"NCAFC is the political core of the movement"

Submitted by AWL on 18 January, 2011 - 7:48

Michael Chessum, a co-founder of the National Campaign Against Fees and Cuts (NCAFC), talks to Solidarity about the organisation’s conference (Saturday 22 January), and the role of student struggle.


The NCAFC is the major organisation leading the anti-cuts movement in education. It needs to develop its own structures, and we need to have a debate about how these will work. The NCAFC is the organisation that will play a durable, stable role in leading the student anti-cuts movement and linking up with the workers’ movement. There are other bodies, such as the national education assembly, but the NCAFC is the political core of the movement.

Students are about to stop being at the forefront of the whole anti-cuts movement; we’re about to become a part of larger waves of industrial action across the public sector. We’re going to go from just leading our own demos to supporting workers in struggle in their own workplaces, on their own demands, and that might require different tactics. But the things we do, such as direct action, are precisely how we can be most useful to the working-class movement.

The TUC might not call for the occupation of a building but we can. It’s a question of where do we put our energies? The NCAFC has the politics to answer that question.

We should continue with rolling days of action and try to expand our numbers; we are not going to wither. Schools and Further Education students prove that. In the anti-war movement they were like a flock of sparrows, you never knew when they would land, when they would take off. But I think they’re in the movement to stay.

We need to figure out where we stand in relation to the official structures. We need to ask ourselves whether we think NUS will ever be a fighting union. I’m uncertain about whether to advocate disaffiliation or not. We’re capable of leading a good intervention — we can discredit the leadership at the NUS conference this April — but we need to have a discussion about whether it is worth staying in NUS merely to make a point. We certainly need to build parallel, alternative structures to NUS. This is a role the NCAFC can play.

We can stop the government doing what it’s doing. That means mass unrest causing the Lib Dems to panic, and making the coalition break down. I think the way you break the coalition isn’t to focus on the Liberal Democrats, but to concentrate on building a mass social movement. I don’t think that the Lib Dems are a party that we can successfully lobby by presenting them with working-class politics.

That’s one target: bringing the government down. But we don’t necessarily pose it with the slogan “bring down the government”. But if the government lost on a big policy like this, that could bring them down. Raising the slogan “bring the government down” isn’t necessarily very helpful.

When the history books are written, our success will be measured by the extent to which this time is remembered as a time when a generation became conscious and built a movement that took British politics dramatically to the left.

If the government falls, you replace it with the only alternative — you replace it with Labour. I want to know, what’s the alternative to Labour? We need to discuss this in the movement — is it possible to reclaim Labour? I don’t think that it is. I think that it’s “workerist” to just say, “let’s join the Labour Party because that’s where the unions are”.

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