Recently, University College London students’ union took the almost-unprecedented step of banning military organisations such as the Officer Training Corps from affiliation to the union. Almost no other SU has done so, and it was a brave move. Remarkably, the meeting reached the required quorum attendance of 1% of students (which is rare as rocking horse shit anywhere), thus making the decision constitutionally binding – over 350 students attended.

Of course, there’s a lot more to do – Campaign Against the Arms Trade, for instance, noted that UCL still has extensive ties with various arms companies and a campaign against that is gathering steam. So it’s no surprise that right-wingers in the union bureaucracy have suspended her on the basis of almost nothing, and are attempting to get the decisions of the AGM (which also included twinning UCLU with a Palestinian university) overturned.

Counter-recruitment, despite its liberal tendencies, is a perfectly acceptable and supportable anti-war tactic, and the same goes for the ‘twinning’ movement. But the real kicker is not the ostensible political issues so much as the typically bureaucratic mode of getting her out. These practices are the defining feature of student politics, and the cancerous excrescence that campus Communists are most concerned with excising.

For all these reasons, we urge support for comrade Godwin.

A petition in her defence can be found here.