When student politicians are bored or drunk, they have been known to write songs ridiculing political organisations that they do not like. At the National Union of Students Conference in December 1987, a photocopied booklet entitled, The Big Sectarian Songbook was sold to raise money for “Justice for the Miners.” This anonymously written songbook mainly comprised of songs that ridiculed Trotskyist organisations. These, in the main, I found amusing. There was a second type of song that was quite prominent in this booklet, those praising the IRA. There was a specific emphasis of praising the IRA for the Brighton bombing in 1984. These I did not find amusing. In fact, I found them rather sick.
Below, I copy two of each variety that were published in this booklet:
57 VARIETIES
(The Chicken Song)We’re a small Trot sect
With a small red student base
But we dream one day
That we’ll rule the human race
People laugh at us
But we’ll show the world they’re wrong
Overthrow the State
While we sing this left wing songBuild a Workers’ Front
Sell a paper to your gran
Have a fuse then split
Be as wacky as you can
Caucus in a letter box
Change your name another time
Turn to industry
And then alter all your linesThere’s fifteen of us
We’re the vanguard of our class
Proletarian
With a dialectic task
Met this bloke in Greece
Now an international’s formed
Like the Bolsheviks
When the Czar’s Palace they stormedHave a faction fight
Write polemics by the score
Purge your tendency
And reduce your ranks to four
Call for unity
Say the enemy is Benn
Liquidate in Workers Power
And then do it all againBecome entryists
Utilise the bourgeois courts
Launch an armed struggle
Try and build a base in Shorts
Call a general strike
Like Poussad look to the stars
For you never know
Perhaps there’s a loony Trot in Mars
SWP LOVE SONG TO TED GRANT
(Wonderful World)
Don’t know much about history
Marxism’s still a mystery
Don’t ’bout the line that Lenin took
‘Cause I’ve only read Tony Cliff’s book
But if you’d sign a non-aggression pact
We’d support an Enabling Act
And what a wonderful world it would beNow I don’t claim to be a real Marxist
All I’m trying to say is maybe if the Millies
Would all join Socialist Worker
Then the Labour Party would go away
BRIGHTON BEAUTIFUL
(The Thatcher Song)Well tell me Mr. Tebbit back in 1984
You thought you’d won the Tories
When you spoke on Conference floor
Oh you were so successful
And your praises they were sang
But later on that night me boy
Things went off with a ……Tell me Mr. Tebbit were you playing on the strand
Or flashing all your money
In a hotel that was Grand
Oh things looked bright and beautiful
Sure who on earth would say
You’d meet an active service unit
Of the aye ahr ……Tell me Mr. Tebbit as you lay there with your wife
A bold attempt was duly made
To end your fucking life
The working class they rescued you
The firemen and the like
They should have told the two of youse
To get on your ……Well tell me Mr Tebbit when the miners were on strike
Saving their communities
You didn’t care a hike
Their families they were starving
But you didn’t make a sound
Now perhaps you know how it must feel
To be buried under ……Tell me Mr Tebbit did the nurses say to you
They’d heard room service in the Grand
Could make the Tories blue
Oh did you sit bold upright
Shouting loudly you’re a dunce
Our leader almost had three rooms
Delivered all at ……Tell me Tebbit well what will you vermin do
When Ireland gets her freedom
And throws out the likes of you
We’ll be building not destroying
A Republic we will find
Until then all things Brighton Beautiful
Are playing on my mind
ROOM SERVICE
(the other Man Utd aeroplane song)Those sleeping Tories in their hotel bedrooms
They went up tiddly up up
They can came down tiddly down down
Up down splattered around
Some on the eighth floor
And some on the ground
