'Fools Rush In' - Students queue in the cold, desperate for accommodation (photo credit: Aberystwyth University Lib Dems)
Despite pleas from the Guild for students to remain calm and make informed decisions on accommodation, in a campaign they term ‘Fools Rush In’; students were today seen queuing outside Alexanders Estate Agents in the cold – some from as early as 6am – desperate to get a room for next year from the newly released student property list.
Today’s scenes comes just months after the university was forced to put bunk-beds into single rooms, and ask non-UK European students to defer entry, in a bid to make enough room available for incoming undergraduates who arrived this September.
It’s nothing new that there’s a crisis in the accommodation sector in Aberystwyth. Every year since 2007, students have been left out in the cold, and every year the University says it’s resolved the issue, only for the problem to inevitably arise again due to lack of real action coupled with rising admissions. In 2008, 56 students were left in hotels; whilst in 2010 83 had no accommodation and several dropped out as a result. This academic year, 600 students ended up in bunk-beds, whilst international students were told to stay away.
The crisis has meant many students have felt the pressure to sign onto private property for second year just a few months into their first semester, leaving them paying extortionate rents for housing that often fails to meet quality and lacking proper licensing.
With a seeming lack of real action from the University, the Union, or private landlords, is it time for students to step up to the plate and get involved in the Council, to ensure better regulation, and student housing provision? Or maybe the Union should revisit the idea of a student letting agency or housing co-operative. One thing’s for certain, for yet another year, the welfare of students has been sidelined in favour of private sector profit.
Well, terrible populist direct democracy. After the rocky launch of the government’s new epetitions website, I started to wonder just how much was spent moving over to this system from the petitions on the old number 10 site. In order to get this information, I shot off a freedom of information request to the cabinet office on July 28th. Today I finally got my response.
The Cabinet Office have confirmed to me that a total of £80,700 was spent developing the new service, including “design; process analysis; development and testing; the warranty period; infrastructure setup and accreditation; and the SSL certification i.e. an extra layer of online security.”
I also asked for the expected yearly cost to maintain the site. They have quoted a figure of £32,000 per year for “support, maintenance and hosting of the e-Petitions site.” It is unclear if the moderation of petitions is included within this.
So there we have it, they clearly paid too much for what was such an unstable service, but it’s still one of the cheaper government initiatives we’ve seen in recent years.
In 1997, Labour swept to power, receiving a disproportionately large number of seats compared to their vote share, thanks to the electoral system of FPTP used in the United Kingdom. Labour promised positive change for the country, but what we saw was the enshrinement in British politics of neo-liberal principles and authoritarian law, compounded with corruption, sleaze, and disillusionment.
Under New Labour we saw the deregulation of the banks and financial sector, which would contribute to the recession in the late 2000s, and allows obscene risks to be taken whilst bankers and executives pocket millions of taxpayers money to this day. We also saw the introduction of tuition fees in higher education, restricting access to education for thousands of young adults across Britain who were turned away by the prospect of debt on top of ever-rising living costs, and paving the way for the tripling of tuition fees from 2012. After 2000 we saw attack after attack on civil liberties, perhaps best highlighted by section 44, and detention without trial. On February 15th, 2003, over a million people took to the streets of London in opposition to action in Iraq; ignoring their cries for peace, the UK Government engaged in a barbaric and unjust – many would say illegal – war that would destabilise a region and lead to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. It was clear this was a government that did not listen to the concerns of the people.
A New Hope
Born from a failed political system, the coalition that acts as a catalyst for radicalisation.
The end of the 2000s brought rising unemployment, a financial sector that was lining the pockets of its executives, and representatives that would rather spend taxpayers money on personal duck ponds than public services. The people were angry at the Government, and at the political system that had allowed all this to happen. The seeds of change had been sown.
As the new decade started, and an election loomed, the people of Britain sought real change, a chance to clean up politics, and to have their voices heard. Angry with Labour after their record in government, and concerned about the threat of any conservative government, voters looked away from the same old parties and found a champion for their beliefs in the form of the Liberal Democrats, and Nick Clegg.
In the run up to the General Election, the Liberal Democrats captured the support of the country. They inspired older and first-time voters alike, with their promises to bring about electoral reform and usher in a new political age; to not just oppose any rise in tuition fees, but to abolish them; to build a progressive tax system; to invest in renewable energy; to truly represent the people.
Come election day, however, the new-found support for the Lib Dems was nowhere to be found – no doubt due in part to the electoral system acting against them. The voters who had put their faith in the party, particularly students and first-time voters, were now facing the serious prospect of all their efforts achieving nothing. All hope now rested in the idea of a progressive ‘rainbow coalition’.
For days, the nation waited to learn who would lead the new government. Demonstrations occurred to remind the Liberal Democrats, who now found themselves kingmakers in a hung parliament, that they had promises that they must live up to.
They didn’t. One year ago, a Conservative-Liberal Democrat Coalition Government was formed. Many of the key pledges of the Liberal Democrats, and the hopes and desires they represented, were crushed there and then. Abolition of fees would become an allowance to abstain on raising tuition fees, and introducing STV became a referendum on AV linked in the same bill with Conservative gerrymandering.
May 2010 would become the start of the program of the most regressive policies ever seen in modern Britain. Policies that sacrificed the public sector and welfare in favour of making the richest in society even richer. Policies that would destroy the aspirations of generations to come. Policies that put the economy, and the environment at great risk. Policies that would rapidly radicalise the people of Britain.
When They Say Cut Back
In 2010, the Coalition Government held the Comprehensive Spending Review, which outlined plans to cut £81bn in public funding up to 2015, putting 500,000 public sector jobs at risk, destroying public welfare, cutting funding for the arts, and the scrapping of EMA. The Government was proposing massive cuts, whilst doing nothing to prevent the £120bn tax shortfall from dodging and uncollection, or halting the disgusting bonuses and damaging practice of the financial sector. The Government had declared war on the very people it exists to protect.
With peoples lives and livelihoods at stake, people all across the country began to mobilise. One week after the cuts were announced, UK Uncut made their first strike back against the cuts by shutting down a store belonging to Vodafone – a company who have dodged £6bn in tax. In the coming weeks and months, the now famous scissor logo of the decentralised protest group would appear in shops and banks all across the country; peacefully demonstrating against those responsible for the deficit, those who should be paying the price instead of the public. The fightback had begun.
NUS Demo Lition March, photo credit: Andrew Moss
Later that Autumn, the Browne Review was published, and the Government set in motion plans to make real term cuts to Higher Education of between 80% and 100%, whilst trebling tuition fees to £9,000. The higher education policies, which I blogged about at the time, will actually increase the deficit, whilst destroying education, and putting jobs and the economy at risk. With young people facing the prospect of high costs for poor education, coupled with high youth employment, students took to the streets in their tens of thousands to fight for public education, in days of action called by the National Union of Students, and later by the National Campaign Against Fees And Cuts. The scenes from these demonstrations would become the face of public discontent, with images of Edward Woollard throwing a fire extinguisher off of Millbank, and with video of police dragging Jodie McIntyre from his wheelchair, whilst children as young as 12 were kettled on Westminster Bridge for hours on end. The winter saw these same students take the fight to their own institutions, occupying and teaching the alternative, including at my own University here in Aberystwyth.
March For The Alternative
Going into 2011, the demonstrations and protests so far had largely been decentralised events organised by the people themselves. This continued to be true in the first few months of this year, where in January 15,000 students and workers marched on London, and in February where a new wave of student occupations occurred. This monopoly of the people was all about to change however, with the trade unions working together to organise what would turn into one of the biggest demonstrations in British since the turn of the century, as around 500,000 shut down London in opposition to the cuts to public services. With the funding and organisational abilities of all the unions, it was possible for mass mobilisation, which meant this demonstration had people from all walks of life standing together in solidarity against the cuts, be they pensioners, students, single parents, public sector workers, lecturers, farmers, disabled, unemployed – whatever you can think of, they were there.
March 26th was when these grassroots local networks of activists, national campaigns, unions, and the public all came together with one united voice. The day would stand as testament to the public opposition to the Government’s shameless attack on society. The people had come to be radicalised, radical Britain had well and truly been born.
Strike Whilst The Iron Is Hot
Since the national march on the 26th March, people have gone back to their communities, to continue the fight in their local area. Students are expressing their outrage at tuition fees and funding cuts, with more left-wing candidates being elected to local unions, as well as within the NUS. We’ve also seen UCU strike over pensions, and on June 30th, 4 unions, PCS, UCU, NUT and ATL, representing around 1 million workers, will be on strike. June 30th is a vital opportunity for students and workers to once more stand side by side, in solidarity against the cuts. The Education Activist Network is urging everyone, regardless of who you are, to join those teachers and lecturers on the picket lines.
We cannot afford to let the anti-cuts momentum waiver, and so it is heartening to see that as activists continue to shut down banks and stores across Britain, the unions are ramping up the fight. The people must continue to campaign for the government to tackle tax dodging and bankers bonuses, rather than destroy education and dismantle the NHS. We must fight, and we must win.
Next week the Government is scheduled to release details of the Browne Review of Higher Education Funding and Student Finance, however some details have already been released – We know that the review will call for variable rate interest linked to graduate earnings, and to at least more than double fees to £7,000 from the current rate of £3,290 per year. The Guardian reports that a higher fee of £10,000 was considered but Browne understood that such a rise would be too “toxic”.
I reject every aspect of this report, right from the appointment of the person who spearheaded it – Baron Browne. Browne was Chief Executive of BP until 2007, when he resigned after allegations regarding his personal life and misuse of company funds; and he faced perjury charges for lying in court. He pushed for dangerous cuts that compromised safety at BP, making him largely responsible for multiple disasters, including the Deepwater Horizon explosion earlier this year. Browne’s only experience with regards to education comes in the form of being a Cambridge Graduate as well as graduating from Standford. He also allegedly has links to the partner of Peter Mandelson, who was responsible for the appointment, and also accepted a job from the present government, undermining [further] the independence of this review, say the University and Colleges Union.
One option laid out in the review, and apparently approved by both sides of the Government, is to introduced tiered interest rates for HE students from 2012; which would replace the current fixed 1.5% rate. This means that whilst graduates won’t be earning any more than at present (starting salary approximately £22,000 in 2009), they would be be expected to pay more back each month, putting them at greater risk of accumulating new debts as they struggle to balance rising living costs, the rise in VAT, and having to pay off more of their even larger student debt.
The review also recommends rising tuition fees to at least £7,000. Such a rise would do little to offset the savage funding cuts education and the wider society face, and in essence means students are paying more for the same, or worse quality of education than seen now as institutions are forced to stretch their funding to the limit. The biggest impact of raising these fees, however, is that it fatally undermines the viability of university education to persons from less-well-off backgrounds. Thousands more people will be denied the opportunity to learn, not because of their ability, but because of their income. Education plays a vital part in enabling social mobility, and graduates more than pay for themselves in graduate employment work over the course of their life. By reducing the number of graduates by excluding those from lower socio-economic backgrounds puts the economy at risk over a far greater period than presently seen with the global recession and deep spending cuts. An entire generation faces the prospect of long-term unemployment, large debts, and grossly reduced welfare and services to support them.
Raising tuition fees doesn’t just compromise society and the economy. A £7,000 means that we won’t just see a division of universities to elite institutions and lower quality colleges similar to polytechnics, but we risk seeing up to a quarter of the Higher Education sector struggle and perhaps collapse as the low-income students they rely on to survive are forced away from education due to costs. Additionally, science contributes billions to the UK economy, and being hit with the double-whammy of funding cuts and less graduates puts UK – and international collaborative research on the back burner, reducing economical contributions and delaying important scientific progress.
Prior to the General Election, over a thousand PPCs signed a pledge to oppose any rise in tuition fees, including Clegg and most of the Lib Dem MPs. Now-Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg also said in April that rising fees to £7,000 would be a “disaster”, and their manifesto pledged to scrap tuition fees entirely over 6 years. The Browne Review is likely to be the strongest test for the Liberal Democrats and the Coalition Government. Whether the Liberal Democrats will support the rise in fees, citing they “didn’t know how bad the deficit left by the last Labour Government really was”, and that “coalition government always means compromises”; or whether they will stick to their original pledges is yet to be seen, but I sadly expect we shall see the former.
12/10/10 Update: It’s even worse than expected. The review calls for uncapped fees, and lays out models for up to £12,000. Repayment of loans would also follow market rate, currently 2.2%+inflation. If implemented, this policy would throw away the ambitions and chance of success of an entire generation due to the mistakes of the older generations who took what they pleased, and leave us to pick up the tab and suffer the consequences. It is not on, and students, unions, and politicians across the country should not support any rise in fees, especially the Lib Dems, all of which signed the NUS pledge to oppose increasing tuition fees.
