Students come up against a political brick wall

The explosion of anger on London’s streets yesterday was not confined just to the students who attacked the Tory Party HQ. It was also expressed in the fact that unexpectedly vast numbers of students and lecturers turned out to demonstrate against soaring tuition fees and education cuts.

Over 50,000 came to express their opposition to the Con-Lib government’s programme of cuts. It was the first major march against the Coalition and the biggest student turn-out for over a decade. Frustration and anger ran through the whole march. A common refrain was that “no one is listening” – reflecting the fact that the accepted political process is a dead end.

“Tory scum”, chanted students breaking in to the Millbank headquarters of the Tory party. They should have added “Liberal Democrat and Labour scum”. In fact the Tories are the only main party that are not fees turncoats. Before the election, every Liberal MP signed a pledge to oppose a rise in fees. And it was New Labour that first introduced top-up fees in 2001, against Blair’s specific election pledge not to do it.

New Labour commissioned the Browne review of higher education funding, which went even further than the Coalition to propose lifting the cap on fees altogether. Who can say they wouldn’t have accepted its proposals if they were in government?

NUS President Aaron Porter, a member of the Labour Party and like Ed Miliband a supporter of a graduate tax, cannot explain how a tax, rather than higher fees, would enable young people from less well off backgrounds to go to university in the first place.

Lord Browne’s proposals represent the completion of the marketisation of higher education, which is enthusiastically supported by all parties in parliament. It discusses university entirely in the narrow terms of economic growth and money. David Cameron was happy to be able to tell a Chinese student that raising fees for British students would mean fees for overseas students could be held down.

Public funding for universities is being slashed by 40%, to be replaced by 2012 with student fees of up to £9,000 a year at some universities. Students starting university this year will already leave with debts of at least £25,000 each and the new measures will push that even higher.

And when they graduate, they will enter a job market in slump. With 69 candidates chasing every graduate job, the 2010 graduate cohort joined thousands still unemployed from the previous two years. They are now part of a generation of young people, graduate and non-graduate, who are over-represented in the ranks of those unemployed for more than a year. Youth unemployment is nine times higher than the national average.

The reality is that universities are now part of the market state and unworthy of the passionate commitment that lecturers and students continue to give them. The answer to this massive problem is to go beyond protest against the Con-Lib government, and recognise the transformation of the state as a whole that has resulted from corporate-driven globalisation.

States provide education only insofar as it will benefit big business. Whichever party is in control they are ready to sacrifice the future of millions of young people – and everything they could achieve for human society – on the altar of the mighty market.

But using technology and networks that have been largely created by the younger generation, a global alliance of the young and older workers can facilitate a transfer of power away from these global elites, and their corporate masters, and into the hands of the majority.

In the end, neither marching nor extreme forms of protest like the attack on the Tory Party HQ by themselves will bring about the kind of social revolutionary change that will create a world free from profit and exploitation.

People’s Assemblies, with full representation of every part of the community including students, young people and the unemployed, are the way to make a start in the process of transforming society’s economic and political power structures. All students are invited to come to Liberation Beyond Resistance – Towards a People’s Assemblies Movement in London on December 11, to plan the next steps along this road.

Penny Cole

Making university education free for all

The Coalition’s drive to turn university education into a market-driven business in place of a state-supported system has resulted in an unprecedented alliance of students and lecturers. If the aim, however, is restricted to pressure on the government, the alliance will flounder on the rocks of reality.

That, unfortunately, is certainly the aim of the University and College Union (UCU), which has is organising a joint march with the National Union of Students (NUS) in London next week. “The demo is part of our strategy to influence the Coalition Government,” says the UCU website.

In a similar spirit, the NUS led by president Aaron Porter, a Labour Party member, was caution itself when it responded to the announcement this week that tuition fees will rise from the present £3,290 to anywhere between £6,000 and £9,000 a year. Add in living costs, and students can expect to leave university owing up to £40,000 in loans.

Porter berated the government for providing “no reassurance that requirements on access, employability, quality or the student experience would be any more effective than they are now." The NUS president is reported to favour a graduate tax instead of higher tuition fees – more like an alternative market solution than a clarion call for free higher education.

And is politically difficult for Porter to oppose the Browne report into fees that recommended the rise in fees. The former head of oil giant BP was actually commissioned by New Labour to report on the future funding of universities. Students will also remember that the Blair government was the first to introduce tuition fees, beginning the undermining of higher education that the Coalition has deepened.

Both the NUS and the UCU are banking on Liberal Democrat MPs to block the dramatic rise in tuition fees. Lib Dem MPs signed a pledge during the general election campaign opposing higher fees. But opposition from ministers like Vince Cable has melted away under pressure from the Tories who are the senior partners in the Coalition.

The harsh reality facing members of both the UCU and NUS is that the attack on higher education is totally bound up with the financial crisis and economic recession. That is what is driving the drastic cuts in university funding which tuition fees are supposed to replace. It’s the same crisis that will cost 100,000 local council workers their jobs as central government support is slashed.

Graduate students are already suffering because of the recession. More than 21,000 – nearly 9% of the total – who graduated last year were still without work six months later, and 55,000 ended up in stop-gap jobs such as bar work. The figures are certain to worsen as the spending cuts reduce the number of opportunities for graduates.

Capitalism as a system isn’t working and as a result, the state is transferring the burden of the crisis on to students, workers, the unemployed, pensioners and those dependent on benefits. Under these conditions, no amount of pressure will make the Coalition change course. We need to go beyond resistance.

Free higher education in place of fees and loans remains the aspiration. In a country as rich and developed as Britain, it ought to be achievable. Standing in the way of this is a bankrupt economic and political system based on exploitation and profit, backed by a ruthless state. As a first step to breaking this impasse, students and lecturers need to link with firefighters, transport workers and others in the cuts firing line to plan a co-ordinated mobilisation against the Coalition with the aim of bringing the government down.

Paul Feldman
Communications editor

A mortgage for a degree

Introducing a free market in tuition fees that universities in England can charge students, together with the coalition’s planned spending cuts, will undermine the last vestiges of state-funded higher education.

Students will in future leave university in debt to the tune of around £50,000, if proposals announced today go through. The average degree would actually represent a mortgage rather than the result of three years studying at a place of learning.

Not that Lord Browne, who drafted the report on funding for the Lib-Con government, would understand financial pain. The former chief executive of the BP oil corporation left in 2007 with a £5.3 million pay-off and a £21.7 million pension pot, as well as millions of pounds in shares.

His recommendation that the existing cap on tuition fees of £3,290 a year be scrapped and universities be allowed to charge what they want, imposes market conditions that convert higher education into a commodity to be bought and sold like any other good. Universities in England will then leap to the top of the league table of countries where it is the most expensive to study.

At the same time, government funding seems certain to be directed away from arts and humanities courses as part of spending cuts to be announced next week. Together with the fees rise, access to university education is certain to become more unequal than ever before.

The University and College Union, which represents lecturers, criticised Browne’s proposals. Sally Hunt, the union's general secretary, said they “represent the final nail in the coffin for affordable higher education” and would “price the next generation out of education”.

But, of course, all this began with New Labour. The Blair government was the first to introduce tuition fees and business (that’s what higher education is considered to be) spokesman, John Denham, did not oppose the Browne report outright, merely saying: “It is right that students make some contribution towards to cost of their higher education.” The system had to be “fair, progressive, sustainable” – whatever that means.

So any notion that a Miliband government would save the day should the coalition collapse over the issue of a free market in fees (most unlikely), is pure fantasy. The truth is that massive spending cuts and increases in charges across the board are on their way, no matter who is in power.

What the Browne report does confirm that the capitalist state is now setting about in earnest the wrecking the remaining parts of the post-1945 political compromise that was the basis for free education, the National Health Service and social support of different kinds.

Against the background of a deepening financial crisis, the state intends to wash its hands of social responsibility through a combination of contracting out, market forces and the “Big Society” project. What New Labour began, the coalition intends to complete.

The question then arises: what is the purpose and usefulness of a state that cannot provide for its citizens? What is the point in carrying on with a state that is beholden to corporate power and financial markets? What is the point in persisting with the fraud that is known as Parliamentary democracy when it produces a savage assault on the electorate?

To ask these questions is to answer them. We live in a state that has failed, one that is propping up an unsustainable and unstable economic system. Opposing the break-up of higher education and the cuts programme has to go hand in hand with a strategy for creating a real democracy based on the actual origins of the concept – people power.

Paul Feldman
Communications editor