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CHARLES CLARKE
Between 1969 and 1973 I was actively involved in student politics. In the summer of 1969 I spent three months closely observing the ebb tide of revolutionary student politics in Paris. In the autumn of 1969 I went to Oxford University and became involved in the Oxford Union and the Labour Club, and was elected at the end of my first year to the Treasurership of the former and the Committee of the latter. I later resigned from both and became active in the Oxford University Student Representative Council (SRC), first as Chairman of the SRC's Standing Committee on University Discipline, then as Information Officer on its Executive Committee, then as the SRC representative for my college, and finally as President of the SRC from July to mid-December 1972. In the latter capacity I initiated and led the university-wide campaign to transform the SRC into a fully-fledged students' union, a campaign which was wholly successful, as the existence from 1973 to this day of the Oxford University Students' Union (OUSU) can testify.
It was through my role as President of the SRC in 1972 and my subsequent involvement in the politics of the National Union of Students (NUS) that I got to know Charles Clarke, the former President of the NUS and before that of the Cambridge Students' Union who became Kinnock's research assistant when Kinnock held the shadow education portfolio in 1981 and who has headed Neil Kinnock's private office since 1983. I can therefore speak of British student politics of the late 1960s and early 1970s, and of its impact on the Labour Party, from my own experience of those politics and my own knowledge of the most influential student politician in Kinnock's entourage. Charles Clarke and I go back 19 years, and to some extent what is at issue between the L&TUR and Kinnockism has reflected an earlier parting of the ways between two student politicians who once worked closely together but with very different arrières pensees.
This will not have been obvious to L&TUR readers, since I have never referred to my political dealings with Charles Clarke before, for various reasons, including a residue of good will, notwithstanding present differences, towards a former political ally, and more generally a desire to avoid personalising important political disagreements. But politics is a very specialised business, in which only a handful of individuals are engaged full-time. The relations between these individuals are accordingly of some importance in explaining the developments that occur. And there comes a point in most lines of political development where personalities as well as policies need to be thought about and their roles acknowledged, and the political differences which have arisen between them explained clearly and openly.
L&TUR has been at least implicitly at odds with the political vision of Charles Clarke since April 1987, when its second issue, which contained an editorial criticism of Kinnock's strategy in the light of the Greenwich by-election fiasco, was published, and I think that he has been as aware of this as I have been. And I do not doubt that I have him as much as Neil Kinnock to thank for the fact that the L&TUR has encountered a virtually endless series of obstacles to its endeavour to get a readership in that section of the Labour Party which most badly needs political and mental invigoration, and which might normally be expected to be most receptive to informed and reasoned political argument, the Parliamentary Labour Party.
The parting of the ways between Charles Clarke and myself occurred in the late 1970s, although this did not become manifest until I launched the L&TUR a decade later. But it reflected the percolation to the surface of the different attitudes to politics which had underlain, and been temporarily masked by, our involvement on the same side in the student politics of the early 1970s. This difference in underlying attitude had several dimensions, but the most important of them was undoubtedly an affair of roots.