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THE FALL OF THE LABOUR CLUBS
But while the rise of student unionism did anything but prepare leftwing activists to make a useful contribution to the ranks of the PLP, it also prevented the products of the Labour Clubs from doing so.
The Oxford University Labour Club has produced many Labour MPs. At one time to become its Chairman was as good a starting point for a political career as you could hope for: Michael Foot, Tony Crosland, Roy Jenkins, Tony Benn, Brian Walden - the list is long and impressive. It is striking, then, that none of the chairmen of the OULC in 1969-1972 became MPs. When I first joined it its Chairman was David Lipsey, who was widely tipped for a parliamentary career. He began well, getting taken on by Tony Crosland as a research assistant. But that is as far as he got in politics; he eventually settled for a career in journalism instead. His successor was a certain Godfrey Stadlen, an impressively intelligent, thoughtful and principled person. He ended up in the civil service. Even the less high-minded figures, who were more adept at manoeuvring than at arguing for coherent policy positions, but whose political skills, such as they were, would normally have taken them far, appear to have got virtually nowhere. A couple of them have made it as far as Prospective Parliamentary Candidates, but no further. The rise of student unionism blocked off their avenue into high politics. (It was only when the OULC had itself got involved in the politics of student unionism from 1973 onwards that it began once again to function as a launching pad for Labour careerists. But by then it had been infected by its involvement with student unionism, and had largely ceased to be what it was meant to be.)
Within a mere twelve years of the birth of student unionism with Jack Straw's election to the NUS presidency in 1969, the Parliamentary Labour Party had been deprived of its crucial prerogative to choose the Party's leader. The premise of everything which has been done to the Labour Party by Neil Kinnock is the event which occurred two years before he became leader, the emasculation of the PLP by the adoption of mandatory reselection of MPs and above all the creation of the electoral college in 1980-1981.
It should already be clear in what way the rise of student unionism had prepared the ground for this development. The constitutional changes of 1980-1981 were the first great victory of the political generation which had been formed by the new student unionism and which was animated by the contempt which student unionism engendered for parliamentary politics in general and the PLP in particular. But this victory simply cleared the ground for other developments, in which student unionism, as it came into its own inside the Labour Party, spread its wings with a vengeance.
The worst effects of student unionism remain to be described. They cannot be described properly except in conjunction with an account of what the CPGB thought it was up to in promoting this political fashion.
Next article - The Student Movement and the Communist Party of Great Britain