History
In the 1967, the National Association of Labour Student Organisations, the Labour Party's student organisation, was derecognised by the party after it was taken over by supporters of the Socialist Labour League. While the Scottish organisation continued, the Labour Party was left without a national student body.
One of the principal areas of conflict was the Vietnam War, with Trevor Fisk, the leading member of the traditionalists, refusing to criticise Harold Wilson's government over its tacit support for the United States in the war. The fight against Fisk was led, in particular, by Jack Straw, who supplanted Fisk as President of the NUS in 1969.
In 1970 Labour students created the "Students for a Labour Victory" to co-ordinate campaigning in that year's general election. That organisation became the National Organisation of Labour Students, which held its founding conference in 1971. Despite changing its name in the early 1990s, Labour Students is still sometimes referred to by the acronym NOLS, which is pronounced "Nols".
In its early years, NOLS was divided between two factions - the entryist Trotskyist Militant tendency and a mainstream left group, associated with Tribune, which formed in January 1974 called Clause Four, after the central political statement of the Labour Party constitution. Militant controlled NOLS from January 1974 to December 1975. Members of NOLS in the 1970s included Charles Clarke, Bill Speirs, Peter Mandelson, Sally Morgan, Mike Gapes, Mike Jackson, Nigel Stanley, Margaret Curran and Johann Lamont.
During Tony Blair's premiership, Labour Students opposed the Government's planned introduction of university "top-up" fees. Labour Students were broadly supportive of Gordon Brown's government.
Read more about this topic: Labour Students
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
“When the coherence of the parts of a stone, or even that composition of parts which renders it extended; when these familiar objects, I say, are so inexplicable, and contain circumstances so repugnant and contradictory; with what assurance can we decide concerning the origin of worlds, or trace their history from eternity to eternity?”
—David Hume (1711–1776)
“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)