This handy guide, first published in CS11, will help you distinguish between the various, yet on the surface almost identical student groups likely to be recruiting on your campus. Exactly why the left is so divided is dealt with in this article (link). By Harley Filben.

1. National Campaign Against Fees and Cuts

Semi-secret parent organisations: Alliance for Workers Liberty / Workers Power

NCAFC has become remarkably persistent for a student organisation, having survived two whole summer vacations intact. That it has lasted this long with two different adult organisations in sponsorship is little short of a miracle – especially considering that one of those organisations is the Alliance for Workers Liberty, which has spent its entire history fusing with other groups, doing a perfunctory recruitment raid and splitting away.

But the going has not been smooth – last spring saw a dispute over attendance at conferences which was incomprehensible to anyone outside the two Trot groups jostling for position. Naturally, the argument was completely apolitical, and really amounted to each side worrying that the other was taking charge.

Politically, NCAFC is a nostril-hair’s breadth to the left of EAN; but, like all the student groups, it consists mainly of Marxists disguised as well-meaning left-Labourites so as not to alienate anybody. Except people already tired of this warmed-over 70s nostalgia thing…

Most likely to say: something sneaky behind another member’s back.

Least likely to say: anything that amounts to a principled airing of political differences.

2. Youth Fight for Education / Socialist Students

Semi-secret parent organisation: Socialist Party in England and Wales

Two fronts for the price of one. Socialist Students has had more or less middling success over its five or so years of existence, but exists as a periphery of students around the Socialist Party; as the student struggle heated up, instead of involving itself in NCAFC or EAN, a whole new front was born – like Minerva from the head of Jove – in the hope of bigger and better things.

Alas, it was not to be – YFE and Socialist Students are more or less the same thing, and remarkable principally for their refusal to co-operate productively with their competitors who are (after all) standing on more or less the same politics. To the extent that there is anything distinctive about YFE’s politics, it is merely adaptation to SPEW’s particularly severe obsession with cuts, nationalisation and the trade union bureaucracy.

Most likely to say: sentences featuring the word ‘cuts’ at least twice.

Least likely to say: “Yes comrade – of course we’ll build for your demonstration!”

3. Education Activist Network

Semi-secret parent organisation: Socialist Workers Party

As with most student left groups, this one is the latest in a whole series of marginally different fronts for a single adult group; before it, there was Another Education Is Possible, and before that there was Student Respect …One thing is certain: the SWP loves to recruit students, and it thinks it knows how – repeat the mantras of left liberalism in a more strident, shrill tone than the liberals themselves can muster. Relatively few comrades stay the distance, however, as upon prolonged exposure the hardened SWPer comes to sound like the most stuck-up sort of teacher, lecturing society like a badly behaved pupil, and utterly resistant to all outside influence.

As for EAN, there is a shade of difference with regard to its predecessors. Another Education is Possible and Student Respect at least implied some kind of politics, inadequate as they were. EAN’s name is deliberately chosen to be apolitical, and its existence coincides with a series of flip-flops by the SWP on the matter of whether or not to suck up to student union bureaucrats. The bureaucrats aren’t buying – but that won’t stop the SWP from trying.

Most likely to say: bankers are bad, the BNP are Nazis, and so forth.

Least likely to say: anything consistent from one week to the next, on recent evidence.

4. Student Broad Left

Semi-secret parent organisation: Socialist Action

Though descended from Trotskyism, Socialist Action are a small and highly concentrated expression of everything that was wrong with Stalinism – except, of course, the mass murder. A notoriously clandestine organisation dedicated to worming its way into positions of influence in the official left (at their peak, SA comrades staffed Ken Livingstone’s mayoral office in return for more than one six-figure salary), the seething pit of backstabbing and careerism that is student politics has much to offer them.

SBL is their creature, through and through; its politics are those of the Labour ‘soft left’, but politics is not really the point with such people. Rather, it is to act as a last line of defence for Labourites, officials in the ‘liberation campaigns’ and so forth against their more properly leftist critics. Bear this in mind when dealing with them – and watch out for icepick-shaped bulges in jacket pockets.

Most likely to say: whatever Ken told them to.

Least likely to say: anything with even the faintest odour of principle.