Universities move towards higher fees

Submitted by Anon on 12 September, 2008 - 11:52

This academic year will see a review of the £3,000 cap on top-up fees, most likely resulting in new government policy of allowing universities to set much higher variable fees. Much more than anything New Labour has done so far, this will mean a move towards a US-style system of pretty much unrestricted free markets in higher education.

Yet the Blairite-led National Union of Students plans, pretty much, to do nothing.

In 2005, the year that the original proposal for variable fees up to £3,000 passed through Parliament, by a majority of just five votes, NUS cancelled its national demonstration. It has only held one since then, mobilising less than ten thousand people. This is a multi-million organisation, yet its campaigning activity is, in meaningful terms, zero.

This year NUS, which continues to promote the timid demand and limp slogan “Keep the cap” [on tuition fees], plans only a day of action on 5 November. Even if this was not the day after the US presidential election, when it is guaranteed to get no attention whatsoever, “days of action” are student bureaucrats’ favourite way of avoiding organising a national demo — and in any case, NUS is not building seriously for it.

Wes Streeting, the Labour Students president of NUS, has also promised to bring back the anti-democratic “Governance Review” reforms which were defeated by NUS conference in April. Astonishingly given their claims to be concerned about democracy and value for money, the NUS leadership plans to get their pet student unions to call for two emergency conferences, so that they do not have to wait for and risk defeat at the 2009 conference next Easter. Delegates to extraordinary conferences do not have to be elected!

The two issues are linked: the aim of these reforms is to “lock in” NUS’s current bureaucratisation and lack of campaigning activity, in order to ward of the possibility of it being used to seriously take on the government.

In these circumstances, there is an urgent need for a united, non-sectarian student left that can mobilise, inside and outside of NUS and student union structures, both to resist the bureaucrats attempts to close down democracy and to take on the government.

That is what the Education Not for Sale network exists to do. We will be working with those student unions who want to resist NUS’s disastrous course to organise the action NUS won’t – including a national demonstration in the second term.

ENS is only one part of the left. We are very much in favour of left unity, and of the left working together — with SWSS/Student Respect, Socialist Students and others. But we also believe in building ENS as a non-sectarian, democratic united front of student activists from different points of view who share the perspective of achieving fighting student unions and NUS. That is an essential part of the fight for unity.

ENS activists have been central to a number of student campaigns — from young workers’ rights activism to action on climate change to the hugely successful Feminist Fightback initiative.

Get involved! Help us build for a national demonstration! Support Education Not for Sale!

• For more information, ENS campaign materials or a speaker for your campus, get in touch: education.not.for.sale@gmail.com / www.free-education.org.uk

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