After Burns, cooler heads prevail at NUS Scotland

Robin Parker is working late. When the new National Union of Students Scotland president greets me at the door of his office, the union’s plush headquarters in Edinburgh’s New Town is so quiet it looks like he might be the last man standing. And his day is far from over, he tells me: he’s off to London on an overnight train to check in with NUS’ national honchos.

The 24-year-old is still in his first hundred days at the helm of the union’s Scottish wing, but it has been a far from tranquil start. The day before we meet, the University of Edinburgh announced plans to charge UK students from outside Scotland £36,000 in tuition fees, while two other institutions (Heriot-Watt and his alma mater, the University of Aberdeen) announced Rest of UK fees capped at £27,000 in buy-three-years-get-one-free concessions.

It's the issue which may come to define his presidency. Lambasting Edinburgh's decision as "outrageous", he speaks with the frustrated air of a campaigner gearing up for a long, difficult fight. "It's bad for their reputation, and it can't be good for them in a business sense," he says.

A sober Englishman with a wispy beard and long blonde hair tied back in a ponytail, he isn’t your run-of-the-mill student politico: in Parker, the standard student unionist mix of brash charisma and political fervour is supplanted by a quiet earnestness and a thoughtful demeanour which doubles as a mean poker face. Ask him about his politics, and he’ll readily identify himself as a floating voter.

"I think I've voted for at least three parties in the last two years," he says with a small laugh.

Indeed, the association of student unionism with party politics seems to bother Parker: the idea of young people as naturally left-wing is a truism, he says, and "in recent terms it's unfair to brand NUS as simply a Labour Party breeding ground."

In conversation, Parker is relentlessly circumspect: at first it seems like evasiveness, but it quickly becomes clear that he weighs his words carefully before speaking. Even on the issues he is most passionate about - climate change and widening access - Parker is impeccably measured.

A native of London’s diverse Mile End district, it is to those environs that he credits a political identity concerned heavily with social equality. "East London is very polarised in terms of people's lives and people's expectations," he says. "There are very wealthy people working in Canary Wharf, and then there are people from Bangladeshi or Somali backgrounds who have far fewer opportunities open to them."

He studied geography at the University of Aberdeen, admitting that he initially took little interest in student politics there. Indeed, he confesses that the first vote he cast at Aberdeen University Students’ Association was for himself, during his successful bid for the union presidency in 2009.

To hear him tell it, Parker’s political history is a narrative of idealism accelerated by benign peer pressure: an environmental activist (he was president of Aberdeen’s People & Planet affiliate, the Shared Planet Society), his AUSA presidential nomination came about as a consensus decision by a coalition of students unhappy with the union establishment. Two years later, his decision to stand for the NUS Scotland presidency was at the encouragement of fellow members of the union’s Scottish Executive Committee. He's quick to clarify that he isn’t some kind of perennial figurehead: indeed, he might be better characterised as a skilled but slightly reluctant political operative who thrives, or perhaps relies, on the support of a circle of trusted colleagues. When asked if he would have run without that extra momentum, he hesitates longer than usual before answering: "I think I’ve always really valued the friendships that have brought me along the way."

He speaks warmly of NUS UK president Liam Burns, his presidential predecessor. Parker’s views often diverged with those of Burns, a Labour-supporting union establishment figure, but that didn’t stop Burns from tacitly supporting Parker’s presidential bid on his way out the door. In fact, according to Parker, "one of the reasons [Burns] supported me to be his successor was because I disagreed with him when he needed to be disagreed with."

The Scottish presidency, he says, "seemed like a natural progression, after having been on the exec committee and having played quite a vocal role in trying to keep our exec team on track, and trying to be a critical friend to Liam."

That election was both close-fought and close to home: Parker beat his opponent, Jennifer Cádiz, by just over 10 per cent of the vote. Curiously, Cádiz was both Burns’ deputy and Parker’s girlfriend, but he rejects the idea that the election was "an establishment/disestablishment contest in the way that my first Aberdeen election was.

"It was much more two people who are both well-known and well-respected within the student movement in Scotland," he says. "I think our differences were more about nuances in terms of what we wanted to do and what we wanted to focus on."

The job can be "frustrating" and "hectic", he says, but even these gripes echo a heartfelt enthusiasm for the cause and the campaigning trade. Three months in, he admits that he's finding it hard to advance his chosen agenda: "To some extent, my agenda has been set for me," he says. With the consultation over RUK fees ongoing, Parker's focus is now on lobbying Holyrood for a legislative intervention to cap fee levels.

It's set to be a long process, and Parker is pragmatic about the role of campaigning organisations like NUS. "At the end of the day, we can't decide what universities do, or what the government thinks is best for students. We can only influence as best we can."