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STUDENT POLITICS TURN INWARD LOOKING
The activity of the CPGB was itself guided by a truly novel and complex conception of what it was up to in launching student unionism on an unsuspecting generation. But this conception bore little relation to what the CPGB actually achieved. What it achieved was a catastrophe.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s the CPGB transformed British student politics. Between 1969 and 1973 student unions supplanted Labour Clubs as the launching pad for people with ambitions in the Labour Party. This was not what the CP meant to do, but it is what it did. And the implications have been enormous, so enormous that the generation of political activists which lived through this change is still not able to understand itself or the society it lives in or the damage it has been doing.
In the old days the function of university Labour Clubs was to enable students interested in a political career in the Labour Party to learn the ropes. Labour Club activists were not oriented to student representative politics at all, but to the outside world, and above all Parliament, and the Parliamentary Labour Party, as the central institutions for dealing politically with the outside world, whether at home or abroad. They did not spend their time debating what policy to adopt on matters such as university discipline or curriculum reform or the level of student grants, but the case for further measures of nationalisation or incomes policy or comprehensive education or unilateral disarmament and so on.
This orientation led them to develop a respectful attitude towards MPs, learning from them, modeling themselves on them, cultivating them, making contacts that would stand them in good stead in their initial careers, etc. The short-term ambition of every Labour Club activist was to get elected to the Club's Committee and eventually to become its Chairman, because the Chairman had the privilege of choosing the Club's 'card' of guest speakers for the coming term and so was able to choose the political celebrities he wished to cultivate. At Oxford and Cambridge (and no doubt elsewhere too), the supreme ambition of Labour hopefuls was to obtain the presidency of the Union (that is, the university debating society) in addition to the chairmanship of the Labour Club so that they might choose two 'cards' full of MPs and other celebrities and so get off to the fasted possible start in their careers.
This orientation implied and developed a serious measure of respect for the PLP. A chairman of leftwing views would invite members of the Tribune Group to address the Club, because these were the MPs he had an interest in developing links with; a rightwing chairman would invite MPs like Tony Crosland and Brian Walden or Roy Hattersley to speak for the same reasons, and so it went on. In other words, the routine activities of Labour Clubs tended to connect their active members with the various factions or tendencies within PLP. In doing so, they kept these factions and tendencies topped up with new blood and so enabled the PLP to reproduce itself in each new generation.
Student unionism had a totally different effect on leftwing activists. Through student unionism they became absorbed in student and university affairs. They were not oriented to the outside world at all, except in so far as events in the outside world furnished pretexts for flowery resolutions. Student unionist activity did not develop any interest in Parliament in those who engaged in it, and no orientation to the PLP as such. In so far as student union activists were oriented to the outside world for any practical purposes, this was to the government itself rather than the PLP, that is to the Ministry of Higher Education and Science as the antagonist to be defeated in the annual grants campaign or in the campaign to preserve student union autonomy in respect of how they allocated their funds (in opposition to the government's attempt to prevent what it called ultra vires payments, that is, the allocation of funds by student unions to purposes outside their proper authority, e.g. grants to political causes).
Because student unionism was not oriented to the PLP, it actually tended to develop a dismissive attitude towards the PLP. By attracting ambitious leftwing students who would otherwise have operated inside the Labour Clubs, student unionism tended to preclude student politicians from functioning later to invigorate the constituent elements of PLP. It developed no interest whatsoever amongst its active participants in the issues which were the stuff of internal Labour Party policy debates, and so it precluded people from reflecting on the policy dilemmas which had confronted previous Labour governments and the policy options which a future Labour government would have to think about. It developed a thoroughgoing lack of interest in the history of the Labour Party in or out of government and so a cast of mind in which all informed historical perspective was conspicuous for its absence.
And because it had the effect of disconnecting these leftwing students from the PLP, and disabled them from relating effectively to the PLP through its constituent tendencies and factions, it actually tended to develop in them a predisposition to supplant and supersede these constituent tendencies inside the PLP. Whereas the Labour Clubs tended to ensure the reproduction of the constituent elements of the PLP, student unionism fostered a cast of mind amongst those activists with parliamentary ambitions which disposed them to wipe out the existing tendencies within the PLP and remould the PLP in their own image, the image of student union activists.
Another effect of student unionism was that it developed in its active participants an interest in manoeuvring for office within the apparatus to a far greater extent than had been true of Labour Clubs, while precluding the development of any aptitude for the business of political recruitment or proselytising.
Because, unlike Labour Clubs, student unions had their memberships laid on for them, no student unionist needed to bother about recruiting members to the union. But every Labour Club activist with career ambitions had an immediate interest in recruiting new members to the Club. The Club did not have any members laid on for it at all. Its membership was a function, over and above the general factor of the Labour Party's national standing and appeal, of the energetic recruiting engaged in by its own active members. These members had an interest in doing this, in that it was the way in which they could build up personal followings in the Club's membership.