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LABOUR CLUB AND STUDENT UNION POLITICS COMPARED
I was an active member of the Oxford University Labour Club in 1969-1970 and was able to observe the game at close quarters. The way to make headway in the OULC was to become the OULC representative for your own college, and then coax and cajole (bribery was not unheard of) as many members of your college as possible to take out Club membership. This gave you a block vote with which to bargain with your counterparts in other colleges in the negotiations which went on in the formation of unofficial slates or tickets in the end-of-term elections for the Club's officers. I dare say that this sort of thing made for a certain cynicism, but all politics have their seamy side, and at least this business developed certain practical aptitudes which future Labour MPs would need.
And, in addition to recruiting student members for the Labour Club, student activists would regularly canvass for the nearest Constituency Labour Party in local and general elections, and develop useful skills in the process.
None of this applied to student unionism. Student unionists developed no aptitude for recruitment or proselytising, let alone canvassing the general public, at all. What they developed instead was an exaggerated and unhealthily premature taste for competition for bureaucratic jobs.
The offices in a Labour Club were normally of one term's duration only, made minimal demands on a student's time, and carried no material rewards whatever. While people competed for them, it was merely as stepping stones towards the only office that was really worth having, the chairmanship itself, and this was sought only as the jumping-off point for a political career in the outside world. In student unions, on the other hand, at least one post, the Presidency, was a full-time job which lasted for an entire academic year and was accordingly accompanied by a sabbatical from academic work. In some student unions by the early 1970s, there were sabbatical vice-presidencies as well, sometimes two or three. These offices were hotly contested, because they were real prizes in themselves, carrying with them, apart from various other perks, what amounted to an extra year's grant. In some student unions, notably that of the Polytechnic of North London, certain activists managed the tour de force of getting themselves elected and re-elected to sabbatical posts several years in succession. (I think it was Terry Povey, a leading IS member at PNL in the early 1970s, who established the record of four years, but I may be wrong.)
In the Labour Clubs, competition for office developed recruitment and bargaining skills and was competition for access to stepping stones to a future career in the PLP. In student unions, competition for office was more intense because the immediate material prizes were greater, but relied not at all on recruitment and bargaining skills but almost entirely upon cut-throat manoeuvre and intrigue. And the offices won in a university or polytechnic student union were not stepping stones to a career in the PLP, but to a career in the NUS if anything. They therefore prolonged the activist's narrow preoccupation with student affairs and postponed his graduation to the political world outside higher education, and tended to deflect him from involvement with the PLP.