Jeremy Corbyn – UCU Left

At last we’re off — the general election has been called. Out of the blocks comes Jacob Rees-Mogg telling us all how the people who died in Grenfell should have used ‘their common sense’ and ignored the Fire Brigade’s advice and left their flats. What a despicable man. This was no slip of the tongue but someone dripping with class privilege revealing his total contempt for working class people.

Mogg’s very existence symbolises what this general election is all about, and why, as Jeremy Corbyn has said, ‘it is a once in a generation opportunity to fundamentally shift the balance of power in our society’. We have a clear and straight choice in this election. Will it be five more years of the Etonian elite, passing policy after policy that continues to reward the rich and powerful? Or will it be a Corbyn-led Labour government that promises to introduce measures that not only reverses the impact of a decade of austerity but also to change the acceptance that it is only through competition and marketisation of the economy that society can function.

A Corbyn-led government would signal an end to all those painful and so damaging senior management emails that remind us that we are a ‘business’ and our students are our ‘customers’, as they continue to drive through the ‘stack ‘em high, sell ‘em cheap’ brand of higher and further education.

I can’t wait…

We have the opportunity to put into office a Labour government that promises within the first 100 days it will abolish the Tory anti-union laws and set up a Ministry of Labour to introduce legislation to create national collective sectoral bargaining. A Corbyn-led Labour government promises to create 400,000 green jobs and to reduce carbon emissions to net zero by 2030, end the privatisation of our public services, scrap tuition fees and reintroduce EMA. The Labour Party Conference voted to ‘maintain and extend free movement’ to end the hostile environment created by the Tories as they attempted to scapegoat immigrants for their disastrous polices. This too must be in their manifesto.

Labour has started the campaign well, but there it is a long way to the 12^th December.

The Tories and the media, as well as attacking Jeremy Corbyn for being a terrorist-loving, baby-eating Marxist who would turn Britain into a Gulag, will attempt to focus the election around the single issue of Brexit. They will claim that Corbyn’s position is confusing and difficult for the electorate to understand.

Whilst Corbyn’s position is one that I don’t agree with, it is hardly complicated or confusing. Labour, if elected, will, within six months, renegotiate a deal and put it to the people to decide if they support it or not. Remain will be an option on the ballot paper. Why is this confusing?

It’s not, but the Tories, the Liberal Democrats, and their media friends, want to keep the election focused on Brexit to divert the electorate from discussing their record as the architects of austerity that has wrecked so many people’s lives.

Don’t vote for the yellow Tories

A vote for Jo Swinson is a vote to continue Tory policies. The Liberal Democrats had an opportunity to go into coalition with Gordon Brown’s Labour Party but decided to enter a collation with Cameron’s Tories. It is they, as the Tories’ Coalition partners, that launched the biggest attacks on working people since the 1930s. If they had to make that choice again, they would even more happily make the same choice and prop up a Johnson government rather than see Corbyn in Number 10.

No one should be surprised by this. The whole history of the Liberal Party has been one that has always taken the side of the establishment. It was under a Liberal government that leading Suffragettes were imprisoned, force-fed and tortured. This is why it is ridiculous for the Green Party to have agreed to join the ‘Remain Alliance’, a decision they will live to regret.

The Liberal Democrats are not the only ones who would prefer a Johnson government than a Corbyn one. Many Labour MPs feel the same way. Tom Watson’s resignation for ‘personal’ reasons followed by Ian Austin’s announcement that he too will not be standing (and calling for a vote for Johnson) tells us everything many of us suspected about the degree to which the Blairites oppose a Corbyn-led government. No doubt more attacks like these are being planned.

We should say good riddance — go and join Chukka and his friends in the wilderness.

UCU can make a difference

UCU is not affiliated to the Labour Party. But it does have policy for calling for a vote for Labour. It was a motion Jo McNeil and I put to the 2017 UCU Congress and was passed overwhelmingly. UCU can make a real difference in ensuring that Jeremy Corbyn enters Downing Street on December 13th.

First, we have the announcement of eight days of strike action in HE starting on the 25th November. This announcement followed the brilliant ballot result where over sixty institutions got through the threshold and voted overwhelmingly to strike over Pay, Pensions, Casualisation, Workload and Equality. The strikes will allow us to take the issues that affect HE to the heart of the election campaign.

No doubt there will be pressure from within the General Council of the TUC on our General Secretary for UCU not strike to ensure there is ‘no distraction’ from Labour’s election campaign. Strikes will not distract from getting Labour elected — they will be central to getting Corbyn elected. Strikes, as a part of the general election campaign, will also act as a reminder to the employers that if Corbyn is elected we will use our collective power to resist attempts to undermine that government.

This election campaign must be run differently from any campaign that has been conducted before. Already the signs are that Labour’s campaign is wanting to build upon the approach adopted in 2017; a campaign based on policies that show clear red water between the Tories and the Liberal Democrats, with mass rallies to mobilise the 500,000 Labour members to get the vote out. Strikes are part of this campaigning approach.

Second, UCU must implement the policy passed at the last NEC meeting, calling on the union to launch a Vote Education Campaign that encourages members to organise hustings, rallies and to set up stalls to inform the public what is happening to Further, Adult and Higher education.

29 November: join a carnival of resistance

School students will be striking for the climate on November 29th, and have called on the trade union movement to join them. One of the strike days that UCU chose to take action on will be the 29th.

We must turn 29th November into a carnival of resistance. UCU London Region has already called a March for pay, pensions and the planet. We will be marching to join the school students, and holding a rally. We will be inviting trade unionists and shadow front bench MPs to join us too. We will be looking to do the same across the country.

It won’t be just HE colleagues who will marching on the 29th, but FE too. In particular, we want to highlight the plight of Adult Education. One of the biggest historic scandals throughout the period of austerity is what has happened to Adult Education. This is the education sector in which the budget has been cut by 45% in the last decade.

This year is the hundredth anniversary of the beginning of Adult Education. We want to carry a message into this election that we want a hundred years more.

We will be calling on postal workers, six form teachers and anyone else to join us on the day to take a collective message into the general election campaign that we want radical change.

We have four weeks to make history. I can’t think of a better Christmas present than seeing Jeremy Corbyn in number 10 and John McDonnell in Number 11, but we will need to launch the fight of our lives to make the dream come true at the ballot box, on the streets and in the workplaces.

– Sean Vernell NEC

Jeremy Corbyn’s stunning victory in the Labour leadership election will change the face of politics in Britain. His campaign focused the angry anti-Tory, anti-austerity feelings shared by millions.

In the article below Sean Vernell assesses the significance of the victory.

Jez he did! Corbyn’s victory brings with it ‘a new kind of politics’.

Jeremy Corbyn’s successful bid to win the leadership of the Labour Party has sent shock waves through the political establishment. His victory was overwhelming and gives him a huge mandate for the anti-austerity policies he put forward during the leadership campaign.

Corbyn’s first act as Labour leader was to speak out against the Tory Trade Union Bill and to join tens of thousands on the “Refugees welcome here” protest in London.

Despite the virulence of the attacks on him, his success in the election, with almost 60% of the first preference votes, was unequivocal. The significance of this victory is enormous. For two months all the political pundits, media hacks and the three other candidates have tried to make sense of his growing mass appeal not just with party members but also with a new generation that has, in the past, been turned off from official politics.

This election campaign has revealed just how out of touch the political establishment are with the true feelings of working people.

They used terms like ‘Corbynmania’ and ‘hysterical’ to describe the tens of thousands that his campaign attracted across Britain. The establishment pundits could only rationalise his popularity by putting it down to some form of mass neurosis.

They cannot understand why working people have such a profound sense of rage and injustice towards those at the top of society who continue to get wealthier whilst they get poorer. They fail to understand the frustration and anxiety that working people feel everyday as their work/life balance firmly tilts towards work – resulting in them having no time to spend playing and watching their children grow up.

They fail to understand the young.

A generation that has been brought up in an education system where developing the capacity to think and be critical has been replaced by ‘employability’, targets and tests. They have made it more difficult for children from working class backgrounds to access further and higher education by scrapping EMA and raising tuition fees. This is a generation that has been demonised by the press and blamed for successive governments’ failure to provide them with decent secure employment.

It is this discontent and these fears that Corbyn’s campaign gave voice to.

His campaign attracted 300,000 new members to join the Labour Party. At the core of his campaign lay an army of 16,000 volunteers who built the rallies and made the calls to get the vote out.

The offensive begins.

The campaign against Corbyn will no doubt start from day one. The media and the right within the Labour Party will try to portray Corbyn and his supporters as being out of touch with the electorate and who couldn’t possibly win a general election.

There’s nothing new here. This was exactly the excuse that Neil Kinnock and Tony Blair used to ‘modernise’ the party in the 80’s and 90s. They argued that the Labour Party (ie the left) had lost touch with the centre ground of British politics and needed to reconnect with the electorate.

For them that meant moving to the right and embracing the market, privatisation and ‘humanitarian’ wars.

Behind the Blairites’ political strategy lay an acceptance that working people are instinctively right wing and had lost any notion of a collective response to society’s

problems. They had, the Blairites believed, swallowed the individualist, ‘there’s no such thing as society’ politics of the Thatcher era. They concluded from this that rather than challenge these ideas the ‘modern’ Labour Party had to mimic the Tories if they were to win office again.

But it was always mistaken to believe that working people had simply accepted these ideas. Social survey after social survey throughout the 90s showed that on key Tory policies like privatisation and taxes most people were to the left of the official Labour Party.

What the Corbyn campaign proved is that by fighting on a principled, anti-austerity, anti- privatisation, anti- war platform and by putting forward alternatives based on collectivism he could attract people into engaging with official politics again.

But, of course, this is precisely what the establishment fears. After their hacks have spent hour after hour writing column after column complaining about the apathetic working class and tut-tutting at their refusal to turn out in elections, they are now faced with the potential of all those ‘chavs’ turning out to get actively engaged in politics.

The narrative will now change to complain about how Corbyn’s ‘new kind of politics’ is ‘too simplistic’ and that his supporters are not qualified to really understand the complexities of running a modern dynamic economy like Britain’s. The Press, employers and the right within the Labour Party, who are a part of the establishment, will collude to do everything that can to destabilise and undermine the Corbyn leadership. They will be relentless.

That is why trade unionists and activists need to rally support for Jeremy Corbyn’s anti- austerity stance and his democratic right to lead the Labour Party.

Corbyn’s victory: A real boost to every campaign

Corbyn’s victory will lift the confidence of all those who wish to fight back against austerity and injustice. Every trade unionist will feel more confident to take on every bullying manager knowing that their views are not extreme – we are now the mainstream.

He has long been a friend to trade unionists in struggle and to those fighting to defend educational provision. He is on record as proposing a National Education Service (like the NHS), opposing free schools and academies, supporting lifelong learning (to be paid for by a 2 percent increase in corporation tax), scrapping tuition fees and reinstating grants, and abolishing the charitable status of private schools. Clearly these policies will be enthusiastically supported by all those who work and are taught within the education sectors.

Every anti-racist and anti-war activist will feel more confident knowing that the leader of the Labour party is for scrapping Trident, pulling out of NATO and will oppose sending the poor and unemployed of one county to go and kill and maim the poor and unemployed of another.

There will be pressure, no doubt, even from Corybn’s own supporters to seek compromise with those who are hell-bent on destroying him. We will need to resist those pressures.

The real power to defeat austerity and prevent the new moves to war in Syria, for example, lies in building a mass austerity movement in the workplaces and on the streets. This means seizing every opportunity to block the Tories’ plans in the coming weeks and months. It means building on the mass solidarity in support of refugees and migrants and against racism which has mushroomed in the last few weeks.

The main defence against all those forces that seek to undermine Corbyn’s mandate is the movements that gave birth to Corbynism in the first place. As long as we are clear about this and continue to build the movement against austerity, war and racism then the excitement and enthusiasm for a new kind of politics ushered in by the election of Jeremy Corbyn to the leader of the Labour Party, could be the harbinger of real hope and change for the left in Britain.

Next stop Manchester, Sunday 4th October.

The week after, on Saturday 10th October, the UCU Left conference, which could hardly be better timed, ‘Education in the front line: how do we fight the austerity agenda?’ will take place in central London. You can register for this by visiting the UCU Left website, www.uculeft.org, where there is also a downloadable flier.

Sean Vernell, UCU Coordinating Secretary City and Islington College and FE national negotiator.

Tag: Jeremy Corbyn

I’m dreaming of a red Christmas….

Don’t vote for the yellow Tories

UCU can make a difference

29 November: join a carnival of resistance

Jez he did!