Editor's note: The Cheese Grater welcomes an opposing view from the Vote Remain campaign team.
The tragedy of the National Union of Students is that it once actually stood for something. How bitterly ironic it is that a national students’ union that once helped make unyielding activism part of student politics now disciplines students for demanding exactly that.
The NUS was founded in 1922 with an ambition to represent students “from a national and international point of view”. Its own centenary materials describe the student movement as one built on “solidarity, cooperation and daring to think radically”, proudly declaring itself as being “radical since 1922”.
That history, that founding statement, matters. The case for leaving is precisely that the NUS has become too unaccountable, too compromised and too institutionally defensive to live up to the very tradition of student solidarity it still invokes.
On 11 July 2025, more than 200 student officers, societies and student groups wrote to the NUS Board. They presented a list of clear demands: condemn the mass genocide in Gaza, call for a permanent ceasefire and humanitarian access, rescind the IHRA definition of antisemitism, defend student protest, lead ethical divestment, and investigate Islamophobia and anti-Black racism inside NUS.
The NUS promptly responded by shutting down any possibility of meaningful debate. A leaked email asked Students’ Union chief executives to “explore whether they were willing to withdraw officers’ support” for the letter, asking for replies by 23 July “so that [they were] able to confirm their attendance at Lead and Change”, effectively threatening to ban student officers from future conferences.
The rest of the letter was just as damning. The NUS suggested that many officers simply “may not have understood what they were signing”, “felt pressured”, or were “too new to student politics”. They accused signatories of spreading misinformation, or engaging in antisemitism. It’s hard to think of a more patronising response.
What a fall from grace. The NUS of the 1970s no-platformed organised fascists trying to recruit on campuses, decades before no-platforming even entered the mainstream political lexicon. Its anti-apartheid work was serious enough that its own defenders still point to campaigns like Boycott Barclays as proof of what a national student movement can do. It was once an unabashedly moral force, willing to take clear positions with the confidence that it stood on the right side of history.
Today, that clarity has been replaced by calculated ambiguity, procedural deflection, and an almost dogmatic instinct to protect the institution rather than exercise moral leadership.
Nowhere has this collapse been clearer than on Palestine — where both a refusal to take a clear position and a willingness to constrain dissent have come together. Faced with one of the defining moral questions of our time, the NUS has chosen a cowardly retreat into institutional caution. Students and officers demanding a clearer stance have been met with scrutiny and pressure. A national students’ union should be a vehicle for collective moral and political expression, yet the NUS has too often acted as an arbiter of speech, moderating, managing, and diluting the very voices it claims to represent. In doing so, it has abdicated the role it was created to fulfill.
The problems extend far beyond this incident. The NUS’s claims in influencing national policy are often overstated, at times taking credit for initiatives it did not directly negotiate. Its internal democratic culture has repeatedly inspired little confidence. At the 2024 National Conference in Blackpool, delegates were told they couldn’t amend parts of reform motions despite a litany of objections, because they had already been approved internally. The reforms passed by 205 votes — a pitifully small figure for an organisation that claims to represent millions of students.
The question becomes, then, why stay?
The costs of affiliation cannot be ignored. Our Students’ Union pays £30,700 annually for NUS UK membership, including a £7,620 fee for NUS Charity membership. While this isn’t an existential sum in context of the Union’s whole budget, it is still student money. It could fund societies, emergency support, events, campaigns, or direct student-facing work.
At this point, the most obvious objection arises. The word “Leave” inevitably invites comparisons to Brexit — a reminder of a national decision framed around cost and sovereignty, the consequences of which proved far more complex than promised. But this is not Brexit in miniature. Disaffiliation from the NUS is not a permanent, irreversible break from a political and economic union. It is a membership decision, and one that can be revisited. If the NUS can “get itself sorted out internally” and show it can once again earn the trust of students, future students can vote to reaffiliate.
Leaving, then, should not be understood as an act of isolation but as a form of pressure — a last resort in the absence of meaningful accountability. Affiliation should be conditional, not automatic.
Nor does leaving the NUS mean abandoning national student organising. Student unions, societies, and campaigns can and do coordinate across campuses independently. We should not be expected to channel all collective effort through a single institution, particularly one that has shown itself to be so prone to dysfunction.
What a shame that it has come to this. The idea of a national students’ union is a powerful one. We should want the NUS to succeed. We should want it to be a confident, principled organisation capable of representing students in moments that matter. But that is not the NUS we have today.
UCL, it’s time to leave the National Union of Students.