Admirable LSE
Sir: Colin Welch narrowly avoids resur- recting an ancient canard, when, in his admirable article on the sorry plight of the Indian economy (Centrepiece, 24 Novem- ber), he blames the malign influence 'of the old left-wing LSE' on its policies. Neither the political scientist Laski nor Tawney, the historian, taught economics. The economics department was dominated by such men as Professors Edwin Cannan, T. E. Gregory, Lionel Robbins, Arnold Plant and Mrs Thatcher's hero Friedrich von Hayek, none of whom was a socialist. They looked on Karl Marx with scorn and were strongly opposed to Keynesianism.
The School's pre-war reputation as a hotbed of socialism owed much to the very well-organised and highly vocal student branch of the Labour Party. Although it greatly outnumbered the local branches of the Conservative and Liberal parties, it accounted for only a minority of the students as a whole, but thanks to the failure of most non-socialists to exercise their voting rights, the union sometimes acquired some strange presidents. Such a one was the Communist ex-president of the Oxford Union, the American Frank Meyer. He and one or two others criticised the School's capitalist bias and campaigned for the incorporation of Marxist teaching in the curriculum. For their excesses on this issue they were expelled from the School and few of its students minded when they were not re-instated.
K. I. Wiggs (LSE 1926-32)
3 Higham Road, Woodford Green, Essex
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