To understand the move last night by Labour’s National Executive Committee (NEC) to abolish the party’s student wing, Labour Students, you need to go back in time nearly 40 years to the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Then, the party’s youth section, the Labour Party Young Socialists (LPYS), had been wholly taken over by Militant, a Trotskyist entryist group. But in the student section of the Labour party (then called NOLS, the National Organisation of Labour Students), mainstream Labourites – like NOLS chairs Mike Gapes in the 1970s and John Mann in the 1980s – put together a broad coalition of democratic socialists and held back a Militant takeover of the group.
NOLS went on to provide many of the footsoldiers for Neil Kinnock’s ousting of Militant and the wider hard left within the party as a whole, and in the 1990s the group enthusiastically supported Tony Blair’s transformation of the party into New Labour.
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