Ian Pattison
Socialist Students national organiser Claire Laker-Mansfield and I recently represented Socialist Students at a debate with the Labour Party and the Marxist Society at Queen Mary University.
The Labour Party speakers seemed unsure whether they were against socialism or trying to prove that the Labour Party was the most socialist in the room.
We were told we should be grateful for the reforms handed down by the benevolent 1945 Labour government.
In reality, the welfare state was won through mass movements of working class people, often led by socialists, pushing the leadership of the Labour Party to act.
We were particularly supposed to be thankful for free education, despite the fact that most people in the room were paying tuition fees introduced by Tony Blair’s New Labour government.
They had really lost the plot when they compared support for workers from Britain going to join the International Brigades in the fight against fascism in Spain to support for the imperialist invasion of Iraq.
They closed the debate by claiming that the Labour Party is all we’ve got, so “get over it”.
When it came to voting on who had won the debate, Socialist Students won by a landslide – even one of the Labour Party speakers admitted defeat and voted for us. The only person to vote for the Labour Party was a member of the Conservative Party!
