to
solidarity with the Palestinians to
demanding the withdrawal of
troops from Afghanistan.
(For a full list of policies, and
more information see my
Facebook group “Chris Marks
#1 for National President”)
THE NATIONAL
CAMPAIGN AGAINST
FEES AND CUTS
In February, anti-cuts campaigns from
all over the country came together to
form the National Campaign Against
Fees and Cuts. This represented a sig-
nificant step forward in terms of bring-
ing together what had previously been
disparate and disconnected campaigns
into a national framework. I believe the
NCAFC needs to continue to provide
coordination, including organising
national actions such as demonstra-
tions. Students Unions that support
the NCAFC, such as Sussex, SOAS
and UCL, should use it to coordinate
the kind of joint actions that we know
are needed but which NUS will not
organise.
I am the only candidate in the presiden-
tial election who has consistently sup-
ported the NCAFC project from the out-
set – not just superficially but actively,
helping build its Northern coordination
and mobilising students from my uni-
versity to attend its meetings. If you
believe the NCAFC represents the kind
of campaign the student movement
needs to help us resist cuts, you should
back me for president.
The National Campaign Against Fees
& Cuts - bringing together direct-action
campaigns on campuses across the UK
www.conventionagainstfeesandcuts.
wordpress.com
againstfeesandcuts@gmail.com
Education Not for Sale - a network
of anti-capitalist activists in the student
movement
www.free-education.org.uk
education.not.for.sale@gmail.com
WHAT KIND OF
NATIONAL UNION?
Years of attacks on NUS’s democratic
structures have left the national union in a
pitiful state. Where NUS once had two
annual conferences of five days, it now has
just one of less than around two and a half
days. The channels by which ordinary stu-
dents were historically able to intervene in
their national union and influence its direc-
tion – such as NUS Areas – have been mas-
sively cut back or scrapped altogether. The
new constitution, introduced in 2009, creat-
ed a Trustee Board staffed by bureaucrats
and managers from outside of the student
movement and paves the way for NUS to
become a fully-fledged commercial chari-
ty-type organisation. The recent cutbacks
to delegate entitlements have led to an
even smaller, less-representative national
conference. When students are facing
increasingly savage attacks from educa-
tion sector bosses and government, a
national union that’s structurally incapable
of organising a fightback simply isn’t fit for
purpose. Activists should fight to reverse
the undemocratic changes and, where we
can’t, activists and activist-led SUs should
coordinate independently of NUS to organ-
ise the action we know is necessary. If
elected president, I’ll help launch a new
“Governance Review” that seeks to reor-
ganise NUS’s structures to make them
genuinely democratic, member-controlled
and responsive to the needs of the strug-
gles we face.
WHAT KIND
OF EDUCATION?
Fighting for free education doesn’t just
mean fighting for the abolition of fees. It
means fighting for an education sector
where students are free to develop as
creative individuals and not trained to
be obedient workers. I believe the NUS
should lead the fight to drive business
out of education; too many of our univer-
sities are hand-in-glove with massive
multinational companies, meaning that
research students often have no control
over what happens to their work. In
schools and FE, employer-controlled
“vocational” courses and apprentice-
ships supply a steady stream of cheap or
even unpaid labour for local and nation-
al employers. Our schools, colleges and
universities should be places of learning
– not conveyor-belts for the low-paid
workers of tomorrow.
VOTE BELL # 2
I’m advocating a
second preference
vote for Black
Students’ Officer
Bellavia Ribeiro-Addy
CONTACT CHRIS
For more information
or to obtain this
manifesto in an
alternative format, email
c.marks@hull.ac.uk or
ring 07931 108 618.