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CHARLES CLARKE AND THE NATIONAL UNION OF STUDENTS
The result of the General Election represents the failure of the faction which has directed the Labour Party since 1983. The dominant influence in this faction has not been Neil Kinnock, but the head of his private office, the former president of the National Union of Students, Charles Clarke. The defeat on April 9 was as much a defeat for Clarke as for Kinnock. [...]
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I first met Charles Clarke at a wedding reception of a mutual friend at King's College, Cambridge, in September 1972. He had then just completed his year as President of the Cambridge Students' Union (CSU) and was thinking of standing for the NUS Executive, and I had recently become President of the Oxford University Student Representative Council and was preparing to launch the campaign to transform the OUSRC into a fully-fledged Students' Union. We liked each other immediately and saw each other as kindred spirits, at any rate in the context of student politics. I was then in the CPGB, which was running the NUS Left Caucus, and he was precisely the kind of competent, no-nonsense fellow-traveller which the CP liked to work with and made it its business to promote.
I had taken no part in national student politics, being absorbed by the situation in Oxford, and had been content to leave it to my better-connected colleague, Martin Kettle, to represent the CPGB's Oxford Student Branch at the national level. But when Martin suggested that I attend the meeting of the Left Caucus to be held in London in December 1972 to decide the Left slate for the next NUS Executive elections, I went along out of curiosity and was delighted to find Charles adopted as the candidate for the post of Vice President for Education. And when a member of the CP's Cambridge branch, Jon Bloomfield, rang me a few weeks later to say that Charles had asked if I could be persuaded to be his campaign manager, I accepted without hesitation.
The Easter 1973 NUS Conference at Exeter University was the first and last NUS conference I ever attended. By the end of it I had established my claim to a career in the NUS and had seen enough of the NUS to know that I did not want such a career.
During the first 24 hours, I got my campaign team to carry out four intensive canvasses of the conference delegates. (In the two months before it, I had spent hours on the telephone to CP contacts at universities and colleges across the country, to get them to canvass their delegations' support for Charles's candidacy.) The result was that Charles Clarke was elected with a massive majority. This was in sharp contrast both to Mike Terry, the Caucus's candidate for the presidency, who was defeated by the maverick candidacy of John Randall, and to Mike Grabiner, Charles's successor as President of the CSU, who was running for one of the other vice-presidencies and was soundly defeated by his Trotskyist opponent. The patchy performance of the Left Caucus's slate was the subject of angry recriminations at a special meeting of the CP after the results were announced, with only the campaign which I had run for Charles being exempt from vigorous criticism.
The other role I played at that conference was as a member of the Oxford University delegation, in which capacity I proposed Oxford's amendment to the main resolution on the annual grants campaign. In doing so, I was challenging the Executive's (and the CP's) line, and Digby Jacks, in the chair, was visibly taken aback to see me making my way to the rostrum and even more astonished by my speech, which to the platform's consternation was well received by the delegates. This did me no harm, however, as was made clear when Dave Cook, the CP's National Student Organiser, approached me towards the end of Conference and told me that the Party wanted to run me for the Executive in the next round of elections in the autumn. I told him that I would think it over.
Looking back, I am grateful to Dave Cook for putting me on the spot in that way. My mind was concentrated by his proposal, and it did not take me long to know that the last thing I wanted was to prolong my involvement in student politics. I realised that NUS politics was not at all a simple extension of what I had been up to at Oxford, but something else altogether. What I had seen of the NUS Communists at the Left Caucus meeting in December and during the Conference at Exeter had repelled me very thoroughly and I knew that I would be lost if I allowed myself to be drawn into their world. And so I told Dave a few days later that I was sorry to disappoint him, but had decided to concentrate on my doctoral research on Algeria. And, just to make sure (since I knew from experience what CP pressure could be), I applied for and obtained a post as an English teacher in a lycée in a provincial Algerian town, and so took myself out of NUS politics for good.
But I do not regret my involvement in the Easter 1973 NUS Conference. It was an interesting and instructive experience at the time and, in retrospect, I can see that I was a witness to an important moment in the history of the Labour Party, the moment when the politics of student unionism underwent a significant change and the politics of the Broad Left was born. It is the politics of the Broad Left, in a lethal combination with those of lapsed Bevanism since Charles Clarke joined forces with Neil Kinnock, which have been dominating the Labour Party these last eleven years and leading it relentlessly to disaster.