William Pinkney-Baird interviews Dario Celaschi, standing for Vice President Society & Citizenship, in the third of a series of interviews with some of the left-wing candidates for NUS leadership positions.
Photo: Dario Celaschi.
‘The reason I decided to stand for Society and Citizenship is because it’s one of the main things about NUS that nobody really understands what it’s for.’ I am speaking to Dario Celaschi, standing for Vice President Society & Citizenship at NUS national conference next week. They continue: ‘I think nobody really understands what NUS is for anymore, not even the officers themselves.’
What, then, should be the purpose of Society and Citizenship? Dario has a clear answer to that question: ‘Society and Citizenship should be about community organising, direct action, empowering students to change their society and to make it the society that they actually want it to be.’
They see signs of hope in a revitalised student movement based around direct action on campus, apparent in the candidates for NUS National Executive Council: ‘people running for the Block of 15 this year are more radically left-wing, more radically dedicated to making change rather than bureaucracy.’ However, Dario explained that rather than fighting on the street, current NUS officers are ‘asking us to sit around and ask for Vice Chancellors to give us free education.’
One of Dario’s main focuses as VP Society and Citizenship would be to engage the student movement in community organising against fascism. This is something Dario has experience in, having organised a successful counter demonstration to an EDL march. In particular, they would ‘set the groundwork for direct action and community organising around anti-fascism, and education around what fascism is and what it leads to.’
Another central focus was the creation of a ‘liberated youth work service.’ While youth work has been a major focus for NUS over the past year, Dario believes that the current approach has been problematic, due to the focus on ‘sitting round making legislation’ and the fact that the Nations have been left out of the campaign. According to Dario, this approach ‘hasn’t translated into training people to community organise themselves’, and instead what is needed is for the campaign to be reinvigorated – made into something ‘students can all get behind.’
Another priority for Dario would be further education colleges. Despite including over half of the students belonging to NUS, Dario argued that a lot of further education unions aren’t engaged with NUS, and that they’d like to see ‘further education colleges engaged, and community organising, and focusing around what they want—what they feel is important.’ One particular issue they highlighted was that of students in further education being estranged from their parents, an issue that had been addressed for students in higher education but not for FE students.
The Nations were another group Dario would work to bring into the NUS Society and Citizenship campaign. They would listen to the policies supported by NUS in the Nations and support them, providing the funding of NUS UK to the campaigns being run by NUS Scotland, NUS Wales, and NUS-USI. Additionally, there could be a successful interchange of ideas, learning from students in Scotland, for instance about what free education actually looks like in practice.
When I asked if twelve months would be enough to achieve these aims, Dario was very optimistic: ‘Most people think that 12 months isn’t enough time to make change, but when I was president at my student union, which was also for a year, I successfully lobbied for gender neutral toilets—throughout the entire city; there’s gender and sexual monitoring on all college application forms so that LGBT people can be catered for; we even did the first comprehensive piece of research on the black attainment gap in further education.’ And, of course, Dario pointed out that ‘David Cameron only needed a year to ruin this country.’
Dario also stated that they were the only candidate standing for NUS leadership who wasn’t associated with a particular faction: ‘I don’t have an allegiance to a faction, to an interest group, I have an allegiance to what I think is right and what students have told me that they think is right.’ If elected, Dario said that rather than ignoring the decisions of NUS Conference, they would ‘want to hold myself accountable to NEC and change my work according to what members and conference actually asks for.’
When I asked Dario if they had anything else to add, they called upon all delegates at NUS conference to support the motion for the introduction of a full-time trans officer – it would be a landmark in the representation of trans people and would make NUS the first organisation to have a full-time trans officer.