Solidarity 171, 16 April 2010

NUS fiddles while cuts battles grow

This year’s National Union of Students conference (13-15 April) represented a new low in terms of political and organisational culture for the student movement. Massive cuts to delegation sizes meant that the conference was smaller than ever, and structural changes which have made NUS even less accessible than before guaranteed an absolute minimum of political controversy in the policy debates. Almost every mildly left-wing motion was heavily defeated and NUS’s policies in favour of fees and cuts were maintained. A small victory was won when a motion in support of future strike action by the...

Who is Ed Balls?

Ed Balls has been the Labour MP for Normanton since the 2005 general election. His elevation to the Labour Cabinet (in 2007 as the Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families) could have been his reward for being Gordon Brown’s adviser from 1994 to 1999 and chief economic adviser to the Treasury from 1999 to 2004. In the latter post Oxford and Harvard-educated Balls was called the “most powerful unelected person in Britain”. For nine months between 2004 and 2005 Balls was employed by the Smith Institute, Gordon Brown’s favourite political think tank. His renumeration was reported to...

Who is Michael Gove?

Labour’s manifesto commitment to “take over” the 1,000 least successful secondary schools in the UK (slightly less than a third) was not much more than an extension of an already existing policy. But it did have echoes of the kind of education policy the Tories’ Shadow Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families Michael Gove has been saying. Except that Gove goes that little bit further. Gove says much more of the state’s education functions can be handed over to private business (they could take over schools and make a profit if they want). For Ed Balls, who wrote the manifesto, if...

My life at work: privatising the skies

Jessica Barnard works as an air traffic controller for NATS. Tell us a bit about the work you do. I work as an air traffic controller for NATS. That used to stand for National Air Traffic Services. But since our £1.5 million corporate re-branding, we are “NATS, the UK’s leading provider of air traffic management services”. NATS is split into two businesses. NATS En Route Ltd (NERL) handles mostly flights at a higher level and looks after most of the infrastructure, such as communications, navigational aids and surveillance equipment. NATS Services Ltd (NSL) competes for contracts to run...

Jersey: island unions to fight cuts

Teachers, firefighters, nurses and other public sector workers seem set to take industrial action in Jersey against a pay freeze and £10 million in cuts. The teachers’ union, NASUWT, have called a march and rally on 24 April, to defend public services on the island. It will be the first march and rally seen on the island since the Nazi occupation! Firefighters are due to begin industrial action on 20 April, with a withdrawal of goodwill escalating to strike action. The Jersey fire service is seriously understaffed with only just enough crew to cover shifts. It is already dependent on goodwill...

Industrial news in brief

The ballot on the Communication Workers’ Union’s deal with Royal Mail runs until 23 April. The leadership is campaigning for a “yes” vote. But the deal is bad. It represents no concessions from management on the big questions of job cuts and restructuring, and will allow Royal Mail to continue eroding wages and casualising the industry unabated. Interviews with activists: www.workersliberty.org/node/13894 2,500 patrol staff at the AA vehicle breakdown service will strike on 2 May. The recognised union in AA, the Independent Democratic Union, say reforms could cut their pension values by nearly...

A million green jobs

The New Labour government has promoted itself as a leading advocate of a new global agreement on controlling greenhouse gas emissions. Tory ranks are full of people who deny that global warming is even a problem, and they will apply pressure if the Tories win the general election. But what New Labour has actually done is wretched. In 1997 the Labour Government set itself a 13-year target to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 2010 to 20% below 1990 levels. In 2006 emissions were the highest they had been since 1997, only five per cent below 1990 levels, excluding international aviation and...

Schools: unite teachers and students!

Superficially there seems nothing wrong with the call by the conference of the NASUWT (the second-biggest teaching union) for industrial action against the extension of pupil power without consultation. Like all trade unionists I don’t think management should bring in any new policy without consultation. But over an Easter weekend when NUT conference tried to prepare for the coming avalanche of attacks on the public sector, we were treated to the spectacle of our “sister” union grabbing the headlines by launching an extraordinary attack on Student Voice. For those unaware, Student Voice is one...

NUT Conference: unite the unions to fight cuts

The National Union of Teachers (NUT) conference in Liverpool at Easter was a fairly unified event, with the main focus on forthcoming struggles over SATs, workload, pensions and funding cuts. In the case of national testing, the union is awaiting the result of a ballot of “leadership group” members in primary schools which could lead to a boycott of this year’s SATs. The ballot is part of a joint campaign with the National Association of Head Teachers (NAHT) and conference was addressed by Mick Brookes, their general secretary. He implored members of both unions to vote in the ballot, saying...

National Insurance furore: it nauseates Vince Cable? It should nauseate us!

“I just find it utterly nauseating all these chairmen and chief executives of FTSE companies being paid 100 times the pay of their average employees lecturing us on how we should run the country. I find it barefaced cheek”. It should have been a Labour politician, or at least a union leader, saying that on the ballyhoo about the 130 bosses who have denounced Labour for planning an increase in National Insurance rates. In fact it was Lib-Dem spokesperson Vince Cable. It’s not that Cable, or the Lib-Dems, are anti-capitalist. Far from it. Under Nick Clegg, further from it than ever. Cable...

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