Socialist Resistance

An archive of socialistresistance.org, 2002–2022

TO FEES

Socialist Resistance no13  |  page 11

This is scanned newsprint, not web text. The original PDFs carried no text layer at all, so every word here was read off the page by OCR. Expect dropped opening letters, run-together words and wrong characters. There was no contents page to cut the paper up by, so the articles were found from the size of their headlines: a headline may carry its kicker, and where an article ran beside a boxed panel a few lines of the neighbour can appear. The scanned issue is the authority; this text is here so the words can be found at all.

EDUCATION SHUT DOWN TOP-UP FEES! not smash the fees. the first place! As hundreds of students protested outside parliament on Tuesday 27th January against the vote on top-up fees, New Labour's cheerleaders on the backbenches threw Blair a lifeline which saved him from the gutter.

Blair only won by five votes, but those votes are a disaster for every working class person in Britain if we do

And we can and must smash this policy. What can you say about the New Labour 'rebels' like Nick Brown who delivered the vote for Blair? He was described by one commentator as having been 'sliced open like a haggis on Burns Night' by the whips. It's not possible to say that they lost their spines - because they never had them in

There is huge opposition to fees, and to making a market of the education system. The NUS, who called a national demonstration of 30,000 last October, know this. They organised the lobby of MPs on the day of the

Yet they discouraged students from taking direct impact. action in the form of a road blockade to stop the traffic in Parliament Square. When police moved in to break it up and attacked demonstrators, the reaction of some NUS stewards was to tell students they shouldn't have blockaded the road in the first place.

The mobilisation on the day was pitifully small, only a few hundred. It was a massive opportunity to mobilise tens, if not hundreds of thousands of students across the

ILEO country to converge on parliament and put pressure on MP's to vote against the government. If Parliament Square had been full of students that day, it would have terrified the government.

The small turnout could only have encouraged MPs to believe that opposition to top-up fees was insignificant The reason for the small turnout can only be that the leadership of the NUS are tied to the same logic as the Labour MPs inside the house: that there is no alternative to Blair except the Tories, therefore better a Labour leader who acts like a Tory, than a real Tory

This logic means that the British higher education sys tem is now the second worst in Europe in terms of funding per student.

In theory, the NUS position is to organise a national day of action against fees on the 25th February, as part of a week long series of local protests in colleges. The NUS needs to throw its weight into building this and send out publicity well enough in advance for students to make an

We need a national shutdown of every single school, college and university on that day and a national march on parliament. The leadership of the NUS are in grave danger of frittering away the biggest opportunity of winning this. So every student, every students' union, and every elected officer must ensure that 25th February does what it should; shut down the education system to fight for the future of education.