TENS of thousands of students and youth are marching today in central London to denounce the tripling of tuition fees to £9,000, and to demand the ending of tuition fees, the restoration of free state university education, and the cancelling of all of the savage cuts in the education budget.
While the NUS leaders, whose predecessors helped Blair and Brown end free state education by bringing in tuition fees in 1997, call for the freezing of fees – thereby accepting the ending of free state education – the mass of students, youth and workers are determined to restore free education at all levels as a basic right.
Millions of workers and middle class people are angry that it is being made impossible for their children to go to university, and that education has been turned into a very expensive commodity through the creation of an education market.
The same millions are angry that their jobs, their benefits and their pensions are being swept away, while food and clothes prices are shooting upwards.
Food prices have risen by eight per cent in the past two months!
Everybody now knows what is happening. In order to maintain the busted capitalist system and keep the bankers and the bosses in the lifestyles that they consider is theirs by right, the rest of the population, some 99 per cent of the people, are required to submit to robbery with extreme violence, without any right to self defence.
What is making the working class and the youth really angry is hearing leaders of the Labour Party and the trade unions, and the NUS say that nothing can be done about the crisis, or that they support some of the Tory-LibDem savage cuts, and that the masses will have to put up with five years of this robbery and destruction of their and their children’s lives, and pin all their hopes on some general election which may or may not happen in five years time.
The Young Socialists have been marching from Manchester to London against all of this rubbish, for the restoration of free state education, the ending of fees and jobs for youth.
They have made it loud and clear that the way forward is to organise a general strike to bring down the Tory-LibDem coalition, and bring in a workers government that will put an end to capitalism, and bring in a planned socialist economy, with free state education and jobs for all as its foundation.
Everywhere the YS has marched they have been met like liberators, with workers and youth cheering them and cheering their call for the working class and the youth to rise up and bring down the coalition with a general strike. The workers and the youth have had enough of the Labour and NUS bureaucrats on their knees in front of the bosses and pleading for mercy.
Workers understand that bringing down the coalition is vital, a matter of life or death, and at the end of five years of coalition rule there will be nothing left to defend. The Welfare State will be a memory.
The News Line urges all students and youth to support the YS march for jobs and free state education, as it marches to London with its call for general strike action.
We urge all to join in the march, and attend the News Line Anniversary Rally that will be held at the end of the march on November 21 in London. (see page 1 and 2)
We urge you all to embrace the message of the YS march. This is that now is the time when the revolutionary leadership of the working class must be built up to organise the general strike to bring down the coalition and bring in a workers government. This will restore free state education and bring in a socialist planned economy to provide jobs for all.
