Martin Shaw writes: Ben Brewster’s and Alexander Cockburn’s account of recent events at lse is competent and largely unobjectionable, but I should like to express strong disagreement with the article preceding it: ‘Student Power: What is to be Done?’ In particular I can only express amazement at the statement that ‘it is instructive how the existence of the Radical Student Alliance strengthened the positions of the student leaders in lse, and how this in turn buttressed the power and influence of the rsa.’
The judgment on the value of rsa to lse is just not warranted by the facts. It is significant t hat Brewster and Cockburn do not mention rsa in their account—except in the ‘Note on History and Structure’ where they remark that the officers of the lse Union ‘have played an active part in nus and rsa’. This involvement tells us very little about the recent struggle, in which the Union leaders (David Adelstein included) have been pushed from below. And as your account remarks, in the sitin, a more militant unofficial leadership, in which Socialist Society members were prominent, made much of the running. At the same time, support from outside lse was not organized by rsa—students joined the sit-in and the march very largely without the prompting of any organization. When the Union did try to make contact with students in other Universities, it did not go through rsa. Nor can rsa have been responsible for most of the messages of support—Brewster and Cockburn say there were 357 of these, far more than the number of colleges that rsa is organized in!