OPINION: Whatever happened to the good old NUS I worked for 70 years ago?

The National Union of Students was formed in 1922 when the Inter-Varsity Association and the International Students Bureau decided to merge.

The objective was to help students in any way possible, with the emphasis being on assisting them to find work during vacations and organising cheap travel for them. Now, I wasn’t around in 1922 but I had a gap year before going up to Cambridge in 1951 and spent nine months working in the NUS Travel department. Which makes me the oldest ex-employee of the NUS by some years.

There was no politics in the organisation in my day. The NUS was set up to help students make ends meet, not to make them guinea pigs for a political objective. The travel department hadn’t dealt with the paper work for its charter flights to America for three months and I faced a mountain of paper work. To sort it, I went in one morning at 8.30am and went home at 5.30am the following day.

I had a gap year before going up to Cambridge in 1951 and spent nine months working in the NUS Travel department. Which makes me the oldest ex-employee of the NUS by some years.

It’s amazing how little there is to do at 4am. The new head of the travel department had just been appointed. Harry Baum was Jewish and had recently been demobilised from the war crimes division of the British army. He had arrested a number of war criminals and told me that the best way to get them to surrender was to greet them with a loaded pistol and fire it into the ceiling.

The objectives the NUS had then were of real use to students. They gave them opportunities which poor students could never have afforded otherwise and found them jobs. In my second year I worked sorting firs one vacation for the Hudson Bay Company.

As they had a free seat in 1952, I actually went to America as a member of the University of Pennsylvania State College Choir and came back as a member of the American armed forces in another free seat. I wondered at the time if Russian spies found it that easy to leave the United States.

Anti-semitism was never a problem with the NUS that long ago. The Holocaust had horrified everyone and the NUS today should recognise just what racism can lead to. Any form of racism, as can be seen in modern times in Ruanda, Cambodia and Burma.

The problem with eradicating it for us is the distortion of our relationship with Israel. Quite rightly we have no influence whatsoever in the politics of the country. We vote in British elections, not Israeli. If the Palestinian students recruited every Jewish student to their cause, we could do absolutely nothing to influence the Knesset – and quite right too.

Yet the recent report on NUS politics makes sad reading. The government has said it will have nothing to do with the organisation in the future and if the NUS don’t make anti-racism stick, they will stay isolated. There will always be racists and we must help all our ethnic communities to continue to make them as insignificant a political force as they are today.

The proof of the pudding will be whether the NUS lives up to their stated denunciation of all forms of the virus.