The new fascists

George Gale

In my first day as an undergraduate I was approached by a totally strange`young man declaring himself to be from what he called 'Kick You' and asking me whether I would come to join him and some friends that evening to read the Bible. 'No thanks,' I replied, 'I've read it.' I never had any further pestering from what I subsequently learned to be the Cambridge InterCollegiate Christian Union. The Communist Party did rather better. They asked me along for tea and buns and didn't mention any obligatory reading of Marx or Engels, and out of curiosity, and for the tea and buns, I went. There were half a dozen or so students there, and what struck me was their dinginess and dowdiness, and I am not speaking of their clothes or general appearance but of the quality of the minds they displayed through the incessant workings of their tongues. They were not for me, I

decided, so I drank my tea, ate my bun, made my excuses and left. In my time I have read a fair bit of Marxist-Leninism, have experienced life in the capital cities of most Communist countries, and have known several, and liked some, Marxists and Communists. But I have never been remotely tempted to join them, although there have been brief occasions when, usually for specific reasons having'little to do with their general politics, I have been tempted to throw in my lot with the Liberal, Labour and Conservative parties (in that order). But this was long after my student days.

Only once did I take part in student politics, and that was to assist in defeating a motion that my college, Peterhouse, should affiliate to the National Union of Students. I thought then that students had no business apeing their elders and affecting to form themselves into an organisation with all the

external trappings of a trade union. Students were, and still are, a privileged class; and it is not for privileged people to make demands for better pay and conditions from those less privileged than themselves. I remain, in a quirky kind of way, proud of my only successful piece of straight political action, even though subsequent students, in their folly, reversed our decision and took the college into the union.

Now, when! consider the National Union of Students, its nature, its pretensions, its organisation, its activities, the quality of its leaders, the general ideas which appear to inform it, I see clearly enough that I was right not to want to have anything to do with it, but foolish in supposing that its march forward would be effectively resisted by a handfull of elitist colleges stepping out of line. The NUS has just completed its latest annual conference, this year at Blackpool; and! have been reading accounts of it in the papers. This admission enables student delegates to say that any criticisms I may make will be invalid, since they will be based upon biassed, selective and inaccurate press reports, and that if people like me wish to criticise the union they should attend its conferences. I dislike Blackpool at the best of times, and a student conference which sits in the Winter Gardens from nine in the morning to midnight messing about with composite resolutions, referring back amendments and, as the Times reports, 'prioritizing' motions comes very close to my idea of hell on earth. Not even real trade unions go on as long and as late and as earnestly as this imitation one; and indeed the NUS has outdone its exemplars in the wording and technique noted above: real trade unions have not yet got round to prioritizing motions, although doubtless they will do soon, now that they have learned about it from the students.

The National Union of Students would be a joke, were it not for several reasons —all of which flow from the decision of university administrators and academics, governing bodies and the education authorities to take the union and its leaders seriously, and to provide the National Union, through its affiliated university, college, polytechnic and other unions, with very considerable public funds.

Students by and large are not interested in politics. They go to university to enjoy university life, to study and to play, to converse as they have never done before and never will again, to acquire skills and qualifications and to equip themselves to enjoy a somewhat broader and better and richer life than that likely to be obtained by most of their contemporaries who went to work instead of to college after leaving school. Few students play a busy and active part in student politics. But some students go to universities for the politics and others, because of their studies, find themselves especially drawn into political activities. A great number of these 'political' students will be found to be studying sociology, polF tics, government, economics: newish addt tins to the academic curriculum and, with the possible exception of economics, additions which possess little academic discipline. The propagation of extreme left'wing views under cover of these supposedly academic disciplines, and the attraction of these subjects to students who have a far greater desire to engage in political activity than in academic study, have combined to produce the National Union of Students as we find it today: a body, that is, wholly unrepresentative of students at large (who Play no part in its political activities) but nonetheless able to put itself forward as the voice of predominant student opinion and as the only appropriate body fit and able to negotiate on students' behalf.

It would not matter very much if the NUS confined its activities to negotiating better grants for students, concessionary fares, bargain rates, better food, better facilities: if it stuck, in other words, to what real trade unions call 'pay and conditions'. This would itself be a bit bizarre, since it would carry the suggestion that students should be paid a wage for studying (needless to say, that suggestion has already been put forward in all seriousness), instead of a grant for fees and upkeep. To the extent that the NUS seeks improved grants, grants for all students, and grants earmarked for books or Other essential equipment, then I have no real quarrel with it, except to remind it that, representing a privileged class, it may be entitled to ask but it is certainly not entitled to demand.

The NUS, however, is very far from confining itself to pay and conditions. A great majority of its active members — its local and national officers, its delegates to the annual eonrence, those who speak at its sParsely-attended local meetings — are less Concerned about pay and conditions than they are about changing society; and they see the NUS as in part a vehicle for that Change and in part a vehicle on which to Practise the further politics and the tactics of change. So we have endless political resolutions at the students' annual conference. One resolution would have given unconditional support to the Provisional IkA but the Communists, who in student union terms tend towards the conservative and sensible, helped in rejecting that piece of nonsense; they also helped to defeat a 151-wing (and by left-wing in student poll

is meant way out beyond the fringes of the Communist party, into the lunatic fringe °f the Labour party and far beyond) demand for direct action against a system of quotas for overseas students.

These two glimmerings of responsibility cannot, however, compensate for the National Union of Students giving its full

suPPort to the Patriotic Front in Rhodesia and its 'armed forces' (which recently abducted a whole school of children — stu

dents, that is, black students: why did that nut bother the National Union of Stu

dents?) But if the NUS's Rhodesian stance ue regarded as an aberrant consequence of Prejudice and ignorance, what are we to

make of the worst, and most publicised, decision of its conference?

By 273,450 votes to 233,790 (delegates cast card votes, again just like real trade unions, and thereby claim to represent the great majority of students who in fact have never so much as voted at a union meeting, let alone discussed conference resolutions) to restore its police of refusing platforms to 'fascist and racists'. This ban was dropped by the NUS last December, it having first been adopted in 1974. It has been used against Conservative members of Par liament. It has been used against Jewish societies and students. It has been used against Enoch Powell. It has been used against distinguished academics to prevent them from discussing the genuinely academic Controversy about the com parative roles of inherited characteristics and environment in determining ability. In short, the National Union of Students refuses freedom of speech and freedom of academic discussion, and thereby denies the freedom on which any civilised society must rest and the freedom necessary for any university to conduct itself. That students, of all people, should be so ignorant as to deny these freedoms almost passes belief. They act in precisely the way Mussolini and Hitler acted towards the Italian and German universities. The students were burning 'sexist' books at Blackpool last week. What books will they be burning next? What strong-arm tactics will they next adopt, to silence men with whose politics or academic theories they choose to disagree? Fascism involves the repudiation of such liberal values as free speech and free academic discussion. It favours violence. It abhors institutions which protect freedoms of speech, of association, of genuine representation. Fascism prefers violence to the procedures of Parliamentary, representative government. We see, in the students' ban on 'fascists and racists' a ban which is, in fact, both fascist (directed against free speech) and racist (directed against the Jews). In Blackpool we saw the intellectuals of the new fascism on display.

If students were doing this in their own time and with their own money it would be deplorable, but there would be little that could be done about it. To use the students' own fascist measures to defeat them would be to sink to their level and would be to deny that which any free society must persist in upholding. Student politicians do not, however, use their own time and money. They use ours: we pay for the National Union of Students, its officers, its conferences, its meetings, its propaganda. At present each student's fee to his appropriate university or college union is paid directly, in addition to his grant, by the taxpayer. The student-union fee is £35 at present. The student does not see this money. It goes straight to the union, whose officers determine how it should be spent. Some of it goes in affiliating to the National Union of Students, and is the NUS's principal means of support. The taxpayer is thus directly financing the new fascism of the left. Taxpayers' money is used to deny platforms built by taxpayers' money, heated and lit by taxpayers, caretakered, cleaned, furnished, decorated and redecorated with taxpayers' money. Taxpayers' money subsidises student bars, student travel, students' guests.

Given the political activities of the NUS, it is deplorable that taxpayers' money is spent so appallingly. The NUS may be right in its claim that student grants are too low (although, having lived in a student township for several years and having observed students drinking fancy and expensive rum and cokes and such like, and observed their hi-fi gear and record collections, I am unconvinced). Certainly, students will soon be claiming their due rise because of inflation.

There is a very simple and very liberal and very democratic solution to the student grant question and to the problem created by fascist-style abuses of the publiclyfinanced NUS. This is to increase all student grants by the full union-fees presently paid direct to the unions. Let each student then decide for himself or herself whether or not to become a full and fully-paid up member of the union, by paying its full fees out of his grant, or to become an associate member, paying a smaller fee commensurate with the use he chooses to make of the various union facilities on offer. Some would join for this or that sport. Others might join only for the beer.

At one stroke, union politics would be cleaned up; and if students of the fascist left wished to continue with their work of destroying the political institutions of our free society, they would then be enabled to do so free from the taint of receiving money directly from the institutions they seek to subvert and destroy. Their consciences would be clean, for they would then represent truly the students who had elected them and who had demonstrated their confidence in them in the best way possible: through their pockets.