STOP FEES NOW ore than 30,000 students took to the streets of London on October 16 to join the NUS demonstration against top-up fees. It was the biggest mobilisation against fees for many years, with students coming from every corner of Britain, including 500 from Glasgow to protest. give us a call. want to join Socialist Resistance Youth Name.. Address. Mobile.. Student rate £6 a term. Cheques payable to Resistance.
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New Labour wants to charge up to £3,000, which will result in students from rich families being able to pick and choose presigious universities, whilst poorer students, if they are able to take on huge debts, will be restricted to colleges which fall with in their price range. The National Union of Students own research shows that 85 percent of year ten school stuJoin Socialist Resistance If you agree with what you see in this supplement and want to get involved, why not join us? Simply fill in the form and send it tous - or
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Feer PHOTO: Andrew Wiard 30,000 joined the march: many with individual banners dents would not go to university if they had to face a debt of £20,000. Paul Mackney from the lecturers union Natfhe was one of the speakers who addressed the demonstrators.
There is now a huge opportunity to defeat the government over fees. New Labour are in crisis, with senior ministers now openly criticising Blair. Students must keep up the pressure. Published by Socialist Resistance, PO Box 1 109 London N4 2UU. Printed by East End Offset, London Es Phil Ward
British government plans to cuddle B up further to the Bush regime
have suffered a blow with the publication of the results of genetically modified crop trials. The Farm Scale Evaluations (FSEs) released on October 17th failed to vindicate agribusiness claims of the environmental benefits of GM crops. Tony Blair is now under severe pressure to resist demands from the US that Britain be opened up to GM agriculture, or even to imports of GM products.
The trials were set up five years ago at a cost of £6 million in order to deflect environmentalists opposition to GM. A moratorium was instituted until the results were known, with the expectation in government quarters that agribusiness propaganda about the beneficial effects of GM on farm biodiversity would be shown to be true.
Greenpeace and other organisations argued that the trials were unfair and unscientific and that GM agriculture was designed to increase the control of agribusiness over food production. They organised raids to disrupt the experiment, but these are claimed not to have invalidated the results.
The trials - the first three (of four) sets -showed that spring planted oilseed rape and sugar beet, genetically modified to be resistant to the new classes of weed killers promoted by agribusiness, caused significantly more damage than the same crops planted in adjacent plots but treated 'conventionally.
With the third crop, maize, GM was found to be 'beneficial' to biodiversity. However, that was because the conventional crop was treated with a herbicide (atrazine) which the EU is about to ban and to which maize is naturally resistant, allowing wholesale obliteration of other plant life that farmland wild animals depend on. The UK has applied for an exemption from the EU ban on atrazine.
The FSE results, it was announced, 'are only applicable to the three crops studied, and only under the regimes of herbicide usage which were employed'. This means that similar expensive experiments would be required, not only to test different crops, but also to compare the effects of herbicide use with those of conventional weed control techniques under different weather or soil conditions.
In response to the possibility that as a result of the findings, GM technology could become caught up in a massive EU regulatory quagmire, agribusiness has started suggesting that herbicide resistance might be introduced using "traditional" cross-breed. ing, rather than GM.
The fact that such conventional crops would not be subject to EU regulation, despite having many of the drawbacks of their GM equivalents, raises interesting questions about the capitalist approach to agriculture. Indeed, the trials themselves accidentally raised similar questions, as it was shown that the differences in biodiversity between beet, maize and rape (conventional or GM) were greater than the differences between GM and conventional methods of cultivating the same crop
The reason is that the experiments were really testing herbicide use regimes. In this respect maize cultivation came out very badly (conventional worse than GM), rape badly and beet not so badly (both with GM worse than conventional). Wheat, which