‘LET THEM FAIL!’ declared yesterday’s Daily Telegraph in response to repeated calls for emergency government funding to rescue endangered English universities as the economic crisis finally engulfed them.
‘A few should be allowed to go bust, freeing up reserves of land buildings, capital and people that could be redeployed easily in private industry, and it would contribute far more to the growth of the economy,’ it said.
While it may not ‘bring down the country with it,’ wholesale collapses in the sector – a major sector of the country’s economy – are imminent and the financial vultures are already circling.
The Tony Blair Labour government and his policy ‘education, education, education’ was designed to massively enlarge the university sector and to off-load government funding for student fees and provide the banks with a huge source of profits from interest on student loans, currently at 6.3 per cent.
Primarily, this present university disaster arose from the drop in the number of overseas students – who are charged more hugely inflated fees (£25,525 per year at Sheffield Hallam University) and £21,990 at SOAS University).
A Universities UK study has revealed a ‘calamitous’ drop of 27 per cent in foreign student applications for 2024, used as a cashcow to subsidise UK students fees of £9,250 a year, despite many students working two jobs to add to their already inadequate student maintenance loans.
UK anti-immigrant policies have also hit foreign student applications with the drive to reduce immigration and charge extortionate visa fees for dependents.
Desperate UK universities like Aberystwyth, University of Creative Arts, Plymouth, Sussex, Roehampton, Northumbria, Kent and Nottingham Trent are all cutting student entry requirements to attract students, thereby affecting the education quality.
Universities are also reducing the amount of face-to-face time with lecturers, further devaluing the courses. Cutting jobs of lecturers and ancillary service jobs is the prime target of administrators, to cut costs, as well as whole courses.
However, the crisis of the UK universities is just part of the crisis of the British capitalist system and is part of its death agony.
The British capitalist economy is no longer a world leader. It is now 12th in the league of capitalist productive forces, it is even outclassed by Mexico.
It is not just a question that it is no longer capable of maintaining a worldwide university system. It is no longer able to offer the working class a standard of living that is anywhere near the great gains that the working class won in the period after the Second World War.
Capitalist Britain is bankrupt and its working class faces a revolutionary struggle to defend its jobs, wages, the NHS, state education and all of its basic rights.
Today we have a Labour government led by a right wing that is desperate to find the ways and means to keep British capitalism surviving.
The Tories were wiped out at the last general election, after being unable to carry out the demands of the bosses and the bankers to make the working class pay for the crisis.
In its place you now have a Labour government with a huge majority which the bosses are relying on to bring in measures to save British capitalism.
The recent anti-fascist struggles showed the beginnings of a workers’ revolution, where tens of thousands took to the streets and drove out the racists and fascists.
The period that we are living in sees the workers of the world rising up, battling for their future by challenging the ruling class’s right to rule, to stop them destroying living standards in every country throughout the world.
The workers of Palestine are leading the way in their struggle to defend their lands and establish the state of Palestine.
The WRP and the Young Socialists are calling for workers to organise general strikes in support of Palestine and socialist revolutions worldwide to dump capitalism into the dustbin of history and establish the world socialist republic!
