NUS -- action needed on fees

Kevin Fox, Secretary of Kent University Labour Club, calls on the NUS leadership to unite students and labour movement activists in radical action against fees.

Over recent months the NUS leadership has been worried -- not so much about the decrease in the number of students applying to university due to tuition fees, but its own performance. Failure to organise national action against fees, accepting this and the abolition of the student grant as inevitable, have aroused deep frustration among ordinary students. This failure to put principle before promotion is causing grassroot discontent that could threaten the position of the Blairites within both NUS and Labour Students.

Many Labour MPs do not support the introduction of tuition fees but, as the lone parents issue showed, will only speak out if they feel that there is sufficient pressure from ordinary people. The failure of the NUS to call for national action or build solid alliances with the trade union movement can only make the introduction of fees easier. If the student movement is to fight fees it must recognise that the abolition of free education is one plank of Blair's dismantling of the welfare state and that it is necessary to link up with progressive elements of the labour movement to fight this and other attacks on the welfare state.

The NUS leadership must learn from its past mistakes. In conceding ground to right-wing policies such as the introduction of fees on a sliding scale, the Blairites in the NUS invited the Government to introduce a much harsher policy. NUS created the impression that ordinary students were not concerned about fees and were not prepared to fight against them. This was highlighted at the 1997 Labour Party Conference when David Blunkett thanked Labour Students and Young Labour for their support. Labour Students and the leadership of the NUS are under the illusion that we can only achieve change by working with the Government, in other words by going along with the Government at the expense of their own membership.

The Government has shown that it only listens when there is significant pressure from below. The recent Countryside Alliance demonstration is a perfect example. If Tony Blair is prepared to send a government minister along in support of a Tory march there is surely hope for an alliance of students and progressive elements in the labour movement.

Radical economic alternatives need to be presented as part of the fight against fees: progressive taxation, an increase in corporation tax, a reduction in defence spending and the slashing of dividend payments. These proposals need to be placed at the centre of the struggle against Blair's attacks on the welfare state. Only when students show their anger and fierce discontent by uniting nationally in solidarity, will the Blair Government even begin to listen.

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