This summer, one line has come up in conversation after conversation with sabbatical officers and union staff – “we should only lobby on issues that affect students as students”.
Cost of living, food prices on campus, transport to and from campus, the impact of missing adjustments for disabled students – all fair game.
But the moment the conversation drifts towards something with a wider political charge, the mood in the room changes. Officers organising around Palestine, in particular, get told this isn’t their issue. It doesn’t affect students as students, so it isn’t the union’s place to take a position.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with having a filter. Students’ unions have finite capacity, and a union that tries to have a view on everything ends up with a view on nothing that lands. But the more I hear “affects students as students” used to close down a conversation, the less convinced I am that it’s being used as a test at all.
It behaves less like a principle and more like a mood. It’s applied firmly to some issues, waved through for others, with no consistent logic connecting the two.
Take transport. Is the cost of a bus pass a student issue? Obviously. Students who can’t afford to get to campus can’t attend, can’t work, can’t participate.
But you could just as easily argue it’s a public transport and local government funding issue that happens to land on students among everyone else, and that a students’ union has no real lever to pull on fares set by a mayoral authority or a private operator.
I’ve gone up and down the country this summer telling officers in training that they should NOT be thinking this way – please don’t stop organising on place-based issues.
If sensible people can land on either side of transport, the line is not obvious. It’s being drawn somewhere, by someone, and mostly not out loud.
Where the line came from
Officers have organised against apartheid in South Africa, against nuclear weapons, against wars their own government was fighting, for decades. Not because any of that touched the day-to-day experience of studying, but because students, as a mobilised part of society, have always treated injustice elsewhere as within their remit.
The student movement’s institutional memory is full of exactly the organising that “affects students as students” would rule out. So where did the phrase come from?
Not from a vice chancellor, and not from nowhere. It comes from charity law – and it’s worth knowing what the law says, because it’s narrower than the way it’s being used.
In 1972, in Baldry v Feintuck, a student at Sussex challenged the union’s spending of £800 on the campaign against the withdrawal of free school milk and £500 for War on Want. The court held that the union was an educational charity and that neither was within its purposes. In 1985 the Attorney General stopped the Polytechnic of North London’s union sending money to striking miners. In 1991, in Webb v O’Doherty, Anglia Polytechnic’s union was stopped from spending its campaign budget against the Gulf War.
The Attorney General issued guidance on union spending along the way, and the Education Act 1994 then defined a union in statute as a body promoting the general interests of its members “as students”. When unions had to register with the Charity Commission from 2010, its guidance for unions carried the phrase over.
So it is a real test, with real teeth. Trustees who spend charitable money outside the charity’s purposes can be personally liable for it. Anyone telling an officer to be careful is not making it up.
But look at where the courts drew the line. In Webb the judge distinguished between discussing political matters and reaching a collective view on them, which an educational charity can do, and spending charitable money on a campaign to shift public opinion, which it can’t. Students remained, in his words, “perfectly at liberty” to campaign in their private capacities.
The Commission’s guidance for unions says the same in simpler terms – a union can debate a motion on something that doesn’t concern students as students and reach a corporate conclusion on it, it just can’t usually spend money implementing it.
Counsel’s opinion obtained by NUS goes further, reading the Commission’s line about not commenting publicly as directed only at the bodies that can bind the union to spend. And CC9, the Commission’s campaigning guidance for every charity, allows campaigning – including on contested political questions – where it furthers the charity’s purposes and stays clear of party politics.
That is a spending test, applied to purposes that are usually written as the education and welfare of students at a particular institution. It is not a rule about what students may think, say or organise. It is not a rule that a union must be silent on anything the general public might also care about. The judgement to be made is whether this campaign, run by this union, furthers those purposes – a question trustees answer with reasons, not a category that answers itself.
What’s happened since is an accumulation of caution – funding pressure, wariness of complaints from the university or the Office for Students, a nervy few years of press stories about unions and free speech. Each is a reasonable thing to be wary of. Stacked together, they’ve turned a spending test into a speech test. A phrase that was meant to start an argument (“does this further our purposes?”) is being used as though it ended one.
That is the chilling effect. Not the law itself, but a reading of it that is wider than the law, applied by people who would rather not have the conversation – and it’s doing more to shape what unions do than most of their strategic plans. The encampments of 2024 showed what that costs: unions that reached for a simplistic “neutrality” line justified by charity law, and members who concluded their union was ignoring its own mandate.
Everything affects students as students if you look for the link
The other problem is that almost any global issue can be traced back to student life if you’re willing to draw the line.
Instability in the Middle East pushes up shipping and energy costs. Energy costs push up rent and bills. Rent and bills are a student issue by anyone’s definition. Officers organising on Palestine could make exactly that case, and some do.
Whether you find the chain of causation persuasive is a separate question – but it exists, and it’s no more of a stretch than plenty of connections unions accept without argument.
Climate is the clearest example of the double standard, because it’s been reframed successfully. A couple of officers told me this summer that they don’t feel they can organise on climate as a headline issue any more – the mobilised membership that existed ten or 15 years ago, when school and campus climate strikes put young people at the front of a global movement and students ranked climate above every other issue, isn’t there in the same way now. Cost of living has taken the space climate used to occupy, and officers worry that campaigning on climate for its own sake fails the “affects students as students” test.
And yet SOS-UK’s work on energy efficiency in student housing shows how that test bends. Its Student Energy Action for Life project works directly with landlords, pushing for insulation and efficiency upgrades in the ten cities with the highest concentrations of student housing, off the back of its own research finding that over half of students have dealt with damp or mould, and close to half say poor conditions have affected their mental health.
Nobody would call that campaign out of bounds. It’s a housing campaign and a cost-of-living campaign. It’s also a climate campaign. It just isn’t badged as one, and badging it that way apparently makes it optional.
So the test isn’t sorting issues by whether they affect students. It’s sorting them by whether someone has already done the work of translating them into cost-of-living or housing language, and by how comfortable people feel with the politics underneath. Climate gets a pass once it’s wearing a landlord letter template. Palestine, wearing a chain of causation that’s no weaker, doesn’t.
What officers need
The risk isn’t only that individual campaigns get shut down. It’s what this does to the appetite for organising across the whole movement.
If officers learn that anything beyond the immediate, provable campus issue is out of bounds – except when it isn’t, and nobody can say why – they don’t just narrow their agenda. They narrow their instincts. They stop practising coalition-building and stop taking risks on anything contested. A movement that only ever organises on issues someone has pre-approved has quietly given up on being a movement.
Not every union should organise on every global issue. Capacity is finite, the reputational risk isn’t imaginary and the trustee duty is real. Officers deserve support in making these calls, not a blank cheque.
But support means help with the test as it exists. Does this further our purposes? Can we show the link? What’s winnable, and what does the membership want? Not a blanket rule that isn’t applied consistently anywhere.
There is a line, and charity law draws it. But it’s drawn around the union’s purposes, and it’s meant to be argued over case by case. “Affects students as students”, as it’s used now, isn’t that line.
It’s a phrase that sounds like a principle while doing the work of an instinct – and instincts, unlike principles, are very hard for an officer to defend when a student asks why one global crisis gets a campaign and another gets silence.
