Thirty-Five Years Ago

Recent events with all these diplomatic expulsions remind me of when in the late 1980s I was concerned about Marxism in Higher Education. I'm not talking about the teaching - which was partly Marxist in the earliest 1980s in undergraduate days, especially Sociology - but about the students and especially those who came from abroad.

I learnt my Marxism from the best of them, so I know all about economic determinism. My essays into this particular undergraduate Marxist class were those of economic liberalism, to challenge their dominant ideology, but my writing used the idea that dispersed economic ownership caused dispersed power. In fact, oddly, the European Politics I learnt about was also of the same thought process: an economic determinism where institutional business sharing across national boundaries brings about political merging within Europe.

Someone must have passed on the fact that as an undergraduate I did write some very right wing essays: Hayek and Friedman, and the Economic Liberalism that had taken over the Tory Party. It didn't last because by the end of 1982 I was a social liberal. But the record was deposited and my services were required.

Some wondered at the time how it was I afforded doing postgraduate work. I was approached, of course, and I won't say by whom (obviously). I then was given a contact. What I did was use the postal services relating to the Methodist Chaplaincy to receive and send messages. I used to write reports, on a single sheet of paper on a glass base, and these were posted. My working name was Revd. Standfast, and my reports followed on from Research Methods Tutorials and organised and private social events. Messages for Revd. Standfast at the Chaplaincy were for me, and were about concerns by the authorities over some of these folk.

I used to sit in these tutorials and listen to this (what I considered) Marxist garbage that some of the foreign students expressed, and in some cases decided that they didn't actually believe in it but were trying to be academically 'right on'.

Those I suspected further I befriended, and I think only in one case did I pass on serious concern. There was this very intense and gifted female, who had a circle of friends she was trying to convince to be anarchistic - to turn political thought into action. What happened was I went to her student house and had these discussions, where I challenged her with Hayek's The Constitution of Liberty and she had a go at me about the Marxist Frankfurt School. We got quite friendly amid the debating. You can imagine me in bed with her with this going on, enjoying the fruits of investigating her rather closely as well as her in her circle of friends. She was called Maria, was Spanish, and had a tendency to wear revealing nighties around the student house after we got up in the morning. Some of her radicalised female friends were just as enticing. It was a happy time.

The work lasted for a year and a half, and I write about it now because it is the anniversary of it starting in 1983. Thirty-five years ago! My work meant the authorities had everything they needed. As it happened, my Spanish target left six months after the work was finished. I think she took up research in Belgium. I think she was told to go. Others were monitored: some of them left the country earlier during the Miners' Strike, so Maria knew that they were on to her. Yes, the Revd. Standfast received a letter thanking me for my services; I have it in front of me: dated October 1st 1984.