Plus C'est La Même Chose

As a deeply nostalgic former student hack - the six years I spent in student politics in NOLS were the best political and organisational training it's possible to get and provided me with a network of friends and comrades that I've stayed in touch with ever since - I get incredibly agitated and upset when I read coverage of matters NUS in the media, such as today's letter in the Guardian signed by Rob Owen, Dominic Kavakeb, Claire Solomon, Assed Baig and Jennifer Jones.

Just who are these people, who refer to modernisation of the NUS in terms of "the NUS reformed back to the 1950s, when it was little more than a network of right wing students associated with the CIA."? And what on earth makes them think that NUS (like the Labour Party) would be better off under SWP dictatorship than under the sensible concensus management of spin-doctors, full-time professionals and an old boys' network of sabbatical officers such as myself?

A quick bit of Googling reveals that Rob Owen is a Midlander who has infiltrated the Southeast in order to propagate his particular brands of music, rugby, woodworking and Irish stout. Dominic Kavakeb is a man who likes a good laugh, especially by invading the privacy of Brixton rappers. Claire Solomon is a fictional character from the New Zealand soap opera Shortland Street. Assed Baig is a promising young black football player and Jennifer Jones is an 89-year-old Oscar-winning former sex goddess. It's just typical of the Guardian to assume that they represent today's students.

When I was NOLS National Secretary, I couldn't find the CIA under C in the phone book. But it wouldn't have made any difference even if I had been smart enough to contact them through their website, or leave the motorway at Langley, as instructed by those massive and iconic freeway exit signs. The CIA didn't trust me in those days and certainly would not have talked to me about communist infiltration of the national union of students. I think it may have had something to do with Director Bob Gates having an irrational loathing of red-heads, the term he used to describe the Sandinistas in the days when he was funding the contras.

It's all very different today, of course, when a visit to Waterstones or 10 minutes online at Amazon will equip you a veritable library with books on the subject of CIA postwar funding of social democratic organisations and establishment of anti-communist front organisations in the student and labour fields such as the World Assembly of Youth and the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions.

Still, I suppose it's still a good idea to pretend that this is all a fantasy put about by the SWP.

After all, most people can't read and the rest are stupid enough to read my blog, so I can tell them anything really and they'll lap it up.

One thing's for sure, though. This is all much more fun than writing about Hackney and its boring local politics. I'll leave that to our MPs, who are much more interested in local affairs than I am. This is very definitely not a "Councillor blog". It's a blog by someone active in Labour politics, one of whose forms of activity happens to be being a Councillor. I wouldn't want anyone to think it was something I took at all seriously.