The annual conference of the National Association of Labour Student Organisations was held this year at Wo #ley Hall, néar Sheffield, from March 26th to April 1st, This unfortunately clashed with the General Election, since it was impossible, for financial reasons, to postpone it, so all 70 delegates went into Sheffield Heeley constituency on pelling day and helped to win the seat for Labour with one of the largest swings in the country. Perhaps the most important of all policy debates at the conference centred around attempts to amend NAISO's position on industrial policy, These were defeated, and the conference overwhelmingly reasserted NAISO's opposition to incomes policy and anti=Trades Union legislation, On other major political 4ssues NAISO onee again expressed opposition to the Government's immigration policy and declared its complete support for the Vietnamese National Liberation Front and the people of Vietmam in their struggle for freedom against the American occupation. Ho Chi Minh was once again re-elected as an honorary Vice-President. The conference also opposed the expulsion of Ken Coates from the Labour Party, and the refusal of the NEC to endorse John Palmer and Constance Lever as Parliamentary candidates, It was disappointing that there was little that was new said in these debates, and no real attempt to carry forward negative positions of opposition to government and party leadership actions into more positive alternative programs, The most interesting debates were on inter= national economic policy, where the conference discussed the kind of programs around which international co-operation might be possible; about underdeveloped countries where the roles of legal or illegal, revolutionary or social democratic parties were discussed, and about student affairs, It is, perhaps, inevitable that debate in a student organisation should be largely static since each year there is a new influx of students into the universities, and the same old arguments have to be fought through again. For NAISO the most important thing is to find organisational ways of strengthening the left in universities. This was high-lighted by the record of NAISO member= ship, which had remained static at about 6,500 for two years, despite a rapid increase in the number of university students. Since the previous inereases in membership had been concentrated in the years of CND activity, 1959-61, and the collapse of the Tory government 1963-64, the obvious conclusion is that NALSO activity is tending to reasgt passively to outside circumstances rather than generating any dynamic of its own.(NAISO is not the only section of the left of which this is true.) The problem for NALSO is to find ways of oVercoming the tendency of students to concentrate on purely theoretical discussion inside their own university, that is to say to find a role for NAISO as a national organisation, The scoMference outlined two main directions of action, thus taking a step forwards The first was in student affairs where recent events in the National Union of Students (the ISC debate, increased politicisation) and in individual universities (the Glasgow and Cambridge discipline scandals etc.) offer opportunities for political action directly related to students! own life-situations. NALSO will hold a school on the experience of UNEF (French) and other radical student movements abroad, and will hold meetings and issue vosters on the conflict as it develops. The other projected line of action was intl: CSE. A working paper was accepted urging that CSE offer scope for students to use their opportunities and special skills in research. in ways directly useful to the labour movement and to-invyolve themselves in the movement. The conference instructed the executive to affiliate NALSO to CSE and to co-operate fully with it. As a first step NALSO will not hold its usual summer school this year, but will join in the CSE summer school.
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