Universities fight back against corporate body snatchers

The onward march of commercial considerations into every area of public life and services has led to an unlikely resistance movement in the shape of the Council for the Defence of British Universities.

Enough is enough, says the CDBU which has an impressive list of supporters. Its 66 founding members include top academics like Colin Blakemore, Richard Dawkins and Ronald Dworkin, literary figures like Michael Frayn, Alan Bennett, Claire Tomalin and the former Lord Chief Justice, Lord Woolf.

The CDBU declares: “In the protracted recession of a knowledge economy, where knowledge is money and growth is elusive, powerful forces are bending the university to serve short-term, primarily pragmatic, and narrowly commercial ends. And no equal and opposite forces are organised to resist them.”

While the attempt to turn universities into money-spinning ventures is not new, it was given fresh impetus by the Browne report into higher education published in October 2010. Browne was former head of oil corporation BP.  

Commissioned by the previous government, the report led directly to the imposition of student tuition fees of up to £9,000 a year. By now, responsibility for higher education had appropriately passed to a ministry dedicated to “business innovation and skills”, under Vince Cable.

The aim was threefold: to cut public spending on higher education (especially in the arts); make universities compete with each other for students; force universities to seek higher levels of private sector financial support. In other words, universities were to become “business centres” rather than places of learning and research.

The CDBU believes that “misguided policies” are undermining British universities in the way described. But for all the learning embodied in the organisation, this really does miss the point. A business invasion of the corridors of learning has been under way for almost two decades.

In his book, the Corporate Takeover of Britain, writer and campaigner George Monbiot says that there is scarcely a university that has not been compromised by its funding arrangements. He explains:

Business now inhabits the cloisters of even the biggest and richest institutions. Cambridge University, for example, possesses a Shell chair in chemical engineering, BP professorships in organic chemistry and petroleum science, an ICI chair in applied thermodynamics, a Glaxo chair of molecular parasitology, a Unilever chair of molecular science, a Price Waterhouse chair of financial accounting and a Marks & Spencer chair of farm animal health and food science. Rolls-Royce, AT&T, Microsoft and the biotechnology company Zeneca have all set up laboratories in the university.
In June 1999, BP gave the university £25m to fund work across five departments. In November 1999, Cambridge set up an £84m joint venture, funded largely by the British government, partly by industry, with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Its purpose is to “change the face of business and wealth creation in the UK” by stimulating “research spin-offs” and “training the business leaders of the future.  

Stefan Collini, professor of English Literature and Intellectual History at the University of Cambridge, has documented the corporate invasion of universities over a long period. He rightly regards it as an attempt to bring universities “into line”, to make them serve the economy above all other considerations.

Collini also indicts Labour for an approach that is indistinguishable from that of the ConDems. In fact, large chunks of the 2011 White Paper on higher education repeat the phrases used in a White Paper produced by Peter Mandelson in 2009 under the previous government.

Setting up the CDBU indicates that resistance is growing to commercialisation of learning. But its members are mistaken if they believe that the invasion of the corporate body snatchers is merely a policy issue. For over 30 years, the British state has driven down this road in areas of health, public services and transport, to name a few.

We have moved from a welfare state to a market state in the process. This is no longer a democracy but a corporatocracy. To rescue education from its clutches, we need a democratic transformation, an Agreement of the People that removes profit from the equation in favour of social interests and needs. That's something for the November 17 Assembly to get its teeth into!

Paul Feldman

Communications editor

Revealed: those Cable-Miliband texts

We have been offered details of some the frequent texts exchanged between Vince Cable, the business secretary and leading Lib Dem, and Ed Miliband, the leader of the Labour Party.

How they were obtained, we don’t know. But we thought the “public interest” would be best served by publishing extracts. These cover exchanges from early September this year and go right up until yesterday afternoon. Enjoy!

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Ed:

What do u think of my predistribution speech? Need fairer, responsible capitalism. This is my big idea.

Sent @ 16.42 Sep 6

Vince:

Great idea imo. Redistribution old hat now!!!! LDs can support predistribution.

Sent @ 16.59 Sep 6

Ed: If bosses play ball we could save billions in pub spending. Genius stuff from US

Sent @ 17.02 Sep 6

Vince:

Deficit getting worse. So every penny we can save…

Sent @ 17.04 Sep 6

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Vince:

Great to be on with Ed [Balls, shadow chancellor] on Marr’s show. Bit of a stir when I said was on centre-left!!!!!

Sent @ 14.17 Sep 9  

Ed:

Left/right not issue anymore imo. System needs sorting. Ed’s ego a prob tho!

Sent @ 15.19 Sep 9

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Vince:

Bros gave Ed bad time at TUC. What’s wrong with them? Thgt they were all signed up?

Sent @ 18.30 Sep 11

Ed:

Think they own me!!! Don’t want to know abt deficit. Pay freeze right for country. Glad Ed was there and not me!!!
Sent @19.07 Sep 11 

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Vince:

Hope my plans on emp tribs ok with you? [Cable is to consult on curbing employment tribunal payouts and other restrictions]

Sent @ 13.05 Sep 14

Ed:

No probs! Too much conflict in the system. Sort it out Vince!

Sent @ 14.27 Sep 14

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Ed:

Hope u liked my int in D Tel. Cld bring our 2 parties closer. Need to wk 2gether after 2015 [date of next general election].

Sent @ 13.20 Sep 15

Vince:

Great stuff. Liked bit about saving capitalism from itself. Can we do it? Yes we can!!!!!

Sent @14.00 Sep 15
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Vince

Nick’s [Clegg] apol on fees was amazing. Cldn’t believe it!!!! Whatever next!!! He can’t last. My turn????

Sent @ 11.01 Sep 19

Ed:

Hope so. Be gt to have u and LDs with us after 2015. Still more cuts to come. So need to wk closer.

Sent @ 11.05 Sep 19

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Vince: Polls show you well ahead. Cld u manage without LDs after 2015? Pity if so.

Sent @ 14.25 Sep 21

Ed: Don’t worry. Public don’t really like any of us. Will they vote? Will need each other imo.

Sent @ 15.08 Sep 21

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Vince: Bit lonely in govt. Most Tories won’t speak to me!!!! Keep telling myself in govt in nat interest. Not sure anymore!!!!

Sent @ 8.50 Sep 23

Ed:  Don’t worry. You’ve got a friend in me [believed to be a Toy Story reference]. Tories are out of touch.

Sent @ 8.52 Sep 23

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Ed:  Great speech at ur conf Vince. Lvd stuff about Tory headbangers and plebs. Small business bank right way to go.

Sent @ 15.58 Sep 24

Vince: Cheers! They love me here. Nick is done for imo. I could relaunch LDs in time for 2015. But u know LDs. They can’t make up their minds!!!!!

Sent @ 16.20 Sep 24

Ed: I’m here for you. There’s a new third way and we’ve found it.

Sent @ 16.25 Sep 24

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'New Bargain' gives us a one-party state

New New Labour (NNL) has not only confirmed that in essence it is indistinguishable from the other mainstream parties but that also the present form of what passes for politics in Britain is well past its use by date.

As to the first point, even before its conference kicked off NNL was scrambling to show that it was the party of market-led “solutions”. Ed Miliband – or should that be Moribund – declared that he favoured £6,000 a year university tuition fees instead of the Coalition’s £9,000.

Wow! The boldness of the idea took your breath away. Only joking.

Even the moderately-led National Union of Students had to say that far from advancing university education, the proposal reduced the whole issue of funding to a bidding war between the Coalition and Labour.

In power, when it was only New Labour (the other New is more recent), introduced tuition fees. In opposition, they opportunistically and hypocritically opposed the Coalition’s increase to £9,000.

Now they’ve accepted in principle that students should borrow the money to pay for their own degree. Once again there is not even a cigarette paper between NLL and the Coalition.

And that also applies when it comes to resisting government attacks on pensions. NNL is opposed to strikes scheduled for November 30. Even the ever-so-cautious Dave Prentis, leader of Unison, was aghast.

"It's no time to sit on the fence when this country faces a stark choice between taking on the powerful and privileged, or letting the price be paid by the poor and the powerless. My members are no militants. But they will stand up for what's fair, what's right," he told the conference.

Well, Brother Prentis, I have some news for you. NNL is not “on the fence”. It stands four square with the government. After all, the pensions’ attack was prepared by one of its former ministers, Lord Hutton.

Naturally enough, shadow chancellor Ed Balls then declared that a future NNL government would not reverse Tory spending cuts. As Labour councils are implementing most of the cuts with party backing, this was no surprise.

Balls, of course, together with Gordon Brown, helped created the “light touch” system of financial “regulation” which contributed to the 2008 financial meltdown and led directly to the Coalition’s axe on public spending. Of this, Balls had nothing to say.

He did, however, urge the Coalition to reduce VAT to 5% on home improvements. As someone suggested, this is a canny move for all those MPs wanting to do up their second homes at taxpayers’ expense.

From Miliband today, there was the disgusting equation of “anti-social tenants” with asset strippers in his "New Bargain" speech. Oh how the Daily Mail and the right-wing press will love this. Miliband is bidding to outflank prime minister David Cameron, who used the August inner-city riots to blame “feckless parents”.

Milipede’s appeal to what is known as the “law-abiding silent majority” is straight out of the Tory textbook. He was scheduled to say: "The hard truth is that we still have a system where reward for work is not high enough, where benefits are too easy to come by for those who abuse the system and don't work for those who do the right thing."

In practice, all this leaves us with is a one-party state where “politics” is reduced to a competition for the most right-wing policies. No wonder increasing numbers of people are sick of the whole charade and want nothing more to do with it.

Ultimately, however, we have to find answers to the catastrophic economic crisis that is beginning to engulf society. With the parliamentary channel patently a cul-de-sac, our future lies in practical, revolutionary proposals like people’s assemblies and not in the Westminster merry-go-round.

Paul Feldman

Communications editor

When marching is not enough

The contrast couldn’t be clearer. In Egypt, they gather in hundreds of thousands and strike with the aim of bringing down the Mubarak regime. In Britain, the leadership of the trade unions wants workers to walk through London at the end of March – and then go home.

By March 26, the date of the march called by the Trades Union Congress (TUC), up to 200,000 public sector workers will have lost their jobs, as councils – many of them Labour controlled – implement government cuts, wrecking local services.

By then, those keeping their jobs will have suffered a massive erosion in their standard of living as food and fuel inflation takes off.

By then, university and college lecturers will be staring at closures and redundancies.

By then, the astronomical increase in university tuition fees will be a reality facing the next generation.

By then, the Coalition government would have forced through further marketisation of the National Health Service, building on the work of New Labour.

In other words, by then Cameron and Clegg will be halfway to imposing the burden of the capitalist crisis on the backs of ordinary working people.

Last week, the TUC called member unions together to discuss its response to the effects of the spending cuts announced last October. Talked up by the media as a planning meeting for a wave co-ordinated strikes against the cuts, it was nothing of the kind.

TUC general secretary Brendan Barber stood on the steps of Congress House and ran up the white flag. Frightened by the existing anti-union laws – and alarmed by the threat of further legislation – Barber and the right-wing led major unions ruled out a confrontation with the government.

All Barber would say was that there could be action around “specific disputes” but none were planned. What are scheduled, however, are talks with the government over planned changes to public sector pensions.



A World to Win supports the TUC demonstration but not simply to register a protest against the government’s policies which are directly driven by the deepening capitalist economic and financial crisis.

We will campaign on the march for a way forward beyond March 26 that is not dependent on the manoeuvres of the TUC leadership. AWTW will urge:

 Leaders of trade unions opposed to the TUC right wing to call their own conference to plan joint action against the Coalition
 Occupations of town halls, universities and colleges to block job losses and the destruction of services
 The removal of discredited local councillors and their replacement by trade union and community representatives
 The creation of a network of People’s Assemblies to build a sustained challenge to the government’s authority.

As the resolution adopted at the weekend National Assembly of Education said, People’s Assemblies can:
 unite students, education workers, trade unionists, community groups and all those resisting austerity and ConDem cuts, as well as climate change activists, campaigners for human rights, migrant support networks and anti-racist groups.
 develop an alternative democratic voice and long-term presence to effectively challenge corporate/financial power and its grip on the existing political system.

A key role for Assemblies would be the development of alternative economic models to the failed profit system. We have to take the opportunity presented by the crisis to set out what we are for as well as what we are against, and to create strategy to put that into practice.

The revolutionary upsurge in North Africa, prompted by worsening economic and political conditions, will make its appearance in Britain. With the TUC on its knees, preparation for that eventuality is everything.

Paul Feldman
Communications editor

Students show the way

The first National Assembly for Education has adopted a strategy to broaden and deepen the student movement against cuts and fees, to take it to workers and the population at large and for the development of people’s assemblies.

The gathering, called by students from occupations around the country who met on December 14, was held the day after 2011’s first protest marches against the Coalition government. The National Assembly came out of the massive wave of student protests during November and December last year, which saw occupations in fifty universities and colleges which became organising hubs.

Students who felt betrayed by the right-wing leadership of the National Union of Students leadership under Aaron Porter, created the London Assembly, itself a new phenomenon in the history of the British student movement.

In a historic decision, and against some opposition, the December 14 meeting voted to make the national assembly inclusive, embracing not only students and education workers but that it should be open to all to participate and vote. The aim of yesterday’s assembly was to develop a strategy to “take our movement forward to victory”.

Yesterday's meeting brought together students from London's Institute of Education, Birkbeck, LSE, University College, Manchester, Kent, and Stirling universities, sixth form colleges, with trade unionists from UCU and political activists. Held under the banner of the London School of Economics Student Union, yesterday’s meeting first heard Camden Town sixth-form college student, Ruby Hirsch. She appealed for students to unite with workers and said events in Tunisia proved that it was possible to overthrow a dictatorship which had been in power for so many years.

Jim Wolfrey, of University and College Union (UCU), called for the TUC’s March 26 demonstration to become “our day of anger”, referring to the Egyptian revolutionary movement. No government could stand in the way. UCU is balloting this week for strike action in defence of jobs and education, he said.

Student activist Ben Beach, from University College, said the aim was to use occupations as a hub to go out to thousands of students: “We have turned a right-wing university into a left-wing one, using consensus decision making and an autonomous system”. Support had flowed in from workers in the college and from around the world. Labour leader Ed Miliband was “neither socialist or red, and would not provide a solution to the cuts crisis”, Beach noted.

The hundred-plus students, education workers and political activists responded enthusiastically to accounts by participants in the revolutionary events in Tunisia and Egypt. Mohammed Inab said that the Tunisian government could not be reformed. His father, a 63-year-old primary school teacher, now headed a local people’s defence committee which organised barricades to safeguard security. Remnants of Ben Ali’s presidential guard had tried to stage a counter-coup against the people’s uprising, moving hundreds of cars full of weapons and bombs to create a provocation. The barricades had stopped the transport, co-ordinating their actions live on national television.

Wasim X told the meeting that the Egyptian movement was inspired by the way students had taken Saturday’s protest to the Egyptian embassy in London and made it “almost an internal affair”. In Britain and Egypt alike, those attacking living standards are the same ones who are deaf to the voice of the people, he said.

Mark Barrett spoke in favour of building inclusive People’s Assemblies to unite students, education workers, trade unionists, community groups and all those resisting austerity and ConDem cuts, as well as climate change activists, campaigners for human rights, migrant support networks and anti-racist groups.

The aim was to develop an alternative democratic voice and long-term presence to effectively challenge corporate/financial power and its grip on the existing political system. He called for assemblies, to unite resistance to the cuts but also to build a bottom-up, long term movement in response. The national assembly supported these aims plus a proposal for city-wide assemblies to be formed.

The assembly also supported calls for a general strike and the defence of victimised students on a day when police used CS gas on tax avoidance protesters. All in all, it was a major step forward, not only for students but for the struggle against the Coalition government as a whole.


Corinna Lotz

A World to Win secretary

Parliament as a dead parrot

The events in and around Parliament yesterday represent a watershed – not just for university students but for society at large. Higher education officially became a business and the present political process was shown to have less life in it than a dead parrot.

Years of emphasis on education as the way to success and overcoming accidents of birth are now associated with heavy debts which are impossible for many to contemplate. The hopes of a new generation are being dashed in front of their eyes.

The Tories, building on New Labour’s introduction of tuition fees, used the Lib Dems to impose a market model on universities, turning students into “customers” at a stroke. Ed Miliband, apparently the new leader of Labour, refused to commit himself to overturning the vote which transforms education into something for the wealthy.

No wonder students were driven to confront the state in the shape of the Coalition, the police and the monarchy. And the cracks are showing. Not only were the Lib Dems hopelessly split (leaving Nick Clegg’s position vulnerable), but the police were barely able to cope.

The use of intimidation by police – truncheons, riot gear, cameras, horses, kettling, etc –probably spurred on protests as students became angrier and saw it as a challenge. The hundreds who attacked the Treasury and the Supreme Court could not have sustained this without the thousands who came to demonstrate and felt frustrated when the vote went through.

Outwitted by a spontaneous movement independent of the official “leaders” of the
National Union of Students – who never opposed the original introduction of fees – the police lost control and landed the heir to the throne in the middle of it all. “Off with their heads” hadn’t been heard on London’s streets for some time – until last night.

Furthermore, the students have shamed the leaders of the trade union movement, apart from a minority like Bob Crow of the transport RMT who mobilised his members to join yesterday’s demonstrations. Leading bureaucrats from Unite and other unions are actually going round cities like Leeds telling Labour councillors they have to implement the cuts.

Their refusal to call members into actions against the cuts – and £9,000 tuition fees are a direct consequence of the savage reduction in state support for universities – left students vulnerable to police attacks on London’s streets.

Students, by contrast, are united by the sweeping nature of cuts which affect them all. Not just those already at university but those at colleges (who face the end of maintenance allowances) and schools. They are aware of what their parents had and are enjoying their support in opposing tuition fees.

A spirit of altruism prevails, embracing common interests between poorer and better off students and wider interests of society. Students around the world, from Pakistan to France, are following the struggle in Britain because education is under attack in every country.

Global capitalism is in crisis, as we have tried to explain in our booklet Beyond Resistance (which you can download for free). The state, which props up the system, is transferring the cost of formerly public services like education entirely on to the backs of those who use and need them.

The social system – the government, the state, the corporations and the banks – has lost any moral authority to rule. Its mandate from the ruling elites is to restore capitalism, whatever the cost. Creating a sustainable alternative now becomes a practical necessity. Students have seized the initiative. They are in the best position of all too inspire the wider population to create People’s Assemblies (see tomorrow’s event) to challenge and defeat a state that is heading towards outright suppression of all dissent.

Corinna Lotz, AWTW secretary
Paul Feldman, communications editor

The contagion of revolt

Protests by students and teachers throughout Europe are mounting as governments try to offset savage reductions in education budgets with increased fees in the losing race to prevent state bankruptcy.

Students marched throughout Britain yesterday as well in Italian cities yesterday in protest against attacks on education, blocking roads and railway lines in some of the biggest demonstrations seen in decades.

Hopes that the feverish activity resulting in an €85bn loan package for Ireland would inhibit the debt contagion spreading throughout Europe and the rest of the world were dashed as global investors immediately sent the rates soaring for lending to Portugal, Italy and Spain as well as Ireland and Greece.

"The crisis is intensifying and worsening," said Nick Matthews, a credit expert at the Royal Bank of Scotland. "Bond [government debt] purchases by the European Central Bank are the only anti-contagion weapon left. It needs to act much more aggressively."

Agreement on a European Stability Mechanism (ESM) to be launched in mid-2013 will be far too late to prevent a string of state bankruptcies. The loan package for Ireland itself postpones the intention of the ESM to force banks and hedge funds to take losses if a country runs out of money. The UK’s contribution to the Irish package is an attempt to ease the strains on the interdependence of the failed Irish economy and UK-based banks.

The ESM, if it comes into force, will not only test the power of the Eurozone governments against the global banks and non-banks, but will require a long process to arrive at unanimous agreement among Eurozone countries that a country is insolvent and qualifies for help.

As the crisis continued to spread, French Minister for the economy, Christine Lagarde says that each European country is facing very different conditions and each should be treated on a case by case basis. Whilst it is true that the levels of indebtedness vary, the development of the global economy means that debt is universal and the fate of each country is entangled with the fate of the whole world system, not just that of the Eurozone or even the whole of Europe.

In the US, the fallout from the mortgage defaults that triggered the global meltdown in 2008 is continuing despite the launch of a second round of quantitative easing or printing of money. US house prices fell for the third month running in September and at a quicker-than-expected rate.

The end of the government’s tax incentive for first-time homebuyers joined persistent unemployment, high rates of foreclosure and an excess of vacant homes. Home prices have plunged by 28.6 per cent since peaking in June 2006.

As every desperate economic measure stokes up social unrest, the time has come for a new kind of politics. Iceland was the first country to be driven into bankruptcy by the global financial meltdown of 2007/8. It has just elected a 25-person Constitutional Parliament to re-write its constitution for the first time in the Republic’s history.

It is a small indication of the much bigger political changes needed to resolve the economic, social and ecological catastrophe caused by capitalist production. The December 11 event in London on creating People’s Assemblies would be a good place to start.

Gerry Gold
Economics editor

The state prepares for a showdown

Rank-and-file students and their national leaders are travelling in opposite directions. At college and university level, students are preparing for further action against soaring tuition fees. At national level, the Labour-led leadership of the National Union of Students (NUS) is heading for the hills.

Behind the rhetoric of a “decapitating” Lib Dem MPs, the NUS is actually trying to behead the spontaneous movement that erupted on London’s streets last week. The NUS wants to direct student energy towards – wait for it – collecting signatures with the aim of making Lib Dem MPs face by-elections!

This is not so much a strategy as a travesty. The proposed law about recalling MPs is not even published yet and it will simply be restricted to issues of corruption like expenses fraud. Meanwhile, the majority party in the Coalition, Cameron’s Tories, are simply let off the hook.

The aim of NUS president and aspiring Labour MP Aaron Porter is to postpone, hinder, divert and fragment a growing social movement against the Coalition government. Simply marching from point A to point B with the aim of winning over “public opinion” won’t bring about change and frustration with a failed political process exploded at Millbank. Naturally, Porter – who is not opposed to tuition fees in principle – condemned as “despicable” the students who went on to attack the Tory Party HQ.

The reality is that the struggle against the Coalition’s massive spending cuts, which are driven by a deepening global debt crisis (with Ireland this morning on the verge of bankruptcy), cannot be contained within “normal” boundaries of protests and one-off strikes. And the state is conscious of this and will learn from the police’s obvious unpreparedness for the size and anger of last week’s march.

According to the Observer, defence firms are working closely with the government on a "militarisation" strategy to meet mass resistance to the impact of the cuts. Firms are apparently in negotiation over possible orders for armoured vehicles, body scanners and surveillance equipment. Scotland Yard's National Public Order Intelligence Unit and other state bodies are said to be stepping up monitoring of left-wing groups.

So while the NUS and the leaders of the major trade unions in Britain sit around in la-la land, the state, as always, is getting tooled up. This has to be the case because, ultimately, the emerging struggles revolve around and are decided by the central question of state power – who wields it and for what purpose.
The present capitalist state will everything and anything to sustain the very system upon which it rests. If that requires massive spending cuts and propping up failed banks, that is precisely what it will do. If that obliges the state to bring out the iron first, it won’t hesitate.

In these unprecedented times, where existing political processes are reduced to a cul-de-sac against a background of insoluble economic crisis, direct action and extreme forms of protest will in themselves not be enough to defeat the Coalition and the state. Students, however, having taken the lead in the struggle against Cameron-Clegg, are in a position to inspire a significant shift.

They could achieve that by going outside of their campuses to the local communities and workplaces with an appeal to create People’s Assemblies. These could become a democratic alternative to a failed undemocratic political system. A network of People’s Assemblies will have the capacity to facilitate a transition to a society based on co-operation and self-determination instead of profit and corporate power. Then we could repudiate the state’s debts to the banks and create an education system free for all.

Paul Feldman
Communications editor

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