Labour Students is a Pyramid Scheme benefitting a tiny minority. Picture via Dreamstime.
From a corrupt seed, a corrupt vine and tainted fruit. Matthew Hopkins examines recent developments in the youth wing of the Labour Party as Labour Students tears itself apart in a frenzy of infighting and Labour groups at 11 of the largest and most prestigious universities in Britain threaten to break away.
Like all poisons, once it has spread it can be hard to see where the destructive culture of the modern Labour Party begins. What makes children with a good education and a functional middle class background grow into the kind of warped adults who can perceive depraved organisations like the Paedophile Information Exchange as an oppressed minority? What would make a man into the sort of person who would turn on his own brother?
There are many factors involved in the Left’s extraordinary ability to corrupt its adherents. For his part, your author would point in part to godlessness and the rejection of thousands of years of acknowledgement of a higher power. Another cause is the intentional inculcation of young people into the vile narcissistic ideologies of the left.
Labour Students is the place where much of this begins. For young people, university is often the first time they live away from home and begin to forge their own independent lives and futures. Superficially, Labour Students offers a seductive opening for young people to advance their careers and a fast track to getting the levers of power into their grasping little hands.
In reality, Labour Students is a sort of pyramid scheme in which almost everyone has some sort of position or title – an illusory sense of importance – but the fruits of success and real opportunity of a political career are given only to a few.
Labour Students is made up of individual student societies at each university. A university Labour club can vary in size from a handful of people to 30 or more. Each society has its own committee with a large executive committee. The committee can include a Chair, Vice-Chair(s), Secretary, Treasurer, Publicity Officer, Green Officer, Campaigns Officer, LGBT Officer and so on.
It will be obvious that in many Labour societies everyone will be on the executive committee and have some grandiose title – elected unopposed. Anyone who cannot even get on the local committee is not worth bothering with. Labour Students committee members are fed a constant diet of propaganda about the successes of former luminaries such as Stephen Twigg or Phil Woolas and led to believe that their largely meaningless titles are the first step on the road to a glittering political career.
At the next tier above the club are various informal regional arrangements where delegates from individual clubs may be appointed to positions of responsibility, usually helping to coordinate the deployment of volunteers to election campaigns. The payoff for the Labour Party is mostly at this level where young people, dazzled by the illusion of status, are convinced to provide large amounts of free labour at the expense of their studies or more productive activities.
Higher up the pyramid are the Labour Students Conference and Labour Students National Council. Labour Students National Council selects the candidates Labour will run (or at least support) for the National Union of Students elections whilst conference elects the Labour Students National Committee. In reality these bodies are mere rubber stamps for decisions made by Labour Party staff in consultation with the Labour Students national officers. Elections often have only one candidate with anyone else who wishes to stand marginalised or intimidated into standing down.
In 2011 Oxford University Labour Club disaffiliated from the National Organisation of Labour Students due to what they called ‘democratic failings’ or to put it another way, the fact that every single member of the National Committee was elected unopposed and no one is allowed to see the constitution (archive). In 2012, Cambridge University Labour Club disaffiliated due to, amongst other things, “absence of contested elections”. Putin’s Russia literally has more democracy than Labour Students.
This year, things have started to fall apart. With the Labour Party itself under the charismatic leadership of Ed Miliband, Labour clubs at no less than 11 prominent universities threatened to disaffiliate (archive). The rebels including clubs at York, UCL, Leeds, Hull, Warwick, Sheffield. The conference shortly after was marred by mass walk-outs and allegations of intimidation and bullying (archive).
The truth of Labour Students is that only the chosen few, a tiny minority undemocratically inducted into national office actually obtain real success from their time in Labour Students. That select group is by no means chosen on merit. They may rely on family connections or they may simply offer their bodies. Those other students who have given up so much of their time resent the lack of fair opportunities.
Your humble inquisitor has been there and done that, although unlike most he did gain some benefit from his time with Labour Students. To those young men and women at university now the Witchfinder offers this advice. Jack it in. Labour Students is a scam – a one way street in which members provide hours of free, menial work in return for meaningless titles and the glittering but ultimately illusory offer of advancement in life.
Go drinking. Join a sports society and impress members of the opposite sex. Have lots and lots of sex. Work hard on your studies and get a well-paid job – success in the real world is a far surer and less unpleasant route into politics. Become a lawyer or something. Do not let the Labour Party dupe you into damaging your academic prospects by giving them your time for nothing.
Like any pyramid, or the capitalist societies socialists claim to decry, Labour Students has a lot of people at the bottom and a very, very small number of people at the top. Matthew Hopkins recommends getting a life instead.
