The New Next Generation Profiles: Susan Nash

Over the next few Saturdays we’ll be running a series of articles profiling rising young stars in the Labour Party. Luke Pearce took coffee with Susan Nash, shortly before her election victory as the new National Chair of Young Labour for 2010-11.

There’s something soothing about Starbucks (even though we should probably hate it for the bastion of consumer capitalism that it is). I raise no objection. Susan appreciates the grande latte, telling me she feels the worse for wear from yesterday’s midweek night out. I can’t tell: she carries herself with confidence and has barely finished working another day as the NUS’s Vice-President for Society & Citizenship.

It sounds a bit of a wishy-washy role to me. But Susan explains that it covers areas she has long been passionate about: encouraging students to be active citizens in their local community and nationally, while allowing her to pursue her ethical concerns, such as climate change and development. With the likes of Franny Armstrong, Susan encouraged NUS to become a founding member of the 10:10 campaign, and has the necklace to prove it. But it was encouragement by Labour friends that first got her involved in NUS.

“It was tough being involved in the students’ union and NUS during the New Labour days. I opposed Iraq [the war] and marched against it. As a party member you were often asked to define your red lines… but people around me kept me involved. I was able to channel my frustration and anger [with some of the government’s actions] through the students’ union.” She still comes across as a loyalist, bemoaning those who opposed the Labour faction in their NUS days only to seek parliamentary selection later on.

“I hate that as soon as you join the party, you have to put yourself in a box that says Compass/Progress/Miliband-D/Miliband-E etc. A lot of the divisions are false. I agree with Progress on some things, Compass on others.” Having rubbished ‘labels’, Susan then uses one in an attempt to define herself. “Pragmatic socialist? Doesn’t sound very inspiring does it?” She supported Ed Miliband in the leadership contest, while many of her Labour friends supported David. She was canvassed repeatedly to join the latter’s camp, but eventually put her signature to a letter in the Guardian encouraging the younger brother to stand.

We spend some time talking about the Labour leader. Susan is clearly a fan, something that would be easy to discount as blind loyalty were it not for the fact that she’d bet her chips on him from the beginning. She recalls seeing Ed speak on a number of occasions prior to his leadership bid, and says she was impressed by his accessibility, desire to listen to members and his “human touch”. “He spoke at the Youth Conference in Gillingham, not just talking at us, but saying a few words then splitting us into groups so that everyone could have their say… so often Labour events are stunted and repetitive. This was fresh.” She could tell he would win.

Why devote so much time to politics? “I’ve always been a rather argumentative one, getting on teachers’ nerves. I was a grade A student, but decided to stick up for the trouble makers in the class. I found it really hard not to chip in, to not be heard.” Politics seems to allow her to channel the argumentative nature that she believes derives from being the middle child of three sisters.

Susan says her parents have no particular Labour background and read the Daily Mail. “They don’t really know what I do,” Susan says. “Mum recently said she’d heard I was running for another election [National Chair of Young Labour], and I’d forgotten to tell her. She wanted to know if she should start ironing my face on t-shirts like for my NUS election!” But the family are no Tories either: “We’d always have the news on as kids, and Dad taught us anti-Maggie Thatcher songs.”

Susan recalls as a teenager being excited by Tony Blair’s ascension to Downing Street and getting more interested in politics around that time. But political discussions in the Republican household normally centred around Northern Ireland. Like some of the other subjects I’ve profiled for this series, Susan initially claims to be from a fairly ‘non-political’ family and then paints a picture of one very much interested in the current affairs of the 1980s and 1990s.

“I started to become more Labour when I studied politics for A-level. My teacher Miss Knowles tried to remain impartial but it was obvious that she supported Labour.” Susan was also drawn to Labour after her family benefitted from EMA. She was dating the son of a Liberal Democrat councillor at this time (an early form of a future Lib-Lab coalition). It didn’t work out: being challenged on her support for Labour by his family only served to harden her loyalty to the party.

Surely Susan has political ambitions. “I don’t at the moment, but I won’t rule it out.” She chose to run for Chair of National Young Labour, this time without particular encouragement, so she says, unlike for all her previous students’ union roles. But she still claims that she “fell into” working in politics: “I kind of regret doing politics at university because I don’t have a specialism… whilst I have a lot of views and insight, I don’t feel like I’ve yet got an area of specialism or expertise that I think politicians should have.” Now she worries she’s started to sound like a boring political hack. “I once took Shakira round Parliament. She’s quite short – and so’s Jack Straw.” Random.

Teaching is still an option. Susan tells me that as a child, she used to lock herself in her room and read for hours: she’s always been inquisitive and appreciates the transformative power of education. “The reason I’m here today is that even though I went to a crap school, there were great teachers.” Teachers have to do what they can with the resources available. “My sister says I’d be a crap teacher: I wouldn’t be able to take orders.”

Perhaps Susan just prefers telling others what to do. But politics also represents a certain glamour in her life. She tells me how her family in Walthamstow were never well-connected, she didn’t go to restaurants, the theatre or foreign holidays beyond Ireland when growing up. “So when I first got involved in Labour, and had the opportunity to meet those people on TV, I was really excited. I did that really annoying thing of name-dropping, not because I was bragging, but because of the contrast in my life, because I couldn’t believe it was happening to me.” For the other girls growing up in Walthamstow, it was East-17’s Brian Harvey sometimes seen driving past the school gates in his flash car that got them excited. Susan says she was more of a Steve McManaman fan. “I wasn’t a Barbie girl, I was more of a football-Lego person. I always played defence because I had a dirty tackle.” She must have stuck out at school.

Feminism didn’t surface much on Susan’s radar until she met the women’s group at university, which introduced her to issues such as the gender pay gap. She tells me about ‘Lead for Women’, a campaign set up by a small group of Susan’s friends and colleagues who got together during summer 2010 because they were frustrated at women’s experiences in the Labour Party. “It’s been great to see it develop, with the voices of other women in the party who have experienced discrimination during meetings, selections or at events.”

Susan regales me with a revealing anecdote about being a young woman in the Labour Party. She once attended a Labour fundraising dinner, after which most of the attendees continued to socialise in the bar. She was sitting next to a group of male guests when one of the group leant over to inform her of his room number and insist she join him. Fortunately a woman member intervened to rescue Susan. It obviously wasn’t enough to put her off politics.

We haven’t really spoken about the NUS. Susan talks about her role in the NUS’s ‘Come clean on fees’ pledge campaign which so embarrassed Liberal Democrat MPs during the recent headlines on top-up fees. “Many people told us we were going to cost Labour the election. But we knew we had to do it, it was the right thing.”

The last six months have been both the best and the worst of Susan’s life, she tells me. “We didn’t anticipate getting 50,000 students on the protests. I spoke to some older people on the day, parents and grandparents who said they’d heard me and Aaron [Porter, NUS President] on the radio and been won round. But it was also deeply frustrating that on that day, instead of talking about the issues, we ended up talking about the violence.” She contrasts this to the Educational Maintenance Allowance (EMA) campaign, who managed to keep their issue in the headlines despite a biased media.

In another reality I’d be interviewing Susan in the capacity of NUS President. She was encouraged to run for the post last time, but chose against splitting the moderate vote, allowing Aaron Porter a clear run against the far left (Porter has since decided against standing for re-election). She says she has no regrets about not running. But I can see she’s spent plenty of time thinking about the ‘what ifs’.

Her experiences with the NUS will stay with her, whether or not she goes into politics. She loves the glamour, but says she’ll be content if it doesn’t work out. For once I believe the person I’m interviewing on this. She’d be content as a teacher. But she’ll not pursue that path until she’s gone as far as she can in politics: Susan gets too much out of it.