[9] At the 1969 NUS conference, then president Trevor Fisk came up against Jack Straw (then close to Bert Ramelson of the Communist Party of Great Britain, but much later Foreign Secretary under the New Labour government of Tony Blair) over the issue.

Straw was followed up as president by Digby Jacks, also representing the Radical Student Alliance (formed in 1966 by Fergus Nicholson) and a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain.

According to contemporary British government reports, the RSA was connected to the Trotskyist-led Vietnam Solidarity Campaign and had close links with the Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund (organising a protest following Rudi Dutschke's shooting).

At the same time, the NUS adopted a No Platform policy; a concept pioneered by the IMG in 1972; to stifle the campus organisation and speech of nationalistic British groups that it declared to be "racist or fascist".

After members of the QUBSU organised a protest against the hardline Unionist politician Bill Craig, the then Minister of Home Affairs, some members such as Bernadette Devlin, Eamonn McCann and Michael Farrell decided to found the Trotskyist group People's Democracy in 1968, which played a role in the Northern Ireland civil rights movement.

Following a meeting in Galway in 1972, to combat divisions, it was agreed that a group called the NUS-USI would be founded with dual-membership to cover Northern Ireland.

[13] In 1970, NUS vice president Tony Klug visited South Africa and met with Steve Biko of the SASO among others.

The first of these Broad Left presidents was Charles Clarke (later a Home Secretary under Blair) who as a member of the Clause Four Group, won the National Organisation of Labour Students back from Militant influence.

Other presidents included Sue Slipman (who began on the Eurocommunist wing on the Communist Party of Great Britain but ended up a founding member of the Social Democratic Party by 1981), Trevor Phillips (a Broad Left independent and the first black NUS president, who later led the race relations group the Runnymede Trust) and David Aaronovitch (who was then a Eurocommunist, but later became a journalist aligned to neoconservatism).

[citation needed] The campaign has since been extended into Students Organising for Sustainability (SOS-UK), an educational charity responding to the climate emergency and ecological crisis.

This became a very high-profile campaign when many Liberal Democrat MPs, who all signed individual NUS pledges stating they would vote against any rise in tuition fees if elected, had to abstain or do the opposite as part of their coalition agreement.

The NUS, under new leader Aaron Porter, organised a national protest attended by thousands in November 2010, demanding an end to education cuts.

[20] Porter responded to the claims on NUS Connect that "In all of these meetings and communications we stated our firm and clear opposition to cuts" and that the distortion of the discussions was "political desperation from a coalition government losing the arguments on its own policies".

[24] Its supporters however defended the review as providing a more 'innovative' corporate structure which was hoped to make it more credible in negotiating policy, rather than simply 'reactive'.

[26] The perceived lack of progress on governance reform also prompted Imperial College Union to hold a referendum on disaffiliation.

[31] At the following executive meeting on 3 December 2014, a similar motion, which condemned ISIS, expressed solidarity with the Kurdish people, and called on NUS to challenge "Islamophobia and all forms of racism being whipped up" was resubmitted and easily passed.

[32] At the 2016 NUS conference, Malia Bouattia was elected president with 50.9% of the vote defeating Megan Dunn who had sought re-election.

[42][43] Newcastle, Portsmouth, Hull and Loughbrough disaffiliated; the remainder maintained affiliation, although NUS reportedly broke campaigning rules at Oxford, Cambridge, and Christ Church.

The changes, developed from "two [years] of consultation with hundreds of students' unions, [as well as] legal and expert advice,"[54] were described as "the most comprehensive and wide-ranging structural reforms in NUS history".

Martin faced criticism for developing a drastic programme of financial, governance and campaigning reforms for approval by the 2019 National Conference; however after around five hours of debate, 700 delegates voted in favour of the package.

In May 2022, the UK Government announced it would sever all ties with the NUS on the basis claiming that it had failed to tackle “antisemitic rot at the heart".

It will focus on students' union quality, talent management, equality and diversity, strategic development and turnaround, ethical and environmental work, and fundraising.

[82][83] Posters promoting the campaign were also removed from several railway stations on the grounds that Network Rail is an "arms length public sector body" and must therefore remain politically neutral.

[84] NUS president Toni Pearce defended the union's actions saying that the breach of a promise regarding tuition fees: "Wasn't a minor misdemeanour.