Registration for UCU Congress 2025 closes in just over a week (23rd April), and this year it will feel quite different as it is the first hybrid Congress.

It is vital that we make sure as many members are registered as possible so they can participate in vital debates and votes on how UCU resists attacks on pay, jobs, funding, censorship and fights for equality, welfare not warfare and for climate action. A central debate will be whether UCU backs national action to defend the post 16 education sector – this is desperately needed in HE, FE and Adult Education. Every vote will matter, and every member who wants a progressive left union should be encouraged to stand as a delegate.

The calls for a hybrid Congress were in part to try and ensure Congress was more “open” to members. There were debates that it would enable more disabled members, neurodivergent members and those with caring duties a different way to participate, by participating online. Ensuring Congress is accessible is of course essential, however it is important to recognise that online attendance comes with its own barriers, from technology to simply being unable to step away from other responsibilities while participating remotely. It is vital that online participation does not exclude delegates from debates and networking opportunities, but it is not clear that the tech will offer seamless interaction between in person and online spaces.

UCU Left believes that Congress should be an open and welcoming place for all members to attend. The union must do everything possible to ensure the event, its timing, and the location that hosts it are accessible, and members are given sufficient accessibility and caregiver support. Congress is the sovereign decision making body of the union, the decisions taken will determine the future policy of the union, which will hopefully ensure we can turn the tide and ensure we resist the many crises facing us. 

There are important benefits of attending in person:

1. Feeling part of a collective body. Attending Congress is an opportunity to be around other members who want to see change and resist the difficulties we are facing in our workplaces and society. There is a great sense of solidarity meeting other like minded people, which is a great antidote to what can often be quite isolated lives.
   
2. Debate and discussion. Members may have certain ideas about motions and how they want to vote, but being in the Congress Hall listening to those speaking, and discussing the ideas with people in the breaks before and afterwards strengthens our collective decision making. Members may put things in a way that we haven’t thought of before, so those conversations off the congress floor can help develop our understanding of where motions and debates are coming from.
   
3. Building networks. If you have been to Congress before, you will know that you meet many new people and reconnect with those you already know. It is an opportunity to share experiences and learn from each other about ways to tackle issues. Issues that seem too big to tackle, or if we feel overwhelmed or unable to make a difference, are shared with others and they will be able to put forward different ideas or agree to set up new networks to share ideas to resolve issues together.

We face high workloads and many of us have personal commitments, it can feel very challenging trying to balance our work, trade union activities and personal lives. However, being online and trying to balance these is even more demanding without the added benefits of the collectivism, solidarity and good chats you can have at Congress.

We therefore, urge all members to come to Congress and in person, and to encourage their colleagues to do the same.

Article by Rhiannon Lockley, candidate for UCU Vice President, in Times Higher Eduction on 13 February 2025

Limiting industrial action to defensive branch battles on redundancy is not enough. We need to politically challenge the HE funding model, says Rhiannon Lockley.

UK higher education’s funding crisis has been developing for 15 years. When the coalition government introduced £9,000 fees for home undergraduates at English universities and cut block grants for teaching in 2012, it turned the economics of student recruitment upside down. Stable finances, planning and regulation were lost in a scramble for bums on seats. 

This accelerated when student recruitment caps were abolished – partially in 2014, and then fully a year later. University managers realised that each home undergraduate earned them £2,000 more than they cost to teach, so they could make serious money via economies of scale. Thus began a splurge to invest in campuses, buildings and marketing departments. 

But as the value of England’s regulated undergraduate fees fell in real terms – alongside that of the government grants that remained, in various forms, elsewhere in the UK – universities increasingly relied on the subsidy provided by unregulated, exploitative international fees. 

It took only a decade for the system to go from boom to bust. Last year, vice-chancellors started announcing redundancies on a mass scale, reaching more than 10,000 in 2023-24. This year, the pace of announcements is only increasing. The scale of destruction hitting higher education is immense. The economic models behind UK higher education are imploding.

Clearly, members look to unions during times like these. Last May, members of the University and College Union voted at our UK higher education sector conference (our key higher education decision-making body) for a campaign to start building a UK-wide industrial response to the crisis.

Last December the UCU higher education committee voted to act on this resolution. Unfortunately, this decision hasn’t been implemented in a timely way to allow strategic action in advance of Labour taking decisions on higher education funding. Instead, we’ve seen repeated delegitimising of UCU members’ decisions.

We all get involved in unions to make a difference, and we won’t always agree on how to do that. This is why UCU strategy is led by conferences, to which all branches can send representatives and proposals. This gives everyone a hearing, making sure we assess different views fairly and take binding decisions together. Union democracy supports good decision-making. Sometimes union members are disappointed with those decisions, but we need to behave in a collegial fashion and respect democracy.

An ongoing approach of denouncing UK-wide action is not delivering sector security. Instead, the carnage is intensifying. UCU branches and the staff supporting them have shown huge resilience in local fights but members are being made redundant in droves.

If we understand that the UK’s various university funding models are all broken, dooming the sector to escalating decline until they are replaced, then there is an obvious problem with limiting industrial action to defensive branch battles on redundancy: the employer can wait out the branch. 

To meaningfully act in the interests of members moving forward, UCU must do two things: escalate beyond branches being hit and politically challenge the funding model. 

Even though the funding crisis is made in Westminster and the other national capitals, UK anti-union law stipulates that industrial activity must be tied to employment conditions. This means such a campaign has to be conducted over pay.

You don’t have to look far to see this in practice. After all, that’s what the National Education Union did in English schools, taking strike action on pay as part of a wider campaign for increased school funding. It’s also what our Unison colleagues in higher education are doing right now. UCU must not be misdirected into paralysis. Repeating the line that pay cuts save jobs just reinforces the logic leading the higher education sector to collapse; pay suppression and job cuts are both caused by failure to fund universities in a sustainable way.

If the UCU is united and confident, we can take on the challenges we face. At my branch, Birmingham City University (BCU), we’ve doubled our membership. BCU does not participate in national bargaining over pay and conditions, isolating us, but we’ve fought disputes on safety and pay, beating ballot turnout thresholds and establishing a BCU bargaining and negotiating body. Our members are engaged and ready to fight: they trust branch leaders. This comes from clear, consistent messaging on strategy, united leadership, and negotiators’ understanding of the importance of organised leverage.

It also comes from keeping members informed and in charge of decisions. I’ve used this approach at regional and UK level, winning me endorsements across the union for my commitment to building confidence through mutual respect and consensus. I strongly believe that for the UCU to respond credibly in the current crisis after a period of internal division, we need leaders who understand and will demonstrate commitment to a member-led approach.

I am standing for UCU vice-president, not because I have all the answers, but because I believe in our collective capacity to bring meaningful change. Democracy, integrity and unity are key to getting UK higher education through the storm.

The market system has set universities against each other in cut-throat competition. Our job as trade unionists is to resist division. We need to stand up and fight for the sector and for everyone who works and studies in it.

Rhiannon Lockley is a foundation year lecturer in the Faculty of Health, Education and Life Sciences at Birmingham City University, where she is UCU branch chair.

After last night’s amazing counter protests by anti racists across the UK, Sean Vernell argues we need to continue the fight.

The scenes of fascist and far-right thugs attempting to burn down hotels that accommodate refugees and attacking anyone with a black or brown skin who happened to be walking by has horrified the majority of people in Britain. The far-right and fascist targeting of businesses owned by Muslims has echoes of Kristallnacht, the pogroms launched against Jews in 1938 in Germany by Hitler’s brown shirts.

The aim of the far-right is to scapegoat the most vulnerable in society for decades of poverty experienced in working class communities. They want to gain support from working class communities who have suffered the most from successive governments which have promised much but delivered nothing but further immiseration.

The obvious truth, which the liberal press seems unable to come to terms with, is that the fascists and far-right feel confident to launch such attacks because of the way mainstream political parties have fostered anti-immigrant sentiment. The Tories’ ‘stop the boats’ slogan, now echoed on many of the riots outside hotels accommodating refugees, was never challenged by Starmer. Instead, the leadership of the Labour Party attack the Tories for being ineffectual at stopping ‘illegal’ migration to Britain.

Labour and the Tories danced to the tune of the right-wing tabloid press who on a daily basis over many years used their papers to convince its readerships that migrants are to blame for the crisis in the NHS, the lack of affordable housing, poverty pay and foodbanks.

The starting point to assess how we defeat the fascists and the far-right is to remember that the anti-racists in Britain today are the majority.

A statement put out by hundreds of MPs, Trade Union leaders and celebrities calls upon the whole of the movement to unite to defeat the fascists and far-right. Sign it at bit.ly/unitystatement2024

Out of the blue?

For many of the liberal political commentators, the far-right mobilisations come out of nowhere. They have been taken by surprise by the level of support that the call to physically attack refugees and anyone of colour has had from within some working-class communities. Whilst they are aghast of what has taken place, they need to take account of their role in allowing the likes of Robinson and Farage to portray themselves as the ambassadors of the dispossessed.

These liberal commentators sneer at working class people, writing off everyone who voted for Brexit as a racist. They failed to understand the deep despair within working class communities whose lives have been impoverished after decades of austerity.

The failure of the Labour and Trade Union leaders to lead the fight to reverse these attacks has allowed right-wing populists and fascists to place themselves as anti-establishment leaders who will take on the corrupt establishment.

Learning the lessons of history

This is nothing new. In the 1930s Oswald Mosley, like Farage, came from an upper-class background and was supported, again like Farage, by the Daily Mail and other tabloid newspapers.

It is in deep economic and political crisis that fascist organisation emerges, and can do so very quickly. Fascism as a particular form of political organisation was first seen In Italy in the 1920s. Mussolini went from having no organisation to seizing power in two years. In Germany, Hitler’s Nazis, after the Wall Street crash in 1929, saw a big increase in votes winning the largest number of seats in the Reichstag. President Hindenburg appointed Hitler as Chancellor in 1933 believing that the establishment could control Hitler.

Today the political and economic crisis is not as deep as the period that followed WWI. The failure of the hope of revolution in German led to counter-revolutionary despair. But it is sadly not far-fetched to foresee a situation where in France, Marine Le Pen’s Nazis may fail to win the Presidential election but could be offered a key place in government by Macron and others, out of fear of working-class resistance.

What makes fascist organisation different to other forms of far-right tyrannical government that have came to power on the back of a military coup is that they had a base within different sections of class society. First, the middle class and small businesses who were crushed by the economic crisis. Second, the unemployed. This then allowed the Nazis to win some support amongst the working class. It is at this point, when the Nazis have a serious political platform, that the employers, who have lost any idea as to how to end the economic crisis turn to fascism.

To get to this stage the fascists need to build a street movement which allows these different sections to express their rage to the establishment. Like Hitler and Mussolini, ‘Tommy Robinson’ (real name Stephen Yaxley-Lennon) recognises that the key to the far-right becoming a real alternative is through building a street movement. He will be aided by far-right populist MPs from Reform UK who also recognise that they too need a street movement to survive.

Fascists use racism to achieve their aims by dividing working class opposition. The racist target changes depending on the context. In Germany it was the Jews. In the 1970’s in Britain the main targets for the Nazi National Front went from the Caribbean community to Ugandan Asians. In the 80s after Thatcher’s notorious ‘swamped’ speech, the Asian community became the target.

Today Robinson targets Muslims. Islamophobia is used to divide opposition to the fascists and the far-right, which opens the gate to attacks on all other communities. For fascists, racism is simply a tool to achieve their real goal – smashing independent working-class organisation that they rightly see as the key bulwark against everything they stand for.

Defeating them on the streets

This is why the key to defeating the fascists and their far-right supporters is by mobilising against them. There are some within the movement who argue that we should not confront the Nazis on the streets on the grounds that this plays into their hands by giving them publicity. If anything will play into the hands of the fascists and the far-right it will be pretending they will go away if we ignore them. They won’t. If there are not counter protests like the inspiring (and incredibly brave) ones we have seen so far, the fascists will grow in confidence.

This is how we defeated Mosley in the 30s, the NF in the 70’s, the BNP in the 90s and the EDL in the 2000s.

The millions of people who have marched week in week out on the streets of Britain in solidarity with Palestine demonstrate the potential power we have to build a street movement that dwarfs the fascist and far-right mobilisations.

We need to unite every part of the movement if we are to defeat the fascists and the far-right.

Starmer looks to stiff prison sentences to deter the far-right, as he did when he was Director of Public Prosecutions in 2011, when he locked up thousands of mainly black youth who were rightly protesting about the killing of Mark Duggan, another black man, by police in North London.

What Starmer won’t do is implement policies that will deal with the root causes of these horrendous attacks – racism , poverty and the lack of leadership from the top of the movement to coordinate generalised resistance to them.

This is why, alongside mobilising counter protests, we need an organised labour response that makes clear who the main enemy is.  We cannot have any more pandering to racists within trade unions that campaign around slogans like ‘British jobs for British workers.’  We need a Trade Union movement that says – not just in words but also in deeds – that workers must not pay the price for corporate greed and government corruption.

The lessons of history cannot be clearer on how to deal with the growth of the fascists and the far-right – the maximum amount of unity is needed to confront the Nazis on the streets. But also we need an organised Labour movement that deals with the root causes of working peoples’ despair, through mass mobilisations and strikes to prevent further attacks on our communities.

Sean Vernell, UCU NEC

• Trade unionists, MPs and campaigners’ unity statement against the far right. Use the statement in your workplace and your local area. Add names and see the full list of supporters at bit.ly/unitystatement2024
• National day of action on Saturday 10 August
• Emergency fund for Stand Up To Racism