UK Students Demonstrate Against Increased Fees and Education Cuts

On Wednesday thousands of students, sixth formers and school pupils demonstrated throughout the UK to protest the governments’ education cuts. More than 4,000 students from the University of Leeds and Leeds Metropolitan University marched into Leeds city centre. There was a very strong police presence all along the route, with eight video filming vans, other police video teams on roof tops, at least 10 police dogs and six mounted police as well as hundreds of police on foot.

As they marched through the city, office workers gathered round the windows and cheered them as they passed.

The demonstrators were met on the steps of the Leeds Art Gallery by up to 1,000 school and further education college students, who had walked out of classes in support of the campaign.

School students from Allerton Grange Comprehensive School had marched five miles into the city centre to attend the rally. On their way they had picked up fellow students from Roundhay Comprehensive. As they passed the Leeds College of Building and Thomas Danby College, students came out to greet them.

Alex from Allerton Grange School told reporters, “These cuts affect school students, not just in the future but right now. The loss of the Education Maintenance Grant (EMA) of £30-a-week for school students is outrageous. The increase of university fees to £9,000 means that the dream of higher education is being taken away from millions of youth, especially from poor families. My mum is very worried about the situation. We are fighting for our future.”

Seyamak, also from Allerton Grange, said, “I think that education is a right. We are the students of the future. I don’t see that you can set a price on education in a civilised society. Education is a class issue. Bailing out the banks should not come at the top of the agenda. If you take away the right to education, what are you left with?”

Students attended from Ilkley Grammar School, travelling 15 miles to get there. They had not known anything about the day of action until their parents received letters through the post from their headmaster warning them of the event and saying they could not take responsibility for what happened to the students if they walked out of school.

One of the pupils explained that in their school staff members had been posted at all the exits. They simply waited until the teachers had gone to their classes and then walked out.

Chris, a guitar student from Leeds Music College, said, “These attacks are international. They are happening everywhere. Cultural activities will be one of the hardest hit areas. According to the government, society cannot afford culture. But everybody has the right to cultural expression, in music and every other form. People need culture.”

Dave, a master’s student at Edge Hill University in Ormskirk, said, “This is not so much about my future because my education has been paid for. I’m here because it’s a fundamental right that you have free education. My parents could maybe have afforded these rises, but a lot or ordinary people can’t. That is why I’m here. It’s the next generation. It’s my kids and everyone else’s kids that are going to feel it.”

Gayle, an unemployed worker who supported the students, had been a domestic worker at Boddington student hall of residence and had been made redundant on September 30. She said, “Loads of other cleaners at the university were sacked in July. I have since tried to get another job but can’t get one anywhere.”

Her daughter is a 20-year-old student who is presently in further education. She is not living at home and is sleeping at various friends or relations. Gayle said, “She is suffering badly. She is entitled to nothing except the £30-a-week EMA and when the government stops that she will literally be penniless. She has to provide for food, clothing, and all the necessaries and yet despite everything she is still managing to go to college. She wants to study Law and Criminology and has a place at Leeds Metropolitan University. But who knows what is going to happen? All governments now are not helping anyone. Even if Labour was in she would get nothing.”

Another protester at the rally said, “University education should be free for all who want to seek it. Putting up the fees even further will discourage millions from poorer backgrounds. I qualified in 2008. I had to pay £1,200 a year fees, plus a £3,000 repayable loan and now I am burdened with debt. In future students will have to pay almost the same amount towards one year’s fees.”

Natasha from Lawnswood High School said, “If they cut EMA and raise the entrance fees we won’t be able to afford university. And even if we go to university, we will come out with bills of £80,000 and more. The future will be McDonalds if we don’t get into university.”

One of her friends said, “We have to think about when our generation is the working generation, who is going to pay the taxes for the people that are retiring?”

Another said, “They are cutting EMA and they are cutting arts and sports programmes, but they are not cutting the Ministry of Defence and nuclear weapons which is ridiculous. They need to get their priorities sorted out.”

In Manchester around 5,000 protesters, including students from the University of Manchester, Manchester Metropolitan University, as well as hundreds of pupils from schools in the city and the wider region, marched from the main university area into the city centre. A group of sixth form students came to Manchester from Kendal in Cumbria, 76 miles away.

The ISSE statement was the only leaflet being given out on the demonstration and one student volunteered to take leaflets to distribute.

The march was met by a heavy police presence, which attempted to divert it away from the Town Hall.

Owen, a sixth form college student, said he felt none of the main parties would oppose the cuts, “which are denying education to the poorest in society”. He agreed with uniting the struggles by all sections of workers, “as they are all connected.”

Another student in a group from Trafford College said, “I have worked hard all through school and at college and I don't think I will ever go to university. I think it will all be for nothing.”

She pointed out the growing unemployment among these who were well qualified and experienced and asked, “What chance have we got?”

Courtesy WSWS

Class Issues At Root Of Racism In Australia

Successive Australian state and federal governments are directly responsible for the attacks on international students studying in that country


Protests by Indian students in Australia over the past 12 days have brought to light an ugly under-current of violent and racist attacks that have produced outrage and deep concern among many ordinary people in both India and Australia.

Once again the suppressed tensions produced by social inequality and decades of free market policies have erupted in a malignant and reactionary form with “foreigners”—this time Indian students—subjected to racist abuse and violence.

The attacks have escalated in the past several weeks. In Sydney, an apartment was firebombed, cars have been set alight and in Melbourne, amid racial taunts, another youth was brutally stabbed with a screwdriver.

On May 31, Indian students responded with a 4,000-strong demonstration through the streets of Melbourne’s central business district, demanding action by police and by federal and state governments to protect their safety.

The Labour government’s initial response was one of damage-control. On June 1, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd offered assurances that “the more than 90,000 Indian students in Australia are welcome guests in our country”.

The only thing “welcome” is the billions of dollars in fees paid by Indian students annually, part of the $15 billion dollars wrung from international students each year that the Rudd government fears losing.

In reality, it is successive state and federal governments—both Labour and Liberal—that are, along with police, directly responsible for the attacks on international students studying in Australia.

According to Federation of Indian Students of Australia (FISA) spokesman Gautam Gupta, bashings and other crimes against Indian students have grown steadily over the past two years, yet complaints lodged to police have been systematically ignored, with students themselves blamed for being “soft targets”.

While police have allowed muggings and bashings to proceed with impunity, this month’s student protests have received no such leniency. Police repression has been immediate, with the mobilisation of riot police, dogs and mounted police.

After students and local residents assembled at railway stations in Melbourne last week, providing safe escort to young Indians arriving home by train, they were set upon by police. Such is the face of state “protection”.

It is noteworthy that Local Area Command Superintendent Robert Redfern, who led this week’s police operations in Harris Park, was also LAC chief in Cronulla during the notorious race riots that occurred there in December 2005.

Under Redfern’s command, police were held back while racist and alcohol-fuelled crowds brutalised West Asian youth. When the latter retaliated over ensuing days, police repression was swift. The state government passed draconian police powers through parliament and the media vilified “Lebanese gangs” for allegedly threatening “public order and safety”.

Calls have been made by demonstrators for greater police protection, but students must be warned: as in Cronulla, these demands are being seized on to justify further ruthless “law and order” policies, aimed against the entire working class.

The allies of the students are not the police and the state, but the students around the country and the world, and the international working class.

“Australia” declared Rudd on June 1, just hours after police violently assaulted Indian demonstrators in Melbourne’s central business district, “is a country of great diversity, harmony and tolerance”. On the contrary, like every other capitalist country, it is riven by enormous—and growing—class divisions.

In the suburbs surrounding Harris Park in western Sydney, and in the western suburbs of Melbourne, including St Albans, where bashings and racial victimisation are on the increase, social tensions are at breaking point, produced by more than three decades of economic restructuring.

Industries, banks and offices that once employed tens of thousands of workers, were closed down during the 1980s and 1990s, condemning entire families to a life of unemployment and poverty from which they have never recovered.

Now, in the face of the worst global depression since the 1930s, unemployment is again rising, with predictions it will hit one million by next year. Over the past 12 months the number of 15-19-year-olds without work has leapt from 10 to 18 percent nationally, with youth joblessness in some areas nudging 40 percent.

The Rudd government, like the Howard government before it, has responded to the deepening social crisis with the stock standard methods of Australian capitalism, seeking to shift public anger and resentment into the reactionary channels of national and race politics.

Over the past 10 years, immigrants, asylum seekers, “boat people”, Muslims and “Lebanese gangs” have all become scapegoats for the failure of the profit system to provide adequate livelihoods and services to millions of ordinary people.

This week, as protests by Indian students continued, Rudd declared on Melbourne radio: “In the last decade, I was advised we had, I think, up to 20 Australians who had either been murdered or had various forms of assault committed against them. That is not the result of Australians being targeted in India, that’s just a fact of violence in cities around the world.”

Rudd and the entire political establishment seek to prevent any serious probing of why the attacks are occurring. That high levels of youth unemployment and poverty have fuelled racial tensions in Australia’s major cities is not an inevitable “fact” of life.

These conditions are a product of the free market policies administered by successive capitalist governments—both Labour and Liberal—and the absence of a politically unified movement of the working class to combat them, offering a progressive, socialist alternative. It is this that has left many young people prey to the reactionary diversions of race and nationality.

In opposition to attempts by Rudd, the police and capitalist media to divide Australian, Indian and West Asian youth along racial, national and ethnic lines, with the real danger that tit-for-tat retaliatory attacks may escalate, the most advanced layers of students and working class youth must turn precisely to the development of such an internationalist and socialist movement in the working class.

Laura Tiernan/WSWS

Attacks On Students Reveal Deeper Malaise

The recent assaults on Indian students are an expression of the deepening social crisis in Australia

Indian students have long complained of police not taking their complaints of racist attacks seriously. Reports have emerged of officers refusing to formally lodge reports of criminal incidents; one student was told to simply move to another suburb to avoid further trouble.

Surprisingly, a few days ago deputy police commissioner Kieran Walshe’s absurdly claimed that there was no evidence that recent assaults and robberies were racially motivated.

In reality, the political establishment has nothing but contempt for the well-being of ordinary students, whether they are from India, Australia, or anywhere else. The attacks have been going on for months, with nothing of substance being done or said until now.

The real concern is to ensure that the highly lucrative flow of education tuition payments into the country continues. International students are ruthlessly exploited, having to pay tens of thousands of dollars in tuition fees while being denied basic rights afforded to Australian students, such as concession fares on public transport.

Education is now worth more than $12 billion annually and ranks as Australia’s third largest export, ahead of tourism and just behind coal and iron ore. Nearly 100,000 Indian youth are studying in Australia, second in number only to those from China.

That's why Trade Minister Simon Crean has held discussions with his Indian counterpart Anand Sharma admitting his fear that recent violence threatened to undermine Australia’s education sector. “It’s not just the quality of the product, it’s the safe environment in which we bring people,” he declared.

Reactionary forces in Australia are exploiting the attacks on Indian students to advance their own agenda. Victorian Liberal leader Ted Baillieu has launched a “law and order” campaign, demanding that the government bolster police numbers and enhance their powers.

Such measures, which the state Labour government of Premier John Brumby will likely implement, will not resolve the situation confronting Indian students and will only result in even worse police harassment and violence against working class youth.

Indian students are left vulnerable because of their precarious situation. Many are unable to live anywhere near their university, due to low incomes and high inner-city accommodation costs, and are forced to travel from the more affordable outer suburbs.

To support themselves, students are typically compelled to combine full time study with long hours of paid employment as convenience store workers, taxi drivers, and other low-paid shift work. This often involves taking public transport late at night.

Most of the perpetrators of the violence against the students are reportedly young people from Melbourne’s working class western suburbs. Many parts of this region have been devastated over the last two decades by mass job losses due to manufacturing plant closures. Tens of thousands of secure and full time jobs have gone, along with apprenticeships, replaced with little more than a few dwindling opportunities for young people in low paid and typically casual sectors such as retail.

Deindustrialisation and permanently high unemployment has inevitably been accompanied by a slew of social problems, including alcohol and drug abuse. Many of those who have recently targeted Indian students were reportedly drug users looking to fund their addiction.

Intersecting with all this is a toxic political atmosphere in which the major parties have all promoted various forms of national chauvinism, invariably involving an undercurrent of White Australia racism. The Rudd Labour government, for example, has recently slashed the immigration intake in response to the economic crisis, thereby implying that lost jobs in Australia are the fault of too many “foreigners”.

At the same time, both politicians and the media have embarked on a new scare campaign over “illegal” refugees. It is no surprise, moreover, that international students have been targeted given that they have long been the victims of systematic and institutionalised discrimination in the tertiary education system. Moves are already underfoot to pre-empt any discussion of these issues.

In the final analysis the attacks on Indian students reveal the tense and violent state of social relations in contemporary capitalist Australia.