UK students

Student activism in the UK and the NUS. See also UCU.

We need political feminism

ON 5 November, activists from Education Not for Sale Women attended FEM 05, the second “FEM” conference and pretty much the only large-scale event on feminist politics to have been organised in the last few years. Since the collapse of the women’s movement there has been a general lack of discussion and activity on the question of women's liberation. NUS Women’s Campaign has historically been a bastion of campaigning socialist feminist politics, but since its capture by Labour Students and “independent” right-wingers in the last two years, its activity has declined dramatically. FEM 05 was...

Activism after the G8

By Josh Robinson, People & Planet East Anglia regional rep LAST weekend, Oxford Brookes university hosted Shared Planet, the annual gathering of student activists from the campaigning network People & Planet. The mobilisations around the G8 seem to have radicalised large numbers of P&P members: for the first time, the event had sold out over a week in advance. But what was particularly encouraging wasn’t just the number of people present, but the fact that P&P members seem to be rethinking the way they see activism. People I spoke to were much quicker to criticise NGO-dominated campaigns like...

How the SWP "Marched on Parliament".

Between fifteen and twenty thousand students marched through London on 23 February [1994] in protest at the Government's decision to cut student grants by one-third over the next three years. They were organised by the Student Activist Alliance, initiated by supporters of Socialist Organiser. That march may prove to have been the beginning of a deep and powerful mobilisation of students for a serious fight to force the Government to retreat. It was an important event. By contrast, the Socialist Workers' Party's [SWP's] much-advertised student "March on Parliament" on the same day - and, indeed...

Students are workers too

By Daniel Randall, NUS National Executive (personal capacity) In these columns, I’ve talked a lot about why students should unite with workers, especially those who work on their campuses such as lecturers, cleaners, librarians or catering staff. But a decade of huge attacks on education funding have meant that more and more students are forced to enter the labour market themselves. Students are workers too. And students are working for increasingly long hours and increasingly poorer pay. Government propaganda about how much more university graduates can expect to earn is not much consolation...

Why we need worker and student unity

By Daniel Randall, NUS National Executive (personal capacity) The entire National Union of Students has been put to shame by one tiny students’ union, on one tiny site, of one university in Devon. Rolle College in Exmouth — part of the University of Plymouth — is threatened with “relocation.” Rolle is primarily a teacher-training college, and many of its students have family responsibilities and financial restrictions that mean they couldn’t undertake the 55-minute journey necessary to get to Rolle’s proposed new site in Plymouth. So for these students, the “relocation” is, effectively, a...

Left Students Prepare For New Year

by bert russell, leeds university and laura schwartz, university of east london Around 70 student union officers and student activists attended “Putting political activism back into the student movement”, a one day conference on 3 September to launch Education Not for Sale (ENS) as a fully-fledged activist network. Held at University of East London’s Docklands campus, and organised jointly with Students Against Sweatshops and University of East London Student Union, it combined campaigns training with political debate and discussion in a way now virtually unique in the student movement...

Don’t Ban Hizb ut-Tahrir — Fight It!

The debate over Islamic “extremism” on university campuses took a turn for the bizarre on 21 September, when Middlesex University suspended its student union president, Keith Shilson, from office and escorted him off campus for refusing to cancel a discussion forum with the right-wing Islamist group Hizb ut-Tahrir. On 15 September, in speech to Universities UK, Education Secretary Ruth Kelly argued that universities should “identify and confront unacceptable behaviour on their premises” in order to “root out extremism” on campus. This followed the Government’s announcement that it plans to ban...

NUS Says: "No Demonstration"

By daniel randall, National union of Students executive In late August, the National Union of Students national executive committee voted to commit the union to organising a national demonstration about education funding at some point during the next academic year. However, at a meeting to launch the union’s campaigns for the year (at which it simultaneously launched an anti-fees campaign for free education and feted Blair’s Higher Education Minister), a number of student union sabbatical officers complained loudly about the forthcoming march. Under their pressure, National President Kat...

Inside the student movement

News and views from inside the student movement... A tale of two meetings A lot of people don’t like meetings. That includes a lot of people on the left, who seem to think that having a meeting is somehow counter-posed to “action” or “doing things.” It’s not unreasonable to dislike sitting around and talking for ages, and the parody of the left in which all anyone ever does is call meetings isn’t a million miles from the truth, but generally I think meetings have got an undeservedly bad rep. Meetings do not preclude “action”. Having interesting and engaging meetings are worthwhile things in...

Inside the student movement: What is “extreme”?

By Daniel Randall Following the 7/7 bombings in London, the tabloid press has been full of righteous denunciations of “extremists” of all stripes. Fair enough, you might think. The belief that blowing hundreds of public transport users up is a good way to get a political point across is pretty “extreme”. Pav Akhtar, the Black Students’ Officer of the National Union of Students, told the Guardian on 20 July that the union was “working with [Universities UK] on their project to combat extremism on campus — including extremism related to political issues, animal rights, the BNP, homophobia and...

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