Interesting to see former National Union of Students president Kat Fletcher pop up as a Labour candidate in a council byelection.
Not because she’s running for Labour – most ex-NUS presidents do. I took note because her name was a blast from the past.
She led the NUS at a time I worked for the anti-racist charity The 1990 Trust and, around this period, I heard several grumbles about alleged racist and Islamophobic incidents.
Not that Fletcher was to blame. She has a long record of public statements condemning all forms of prejudice.
Yet anyone who was into national student politics in the mid-2000′s cannot deny that the NUS was rife with poisonous accusations at the time.
These tensions exploded into the national newspapers in 2005 when Luciana Berger, now a high-flying Labour MP, and two others resigned from the NUS executive in a row over “anti-Semitic” leaflets on a stall at the union’s annual conference in 2005.
Fletcher, who was NUS president at the time, said the union was “deeply concerned” by the resignations and stressed that it had a “proud record in tackling racism and fascism”.
But Berger was quoted as saying: “After five years fighting racism in the student movement, I am devastated to find it so prevalent at the heart of my own union.”
An independent inquiry criticised the NUS leadership for failing to act swiftly against anti-Semitism and the chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, expressed “distress” at the situation.
A year earlier Fletcher’s NUS was at loggerheads with the Federation of Student Islamic Societies (FOSIS) over a motion calling for respected Muslim academic Professor Tariq Ramadan to be banned from the European Social Forum.
Fletcher has, to her credit, stood up against Islamophobia on occasions and internal NUS turmoil was not unique to her term in office. Indeed after she left one student union officer was banned from NUS events after unveiling a banner saying “bring back slavery.”
I seem to recall other incidents during and after Fletcher’s time, some of which The 1990 Trust published on its’ Black Information Link website. Sadly the archive has been offline for a few years now so I can’t access the stories.
I’ve taken quotes from Fletcher more than once and she was impeccably polite, saying all the right things in terms of her commitment to anti-racism and anti-Islamophobia.
Being a student leader has always been a difficult job, a bit like herding feral cats into a pen, and as such she cannot be held responsible for the bad behavior of others.
Yet I understand from numerous sources that the NUS and student societies were notoriously riven with racial and religious spats, tensions and suspicion, during Fletcher’s tenure and after she left.
I never got the sense that she or her immediate successors were really leading the struggle to combat these ills despite their faultless public pronouncements.
But then I was never privy to the behind-the-scenes politics of the NUS and I certainly picked up more information from Black and Muslim students who felt aggrieved over various issues than I heard the NUS leadership’s side of the story.
By Lester Holloway @brolezholloway
