the first Young Socialist Conference, this Easter, can give only limited encouragement to those who hope for a movement of young people carrying into broader socialist terms the activity and idealism of CND. The Conference was dominated by a violent confrontation of left and right wingers, over the Bomb, Gaitskell’s leadership, the paper “Keep Left”, and the “guiding” role of Transport House in the Young Socialists’ development.
Transport House itself was heavily represented in the proceedings. The Chairman, George Brinham, presided with a kindly, but fumbling incompetence—at times like Canute, waving hopelessly at the storm of hostility. Supporting Mr. Brinham was the Assistant National Agent, Reg. Underhill, smoothly effective, skilful enough to argue the shouting delegates into silence on several points of legality. Regional Youth Officers stewarded the meeting. Massed together, they looked like chuckers-out—which, at one point, they were.
Two major speeches were made from the platform for the National Executive. Ray Gunter, posing as an ordinary member of the Labour Party, neither right, left, nor centre, denounced Keep Left, and probably swung the narrow vote supporting the Transport House ban. He spoke with accomplished eloquence, evoking loyalty to the Party, Nye Bevan, and all the rest of it, to condemn the “Trotskyists”. They have every right of free speech, he said, but no right to be in our Party. The hurt, angry faces of the many delegates who supportered Keep Left, but who think of themselves firstly as Young Socialists, showed one what Gunter was doing. Mr. Crossman spoke to the Conference, of the need for Protest and Power, and was uncertainly received.
Faced with this obstructive pressure from the Platform, the Young Socialists obviously had a difficult job to set any direction of their own. The 350-odd delegates (from 726 nominal branches) had relatively little contact beforehand, and if there were natural spokesmen for the majority present in the hall, they rarely reached the platform. But the first session was promising, with an important procedural battle fought and won by the delegates, in relatively good humour.