At the General Meeting held on Wednesday 16th February 2011, OULC took the unfortunate decision to disaffiliate from Labour Students. Our reasons are outlined in the open letter to Labour Students below.

Dear Labour Students,

Yesterday evening, we took the decision by 19 votes to 6 to disaffiliate from Labour Students. This was not a course of action we were happy to take, or one we took lightly. Our affiliation with the student movement within our Party is something we regard as an important part of our identity within the Labour movement. We are sad to be leaving an institution that has secured the election of countless Labour candidates while leading the way on tuition fees. But we could no longer remain within an institution whose democratic failings we feel increasingly threaten to undermine its positive work.

For the last two years as a club we have held an annual debate on whether to re-affiliate to Labour Students following concerns over its democratic proceedings. This year’s elections though, which saw every single position on the Labour Students Exec elected unopposed, showed that the problems that had initially concerned us had become worse not better. One of Labour Students’ worst kept secrets is the prominent role of the outgoing Exec in choosing and encouraging a chosen group of candidates to run for positions, with little to no attention focused on encouraging others to enter the race. This practice is clearly in itself wrong, but also serves to stifle debate and discussion about how Labour Students can be reformed to serve the clubs who need it most.

The undemocratic culture of Labour Students is typified by its constitution, which is not available online or even at the request of members. How can individual clubs be expected to argue for change if they can’t even consult the constitution? We have also been sad to see this same lack of transparency reflected by the organisation itself, which is all too often disconnected and remote from the student clubs it was elected to serve, with little to no regular contact with clubs. During the affiliation meeting itself, even those members of Labour Students who came to speak on its behalf acknowledged that the organisation has ‘lots to improve’, while one recent delegate to Labour Students Conference said that these democratic failings made them ‘sick’. While these shortcomings are problematic as a matter of principle, they are also beginning to affect the services Labour Students provides.

At the last election, we received election material that may have been fine at targeting most voters, but was completely unsuited to targeting students, forcing us the scrap the material and produce our own instead. In Labour Students’ campaign literature, there is no discrete student offer. We have found the local party’s election material more suited to targeting students than our own national body’s. The decisions Labour Students have chosen to take have also seemed disconnected with their membership. While Labour Students’ decision to endorse David Miliband last year was not out of keeping with our club’s own stance (he shared our endorsement jointly with Andy Burnham), the failure to even make members aware in advance that such a decision was being made, let alone inform them how they could make their own views heard, rightly angered many.

Given these problems, it was clear to us that Labour Students is in need of reform. However, it was also clear to us that the institution’s own structures make internal reform near-impossible. When we put some of these concerns directly to members of the national executive two weeks ago, as a club we felt a clear lack of engagement with the issues we were raising. As a club we are consistently outward-looking in our nature, be it in our strong links to the Oxford East CLP and local charities or our record of campaigning in elections across the country. On this occasion though, we felt with regret that the best way to foster a meaningful debate about the way forward for Labour Students was through deciding not to affiliate for the next year. We remain committed to fighting for the values that brought us into Labour Students in Oxford and elsewhere, but these wouldn’t be in keeping with our continued presence in an organisation whose democratic deficit increasingly stifles efforts at meaningful reform and improvement. With this in mind we hope through disaffiliation to start an honest and open discussion about the way forward for Labour Students, and return to a revitalised and refreshed Labour Students. We hope that this decision can be the start of a constructive, open discussion about how Labour Students can stand up for progressive students across the country that we didn’t feel we could have while remaining members.

In comradeship,

Oxford University Labour Club