Incredibly bad night in Manchester
Until 1998, it is worth noting that a university education was still free in the UK - no fees, and a reasonable grant for all students. As of 2008, “home” undergraduates may be charged up to £3000 a year (let’s not even get into the outlandish numbers involved for postgrads and internationals), and contributions towards the £7000-ish of annual living expenses are given out rarely and begrudgingly. Small wonder that 2/3 of us are working - and a significant proportion of those, including, until recently, myself, are working a near-as-dammit-full-time 20 hours - and the debt-fuelled, two-tiered neoliberal academia that is emerging is very clearly a disaster for working class students and would-be-students.
The neoliberalisation of our universities is, equally clearly, part of a broader neoliberalisation of our societies. Social housing, a public NHS, a fair and comprehensive system of benefits - these are all things that, paradoxically, the state could afford in our parents’ youth, when Britain was among the poorest countries in the old EEC, but not now that it has billions to throw around on wars, weapons and bank bailouts. Any demands for a free, socialised education must also be seen as part of a broader social fightback. Nevertheless, university campuses are environments much more amenable to the building of a movement than, say, hospital wards, and must be seen as particularly important ideological battlegrounds.
While I admit to aften being guilty of a centern Mancucentrist bias, Manchester University is definitely among the most pivotal. Founded in 2004 via a merger of the old UMIST and Manchester universities*, it’s the largest in Western Europe and has been home to both one of the most reactionary of managements - led by Australian arch-privatiser Alan Gilbert - and one of the most radical of student bodies. The former were presumably brought in to lead the way in turning other universities from public services to private business, and the latter have certainly been leading the way in the radicalisation of student politics - not least with our groundbreaking campaigns on Palestine - and our campaign for a free education has been steadily building momentum too.
Next year is when it’s all got to come to a head. The government will be reviewing Higher Education Funding, and Manchester is (predictably) one of the universities lobbying to be allowed to charge home undergraduates up to nine grand a year (again, not to mention the astronomical fees levelled at the postgrads and internationals). The review will also, of course, be an excellent opportunity for the student movement to get a socialised education back on the political agenda, and it’s imperative that that movement is fighting fit and ready.
Thus, when I tell you that Manchester’s student union elections have been held this week, you will understand why I haven’t found a second for blogging.
Along with the rest of the activist hardcore, I’ve been eschewing lectures and sleep** for a fortnight of making banners, posters and flyer-packs, of door-knocking and fly-posting, of devoting my every breath to keeping this student union in the hands of the Left ready for the battle next year. And, up against the coordinated might of New Labour, the Tories and the Lib Dems, the rightwing Greens and appalling Life-Of-Brian pseudocommies, I lost.
I say lost; politically, the victory was very much ours. When we got out talking to people, in interminable nights trawling the halls of residence and in countless lecture announcements, we would almost always come out with a hugely positive response. That an organised, mass movement is both possible and necessary, and that the people who’ve been organising hugely successful demonstrations and occupations are the ones to take the union forward - these are not controversial ideas. But for every student we managed to talk to, there were plenty we couldn’t reach, and we simply weren’t ready for the propaganda blitz that we were facing.
Politically, the Labour people said nothing, beyond some Toryesque scaremongering on crime (what this campus needs is a security fence and a private army). They could hardly even admit to their political allegiance to the very party whose policies they’re supposed to be struggling against, and so they didn’t even call themselves Labour. They called themselves The Incredibles. Seriously, they got the copyright for the logo and everything.
Maybe it’s that I’ve finally started on the copy of Shock Doctrine I got for Xmas, but for me their campaign was summed up by the phrase Shock and Awe. It was calculated to dazzle and disorient students, to stop a shred of the politics getting through. Some positions were contested by non-Labour candidates, and many of these shamelessly mimicked our rhetoric, promising a fighting union and a free education, all the while conterfactually deriding the potential for radical mass action in favour of engaging with politicians individually. “The Incredibles” weren’t above this kind of thing either and, for most students, the political water had been thoroughly muddied. Last year (apparently - I only arrived here in September) we had stood out miles from the other candidates going off our posters alone; this time we just looked like a slightly more extremist example of everyone else, and I’ve lost count of the number of potential voters who’s first question was, basically, don’t we just sound the same as everyone else? I was able to tweak the presentation a little to really stress the difference, with what I think were great results (ultimately, you can never be 100% certain who actually did vote for you and who didn’t), but it was hard to get the politics heard above all the noise.
With an army of obnoxious Ollie Reader types and some, err, creative use of their campaign budget, New Labour made sure that their stupid fucking logo was the one thing that did stand out above all the noise. I forget the final number after all the recounts, but they got their slimy Blairite toff into the General Secretary’s office by less than 50 votes out of several thousands. I can’t emphasise how much we’ve agonised over that (and the position of Women’s Officer, which we lost by only 16 votes) since the counts were in - imagine putting 210% into making something happen, failing, and then realising that 211% might have been enough - but the most painful result by far was the election of Campaigns Officer. This post has been held by the radical Left for longer than anyone cares to remember (one woman told me it was 15 years, though I haven’t checked this), and now we’ve lost it to the zionists.***
Their man used a lot of greenish words and, though he’s obviously not a fan of Stop The War, did promise that his election would lead to “less war” (just how many dead Muslims would have constituted an acceptable level of war was not made explicit), and the thrice-accursed Communist Party of Great Britain also ran a candidate. Each one was able to split off some of the Left vote, and one campaigned for a second preference vote of the other****. For all that they were supposed to be electoral opponents and ideological opposites, they were celebrating together on election night; after all, the CPGB lot will unite with anyone against the number one enemy of the global working class (that is, the Socialist Worker Party and all those who don’t hate it with sufficient passion).
Needless to say, this was a crushing defeat. Although votes haven’t been counted for all the minor positions yet, it looks like the Left will have gone from a position of hegemony to holding just two insignificant posts on the Council (one of them by none other than myself, touch wood) and none on the Executive. The ruling party now control the students’ union that was most expected to challenge their policies next year, and the zionists now control the union with one of the most advanced campaigns for solidarity with Palestine. The implications could hardly be more stark. It hurts on a personal level too. To expend so much energy on what turned out to be a defeat felt like running an uphill marathon to the edge of some massive cliff with Sonic-the-Hedgehog metal spikes at the bottom and not stopping in time.
That said, we can recover. We’ve lost the Battle for Manchester, but not the war. Losing the resources that come with control of the union will make campaigning that much more difficult, but hey, if anyone’s used to fighting from a position of weakness it’s the Left. Besides, our campaign may not have kept us in office, but it did get the politics out there in people’s minds - it will only have come to naught if we don’t build on that in the coming months to make the movement stronger in opposition than it ever was in office. Those of us who are members of parties and other national organisations may have to rely on their support more than before, and unions like Essex university, which has just swung to the Left as dramatically as ours has to the Right, will have to pick up a bit of the slack, but one thing I can guarantee - they haven’t heard the last of us!
It still really sucks, though.
* Actually, “merger” is a pretty loaded term for what really happened. “North Campus” - what I still think of as UMIST - has become something of a ghost village. Ever since the merger, they’ve been gradually abandoning the place in preparation of selling it off, piece by piece, for redevelopment in Manchester’s obnoxiously booming property market.
** I’ve also had a lot of time freed up since been January, where I effectively went on paid leave from the call centre. That’s really the only reason I’ve been able to join even the activist softcore, and it’s also an interesting story for another day.
*** This entry has been reproduced far more widely than anything I’ve written before, which has been annoying but has given me an opportunity to discuss some things with the other characters involved. In particular, the Campaigns Officer elect has now made it clear that, contrary to the impression I’d got from his speech and Q&A at hustings, he is committed to carrying our Palestine campaigns forward. To what extent I can trust anyone on the new executive isn’t yet clear, but based on that statement he’s officially “not a zionist”.
****Okay, I can’t prove that, so I’ll retract it. There’s a lot of things I wish I could prove, but never mind…
Man, I leave the city and it all goes to hell! Honestly first they tear down the Hacienda and now this!
I’m sorry they won, but you fought a good fight and you stopped them from being able to claim resounding support. They know without their tricks and money they would have been fuct. And it wasn’t wasted, all the campaigning is investment in the next time.
Hey thanks man. Personally, I’m quite flattered that we were worth so much effort - and we’ll definitely be trying to build on the political capital we got from campaigning long before next year’s elections.
By the way, for about half an hour there both my last two posts vanished, and I was unable to post new ones either. They’re back now, and I’ve made copies, but it was pretty scary. Has this ever happened to you?
It just did likewise to me, yesterday I got a message of server maintenance, so I think tinkering at the mothership is to blame. If it keeps being wobbly always copy the html code draft before submitting. Should be back to normal soon though judging from previous episodes. Did you notice the picture space went up to 3 gb a while back? Bless ‘em.
Yeah, seems ok now. I just have experience of being slapped down for stuff said online recently, and am possibly getting a bit paranoid. WordPress certainly don’t seem to have done anything to warrant my fury… yet.
hmmm, having been at Manchester Uni up until a year or so ago and experienced previous incarnations of the Student Respect slate, I think a bit more introspection might be in order here, rather than just crying foul about other parties doing what they do.
I’m not crying foul, this kind of shenanigan always comes up in elections, it’s why (among other things) true democracy has to be participatory rather than representative. And, to be clear, Student Respect were a minority on our slate.
You sounded good to me until “now we’ve lost it to the zionists”. At that stage I was able to develop theories about why you might have lost - as Stoppers have lost in my institution.
Since you’re counting dead Muslims, you might like to consider that as a non-combatant Palestinian you are nearly three times more likely to be killed by other Palestinians than by Israelis.
http://hrw.org/wr2k8/pdfs/wr2k8_web.pdf. And when you bandy the word ‘zionist’ around as an insult like that you show yourself to be weak on history - not attractive in an NUS candidate.
Stop the War invariably reveal themselves to be members of the contaminated, morbid, gone-wrong left, addled with anti-Imperialism and anti-Zionism to the expense of everything else. Cheap, facile, empty slogans from Stoppers, insulting our intelligence. “We are all hesbollah now” at the same time as “World against war”? Irreconcilable, those two.
You know what they’re saying these days? Scratch a lefty, get a racist. Nobody should be saying that! You should be proving them wrong. Instead, you lost.
“If anybody is used to fighting from a position of weakness, it’s the Left”. That’s as may be. But I don’t see any evidence of reflection about why the radical left might have lost what you view as its former ‘hegemony’. You can blame it on your message not getting through if you like - my theory is that you lost because your baldly manichaean international priorities turned off the thinking voters.
Es
This is interesting. We just had our elections at Warwick, where i’ve been the campaigns officer for the past year. They aren’t fought at all on ‘ideological’ grounds, except for the traditional conservative candidate (who always always looses). But yeah, our winners are all the sort who think either that ‘the union should only concern itself with running its nightclub’ and ‘let’s chat to politicians’. They always are.
@Esperanza:
In so far as any political label can be an insult, I think “zionist” is a legitimate choice. Since zionist ideology is so contrary to my principles, and the zionist state responsible for causing so much human misery, then why not?
Anti-imperialism and anti-zionism are not something we do “at the expense of everything else”. Have I not gone on about a free education quite enough? But western imperialism - of which zionism is a hugely important element - is massive at the moment, causing immense destruction and suffering as well as exposing weaknesses in the existing world order. We’d be mental not to make this a priority.
These are rhetorical questions, by the way. I can’t really be bothered getting into a debate with you.
@Chris:
I was at Salford the other day, and it reminded me that yeah, most unis have to put up with this rubbish all the time. That’s why it’s so gutting to lose even one radical union. But still, the struggle will continue one way or another. I hope you won Warwick, and welcome to my blogroll
“I forget the final number after all the recounts, but they got their slimy Blairite toff into the General Secretary’s office by less than 50 votes out of several thousands.”
Perhaps it’s time to get the broad mass of students voting by allowing them to do it at home? Is there a good reason not to, save for a lack of confidence in the popularity of your own platform?
“Stop the War invariably reveal themselves to be members of the contaminated, morbid, gone-wrong left, addled with anti-Imperialism and anti-Zionism to the expense of everything else. Cheap, facile, empty slogans from Stoppers, insulting our intelligence. “We are all hesbollah now” at the same time as “World against war”? Irreconcilable, those two.”
I strongly endorse this comment.
Endorse what you like, my “Newer Labour” friend, but I think it’s hilarious that you’d describe StWC’s rhetoric as “cheap, facile, empty slogans” but (from your blog) the Incredibles’ apolitical corporate branding as “a great campaign [which] thoroughly deserved the win”.
How’s that campaign, by the way, for lack of confidence in one’s politics? Hiding the party to which the candidates belonged, and drowning out politics in an onslaught of superhero logos, doesn’t sound like an argument you’re winning so much as one that you’re shouting over.
And yeah, the internet would let you shout people down all the more effectively - we need to get people engaged with the politics, then they’ll come out and vote. I remind you that, for all the right’s bitching about turnout, Manchester’s is higher than most universities - and that’s because of the politicisation of campus from the left, not despite it.
Now, what’s brought the local right wing (oh I know, you think you’re the left, but “chipping away at the post-Iraq environment” of radicalism on behalf of a neoliberal-neoconservative ruling party really doesn’t cut it) to my otherwise happy online home? If this is what happens when Cunni links to me then he and I wil have to have words…
Okay, there’s a distinction that should really go without saying but, given the reactions this post has been provoking elsewhere on the local blogosphere, clearly it needs to be spelled out: a zionist is not the same thing as a Jew.
Not only would any such equivalence be nonsensical and offensive (a bit like the whole Muslim=terrorist thing), it would also be completely counterfactual. Some of the loudest and scariest of zionists are in fact Christians, while some of the most influential socialists have been Jews (as an example, I’m a member of a party founded by Tony Cliff and usually described as either Marxist or Trotskyist; Cliff and Trotsky were both Jews, and Marx was born to Jewish parents). Indeed, the Jews (and particularly the Israelis) who come out as anti-zionists are among the people I most admire; anti-zionism is much harder for them than for me, as they run the risk of being ostracised as “self-hating” race traitors.
“Zionism”, as I use the term, basically means “support for the establishment and preservation of a state for the Jews in the place of historical Palestine”. There are surely more rigourous definitions out there, but that’s good enough for us. The definition of a state for one ethnic group is fundamentally racist, and something we should oppose on principle (would there be any doubts over, say, someone declaring the UK to be “a state for the Anglo-Saxons”? We’d quite rightly all go mental). If the zionists’ Jewish state were founded in, say, Antarctica, we probably wouldn’t have needed to get too worked up about it, but the big problem is that the Palestinians were already there, and the various “solutions” to the Palestinian “problem” have all inevitably entailed immense violence and suffering.
It’s a colonial enterprise, and needs to be opposed on the same grounds as all such colonial enterprises. Because of Israel’s location, though, it’s also now the lynchpin of Western Imperialism today, and must therefore rank even higher on our list of things to oppose.
Awesome, thanks
Warwick dropped support of the Coke boycott last night :/ it’s all moving backwards
Just a note to everyone who’s whining about being “censored”: there’s a moderation queue. Get over it. Do you think I check the people trying to comment on my blog, what, hourly? Every ten minutes? I’ve just got in from a day spent doing things away from the computer to find a full mod queue, it doesn’t make me Stalin.
Although - especially given that half of it’s now been reproduced on your own blogs - I don’t see why I should approve them. This isn’t somewhere I want to get into drawn out slanging matches with you lot, it’s not somewhere even oriented around the world of Manchester student politics - I’ve mentioned the elections because they’ve been a massive part of my life for the past few weeks, and now they’re gone there are far more interesting things to talk about.
In sum, let’s not waste any more of each other’s time. I’m sure, if you think about it, you’ll find better things to do than call me names.
Dave. greetings from australia. your bitter struggles in student elections sound eerily familiar.
oh why did Australia have to adopt the british parliamentary AND student union systems?
and why oh why did Britain have to adopt the Australian neoliberal HECS system?
count yourself lucky that your student unions aren’t collapsing like ours are, due to the previous government’s successful implementation of ‘voluntary student unionism’
Please tell me you’re from Melbourne, Anne
I studied my first degree in France, and there there’s nothing compulsory about Student Unions. It’s a different atmosphere, politically, but it’s not all bad; it certainly makes the union go all out for the votes. While there are many criticisms to be made of the hegemonic UNEF, there is a capacity for national organisation among radical students that just isn’t in evidence here. And heres, there’s certainly an argument for unions like ours to disaffiliate from the NUS.
Anyway, we’ll continue your fight against a neoliberal education and I’m glad to have made contact with you.