As students struggle in an ever more demanding job market, the cost of living crisis worsens and student mental health plummets, NUS delegates gathered this week for their annual self-aggrandising circus. 

Though the NUS has been a national joke for years, in 2022 it has sunk to another level altogether. First, they invited rapper Lowkey to perform, compromising the health and wellbeing of Jewish students in the process. 

Lowkey, should his exploits have escaped you, has defended the disgraced former Bristol University professor David Miller, has implied that 9/11 was a “controlled demolition” and has claimed that the mainstream media is deliberately weaponising Volodomyr Zelensky’s Jewish heritage to “stave off” reporting about far right groups in Ukraine. 

When Union of Jewish Students president Nina Freedman complained about this grotesque invitation, her NUS counterpart Larissa Kennedy told her that Jewish students could go and sit in a separate room during the performance, as reported by the JC. 

The UJS then published this appalling text exchange on social media. Instead of unreservedly apologising to Jewish students, the NUS accused them of spreading “harassment and misinformation against Lowkey”. They attempted to reframe the Jewish targets of their behaviour as the aggressors — rightly shattering the last dregs of any respect Jewish students had for the NUS. 

Though the Lowkey concert was reluctantly cancelled following the backlash, unhappy NUS delegates decided to scale the roof and gate of the student union’s 100th birthday party venue in protest. 

Jewish students at the conference have described feeling “gaslit” and “alienated” as a result of the NUS’ behaviour.

The organisation places a huge amount of emphasis in its words on “liberation”. In reality, it is more than happy to selectively and deliberately ignore the needs of certain students if it does not suit their far-left agenda. It is a remarkable coincidence that those they ignore are usually Jewish.

No one who has followed, or been involved in, the NUS’s activities in recent years will be in any way surprised by this week’s events.

I attended NUS conference as a delegate in 2019 and it was clear to me then, as it is even more so now, that the NUS is rotten to the core. 

Instead of debate and discussion, intolerance dominated the conference floor. Delegates were more interested  in factional in-fighting than representing young people on a national stage. 

When I attended, a pro-Israel delegate was booed off the stage by fellow representatives. Is it any wonder that dissenting voices are scared to mount the stage, express their true opinions and voice their concerns? A space that has, in a form of unintentionally sick humour, been branded as “safe” by its leadership, is in reality incredibly hostile for so many.

The indications are that things may be getting worse. Newly-elected NUS president Shaima Dallali tweeted “Khaybar Khaybar O Jews [...] Muhammed’s army will return’’ in 2012. This well-known battle cry references the massacre of Jews in Khaybar in 628 CE. 

The tweet did not deter the majority of delegates from electing her as president.  

NUS is out of touch and unrepresentative. It has a limited understanding of what most students care about. It does not represent the majority but instead amplifies the voices of an intolerant, fringe faction. 

Instead of student mental health, student accommodation, and student finance, candidates debate Palestine, Kashmir and Syria.  

In Shiam Dallali’s conference speech she vowed to “stand for those in Ukraine, Syria, Somalia, Nigeria, Kashmir, Yemen, and of course Palestine.” 

Mainstream organisations  should no longer take this group seriously. Student unions should disaffiliate from this ridiculous  mob.   

When I wrote about the NUS several years ago for my student paper, I argued that the NUS had some “potential”, if it only started to focus on the people it claimed to represent. 

Since then, I have watched it spiral down the far-left rabbit hole of lunacy.  The National Union of Students is an unredeemable cesspit.

If students hope to have their interests represented in front of ministers and MPs they need to re-organise themselves without these nutty activists. The NUS should be dissolved before it can cause any more harm.