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THE SHAPE OF STUDENT POLITICS IN THE 1960s - 1970s
Broadly speaking there were three kinds of students politics in existence in most British universities in the late 1960s and early 1970s, which was the formative period of most of the ambitious young men in Kinnock's entourage.
There was the long established student politics of the party political societies, the Labour Clubs, Liberal Clubs and Conservative Associations, in which students committed to these parties debated policy issues and learned how to get themselves elected on to the committees of their respective societies, and generally underwent training in policy debate, manoeuvre and intrigue to prepare them for a party political career. This form of student politics had its natural extension in the university debating societies, where budding Labourites, Tories and Liberals would confront each other and learn how to score points off each other (sharing this forum with students who envisaged other careers for which an aptitude for public speaking was a prerequisite, notably in television).
Then there was the revolutionary student politics of the 'student revolt' and its aftermath. At first, this took its cue from the 'New Left' and the theories of people like Herbert Marcuse and was vaguely anarchist in outlook. Models available were the Situationists in France and especially the spontaneist March 22 movement led by Daniel Cohn-Bendit in 1968, but these models dovetailed quite easily with the hippy fringe of the Anti-Vietnam War movement in the US and more generally the plethora of conceptions and lines of patter associated with the notion of an 'Alternative Society'. But in Britain this brand of student radicalism had shallow roots and had largely evaporated as a political force by 1969; or rather, the Marcusian New Left element disappeared from the political arena, the hippy element simply dropped out, and the politically activist element reverted to, or condensed into, or was absorbed by a revival of, the unorthodox trend of the Old Left, namely Trotskyism. At first this occurred under the cover of a nominally broad-based movement called the Revolutionary Socialist Students Federation (RSSF). By late 1969 the RSSF had fallen apart and its main organised underpinnings, the International Socialists (IS) and the International Marxist Group (IMG), had begun to operate in the open on their own account.
The third kind of student politics of this period was student unionism.
A fundamental characteristic of student unions is that the essential elements of the unions are laid on for the elected student officers who are temporarily vested with the notional responsibility of running them. The officers of a student union do not have to worry about recruiting members, since all members of the student body are automatically members of the student union. And they do not have to worry about collecting membership dues either, because these are paid automatically to the union by the Local Education Authorities as part of the students' grants. As for administering other activities, most of these actually run themselves as self-governing clubs and societies, the union's job being essentially confined to handling the booking of rooms and allocating funds. The exceptions are the union's own catering facilities, but these are often administered by full-time or part-time employed staff, over whom the union officers exercise a largely nominal supervision.
In short, the administrative side of running a student union is largely on automatic pilot all the time. Little or no real responsibility is vested in its elected officers on this score. The running of student unions requires little real administrative ability and is unlikely to develop this in the people who undertake the responsibility if they don't possess it in the first place. And because it requires little administrative ability, it requires little in the way of a sense of responsibility, and is equally unlikely to develop this sense in people who get themselves elected to office if they don't possess it in the first place.
None of this mattered very much before the late 1960s, because student union activity had tended to be apolitical, and its characteristics did not infect those students with ambitions to get somewhere in Labour politics. But after 1969 it became highly politicised, and the grafting of leftwing politics onto student union irresponsibility gave rise to a political concoction which has had a lethal effect on the Labour Party.
The student unionism which developed around 1969-1971 was a genuine innovation in student politics. What caught the attention in the 1960s were the 'revolutionary' varieties of student politics. But while the Marcusian-spontaneist-anarchist-situationist variety was largely something new, and even interesting in some ways, it was a flash in the pan. As a form of politics it lacked vital ingredients and stamina. It was the revival of the Old Left varieties of revolutionary politics which had substance and staying power, but there was nothing particularly novel about the phenomenon of students being attracted to revolutionary Marxist politics. The Trotskyism of the late '60s and early '70s expressed much the same proclivities of a minority of British university students as orthodox Communism had in the 1930s.
Novelty and staying power were combined only in the third kind of student politics, student unionism. This did not really exist before 1968-9. Its arrival was signalled by the election of Jack Straw to the presidency of the National Union of Students in 1969 at the head of a slate backed by something in the shadows called the 'Left Caucus'. And its existence was consolidated by the election of Digby Jacks as Straw's successor in 1971.
Jacks was (and was widely known to be) a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, and the guiding force in the 'Left Caucus' from the outset was the CPGB. The CPGB's success in getting first Straw and then Jacks elected to the NUS presidency established student unionism as a form of student politics with serious leftwing political pretensions; it gave to student unionism a gravitational pull on ambitious leftwing students which it had never previously had, and it forced IS and the IMG to reorient themselves to student unionism to counter the CPGB's success in this arena, although their presence in it merely reinforced the CPGB's influence.