By Faz Velmi, NUS NEC
Imagine if privatisation were not only government
policy, but the law. That, without too much
hyperbole, is the threat represented by the General
Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS), currently being
negotiated under the sponsorship of the World Trade
Organisation. Where the 1994 GATT treaty liberalised
trade in material goods, GATS would require the
creation of free market for ‘trade’ in
service-provision – with very few exemptions, and
including vast swathes of public services. Despite –
or perhaps because of – the fact that GATS constitutes
such a major attack on the principle of publicly
funded services, there has been an eerie silence about
it in the mainstream press and mainstream intellectual
debate. In Britain, both the labour and student
movements have been slow to take up the issues
involved.
It was therefore extremely encouraging to visit
Cologne on September 14, where a major trade union and
student mobilisation against GATS brought 40,000
people onto the streets. The demonstration, called by
the anti-capitalist organisation ATTAC and the youth
sections of the German trade unions, aimed to put
pressure on the German political establishment in the
run-up to the general election of September 21; among
the most popular slogans were those attacking
ultra-conservative Christian Democrat leader Edmund
Stoiber. As well as large numbers of young trade
union members, there was a contingent from Cologne and
others nearby universities, carrying the banner of the
Education is Not for Sale campaign. This organisation
had sponsored a forum on education and privatisation
the day before, where we learned more about the issues
involved.
GATS and education
The last two or three years have seen European
governments, in particular, moving to radically
reshape their education systems along commercial
lines. These change, like the GATS treaty itself, are
fundamentally a reflection of capital’s constant drive
to open up new markets for exploitation – and
education is an extremely profitable market. This
process expresses itself in three ways. Firstly, cuts
in public funding (eg the introduction of tuition
fees) free resources for diversion to business through
reductions in taxation or increases in subsidies.
Secondly, increasing business influence on what is
researched (eg through corporate sponsorship of
research) and taught (eg through government policies
which prioritise the basic skills at the expense of
everything else) helps provide firms with human and
other resources. And last but not least,
privatisation can open up the education system to
full-blown, direct profit-making. GATS will mean both
the legal entrenchment of these trends and their
extension from a national to an international arena.
This process is gathering speed across Europe, under
governments of all political colours. If the Spanish
conservative government of Jose Maria Aznar has
introduced a law effectively privatising universities,
the German Social Democrats have handed over hundreds
of schools to the giant Bertellsman media corporation.
As a French message of support to the Education is
Not for Sale forum put it: “The ministers come and go,
but the policies sit tight.”
As well as highlighting these threats, however, the
forum focused on the growing strength of European
student resistance to them. Although the attacks
faced by British (one speaker asked the audience if
they wanted the German education system to end up
“like the UK”!) students are more severe than those in
many other European countries, we still lag behind
many others in terms of fighting back. Last winter,
for instance, saw the Spanish student movement
mobilise more than half a million people in
demonstrations and mass occupations against the ‘LOU’
law establishing university privatisation, while this
year has witnessed huge student strikes and even an
occupation of parliament in protest at the possible
introduction of tuition fees in the German state of
North Rhein-Westphalia (of which Cologne is the
capital). Education is Not for Sale has now
established a European wide network of student
campaigning organisations, including the Campaign for
Free Education and the Student Campaign Forum in
Britain, which will be working to raise the issue of
education at the European Social Forum in Florence
this November.
With GATS, student and labour movement activists
face not only the traditional problem of mobilising
large numbers, but the fact that so few of the people
threatened by the treaty are even aware of its
existence. At the forum, student activists from ATTAC
and a representative from FZS, the German national
union of students, discussed the way in which
Germany’s corporate media, though they are
occasionally willing to discuss protests against
individual neo-liberal reforms (eg the threat of
tuition fees), maintain a complete silence about the
bigger issues involved. The challenge in Britain,
too, is to link protests for free education to
over-aching themes of privatisation, attacks on the
welfare state – and, of course, GATS.
Get involved in the protests in Britain
The Blair government, unsurprisingly a strong
supporter of GATS, will be announcing fresh reforms to
student funding sometime later this year (unless of
course it delays the announcement for the umpteenth
time. . .) There will be protests to make sure it
listens to students’ agenda, not the WTO’s. There
will be a free education demonstration in Manchester,
sponsored by Salford University SU, on October 22 and
a NUS action in London within 72 hours after the
Government makes its announcement (contact the SCF for
more details of both). The NUS national demonstration
against tuition fees and for student grants will take
place on December 4, and will be organising a picket
of Margaret Hodge’s constituency surgery before then.
Use the links below to get involved in the action!
There will be a workshop on GATS at LSE entitled "Still at your service? GATS, privatisation and public services in the UK"
on Saturday 16 November. Organisers say;
"At this workshop we want to hear about the realities and consequences of
privatisation of public services such as education, libraries, health care,
railways, the tube and police functions in the UK. We also want to analyse
the connections between national privatisation policies and the WTO's
General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS), an international treaty
aimed at liberalisation of services trade. We believe that local, national
and international neo-liberal policies turning public into private services
need to be discussed and challenged together.
Speakers and presenters from UNISON, RMT, War on Want, Public Services
International Research Unit (PSIRU), Federation of the Police, UK GATS
Network and ATTAC London."
For up to date information, Click here
Other Links
education-is-not-for-sale
free-education.org
Student Campaign Forum
Institute for Education Policy Studies, Schools: The Great GATS Buy (pdf)
Educationet, European Commission to press for free market education
