Richy At Last

An historic week for me as a recovering former student politician. It's NUS Conference in Blackpool and for the first time in my adult life I don't care about the person who has been elected as President. After all, it's not my fault that Gemma Tomelty is up to her eyeballs in student debt. Our student loans scheme is a perfectly sensible approach for students to gain the financial benefits of a good education while repaying society years later from the masses of wonga that they make as professionals. I would have no problem paying back my student loans from the fat salary that I now receive as Associate Director of international PR corporation Weber Shandwick. You can hardly blame me for the fact that I actually received a free higher education myself. All this stuff about "pulling up the ladder" is just typical childish Trotskyite nonsense. If the re-elected NUS President can't manage her financial affairs she should attend evening classes in personal budgeting. About half a million Poles have managed to find work here in recent years, doing all sorts of cultural and creative activities, so maybe Tomelty should take a job pole dancing. In any case, that will teach her for having stood as an independent against the official NOLS candidate.

I spent a total of nearly 2 months of my life (spread over 6 years) shut in the Blackpool Winter Gardens with 1,000+ other badge-wearing activists. Bizarrely I was never allowed to speak from the platform by my faction. I never did understand why my fellow right-wingers thought I would be an embarrassment if I spoke. I mean how crazy would a chap have to be to embarrass right-wing students? But I did get named in speeches by other factions - most memorably by Richie Carrothers of the AWL - a militant splinter organisation that knows where to put an apostrophe.

Richie has subsequently changed his name to Richy (a bit like Mike Sullivan-Gould changing his name to Meaighk Gulivers-Travels, so I wonder what he's hiding). Carrothers used his 1996 Conference hustings speech to plead with delegates "don't take your line from Luke the Nuke Akehurst and the puppet masters in the NOLS balcony".

Carrothers represents that tiny clique of extremists opposed to the war in Iraq, marching with Islington folk-singer Jeremy Corbyn and hordes of Muslim terrorists on Labour Against the War demos. Before we liberated the Iraqis from the tyranny of Saddam he ludicrously claimed that the majority of Labour Party members were opposed to the war. Not something he can claim now that thousands of those damned pacifists have left the Party!

"They fully understand that many innocent people will die as a result", he is reported as having said. "Any such action will ensure that a new layer of Bin Ladens and young extremists will present themselves as the foot soldiers of the future. We should be supporting the people of Iraq by non-violent means to overthrow their murderous dictator, to bring about democracy and stability to their country."

Carrothers' ludicrous assertion that many people would die, a new layer of young extremists would emerge and that we should overthrow a legitimate foreign government "by non-violent means", show just how dangerous this man is.

Equally subversive has been his activities in higher education, where he now works as a entrist, determined to undermine the great progress made in education under Tony's leadership. Richy told astonished members of The Court of Lancaster University that university top-up fees "would be stamped out at the Parliamentary third reading" and, in a move reminiscent of Lenin's putsch at the 1903 Congress of the RSDLP, he invited the University Vice-Chancellor to break ranks with UCEA and set up a new, tight group of professionals representing the vanguard of the academic proletariat.

Not satisfied with this act of sedition, he went on in his role as AUT (now UCU) North West Regional Officer to negotiate a new pay structure for lecturers at Leeds Uni and opposed the introduction of student fees to Northern Ireland. More recently this ultra-leftist has attacked Labour's improvements in education by fighting redundancies at Manchester Uni and opposing plans for a private University in N. Ireland.

But all of these acts of extremism pale into insignificance when compared with the subversive intervention that this man made in Rusholme, Manchester a few years ago. According to Hansard, 25th Feb 2003, a stunned Parliament was told that Richy Carrothers had challenged the Post Office decision to close a Rusholme sub-post office on grounds of proximity to the nearest main post office. Rejecting sensible approaches such as writing to his local M.P. or organising a petition outside Sainsbury's, the militant Carrothers had gone into the street and determined the precise distance between the two post offices with a measuring wheel. This sort of action shows exactly why we need to tighten the law on people hanging about on street corners and impose more ABSOs on those loitering outside sub-post offices.