The following speech was given in the opening plenary at National Campaign Against Fees and Cuts conference in Manchester in December - by AWL member Beth Redmond, one of the lead organisers of the 19 November national demo for free education and the left candidate for President of NUS.
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Hi everyone. I’m Beth Redmond. I’m a student at City and Islington College, a socialist activist and a member of the NCAFC's national committee.
This term, we've done something brilliant. We've revived the student movement. We’ve put free education back on the agenda. Despite inertia, political weakness and outright betrayal from NUS, we’ve shown that large numbers of students do want to fight. We’ve mobilised thousands to make our voices heard, through grassroots organising and a clear political message.
As so often, mass mobilisation has been met by repression. As always, the police protect the interests of the rich against those fighting for a better world. I took part in the protests at Warwick, and protests in solidarity with the anti-racist movement in America. That's the spirit we need to fight in. We need to demand “Cops off campus”, and build a campaign to stop police invasions of our universities, as part of fighting to end all their violence and repression – against students, against workers, and against black people and migrants.
This is an international struggle for human rights – a struggle raging far more sharply in the US and Mexico, for instance, than here, but it's part of the same fight.
When we say we want free education, what does that mean? It means no fees, and a living grant to end debt. But it means more than that. It means education for liberation, to produce thinking people who can stand up for ourselves, instead of jumping through hoops to make money for a boss. A degree should not be a fast-track to doing whatever capitalism tells you.
NCAFC doesn’t fight for free education because it’s good for “competing in the global economy” or “good for business”. We don’t care what’s “good for business”. We care what's good for people, the majority of people currently excluded from wealth and power.
To win free education, we need to educate ourselves about the kind of society we live in. Let's start with the idea there's no money available for free education – or decent benefits – or well-funded services. In fact there's plenty of wealth, but it’s in the wrong hands. The rich have been getting richer at our expense, and it’s the poorest and most oppressed hit hardest.
We can fund free education, and everything else, by taking wealth from the rich. That's why NCAFC says “tax the rich”. It’s why we say “Expropriate the banks”. We want to take public, democratic control over the wealth currently stolen from workers by the rich, to use it for the common good.
We can’t win this by ourselves. We need to ally with the only force that can fundamentally change society, the organised working class. We need to make solidarity with every group of workers fighting for their rights. That starts on campus, from cleaners fighting for sick pay, holidays and pensions to lecturers fighting for a pay rise. We need the kind of mobilisations we saw at University of London and Sussex in 2013. We need to join unions too. Most of us have jobs already, and we're the workers of the future. We can help make the labour movement strong again.
When students and workers stand together, things can change incredibly fast. But that will be impossible if we let racists and nationalists divide us. Bigotry against migrants is the poison of British politics. Our international student comrades, and all migrants, are under attack. We must defend them. We're an internationalist movement. We want free education for everyone; we want freedom of movement and equal rights for everyone. We condemn UKIP, we condemn the Tories, and we condemn Labour's pandering to them.
Whether it’s immigration, education or most issues, the Labour Party has let us down again and again. It’s terrified of saying anything left-wing, despite millions crying out for a radical alternative. On 19 November, none of us marched for £6k fees, or a graduate tax, or any other New Labour bullshit. Sad to say, it's the trade unions letting Ed Miliband get away with this stuff. Workers should demand their unions stop going quiet and letting Labour tail after the Tories and UKIP.
Let me finish by saying that we need to transform the student movement from bottom to top. Repeatedly over the last five years British students have been willing to fight – against tuition fees and cuts, against police brutality, in solidarity with campus workers, against climate change and on many other issues. But we've been let down by our so-called leaders. NUS’s antics over the demo show the blind alley it is stuck in.
All too often, left-wingers get elected to SU positions and go soft. They keep their radicalism for the pub. They stick to being “sensible” and “realistic”. They settle into a bureaucratic culture which tells them things are terribly difficult and nothing much is possible. They become administrators, not educators and leaders and fighters.
We need to transform student unions into educating, political, campaigning organisations. NUS too – we can’t rely on it, but we shouldn’t abandon it to the hacks. Above all what the student movement needs is more people willing to stand up for themselves and others, people willing to fight for their ideas and principles whether they're popular or not.
We need to develop a bigger and more confident layer of student activists capable of educating, agitating and organise to take the struggle forward. This conference will discuss how to do that. Thanks for coming, and I hope you have a good weekend.
