human rights – UCU Left

24 February 202624 February 2026

Stand with Minnesota – Stand Up to Farage

We can’t say we’ve not been warned.

The killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti by ‘Immigration and Customs Enforcement’ (ICE) agents have shocked people across the world. ICE has terrorised communities from LA to Minneapolis and children as young as 2 have been detained. A wave of anti-ICE protests have erupted across the US, but many are understandably scared of standing up against a paramilitary which has been given central Government license to arbitrarily detain, even kill, and placed itself above the law.

Students and university workers at the University of Minnesota have been in the forefront of organising resistance. On January 23, trade unionists and left groups supported a call for a General Strike in Minnesota. Although this was more symbolic than a full general strike, it shows the importance of workers’ organisations and trade unions building a mass movement against Trump.

The Trump administration’s attack on human rights has been making the pages of Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch from Day 1. Those who believed that Donald Trump’s second government would behave like the first saw instead a blistering series of attacks on human rights, free speech, the rights of asylum seekers and immigrants, health, environmental and social protections, education, foreign aid and humanitarian assistance, and the rule of law.

Amnesty observes how Trump’s regime also became a symbol to other right-wing governments. This is celebrated by Nigel Farage and has led to Keir Starmer’s appeasement and copying of racist narratives.

We have seen Trump attack educators and scientists alike. In the summer one of us (SW) wrote

“Trump’s attacks on Harvard and Columbia are a piece with his purge of the Center of Disease Control, Voice of America, etc., proving the old adage of the indivisibility of freedoms.”

That is why everyone who cares for democracy and human rights celebrates whenever people in the US fight back. It is why millions of people around the world Stand with Minnesota and why Bruce Springsteen’s Streets of Minneapolis shot to No.1 in 16 countries in one day.

Democracy is under threat. Trump stood in elections, but his attacks on human rights and trade unions, even states rights, are clearly intended to make the US a more authoritarian society, allowing him and his supporters much more permanent control.

A warning for the UK

Nigel Farage and his far-right ‘Reform UK’ project is modelled on Trump’s project.

Reform are only the visible tip of a far right campaign. Reform is creating a racist mileu for much more extreme political groupings, including open fascists, to recruit from. The most prominent of these is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, who styles himself ‘Tommy Robinson’. A British National Party (BNP) organiser, he has increasingly operated as a social media ‘influencer’, garnering support online, and only breaking out into the public on occasion as he did most recently on September 13 2025, when he managed to bring over 100,000 supporters onto the streets of Central London.

More openly fascist groups like ‘Homeland’ and ‘Patriotic Alternative’ have been active in flag-raising and asylum hotel protests. They have not stopped there. It was only in the summer of 2024 that they attempted to launch race riots across the UK, attacking black people in the street and targeting solicitors firms, mosques and synagogues.

The far right have since attacked trades council meetings. And in Portsmouth, a mob attacked a student hall of residence. Reform’s progress in the polls is emboldening far right violence.

What of Reform itself? As with Trump’s MAGA project, the lines between the old Republican (read: Conservative) party and his camp are blurred, with ostensibly right-wing ‘centre-right’ politicians jumping ship. Electorally, that boosts Farage of course, gaining seats without standing in elections. But it exposes a weakness.

Like Trump and his coterie, Reform has a central contradiction at its heart.

It poses as an anti-establishment party, but is funded by the super-rich. It asks for the support of workers and ex-workers, but it seeks to advance an agenda of increasing exploitation, denial of rights and suppression of resistance. Hence the use of the term “political establishment”, which is part of the language code of the UK far right, like in the MAGA movement.

Across Europe, we’ve seen a rise of the ‘hard right’, including Reform, AfD and other far-right parties, due to austerity after the 2008 subprime crash, regardless of whether the austerity was implemented by Conservative, Labour or their international equivalents.

So the recent batch of defections of right-wing Conservative MPs to Reform UK carries a political risk.

These are the same “establishment” MPs who imposed austerity, cut benefits, oversaw pension raids and wage attacks, suppressed workers’ rights and did nothing while the industrial heartlands of Britain were shut down. These MPs are the enemy of those Reform claims to speak for.

In the face of an obvious contradiction, how does Reform respond?

Simple, it pushes racism.

Scapegoating immigrants has proved a potent method for misdirecting its supporters.

Although Reform generally maintains an arms-length relationship with actual fascist groups, the more Farage promotes racism, the more he opens the door to fascist-led protests, such as the ones targeting refugee hotels and hostels, as Searchlight and Stand Up to Racism have documented. An undercover reporter in Wales exposed one of the groups for the BBC.

The turn to increasingly open anti-refugee ‘stop the boats’ propaganda began by the Conservatives after Brexit, but Farage was always able to position himself as that bit more extreme. The ‘small boat problem’ is resolvable by ‘safe passage’ measures, but it provides a useful target for right wing newspapers. The numbers are also tiny, whether in comparison with the UK population (69.3 million) or the legal migrants applying for work visas (peaking at around half a million a year in 2023).

Although the headlines and cruelty are targeted on desperate people in small boats, in reality, it has been overseas workers applying for jobs in the UK who have faced the biggest impact, particularly for those with visas for nursing and social care, leading to condemnation from the RCN.

Students and staff face deportation

We have seen that international students and staff have faced physical attacks from the far right. But Reform is directly targeting migrants of all kinds.

They are not just making idle threats. In places like Kent and Lincolnshire where they control councils, they are making the lives of migrants harder, and seeking to socially exclude them by cutting funding from ESOL classes.

Farage boasted last year about his aim to abolish Indefinite Leave to Remain, and deport large numbers of immigrants. This places 3.8 million migrants and their families who have been legally living and working in the UK for less than 5 years at risk of deportation.

But Keir Starmer opened the door. Only a few months earlier, Starmer’s government announced that ILR for some migrants would extend from five to ten years, along with more restrictive visa controls. This was all in the aim of ending ‘Britain’s failed experiment in open borders’ (sic). There should be open borders, but Britain has never attempted this!

If Farage gets into Downing Street, we know our students and staff will be targeted all over the UK.

As with social care, targeting ILR will be devastating for university staff and the entire sector.

Universities thrive on their international connections. Staff move between countries. Internationalism is fundamental to scientific research. Knowledge knows no borders, research teams are international, as are collaborations between staff in different countries. And we teach what we research.

The scale of the threat is massive. A quarter of university staff and students are personally at risk.

Staff: In universities reporting to the Higher Education Statistics Agency, 24.6% of staff were from outside the UK in 2024/25. International staff are concentrated in research-intensive universities and among academic and research staff, and of these, more than half of whom are from outside the EU.
Students: HESA data for the period 2020-2025 shows that the proportion of international students studying in the UK fluctuated between 22 and 25%. In 2024/25, over two thirds of all enrollments in Masters and other postgraduate programmes were made up of overseas students – in part, a consequence of more than a decade of home undergraduate student loans.

Keir Starmer’s government has made Reform’s attacks on overseas students appear credible by conceding the idea of an international student levy, on top of the Conservatives’ curbing of international student visa rights the year before.

The stage is set for a major attack on overseas students and staff.

We have to stand up for everyone.

Racism is not just “out there”: it’s on our campuses too

We are also seeing a rise in everyday racism.

We are seeing a growth of an extreme right-wing internet subculture and its impact in the classroom. Union members around the UK are reporting a rise of far-right views expressed by students, ranging from anti-immigration, pro-colonialist and misogynistic ideas, and even open Holocaust denial and swastikas on whiteboards!

Only a few years ago, such instances would be rare. But the growth of the far right internationally, and the weaponisation of AI, means that members are having to challenge students much more frequently.

We must not ignore this offensive. Young people are being influenced by far-right influencers like Andrew Tate. The fascist ‘Tommy Robinson’ and his supporters mostly organise on online forums.

A generation betrayed by politicians are rightly angry – they are likely to be poorer than their parents, will struggle to gain housing, laden with tuition fee debt if they go to university, and face a world that is seemingly falling apart.

The far right is attempting to direct that anger towards those moving to this country, to other workers, to teachers, to scientists – anyone but those responsible.

Our role as educators requires us to robustly challenge racist and other reactionary ideas in the classroom. Lecturers must be able to exercise their judgment and freedom of speech to draw out those ideas and challenge them. This is not always easy.

What can UCU do about this?

Our union needs to massively increase its campaigning and be open and upfront about the clear and present danger posed by Reform UK. Jo Grady has rightly taken on Richard Tice on Question Time, and UCU has made some public comments about the threat of Reform.

UCU is part of the Together Alliance, and is affiliated to Stand Up to Racism and Hope Not Hate.

But we need to do a lot more.

UCU has also done a lot of good work to support migrant members’ rights. We have a migrant members standing committee, and a wide range of resources.

But this work has often been limited by a legalistic approach. Thus when Congress democratically voted to oppose staff monitoring student attendance to comply with immigration monitoring, union legal advice was that reps should not ask staff to ‘break the law’ or ‘refuse a contractual obligation.’

The problem is obvious. If our starting point is to be limited by the law, then any far right government can shackle unions by simply changing the law.

But we also have to keep repeating a basic trade union argument: an injury to one is an injury to all.

Our sister union, the National Education Union (NEU) has publicly labelled Reform a racist party, referring to Nigel Farage as a ‘pound shop Donald Trump.’ This clearly angered Farage, and he has publicly attacked the NEU. But this was inevitable, and has opened up space for union members to engage in serious campaigning backed by their union, both inside the classroom and beyond.

Below we set out some practical proposals.

1. Tackling racism in the classroom

At last year’s FE Sector Conference, one of us (RP) put a motion calling for more support for anti-racist education initiatives led by the union. At Capital City College, we have had Themed Learning Weeks to tackle racist and anti-migrant narratives.

In Higher Education, a different dynamic is at work. For many years, academics were essentially placed above criticism (which had its good and bad aspects!). But now student complaints are amplified by social media, and they are often selectively quoted by managers. Although the UK has not yet had a Tom Alter case, the harassment of Palestinian academics at KCL by far right and Zionist groups has come close. Palestine remains the test case for free speech.

Student complaints can be taken outside of the university to the Office for the Independent Adjudicator (OfIA), so managers are strongly encouraged to ‘believe’ students over staff. Harassment of staff for political disagreements has become routine, despite recent changes in the law supposedly to support free speech.

In Further Education, this issue is not so stark, but we are seeing an increasing use of student surveys to discipline staff if their ‘scores are below the benchmark.’

Educators have a crucial role to play in the fight against the far right.

Colleges and universities have long been bastions of an inclusive culture. That’s not surprising: it is where young people start to develop their own ideas and sense of self. College is where young people often come out for the first time, which is why LGBTQ+ solidarity is essential.

2. Building solidarity

We need to organise within our colleges and universities to defend and strengthen this necessary culture of solidarity and inclusion, and build out into surrounding cities, towns and communities to challenge Reform and the far right wherever they appear – on the streets or in the ballot box.

That is why the big demonstrations – like the Together demonstration on 28 March – really matter.

The far right are playing on workers’ lack of confidence, promoting division and trying to direct frustration against immigrants. The best way to combat this is to mobilise members to come together, first against the racists of the far right, but second, to stand up for ourselves as workers, to fight over our pensions, pay, jobs and conditions.

3. Challenging racism among staff

As the far right begin to gain a foothold in society, casual racism creeps back into everyday conversation. Members are raising concerns about colleagues who say they support Reform UK and claim there are ‘too many migrants in this country.’

We need to build the confidence of members to challenge this and answer the argument that there is ‘not enough to go around.’ We have to explain that this is a lie, that the capability of society to give people a decent living is greater than at any point in history.

But also we have to explain the purpose of this lie: it is, to quote Frederick Douglass, to ‘divide both to conquer each.’ Our enemy is not other working class people, black or white – it is that whole layer in society that flourished under Conservatives from Thatcher to Sunak and under Labour from Blair to Starmer: the super-rich and their enablers in government.

UCU should support initiatives for anti-racist education that challenge racist and anti-immigrant narratives in particular, but also misogyny and other forms of prejudice.

4. Let’s get organised!

Finally we need to take ourselves seriously as a trade union, and organise!

We need to hold regional union day schools where reps can share successes and plan new initiatives.

We should have a space on the national website to share resources for different sectors of post-16 education.

The rise of Farage and Reform is resistable, but to stop them we need to organise. That’s why the Together Alliance National Demonstration on March 28th in Central London has to be our focus in the short term.

Our approach is to fight for mass involvement, and uniting everyone against the far right. We need to explain to members what the far right’s agenda is and where they want to take Britain.

The experience of the US is teaching a new generation the scale of the threat, but also the potential for resistance.

It is time to fight for the future, for each other, and for ‘the strangers in our midst.’

Palestine is still the issue

— Sean Wallis, University College London

Reblogged from seanwallis.uk

The treatment of the Palestinian people is the defining question of the decade.

Where you stand on the deliberate brutal suppression of the Palestinians defines where you stand on the basic question of universal human rights.

Universality is not an abstract question: the alternative is selectivity.

Citizens of the UK have been forced into a position of horrified bystanders to one of the greatest crimes of our generation. In a world of social media and multi-channel international television, we cannot pretend we do not know a genocide is going on.

Our government has been complicit, which means that we are forced to contend with the democratic question: how do we hold our elected government accountable?

Standing with Palestine does not mean turning a blind eye to anti-semitism. On the contrary. We must be vigilant and condemn racism of all kinds, whether against Jews or Palestinians. Racism is the enemy of people everywhere. It is a weapon of divide and rule.

You don’t have to be ‘left wing’ to think like this. You don’t even need to be a liberal.

You only need to think, this could happen to you.

This is not just rhetoric. Around the world, Donald Trump’s New World Order is indeed being directed at people from the Lebanon to Venezuela and Greenland… and Minneapolis.

This is why the demonstrations for Palestine are massive, with a very broad demographic.

When all are counted, the movement for Palestine solidarity is comparable in size (possibly bigger), and is more sustained than, the two million plus who marched over Iraq in 2003 — up to that point, the biggest mass movement in British history.

The Iraq war protests had three, possibly four truly mass demonstrations: one in September 2002 of 450,000, the famous 15 February 2003 demo (two million in the UK with 1.5 million in London), and then a demonstration of 750,000 when the war started. A second demonstration during the war brought some 400,000 onto the streets.

By contrast, the recent Palestine protests may never have had a single ‘February 15th moment’, but the movement has sustained mobilisations in the hundreds of thousands over two whole years. After more than 20 national demonstrations, the movement sees no sign of abating.

It is also notable that this is a movement built in the teeth of grotesque misrepresentation from establishment figures and supporters of the slaughter in Gaza.

Perhaps the most disgraceful chapter was when Suella Braverman, then Home Secretary, libeled the movement as a ‘hate march’, while simultaneously allowing an anti-semitic fascist mob to descend on the Cenotaph on Remembrance Day 2023. This was too much even for the Metropolitan Police. In response, 750,000 marched on the US Embassy — and then Rishi Sunak sacked her.

This overall pattern was reflected in other attempts, such as when the Conservatives asserted that the slogan ‘From the River to the Sea’ was anti-semitic. This is nonsense. But it was defeated by mass defiance and public condemnation.

One might think that the collapse of the Conservatives and the election of a Labour government would have led to a change in tone. But if anything, attempts at repression of pro-Palestinian voices have escalated, in wider society and on our campuses.

Repression on campus

A lot of attention in recent months has (rightly) been on the Government ban on Palestine Action. I think it is absolutely right for this to be challenged, and the ban should be overturned.

When Parliament debated the Terrorism Act 2000, there was no suggestion that the law would be used to proscribe non-violent direct action campaigns. Indeed the legal language was expressed in terms of ‘violent extremism’, literally: a political ideology that intrinsically involved violence.

The ban on Palestine Action raises many questions for UCU members. Can colleagues teach about social movements, theories of non-violent direct action, or contemporary politics without risking being accused of ‘supporting’ terrorism?

The safe solution: Don’t Mention the War. The chilling effect is real.

This ban also directs the criminal law against members of the group like Qesser Zuhrah, a UCL student who was arrested and detained, and began a hunger strike to protest at her prison conditions.

British courts are supposed to uphold a principle of innocence until proven guilty. But Qesser and her colleagues have been detained without bail or trial (‘on remand’) for a year. The Government’s refusal to engage with the hunger strikers is itself a scandal, as Michael Mansfield KC has observed.

Repression does not work. Curtailing free speech does not make society safer, as we learned in the aftermath of the Iraq invasion. On 7/7 2005, among other incidents, London was hit by multiple terrorist bombs, including in Bloomsbury. Then, on Christmas Day in 2009, an ex-UCL student attempted to bring a bomb onto an aircraft in his underpants. The university commissioned a thorough independent review into the student’s time at UCL. The Caldicott Review found no evidence that this man was radicalised while a student, or that intervention by the university authorities might have changed the outcome. The proposals for future action are extremely modest.

Yet, returning to the present day, without any evidence of violent disorder by the anti-war and pro-Palestine movement, campaigners, students and staff are being put under a spotlight.

Long-established parameters of freedom of speech are openly challenged by politicians, not for reasons of public safety, but in order to suppress the pro-Palestine movement. Arabic words like intifada, which literally means ‘jumping up’ and ‘shaking off’ (so that’s Taylor Swift banned) are allegedly a call to violence.

But here’s the thing: the 1987 Palestinian intifada was expressly recognised by the United Nations, who condemned and warned Israel for their acts of suppression. It says something about how far to the right sections of the British political establishment has lurched that they are seeking to retrospectively condemn the use of a word referring to an event that the UN ruled was legitimate resistance to oppression. Indeed, in 2023, recognising the way the term was being misrepresented by anti-Palestinian lobbyists, academics in University College London jointly explored the meaning of ‘intifada’.

University authorities have attempted to bring their share of repression onto campus. Far from acting, as required by their Charters and the law of the land, to protect academic freedom and freedom of speech, the University of London and the University of Cambridge separately brought pre-emptive civil injunctions banning student encampments and protests on their grounds.

Speech is free — if we agree with it. (George Orwell would be so proud.)

New anti-protest policies have followed suit, not just at these universities, seeking to limit protest.

This repression impacts directly on campus trade unions, like Birkbeck UNISON, who were initially told they had to get express permission from the University of London to assemble outside the university entrance to protest at their Board of Governors meeting!

Or SOAS UNISON and UCU, who were prevented from picketing their own entrances.

Student societies have been banned. But the targeting of individuals has been worse. Students and staff have been suspended and expelled from universities by little more than kangaroo courts. Once expelled, overseas students can lose their visa sponsorship, and are in line to be deported.

What can UCU do?

UCU, like all trade unions cannot remain neutral in such a situation.

We must be prepared to take a stand.

Since 2023, in my role as London Region Secretary, I have helped organise and facilitate training for UCU reps on freedom of speech law, working with the European Legal Support Centre (ELSC). As UCL branch secretary, I have advised, represented and supported many individual union members. I have also advised students — because what happens to them may happen to us. And, as an NEC member, I carried a motion to ensure that if members receive initial legal advice from the ELSC they are not prevented from accessing union legal support.

The law is clear: freedom of expression is considered one of the principal freedoms by the courts, because if someone cannot speak freely they cannot defend themselves. Like all freedoms, it is not unrestricted (see Article 10 of the European Convention of Human Rights). But any restrictions on that freedom must be proportionate, and carried out by a proper and competent authority. (Politicians like Nigel Farage who denounce the European Convention wish to strip us of all our Human Rights, including freedom of expression.)

The Office for Students (OfS) has issued regulatory guidance which shows just how far the Universities have already overstepped the legal boundaries the Government officially expects.

May universities issue pre-emptive injunctions against Palestine encampments? The OfS says No, this is disproportionate, and thus likely to be a breach of the positive duty to secure freedom of speech (Example 13: encampment disrupting ordinary activities).

The law is on our side, at least for now.

Trade unions are mass organisations of workers. We have to stand up for basic principles of defending the rights of members, and an injury to one is an injury to all.

Solidarity and internationalism are our watchwords. Our members are of many races and religions. That means we cannot be neutral: we oppose all forms of racism and prejudice.

There are important principled limits on free speech: fascists spreading racism and violence (and organising thugs to do so) must be opposed, not defended. But a ‘no platform for fascists’ principle requires very great care in clarifying precisely where that line lies.

We need to be resolute in our convictions, debate and work through disagreements, and be prepared to defend each other in the face of an increasingly hostile political establishment that seeks to divide us.

We all face a basic test of solidarity. We must rise to it.

Palestine is still the issue.

Tag: human rights