By Sacha Ismail
Background
Access to university was expanded significantly and the first state-funded
maintenance grants introduced in the UK immediately after the Second World
War. This system was extended during the 1960s; yet in 1979, when a
radically right-wing Conservative government began to take revenge for
decades of working-class confidence and militancy through a violent assault
on all sections of the welfare state, less than 10% of young people went to
university.
The post-1979 Conservative governments faced contradictory pressures: on one
hand, business was demanding an increasingly educated and skilled workforce;
on the other hand, publicly-funded education represented an unacceptable
drain on corporate profits and the fortunes of the rich. Their solution was
to rapidly expand higher education, while cutting back funding, both to
students and institutions, year-on-year. Students grants were slashed
severely and ministers repeatedly threatened to introduce tuition fees.
Meanwhile, further education colleges (catering mainly for 16-18 year olds
and those who missed the chance of an education when they were young) were
converted into privatised corporations and funding for schools severely
restricted.
Since its election in 1997, the "new" Labour government of Tony Blair has
continued this neo-liberal programme of cuts and privatisation (both in the
sphere of education and elsewhere). One of the Blair governments' first
acts was to completely abolish student grants and introduce tuition fees of
£1000 a year - policies which the Conservatives dreamed of but never thought
they could get away with!! The average student now graduates with something
like £12,000 of debt; as a result, applications to university have stagnated
and drop-out rates soared, making a mockery of the Government's target of
50% of young people going to university by 2010 (the figure is currently
just under 40%).
Desperate for new funds, an increasing number of university Vice-Chancellors
now call for the complete privatisation of higher education through a system
of deregulated fees, something to which Blair & co. say they have no
objection in principle. The government has already allowed private
companies to take over schools for the first time and massively expanded the
elitist system of academic selection at the age of eleven. Unsurprisingly,
they are keen advocates of the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS)
and have no objection to the inclusion of higher education in its
provisions.
The student movement fights back - sort of
Those from countries with healthier student movements will be astonished to
learn that the Labour government's cuts provoked next to no resistance from
the official representative body of British students. The UK National Union
of Students is the best resourced national student union in Europe;
virtually all of the UK's 3,000,000+ students are members of one of its
hundreds of affiliated organisations and it commands a budget of millions of
pounds. Unfortunately, it is also run by the same right-wing faction of the
Labour Party which produced Blair and his friends. Until 1995, the NUS
demanded free education for all: a massive increase in education spending to
guarantee both an expansion of higher education and a living maintenance
grant for every student. Rather than cause any trouble for an incoming
Blairite government, the Labour Students moved to ditch this policy in time
for the 1997 general election.
They were resisted by the Campaign for Free Education (CFE), a grass-roots
organisation of left-wing activists enjoying the support of dozens of
student unions and thousands of students up and down the country. In 1997
and 1998, when the NUS actively campaigned for the abolition of student
grants (no, this is not misprint, this how ex-NUS president Stephen Twigg is now education minister!) and cancelled its annual national
demonstration against the government, the CFE brought thousands of
demonstrators onto the streets of London and Newcastle.
This was
accompanied by local demonstrations and occupations all over the UK, with
particularly prominent campaigns at Oxford, Sussex and a number of London
institutions. A united left slate made up of socialost groups such as the CFE, the Alliance for Workers' Liberty, Student Broad Left and the Socialist Workers' Student
Society came within an inch (15 votes) of winning the presidency of NUS; and, finally, in late 1999,
the NUS leadership accepted that student grants might be desirable and
organised its first demonstration for two years.
But the Labour Students had done their job by keeping student protest within
limits tolerable to the government. Concerted action in 1997-8 could have
swept the government's plans for higher education away; instead, progress
has been very slow, with protests winning limited victories such as the
reintroduction of limited maintenance grants in Scotland last year. It was
only in April this year, after they were defeated on the floor of NUS
conference, that the NUS leaders accepted the need to campaign
for such basic demands as increased taxation of the rich, no graduate tax
and the withdrawal of GATS. The Government is currently conducting a review
of student funding arrangements, one which Higher Education Minister
Margaret Hodge says will consider 'all options'. In other words, whether
things get better or worse will depend on what students do, now.
What happens next
Something like 7,000 students took part in the CFE's November demonstration
in 1998; up to 10,000 in the NUS demo in November '99; 17,000 in November
2000. NUS postponed its 2001 demonstration until February this year
(eliciting a protest meeting at the House of Commons at which veteran Labour
MP Tony Benn told activists not to "believe a word" the NUS leaders said),
with the result that only 5,000 took part.
The next three months will see two major demonstrations around education
funding - a lobby of Parliament sometime in October and a march through
London in late November. Once again, unfortunately, NUS had to be pressured
into calling these events and its leading officers have devoted more energy
to extolling minor concessions by the Government than mobilising students
against it. Nonetheless, we will be working to make them a success, and to
link them to the upsurge in industrial action and labour movement protests
around pay and privatisation that has occurred in recent months.
The key remains to demand the expansion of education as a public service, a
social right and an end in itself - something which is desirable because it
allows individual development through universal access to the stock of human
knowledge and culture, not because it boosts the ability of business to make
money. The official student movement in the UK has tended to argue the case
for free education purely in terms of economic efficiency - that is, when it
argues it at all. We say: neo-liberalism capitalism should be made to pay
for education, not the other way around.
