LIVING IN LONDON Communist president of students’ union

Press, 24 May 1977, Page 14

LIVING IN LONDON Communist president of students’ union

By

SALLY ADAMS

Sue Slipman will take office as president of Britain’s 820,000-strong National Union of Students on July 1, having been secretary since March 1975. She is a communist and, at 27, the youngest member of the party executive in the country. She is small and alight, with long dark hair and, dark, lively eyes. The walls of her narrow office in i Endsleigh Street, close by Euston Station, in London, are covered with rather tattere posters: urging against drinking Chilean wines or for solidarity with foreign students. She is initially wary and immensely likeable. She grew up in a fairly rough area of London, Brixton. and went to a comprehensive school. There, because she was bored and rebellious she was sent to Fred Newton, the teacher who was responsible for coping with all the toublemakers. He inspired her to want to work. She passed her O Levels easily and than, feeling bored in the Lower VI, organised an unsanctioned holiday during term time. •‘About 12 of us went,” she says. ‘‘lt rained most of the time and was very boring.” When they returned, the headmaster suspended them but, because of a campaign by Mr Newton, she and another pupil were reinstated. Then she won the A Level prize. ‘‘The headmaster had to make a speech saying what a good influence I was on the school. He was very polite. It was all lies,” she said. At school, she and her friends would have called themselves socialists, ‘‘if

we’d known what it meant.” She took a year off and worked on a kibbutz in Israel. Her parents were nonpractising Jews, but she found Israel “too militaristic.” She was offered a university place to read English literature at St David’s College, Lampeter, in Wales, and took it.

“My first memory of Lampeter is seeing Tories playing croquet on the lawn in three-piece suits, their only concession to summer was sunglasses.” She found it “immensely absurd ... an incredibly middle-class atmosphere” but also “upsetting at first. I didn’t have a lot internal confidence.” “MICKEY MOUSE” That was in 1969 and the college had rules about gates being locked by midnight and students wearing gowns. She became active in the students union and fairly soon both gates and gowns had gone. They used to have to sign in to English lectures and wanted to stop that. So they did. How? “By using humour. We’d use any name we could think of, like Helena Rubinstein or Mickey Mouse.” In her second year, having made a decision to join a party on the Left, she became a member of the Communist Party, who “were not at all popular in student circles.” She rejected the ultra-Left, often called the “lunatic Left” in Britain, because she thought they were out of touch with ordinary people. She felt the Communist Party “was the only organisation which had a possible connection with the mass movement, a group committed to the working people.” She says she has now come to terms with its history, “one of the grimmest of any political organisation.” She thinks that

now in approach and attitude, it is becoming a mass party. Certainly, the communists are moderates compared with the ultra-Left. Her father died three months before her finals and her mother was ill with cancer, so while her married elder sisters looked after her mother, she worked an 18hour day to get a good degree because “I realised I would be the one who would have to support Mum.” She graduated with fist-class honours, and then took a year off to look after her mother, who died in 1972. Ater taking a holiday to Greece and points east, Sue went to Leeds University to write a thesis on Oliver Goldsmith and the change during the eighteenth century from art under patronage to art on the open market.

“I wanted to contribute something. I’d been feeling shut off since my mother died.” So during her first week she put herself up for the student-staff committee. It was the first time she had gone to the hustings and made a speech. She had notes but her hand was shaking so much she could not read them. She cannot remember what she said, but she was elected. While at Leeds she became more and more active in student affairs until she was working full-time for the N.U.S. and dropped work on her thesis. ‘NEW SERIOUSNESS’ If she has done anything for the National Union of Students, she says, “it’s that I’m not prepared to listen to a barrage of platitudes. It’s all part and parcel of the new seriousness. Also I’m not interested in having debates in minority areas any longer. The vast majority of our members matter. I’ve stopped speakers moving eight paces to the left the

minute they walk through the door.”

She is actively dedicated to changing society in Britain and determined to play her part in bringing about any change. When she leaves the N.U.S. in July, 1978, she says she will probably set up some political activity, though she does not want to go into Parliament. Which is a lucky thing for her. She would have more chance of getting elected as a National Front, ultraRight, candidate, if recent local government election results are anything to go by. FIERCE FEMINIST She is a fierce feminist and may go into organising woman workers. “I won’t have anything to do with the vast majority of men who want to control me. Most men still find it threatening to have to live up to a relationship. I am not prepared to subsidise their masculinity. I am going to see their weaknesses. I am not going to relate to anyone as a lesser mohtal in any way. “People tend to think I’m unapproachable. They tend to be scared of me. I can be exceedingly critical and tactless and I can be very hasty. I find it difficult to put up with slowness in decision-making. I have good relationships with activists and I’m friendly with people with other views on a personal level, but on a political level . . .” Though she is a dedicated party member, a busy student offical and a strong feminist, which takes up a lot of her time, “I’m not prepared,” she says, “not to have some emotional life.” She is in love with someone but the friendship element, she says with marked emphasis, is just as important.