UCU activists' meeting at King's College London - high stakes, missed opportunities

Submitted by AWL on 16 December, 2009 - 10:31 Author: Ed Maltby

On Tuesday the 15th of December, a meeting of London UCU activists and some students met in KCL. The meeting was hosted by KCL UCU Branch, and politically dominated by the SWP - i.e. a number of SWP full-timers were in attendance, and the meeting was chaired by an SWP student from KCL.

The teachers had a lot to talk about. Cuts are happening across campuses in London, and the UCU is mobilising to meet the attacks head-on. Unfortunately, the mobilisation is happening piecemeal, branch-by-branch. The UCU executive has a strategy of dealing with cuts on each campus individually, rather than leading national action to stop the cuts. The London meeting of activists needed to discuss the relationship between the campus campaigns and the national leadership, co-ordinate the different ballots that are coming up across London so that the strikes happen simultaneously and support each other; and develop a strategy for communication between branches, and co-ordinate action with students and non-academic staff, who are facing the same cuts, but held back by the relative inaction of Unison and Students' Unions across the city.

Around 50 teachers turned up, and around half the room was likely in the SWP. The meeting came hot on the heels of the demonstration at London Metropolitan only a few hours earlier, as a result of which the entire board of governors resigned. This was announced to cheers in the meeting.

Unfortunately, the meeting was not as much of a success as the demonstration. SWP students made a series of platitudinous speeches about the (genuinely impressive) anti-cuts campaigns on their campuses, and how the lesson is that militancy is very important. The SWP industrial organiser and SWP activists in UCU stressed that the only thing those in attendance at the meeting needed to concern themselves with was building a demonstration on the 26th that the UCU leadership had already called. Teachers from QMUL, UAL and UCL were crying out (literally - they were obliged to heckle their points due to selective chairing) for the meeting to take decisions, to elect an action committee to co-ordinate between the colleges in the run-up to the demonstration. But this initiative appeared to blind-side the SWP chair, who deemed it un-necessary, and denounced the notion of an elected action committee as 'bureaucratic', disingenuously arguing that "meetings are all well and good- but we don't want to sit through endless committees, we want action!". Under pressure, the chair conceded that maybe there could be an open meeting of activists on the 19th of January, but the branch chair from the London College of Communication protested that she would be sacked by the 6th of January, and couldn't wait until the 19th for an organising meeting to take place. The SWP industrial organiser spoke up to say, "comrade, I'm sorry you're losing your job on the 6th; but the best way to save it is to build the demonstration on the 26th!".

The chair of London Region UCU spoke up, along with a right-wing UCU NEC member, to argue that this meeting shouldn't make any decisions, nor should it elect a committee, nor should it co-ordinate joint action, because democratic structures already exist within the UCU. Again, reps from UAL spoke up to point out that at many campuses the UCU branch structures were atrophied and unresponsive - if activists were to organise action rapidly, to match the speed of the bosses' offensive, they needed some leeway to co-ordinate outside the official structures of the union. UAL used their own campus as an example - their branch was functional now, but only after a 9-month campaign to renovate it. Other colleges in London could not wait that long. The meeting had to take a decision now, and assemble an interim action committee. This intervention was met with general agreement - whereupon the SWP chair declared that the meeting had been very interesting, but everybody had to get out of the room now, and they could leave their e-mail with the chair if they liked. Many protested, students and teachers alike, but the disruption in the room was by this point too great for the discussion to be continued.

A rank-and-file co-ordination of teachers across campuses in London will come about - it has to, and a lot of teachers want it to take place. But by shutting down the meeting on Tuesday before an adequate decision could be taken, the SWP saw to it that an important opportunity was lost. On the night that the London Met's strike campaign and demonstration forced the whole board of governors to resign, a room full of experienced trade union militants ceded the initiative back to the bosses. The SWP's conception of meetings like this one is politically wrong - they seem to view rank-and-file gatherings like Tuesday's as pep rallies to inspire grassroots militants to go out and work hard to implement the decisions that the executive has taken. The idea that such meetings could be used to bring necessary bodies and independent rank-and-file initiatives into being doesn't come into the SWP's political framework. The reason for this is the same reason that the lone SWPer on the CWU postal executive could happily vote twice for a sell-out deal, and that the SWP's postal bulletin in 2007 refused to condemn the deal for fear of burning bridges with right-wing postal exec members. The SWP is sliding away from rank-and-file industrial politics to an accommodation with executive committees.

Is it obsessive sectarianism to focus on the behaviour of the SWP in meetings like this? I have given over far more words to describing the behaviour of the SWP in this report than I have to describing the actual facts of the industrial dispute in London universities. Am I a blinkered sectarian? In a word, no. The SWP is the dominant left-wing current in the UCU, and a powerful force in the student movement. Their policy to the strikes is a real thing weighing on these disputes, that we need to understand. They are for lobbying the UCU leadership to make it a bit more leftish, and holding pep rallies. We are for the development of rank-and-file organisation independent of the union leadership. There is a political disagreement over what the best strategy is, and a political argument to be made for democracy in our meetings and campaigns. We can't talk this disagreement through, or develop democracy in our movement, without talking straightforwardly about the role the SWP is playing in these disputes.

Comments

Submitted by AWL on Thu, 17/12/2009 - 09:59

http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=409655&c=1 - an account of the resignations of the London Metropolitan board of directors by the Times Higher - although it ignores the campaign waged by staff and students.

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