So They Say: Short Memory (1975)

The So They Say Column from the October 1975 issue of the Socialist Standard

Short Memory

While a large number of Tory MPs are now reflecting on just how Mrs. Thatcher ever came to be elected as Conservative leader, the deposed Mr. Heath seems to be fostering the vision of a triumphant return. He has been making speeches. And he made one recently in Edinburgh which evoked from The Guardian the description “a fierce attack on Labour Ministers.” The form of attack was on orthodox lines — he chose a particularly glaring social problem and proceeded to lay the blame for it at the door of the Labour Party. He spoke of the Government’s attitude towards the current unemployment figure of one-and-a-quarter million in the following manner.

‘Where have all the Labour consciences gone ?’ he asked. 'Gone to graveyards every one.’ And with them had gone Labour’s care and compassion, to be replaced by what he described as ‘a cold stony callousness towards those whose lives had now lost all sense of purpose.’

(Guardian, 6th September, 1975)

The implication being that with a warm-hearted leadership in power (who does he have in mind?) things would be very different. To add point to the callousness of the Labour Party, he asked:

But have Labour Ministers been resigning in droves in protest? Hardly. Has any Labour Minister resigned because of this massive unemployment? Not a single solitary Minister.

That may be Mr. Heath’s idea of a solution, but only for preaching — not practising. Unemployment rose to one million in 1972. He was Prime Minister then — when exactly the same irrelevant gibes were directed at him from the Labour benches. Of course that was all of three years ago: Mr. Heath “did not intend to go back over the past in any detail.” Which is just as well for him — members of the working class might begin to suspect that unemployment is just one of the several cancers upon what was once described by someone as "the unacceptable face of capitalism.”

Woolly Waffle

The Labour party has never polled as much as 50 per cent. of the votes at any general election, says Mr. Bryan Magee, and having considered this point — goes on to pose the following question:

The truth only too clearly is that whatever the Labour Party may think, the masses do not, most of the time, regard it as representing them. And if that is the case, by what right can it claim to speak for them ?

(Guardian, 2nd September 1975)

Mr. Magee is clearly not inhibited himself — he is Labour MP for Waltham Forest. As a result of recent scares among Labour MPs that small “activist” groups within certain constituencies can shape so-called revolutionary policies, he feels free to criticize these rebellious reformers for being "quite untypical” of the Labour Party — which by his own token has only a dubious right to speak for "the masses.”

He describes these factions as "the left of the Left” which we understand he means to be a left-handed compliment. Magee feels that the “activists” adopt an intellectually pretentious stand — “élitist to the narrow of its bones”.

As his article attempts to provide an explanation for Labour’s failure to take as much as 50 per cent. of votes, we look to his own intellect for the answer:

The British people . . . are known throughout the world, and justly, for being tradition bound, past bound. They do not like change. Therefore they want it only when times are unusually bad. That is why it is usually in unusually bad times that Labour is elected to office.

This might be offered as a phoney excuse for Labour’s inability to deal with social problems — things were so bad when they were elected, that they were unable . . . etc. — but it doesn’t explain why they ever leave office. Or does Mr. Magee think that Labour, to use their phrase, gets things moving, and at the first sight of improvement the Conservatives are returned only to mess it all up again?

State Capitalism

The Russians are due to complete their Kama River industrial project (Kamaz) in March 1976. It is currently two years behind schedule, but when finished the complex will become the world’s largest truck-manufacturing centre. It is estimated that lorries of between 8 and 11 tons will be coming off the assembly line at the rate of one every 90 seconds. Although the Russians were unable to interest "western firms” in the construction, they have used a considerable amount of foreign assistance in design and the supply of machinery.

The dimensions of Kamaz are staggering: A $5 billions budget, three million square metres of factory space, a new city to house 250,000 workers and their families, 155 miles of highway, 75 miles of railroad tracks and 150 buildings. All this has been built on a 40 square mile tract of country side in the Tartar Republic, 600 miles east of Moscow.

(Guardian, 11th September 1975)

Such a development requires a large amount of capital to be fixed in it, but where has it come from? If we listened to Mr. Malik, the Russian delegate to the UN, the answer could be that it just dropped from the sky.

In a debate in which member countries attempted to find agreement on what was picturesquely described as “an attempt to reconcile the conflicting interests of the rich and poor nations by negotiation” Malik tried to wash his hands of the “greedy West.” He blamed

the capitalist states who plunder and exploit the developing nations for the disparities in world economic relation.

(Guardian, 4th September 1975)

But facts belie the jargon. Russia is not adverse to dealing with the “capitalist states,” of which it is one:

Nearly every advanced Western Country, as well as the Eastern European countries, has an interest in the Kamaz project. There are 40 US firms alone involved in the project, with contracts valued at $400 millions. To pay for all this the Russians looked to the West. The US Export-Import Bank (Eximbank) and Chase-Manhattan concluded in 1973-4 credit agreements with the Soviet Bank of Foreign Trade totalling $322.9 millions. Moscow is to pay 10 per cent down to US suppliers with the remaining 90 per cent financed by Eximbank and Chase. The latter says it is charging “market rates” while the Eximbank has set a fixed rate of 6 per cent interest.

Interest? We know the “capitalist states” derive their interest through surplus value. Have the Russians found a new source for it?

Daily Bread

A Paddington vicar, the Rev. Michael Stephenson, has been forced to make some less than Christian remarks concerning his governors, the Church Commissioners. That august body had set pay targets for vicars of £1800 for 1974, and £2100 for 1975. Being mere targets, and recalling the inaccuracy of the Church in other fields, it seems hardly surprising that they have been missed. An irate Rev. Stephenson disclosed that his income in the year ending May 1975 was, in fact, only £1487.

The Church Commissioners have agreed that he is “quite right” and will be recommending that Stephenson, and others in his position, should receive the Government maximum of £6 a week increase.

While we have a certain sympathy for Rev. Stephenson, our eyebrows were raised when he remarked:

It would have been far more honest of them to pledge themselves to meet a previous target which has not yet been met, than to set a new target which is sheer pie in the sky when compared to reality.

(Marylebone Mercury, 12th September 1975)

It may be “sheer pie in the sky,” but surely, Reverend, a classic case of “whatsoever a man soweth, that he shall also reap.”

Students need Knowledge

Among a number of other proposals which it is fighting against, the National Union of Students now has a new one to oppose. A Commons Select Committee on science and technology has just recommended that postgraduate science students should receive bigger grants than students studying “arts” subjects. The NUS quite rightly saw this proposal as “divisive” but this is no secret. The committee is not in the least worried by some vague ideas of the unity of students — it has been examining the requirements of capitalism tomorrow. The committee gave their own points of reference used when drawing up their report:

We believe that a system of differential grants for science postgraduates would provide the research councils with a practical and valuable tool to assist in the encouragement of research in priority areas. We are aware that such a scheme may create jealousies between different groups. We believe however that this is a price which may have to be paid if national needs are to play any part in the manpower training functions of the universities.

(Daily Telegraph, 12th September 1975)

If the NUS thought that universities were for "education,” they may now see what “education” is for. But this is not to say that knowledge is an irrelevance. The study of Socialist knowledge is the task which students and workers must attend. When this is done the cries of “divisive” will end.

Alan D'Arcy

Trouble at ‘t mill (2026)

From the August 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Trouble at ‘t mill’ has become a kind of cliché to refer to problems individuals or groups of workers may be having in their place of work. Workplaces are not mills today of course, but the basic ruler-ruled relationship between employer and employee that existed at the time of the mills still applies today. And the same ‘trouble’ still continues to arise, more often than not associated with money and working conditions.

University cuts

And it’s happening currently in what many people might consider an improbable place – institutions of higher education – i.e., universities. Traditionally, work in universities, whether as a teacher, researcher, administrator or anything else, has been considered a relatively secure form of employment. Until 1988 in fact academics had what was known as ‘tenure’ whereby, barring some form of gross misconduct, they could not legally be sacked from their jobs. And even after this, the likelihood of university lecturers losing their jobs remained relatively small for a long time, at least compared with most other areas of employment. But more recently all this has changed. What university employees are now finding is that, as for most other fields of work, they are at significant risk of being declared redundant as their institutions struggle to stay solvent and look to make savings.

In the last couple of years in particular, a whole swathe of universities, from those lower down the pecking order that were once called polytechnics to historic and well-established institutions higher up the scale, have begun declaring deficits – referred to sometimes as ‘black holes’. They are forced, they say, to drastically reduce regular expenditure in what they see as the only effective way – by shedding staff. The term they often use to describe this is ‘reducing the head count’, clearly an attempt to mask the personal impact on the individuals whose lives are suddenly turned upside-down. The main pressure on universities to do this has been the downturn in the number of young people entering into higher education as well as the shortfall of overseas students coming to study in the UK, so denying universities the necessary level of tuition fees to keep them solvent. Examples of institutions currently engaged in making staff cuts and declaring people redundant are Teesside University, Sheffield Hallam, Swansea, Leicester, Nottingham, Edinburgh and Birmingham.

Strike action?

Some universities have done U-turns on declaring redundancies due to the threat of strike action by the lecturers’ union (the UCU – University and College Union), but others have ignored such threats and have gone ahead with dismissing staff despite industrial action. Clearly they view their financial situation as so dire that cutting their long-term wage bill seems more important than the consequences for their reputation of students complaining about not being taught or not receiving their degrees on time. And, at times, universities have openly declared that failing to lower their costs will threaten their very existence. A good example here of how trade unions can sometimes succeed in taming to some extent the imperatives of the financial compete-or-die system all workers (and their employers) live under, but also of the limits of trade union action with the employer simply holding out in the expectation (often realised) that workers are only likely to stay out on strike for as long as they are able to hold out financially themselves.

In the same boat

It also offers a prime example of how the system we live under inevitably threatens with insecurity all those obliged to sell their energies to an employer for a wage or salary – so the vast majority of any population. Such is the case whichever rung of the salary scale a worker happens to be on. The current crisis in universities provides a suitable microcosm of this. Whether someone works as a porter, a secretary, a technician, an ordinary lecturer or a professor, all are equally likely to find themselves out of a job and having to scramble around to find alternative employment. And for academics in particular finding such employment at the moment is unlikely given the current job market in higher education. As a volunteer union representative in my own institution, I have recently seen a science professor of 22 years standing and international reputation break down in tears and state that his life is destroyed. He had been subjected to a humiliating process of ‘pooling’ and then being informed that, after comparing him with his colleagues, it had been decided that his role was to be ‘deleted’. I have been assisting another colleague who, fearing redundancy and having applied for a job in another institution, received a stock response informing her that they had received over 500 applications to their job advert and that she might hear nothing further regarding her application. She did not.

Legal action?

A common reaction from staff hearing that their employment is to be terminated is to talk about taking legal action via an employment tribunal on grounds of unfair dismissal. But if they go to their trade union for assistance in this, they are likely to be told that, if the employer has taken the necessary steps laid down in law – and they usually have – then their dismissal is unlikely to be considered ‘unfair’. The reality, of course, is that, regardless of any tweaks made to employment regulations by governments (something that is happening currently), the system will continue to be weighted in favour of the employer and to give them the upper hand, as it must in the wage-slave society we live in. So unless the employer makes a mess of things by not going through the right motions, then any legal appeal against redundancy is likely to fail. And even if such an appeal is successful, the court will not order reinstatement but only financial compensation, which is often a dismal amount and in any case cannot in law exceed a maximum of the claimant’s annual salary. If legal action is attempted, furthermore, any claimant can expect to wait a long time indeed for their case to be heard. One of the criticisms of the employment tribunal system recently highlighted by the Institute of Employment Rights was that people bringing unfair dismissal claims are waiting up to five years for their case to come to court.

Employment insecurity

Finally, in the higher education sector at least, a further negative consequence of the redundancy exercises employers go in for to reduce their costs is that these inevitably signal a deterioration in working conditions for those employees still in post. Despite the terminology of ‘deletion of role’ that employers often use, everyone who works in universities knows that the work (or at least some of the work) of staff who have been dismissed will still need to be done, which inevitably means longer hours and increased pressure for the remaining staff. Though these staff will be breathing a sigh of relief that they still have their jobs, nevertheless they know they will be called upon to work longer hours and more intensively to cover that work. And they know that, if they don’t come up to the mark in this, they may well be the ones for the high jump next time the employer sees it as necessary to embark upon ‘reducing the head count’.

What’s for sure, finally, is that no solution to this kind of merry-go-round in any sector of employment is to be found in seeking to change employment law or giving employees more ‘rights’ – or anything like that. This is the case whether it’s a sector focused directly on realising profit for its owners or shareholders or one that is part of the infrastructure of the profit-making system, such as education. All forms of employment are locked into the system of buying and selling and production for profit, together with the insecurity and upsets it causes for workers through its constant need to reorganise in order to adapt to capitalism’s economic conditions. And this will continue until those workers decide collectively to do away with that system and replace it with one of common ownership, voluntary work and free access to all the goods and services they produce – what we call socialism.

Howard Moss

50 Years Ago: The row about overseas students (2026)

The 50 Years Ago column from the August 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard 

 

Students who come to the UK from abroad to study make another part of the education pot that is at boiling point. But as with the reasons for the cuts in the education system (discussed last month) so also with the explanation of the row about overseas students. The causes have nothing to do with so-called academic freedom, or colour prejudice, or the duty to help developing countries. The cause of the dispute is within the economics of capitalism itself in one of its periodic crises.

Cuts are demanded in state expenditure by the capitalist class and in education in particular. One of the things which have been cut back on is the “subsidy” to overseas students. This so-called subsidy relates to the fact that the fees paid by all students to universities and colleges of higher education do not in fact represent the true cost of the course they will be attending. The real cost will be many times higher and the balance comes from central and local government grants to the universities and colleges, together with whatever else they can squeeze from private sources. Overseas students (estimated to be about 95,000 for the academic year 1973/4) therefore apparently cost the capitalist class considerable amounts.

For example the “price” of one year of a 3-year course in science at University College London, for the academic year 1975/76 was £157. But this figure probably represents no more than 10 per cent of the true cost of providing the services and equipment available to each student on a science course at UCL. So the call grows from the politicians (the mouthpieces of the capitalist class) and others involved to make students who come here to study from abroad pay the market price.

[From the article, 'The Row About Overseas Students' by Ronnie Warrington, Socialist Standard, August 1976.]

Pressures in the Ivory Towers . . . (1994)

From the November 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

As ever when the A-level results appear in the middle of August, there was a mad scramble by would-be students to get onto the university course of their choice, or at least the best compromise between what they wanted to do and what their exam results would enable them to do. But this year it wasn’t just a matter of students fighting to find a university and department that would accept them. Universities, too, were desperate to attract enough students to get the maximum income from their paymasters. From newspaper and TV adverts to teletext announcements, universities vied to publicise themselves and those of their courses that still had vacancies.

The government boasts about the expansion of university education, but as usual what lies behind such assertions is more revealing than the claim itself. In part the “expansion” has been achieved by simply renaming polytechnics and some colleges as universities. The growth in numbers of students to over a million (double the figure 15 years ago) has not been matched by increases in university funding, meaning accommodation shortages, larger classes and overcrowded libraries. Most significant of all, student grants, which were never exactly generous, have been replaced by a mixed system of grants and loans. With the recession meaning that vacation jobs have all but dried up, and with restrictions on the claiming of benefit, students are now in a really precarious financial situation. Half finish their courses with a debt of £4,000, while one-in-five have considered giving up their courses because of financial problems. One-in-four take part-time jobs during terms, which is bound to affect their academic performance

About one student in eight now fails their course or drops out “voluntarily”. This is due in part to financial pressures, and in part to the increased staff-student ratio, which means less individual attention. Also many students end up in the rush for a degree place by taking courses in which they have little interest but which still have vacancies. In the recession a degree is no guarantee of a job ( not that it ever was) but it is still a qualification that many employers demand. One simple sign of the extent to which job requirements have invaded the university system is the number of courses with “Applied” in their titles: everything from Biology to French or Social Sciences can now be “applied” (to the real world of profit-making, of course).

The government decision to expand higher education was intended to provide a supply of trained graduates for a technological society demanding a high level of scientific and managerial skills. As we just said, this was to be done on the cheap, with the cost per student being drastically reduced. The teaching year is gradually being increased, and the pressure for two-year degrees is mounting. Universities were instructed to pile-’em-high, with financial penalties for not reaching their quota of students. The high drop-out rate is a complete waste as far as the government is concerned. The recession put paid to the need to carry on increasing the supply of graduates, but student demand for university places continued to rise. This seems now to have reached its peak at 400,000 applications for 270,000 places.

Since they ceased to be privileged enclaves where the sons of the ruling class could study Classics, universities have never been ivory towers. Rather they have come more and more to resemble factories with production lines and quotas. Money and the demands of capitalism are the vital criteria, while educational considerations take a back seat. 

Paul Bennett

University Challenge 2001 (2001)

Party News from the November 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

Ever complained about the Socialist Party never doing enough to propagate the case for socialism? Ever wanted to do some useful, productive work to help spread the ideas of world socialism?

Course you have. And now you have your chance. Twenty minutes of effort on your part is all that is needed to help with the Socialist Party's "University Challenge" 2001 campaign. 

The campaign is an open invitation to student political groups/societies to hear the world socialist case at one of their meetings. This campaign has been successfully run previously and resulted in a number of very positive discussion meetings, putting the distinctive case for a world of free access in front of interested minds. So this year we want to really try and get as many meetings as possible.

Don't be put off if you don't want to be a speaker yourself — a local speaker can be found. 

All we need at the moment is for you to contact your local college or university (via their general telephone enquiries) and get the address for the student association or main society's body.

The Campaigns Department has produced a range of standard letters to be sent out to different types of interested student groups (Third World First, Labour Students, Greens etc). These can be Word 6.0 format from gardner_brian@hotmail.com. You can amend the letter for it to be returned to yourself, or to Head Office, whichever suits you.

Cuts in Education (1976)

From the July 1976 issue of the Socialist Standard

Once again capitalism is going through a pretty severe crisis. There is of course nothing new in this. Nor is there anything unusual. On the contrary, it is merely evidence of the normal working of capitalism; a society in which crisis is as endemic as weeds to a flower bed. Marx pointed out over a hundred years ago, that capitalism would inevitably move in phases, one of which was crisis which is what is happening now. When capitalism in Britain or elsewhere gets into a financial crisis its government must turn to anything which offers a prospect of saving the situation, one vulnerable arm of expenditure is education. The direct benefits of investment in education are not as evident to all the capitalist class as is investment in plant or machinery. It takes some considerable time to get any return on the expense of getting children ready for “the work of life” (one of the Oxford English Dictionary’s definitions of education); at least ten years in school to make a labourer, considerably longer for a worker with a technical degree, even longer for a scientist capable of inventing a new type of warhead. So capitalism cuts.

This cannot be in the long-term interests of capitalism. Advanced capitalism needs well-trained labour. Without it, the individual capitalist state may fall behind its competitors in world markets. But long-term interests seldom enter into it. To make his workers redundant, close his plant etc. means less profit for the capitalist, yet nevertheless the capitalist class finds itself doing just that. So also with education. The dictates of this crazy system do not allow for common-sense (even from the point of view of capital). For one thing there are no jobs available for all those expensively-trained students (especially those coming out of so-called higher education). The Times reported (16th January 1976) over 1750 vacancies in colleges, universities and polytechnics which could not be filled in the south-east alone. From the point of view of the capitalist class, with a situation like that, why not cut?

So the hatchet men of the capitalist class (currently the Labour party) start looking for ways of saving the capitalist class’s money. Apart from straight cutting, a future hatchet “person”, Mrs. Thatcher has been suggesting one way for the capitalist class to have its cake and eat it. The method? Easy; you have more colleges, universities etc., without the State paying for them. Which is in effect what she recommended when she open the new University College of Buckingham. This was launched in February of this year as the first "private” university to be started this century in the UK. It is private because there are no direct “public funds” being used for its establishment and maintenance as distinct from other universities in the country. Of course in the long run if this experiment survives, most of the money will come from the capitalist class anyway, but for the moment the state is not being asked to fork out directly. Which is what Mrs. Thatcher meant when she said that she hoped in the future universities would be “encouraged to take their destinies more into their own hands and to embark upon institutional adventures which do not involve the lobbying of public opinion or government departments.” (Times Higher Education Supplement, 13th February 1976). She means of course those that do not require direct public funding.

But apart from this limited possibility, the capitalist class must look at the situation as it is. It must have been clear to the capitalist class what education was costing them. In the financial year 1975/76 for example the total cost of education (admittedly including “libraries, science and arts” government figures) will be £6,164 million. The only item of government expenditure which would cost more this year is the one misleadingly called “social security”. The remedy was to cut £618 million for next year and £1,000 million from the education budget for the following two financial years.

The effects of the cuts were predicted in the run-up to the publication of the government White Paper on public expenditure. One result forecast by the Times education correspondent (23 January 1976) was a large number of staff redundancies; hardly a difficult prediction since there was a serious unemployment problem in the teaching profession before the cuts were introduced. Among the other estimated effects from the cuts are higher school meals charges, reductions in the numbers of students undertaking higher education courses from an estimated 800,000 to 600,000 in the year 1981, a standstill on staff appointments, a reduction in the target for the number of teachers, a standstill on the numbers of children able to attend nursery education etc.

The reaction of the teacher unions was as predictable as the results of the cuts themselves. Fred Jarvis, general secretary of the National Union of Teachers, was typical. He complained about the wastage: it had cost millions of pounds to train teachers who were to be made redundant. “The amount of public money wasted in training them would be about £50m. ‘This is the economics of Bedlam’, he said.” (The Times 20 January 1976.) But it is the economics of capitalism, which unfortunately he and most of his members continue to support. Most of the unions talked of “action” to oppose the cuts. Teacher unions received motion after motion with “demands” for no cuts, opposition to redundancies, opposition to closures, etc. The National Association of Teachers in Higher and Further Education for its 1976 conference has a list of 111 motions almost all of which relate to opposition to the cuts, or financing and salaries. All about as effective as trying to stop Concorde by throwing paper darts at it.

In all the loud and useless flannel of the unions, there are few signs of any realization that the chaos in their lives and those of their children is the result of the capitalist system. For example the Technical Journal for December 1975 when commenting on the disastrous effects the cuts would have in higher education grudgingly acknowledged that as the funding of much of further education “is closely linked to industry, this sector of education has always encountered the occasional potential redundancy situation due to such factors as a declining industry.” Although that could qualify for the understatement of the year, it nonetheless demonstrates something of an awareness (as yet alas, dim) that anarchy in production must lead to havoc in human existence.

Of course it often used to be possible for expensively trained teachers who were suddenly made expensively unemployed to leave the UK and find work abroad, at least in some of the Commonwealth countries. But just as capitalism is world-wide, so also are its periodic crises and so also therefore is unemployment. The Observer (8th February 1976) reported that it is no longer possible for British teachers to get jobs abroad. It even warns teachers against accepting jobs if lucky enough to be offered them. The article ends by pointing out that in the USA teachers can find education authorities running out of money and not having sufficient to pay the wages! So much for “successful” capitalism.

The SPGB is not joining in the campaign to oppose cuts or redundancies. It is pointing out to workers instead, that the cutting down in teachers and resources, while schools are short of both, is yet another of the endless dilemmas created by a social system where cost is paramount. The dilemma in this case is for those who protest at cuts but cannot suggest where the money is to come from, and will go on supporting capitalism which creates such problems.

Ronnie Warrington

A Chemical Octopus (1950)

From the July 1950 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Imperial Chemical Industries Ltd. have issued their Annual Report for 1949. The Report contains some interesting information.

The capital, issued and converted into stock is £84 millions; the Reserves are £39 million, making a total of £123 millions. There is also a Central Obsolescence and Depreciation Provision of £35 millions. The Company has 93 subsidiaries covering Europe, S. & E. Africa, N. America, S. America, Australasia, Far East, Near East and Indian Sub-Continent. Its products include Chemicals, Metals, Paper Goods, Lime, Leather Cloth, Dyestuffs, Explosives, Glass, Paints, Plastics, Salt, Petrol and Cement.

There is a common idea that nationalisation is the last word in combination but what nationalised industry can compare with this gigantic concern which produces such a variety of different products and whose tentacles stretch all over the earth? The direct exports alone amounted to £38 million.

There is, however, an ominous statement in the early part of the report:

“German and Japanese competition has been limited, partly owing to restrictions imposed by the occupying powers, but there are now clear signs that this competition will become a problem in the near future.” (page 4)

There are, however, brighter statements further on. For instance:

“The production of the Dyestuffs Division has shown a remarkable increase during recent years. On the outbreak of war in 1939 responsibility for meeting the demands for dyestuffs throughout Great Britain and the Commonwealth fell largely on the Dyestuffs Division. Production had therefore to be increased by modifying plants and improving and shortening the chemical processes involved' and the measures were so successful that in 1949 production was about three times as great as in pre-war years, although substantially the same plants were in use.” (page 6)

And further:

“African Explosives and Chemical Industries, Ltd., in which the Company and De Beers Industrial Corporation Ltd. are the principal shareholders, achieved new records in the sales of both explosives and fertilizers. Devaluation has increased the profitability and length of life of African gold mines.” (page 12)

And still further:

“The prospects of future trading in China remain obscure. It appears to be the intention of the new Government to use Government trading agencies for all exports and imports but it is likely that they will continue to do business with the local representatives of foreign manufacturing companies, if it is in their interest to do so.” (page 13)

We have been reading for some time news of the disturbances in Malaya, of the bandit menace and of the bodies of troops drafted there to root out the bandits. We have even seen a newsreel of Mr. Strachey handling a gun on one of the expeditions against the bandits. These matters make the following extract from the report topical and interesting:

“Imperial Chemicals (Malaya) Ltd. was able to exceed by 20 per cent its record turnover of the previous year, mainly because of increased supplies, and its profits were again very satisfactory.” (page 13)

We have often been urged in the past to admire the philanthropy and disinterestedness of individuals and companies that make large donations to universities. Being of a suspicious turn of mind we have—suspected. In their earnest desire to impress shareholders with their efficiency and foresight the directors of the company have thrown some light on the subject. This is what they say:

“If a large research organisation, such as the Company's, is to justify its existence over a prolonged period, it is essential that it should be able to secure the services of numbers of able and well-trained scientists, and also to have available a continuous flow of new fundamental knowledge which it can use in solving the practical problems of industry. For this reason it is in the interests of the Company to assist, wherever it can, the universities and other educational bodies, which are responsible for the training of scientists and are engaged in the production of new basic knowledge. For many years, therefore, the Company has made a practice of assisting educational establishments with financial grants. . . .” (page 15)

Then follows a list of some of these grants which include: Post graduate research fellowships about £55,000 a year, and in addition over £4,000 a year on scholarships; Special donations about £20,000 a year; special researches about £8,000 a year; Grants for apparatus and chemicals about £25,000. This makes a total of about £112,000 a year. After the list of donations we find this naive paragraph:

“Except in the cases of the special researches, which are on subjects of direct interest to the company, no attempt is made to influence in any way the choice of the research projects, and the company’s practice of making these grants without attaching conditions is regarded by the University authorities as one of their most valuable features.” (page 15)

How very altruistic. The innocence of them! As if the grateful universities won’t give them “most favoured nations” treatment in order to get further donations. As a matter of interest we get a line on this a few pages later in the Report:

“The Company has found difficulty in recruiting in satisfactory numbers the high grade technical staff which is required, not only for design and construction, but also for all aspects of research and production. Energetic action if needed to increase the number of scientific and technical graduates coming from universities and technical colleges, and to improve and extend its teaching of science in the schools where there is generally a regrettable shortage-of science masters. The Company is maintaining particularly close contact with the Appointments Boards of the Universities and as a result it has been possible to recruit during the year 265 chemists, physicists; engineers and other scientists, of whom 200 came direct from the Universities. This will help the Company to carry out its extensive and varied research programme and to maintain its high standard of technical management.” (page 20)

So they get what they pay for!

There is a great deal more of interest in this Report but we cannot take up more space recording it. However we must not conclude without recording the following tribute to those upon whose work the Company owes its prosperity.

“The Company’s progress was sustained last year, as it has always been in the past, by the loyalty and zeal which was shown, in this country and overseas, by factory managers, foremen and workpeople, commercial, technical and clerical staff, and all other grades of employees. The Directors would like to record their sincere appreciation of such conscientious service and cooperation and wish to mention in particular the support which has been given to schemes for increasing the manufacturing efficiency of the Company.” (page 21)

Now that is real decent of them. It is true that words are cheap, it is also true that those who lack zeal get the sack; still, it is very sporting of them— three cheers for the Company!

Gilmac

Sting in the Tail: Suffer the little children (1996)

The Sting in the Tail column from the July 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

Suffer the little children

Stephen Dorrell, the health secretary, is expected to order health regions to give more priority to paediatric intensive care beds after reports that numbers have fallen dangerously low.

In one of the worst cases, Nicholas Geldard, aged 10, died from a brain haemorrhage last December after being taken to four hospitals and across the Pennines in a snowstorm because no bed could be found for him.

Mr Dorrell’s action could be less than compassionate, however, for according to the Sunday Telegraph (19 May):

“He will also expect at least 33 of the beds to be opened by the winter, when demand is at its highest and to avoid any scandals in the run-up to the general election. ”

This is another example of the cynical contempt the Tory Party and its "Torygraph" supporters display towards the health care of the working class.

Ways of seeing

The 60th anniversary of the Spitfire, one of Britain’s World War Two aircraft, had one Jonathan Glancey rhapsodising over its “beauty” in the Independent (8 May).

He informed us that the Spitfire was “one of the most beautiful machines made”. It was “glamorous, romantic, balletic”, and in case we still hadn’t got the message:

“The spirit of the Spitfire is deeply embedded in our culture, a machine that somehow speaks of cricket, the sonnets of Keats . . ."

All this tripe about a machine designed to kill and destroy, a weapon in British capitalism’s struggle to hold onto its empire, markets and place as a world plunderer. Can something like this really be beautiful?

For us, a kidney machine or even the humble washing machine, which at least reduces drudgery, are far, far more beautiful than the Spitfire and every other instrument of death and destruction.

Utopian “Socialists”

The syllabus of the Socialist Scholars Conference held in New York City in April had 42 speakers listed to speak on 11 subjects under the general heading "Two Cheers for Utopia—Re-imagining Socialism".

This looked promising; after all, when scholars get together to talk about “socialism" they invariably mean schemes for patching-up capitalism through programmes of reforms. Could this really be a conference to discuss genuine socialism?

Even more promising was the statement in the syllabus that:

". . . we believe a little utopia is precisely what our society needs. "

Alas, further reading revealed that for these scholars “Re-imagining Socialism" amounted to such “outlandish” proposals as a guaranteed income, opposition to privatisation and welfare cuts, etc.

This is utopia? Compared to our vision of a classless, moneyless, worldwide society of production for use, the imagining of the SSC is very limited indeed.

Spot that tune

The terms of reference of the Hearing committee of inquiry into the future of further education in Britain spell out what the inquiry’s priorities will be.

The terms emphasise the need for universities to provide graduates with the skills required by industry, and although the need to be internationally competitive gets ten mentions, scholarship gets only four.

Anyone who is shocked by such priorities should remember that this is capitalism, and what is good for business will inevitably come first. This is why a committee dealing with education draws five of its sixteen members from business.

The fact is that the cost of education is borne by our masters, and isn’t it still true that who pays the piper calls the tune?

What Sid wasn’t told

Remember Sid? He was the creation of the ad-men in the Tories’ campaign to persuade your ordinary punter to buy shares in the privatised industries in the hope that ever-rising dividends and share prices would bring him to love the capitalist system.

Of course, Sid wasn’t told that owning shares in a company didn’t mean it would never sack him, and far from having a say in company policy he wouldn’t stand a chance against the big institutional investors. Now, the directors want shot of him altogether because he is a “costly pest” (Independent, 14 May).

Yes, lots of Sids did buy shares, about £ 1,000 worth on average, but mostly they flogged ’em, took the money and ran—in 1987 British Gas had 4.4 million shareholders but now has only 1.7 million.

Sid was only the front-man in yet another foolish attempt to achieve the impossible—making capitalism operate in the interest of the vast majority.

Hanson hits out

Lord Hanson, multi-millionaire turned social pundit has penned a blistering attack on “destructive journalism” in an article in the Spectator (16 May).

The noble lord writes “Destructive journalism fosters the believe that politicians routinely evade the truth and break their promises."

Politicians telling porkies? We are shocked at the suggestion. Broken promises? Tut, tut. What calumny.

But Hanson is really upset at what is written about businessmen: “They are castigated for seeking profit, damaging the environment and much else besides.”

As if businessmen would stoop so low, me lord!

Life and Times: Follow the money (2025)

The Life and Times column from the May 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

A recent BBC investigative programme (File on Four) focused on the financial crisis in British universities, revealing how most of them are urgently trying to make savings by cutting staff numbers and courses on offer. It showed how one of the underlying factors is the falling numbers of students from abroad who pay higher fees than domestic students and on whom many universities have become reliant. The result, so the programme disclosed, was desperate attempts by some institutions to recruit overseas students, even to the extent of overlooking poor qualifications or poor knowledge of English, which may lead to cheating in exams and other assessment exercises and which is then also often overlooked.

The customer is right

But, as I frequently hear from friends in my own local university, the reverberations of the funding problems are more wide-ranging and are causing considerable stress and insecurity to those employed there. One of the greatest concerns for academic employees, apart from the ever-present risk of being pressured into ‘voluntary’ severance or simply declared redundant, stems from the fact that the customer (ie the student) is now very much ‘in charge’. Gone are the days when universities were largely funded by government and regarded by most as places of ‘higher learning’ which didn’t need to be too concerned about where the money was coming from. Gone are the days when students, apart from not being charged for the tuition they received, received local authority grants to cover their living expenses. And gone too are the days when students would look up to their lecturers and see university education as a bonus that would serve them in all manner of useful ways in the years to come. Now that governments no longer fund universities to any significant degree and students have to pay for both living expenses and tuition out of their own (or their parents’) pockets, the tables are well and truly turned.

The anxiety of universities to attract students and then keep them happy when they get there has meant that the students now largely regard their lecturers as servants and are ready to complain and demand redress when things (even small things) don’t go entirely to plan for them – for example if they don’t feel sufficiently well instructed (or even ‘entertained’) by a lecturer or are given lower exam marks than they hoped for or expected. And such complaints are taken deadly seriously by the university authorities themselves with lecturers required to explain themselves and a student’s dissatisfaction not infrequently resulting in a rap over the knuckles for their lecturer or even a formal disciplinary process. And the students’ assessment of their lecturers’ ‘performance’ and the ‘scores’ they are asked to give to them at the end of each module will feed into the university’s decision about whether, for example, a lecturer passes probation, is promoted, or is made redundant if reductions in staff costs are deemed necessary. And though campus trade unions rail against this, they are, so I’m told, rarely successful in achieving any relaxation of these policies or reversal or mitigation of penalties imposed on individual union members who go to them for help.

Obedient zombies

The other thing my university friends tell me is that those who manage to negotiate the hurdles and achieve promotion to higher posts are then required to administer the above processes. In other words, they are required to put the fear of god into their ‘lower level’ colleagues. And just like most others detailed to do ‘the dirty work’ in the repressive regime that employment represents, they usually agree to it and so accept the role of (as one of my University friends puts it) ‘obedient zombie’, even if some at least carry out the tasks required of them with some reluctance but maybe justifying it to themselves on the grounds that they are somehow acting in everyone’s collective interest.

The student-as-paying-customer model that now prevails is also backed up by government policy whereby anyone dissatisfied with the service they have received from their university has the choice of two different bodies they can complain to – either the Office for Students or the Office of the Independent Adjudicator for Higher Education. They can claim redress either in the form of changes to their grades or financial compensation from their University. But, over and above this, universities run scared that such complaints, if upheld, may be made public and so risk damaging their reputation and discouraging future students from applying, which would adversely affect their already precarious financial position. This of course increases the pressure put upon staff and departments within the university to make sure that, if complaints are made to them by students, ‘satisfaction’ is given, so that such complaints do not risk being taken outside the University with the possible consequences of that. Hence the prevailing mentality of ‘the student is always right’.

Money, money, money

What does all this mean for university staff in the current system? It means, for one thing, long hours to fill in for the work of staff who have left via ‘voluntary’ severance or redundancy. It means that other aspects of their work, in particular their research, that they may have been hoping would give them satisfaction and inspiration and increase the sum of human knowledge in their discipline takes second place to something that may seem to have become a meaningless and alienating grind. And it means more stress and insecurity of not knowing if their job will be safe come the next money-saving operation – whichever euphemism is used for it (take your pick between ‘reorganisation’, ‘review’, ‘restructuring’, ‘redesign’, or anything else). The undeniable reality is that the system we live in, in employment and much else, dictates that money shall be the ultimate arbiter. In extreme cases it may decide whether people live or die. In others – and this applies to university employees – it will decide whether they feel relatively comfortable with their life on a day-to-day basis or whether they lead an anxious and insecure existence sweating on their employer’s judgement about whether there is enough money in the coffers to continue employing them.

Howard Moss

Universities Challenged (2011)

From the September 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Government White Paper on Higher Education (HE) entitled ‘Students At the Heart of the System’ has created controversy since its publication in the summer. As the new academic year begins, we take a look at its likely impact.

The White Paper is to form the basis for a new Higher Education Bill in 2012, after the current consultation period ends in a few weeks time. In truth it is the latest in a rather long line of papers and reports setting out a future for HE in the UK since the 1960s. In particular, it follows in the footsteps of the Robbins Report of 1963, the Dearing Report in 1997 and then – most recently of all – the Browne Report of 2010 commissioned by the Labour Government.

During this time, HE in the UK has seen developments that have been similar to those affecting university sectors in many other parts of the world. In particular, there has been a massive expansion in student numbers  – impelled by, among other factors, the conversion of former polytechnics and colleges of HE into what are sometimes termed the ‘post-1992 universities’ and the increased government funding that then allowed them to rapidly expand. There has also been a significant expansion in vocational HE beyond traditional areas of engagement like teaching, law and the ministry. This has been reflected in the growth of what some have considered to be more esoteric subjects like sports management and herbal medicine, and particularly in the development of Business Schools, which only grew to be of any significance in the UK in the 1980s but which are now commonly one of the biggest discipline areas in universities of all kinds.

Unsustainable

The previous Labour government famously set a target of 50 percent of school leavers going on to study at university and while this has never been reached, decent enough progress was nevertheless made, prompting some to complain of a ‘dumbing down’ of entry standards. In 1955 less than 5 per cent of school leavers went on to study in HE, a proportion that had risen to 12 per cent by 1980, to 19 per cent in 1990 and then to over 35 per cent for most of the years in the last decade.

This growth, like many things in the market economy, has happened for a reason. As capitalism has developed and its operations have become more sophisticated, the working class of wage and salary earners who operationally run capitalism from top to bottom have needed to have a different and often more developed set of skills than was required, say, a hundred years ago. While the economy of course still needs production workers, miners and other manual and physically skilled staff, capitalism has developed a vast administrative apparatus around buying and selling, the service economy and the state sector which is needed to ensure that this all runs smoothly.

Figures from the Office of National Statistics have shown that the percentage of workers in the UK employed in manufacturing and construction fell from around a third in 1983 to just under 20 per cent in recent years, confirming a long-term trend. At the same time there has been a significant growth in the service sector, in particular. This has necessitated government encouragement for more young people to seek out the type of education and skills supposedly provided by a university education. The problem has been that in doing this, the government has created a huge amount of additional expenditure to be funded out of general taxation, and as we have seen on a range of fronts in recent times, state expenditure tends to have its limits – especially as the burden of taxation has ultimately to fall on the profit-generating sectors of the economy (i.e. the private sector).

As more and more students have entered HE the cost of their tuition as well as contributions towards their living costs have become too burdensome for the state. This has over the last two decades led to periodic attacks on what many students of earlier generations took for granted. These attacks have included the removal of the right for students unemployed during the holiday periods to claim benefits for this, through to the full-scale assaults on the student grant system and the highly controversial introduction of tuition fees (with students loans to pay for them) mooted under John Major’s Tory government but carried out by Labour under Blair.

In this respect, the Government White Paper is but the latest in a long line of initiatives with a common thread and a common purpose.

Main features

There are several aspects to what is proposed currently and little if any of it is genuinely new. Indeed, what is most striking about it is how it usually develops existing approaches or applies other approaches already implemented by government in other fields. The main features of the proposals in this respect are these.

• Increase debt and reduce (or disguise) the burden on taxation. This is a continuation of what occurred under Blair and Brown when tuition fees and student loans were introduced.  The approach this time is more radical (if radical be the right word) as tuition fees will rise hugely from £3,375 to between £6,000 and 9,000 a year, depending on institution. This is to make up for the fact that in England at least (Wales and Scotland will stick to variations on their existing systems for now), the funding that government gives to support student tuition is to be removed almost completely. This will happen to all subjects except those already in receipt of higher levels of subsidy from the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) because of their elevated cost levels e.g. science subjects, medicine and engineering. To achieve this change, a modification of the student loan system is to be introduced whereby those earning over £21,000 after graduation will begin to pay back their loan through the taxation system with interest charged at RPI plus 3 per cent. In many respects, this is becoming ever more like a disguised graduate tax, with the advantage for the government that those leaving the country after they graduate will still have to pay it back. Like most taxes – whether disguised or not – it  will eventually mean that wages will have to rise, other things being equal, so that people can pay it, in this way cutting into employer’s profits in an indirect and more subtle way.  Furthermore, the attitude of government to the huge (and about to become even bigger) student loan book is also revealing, as they estimate that the amount borrowers will be liable to repay will have risen to £70 billion by 2016-7. Few seemed to have noticed that the government has just asked Rothschilds to develop a plan for ‘how to monetise the loan book’ including ‘selling [the loans] outright to financial investors, or selling loans to one or more regulated companies set up to manage the loans’ (White Paper, p.24). Clearly the recent financial crisis and its causes has been forgotten already.
• Outsource/privatise where possible, introducing ‘competition’. Until recently, the only private-sector university in Britain was the University of Buckingham, though now BPP University College of Professional Studies (owned by the Apollo private equity group) has acquired taught degree awarding powers and others are lining themselves up to be granted university status. This is in part an attempt to provide competition so that existing universities don’t all charge fees at the higher end of the permitted range (as most are proposing to do at present) while being a philosophical nod in the direction of ‘free markets’. The main problem here is that fears about the quality of academic provision declining in these circumstances have some substance. The proliferation of so-called ‘degree mills’ in countries like the US and Canada has long been an issue (where students can effectively buy a degree) and the largest private university in the world by most counts, Phoenix University, Arizona, has seen its applications plummet in the last two years because it has been subject to legal action by no less than 10 Attorney-Generals in different states over its ‘deceptive practices’. Coincidentally, and perhaps unfortunately, it is also owned by the Apollo private equity group.
• Increase links between the universities and the private sector, binding the two ever closer together. Again, this has been happening for years and it is standard practice for universities to check when they are validating new courses that they meet the needs of relevant employers. However, the government is concerned by the recent decline in ‘sandwich years’ for students with business and in internships, and wants to see these encouraged. It also wants to see the links between research and private business developed and commercial opportunities exploited to the full. Interestingly, postgraduate courses already receive little by way of HEFCE funding and have had higher fees to make up the difference as it has long been assumed that much postgraduate study is sponsored by employers (something the government would like to see extended to undergraduate study too, wherever possible).
• Target state support rather than universalise it. Student grants to help with living costs will be targeted at the poorest families only and the old education maintenance allowance for 16-19 year olds studying before they get to university is to be abolished on the grounds of cost. Similarly, HEFCE funding is only likely to remain for those high-cost courses that students couldn’t otherwise pay for themselves out of their loans, and which employers would be reluctant to sponsor as this wouldn’t be appropriate or they would be too expensive, such as medicine, veterinary science, etc.
• Set up a complex regulatory framework to oversee it all. The Browne Report had recommended uniting HEFCE, the Quality Assurance Agency for HE (the university academic quality watchdog) and two other related bodies into the one organisation dealing with the oversight of HE. This will not happen now, and the complexity of the proposals, the loans, the targeting and the new entrants to university status means that the regulators will clearly have their work cut out.

The devil is in the detail

The details of much of this could change and probably will, but the general trajectory is clear: a business-led HE sector; an expansion of vocational courses; students in debt for most of their lives, wedded to wage-slavery just to pay off their loans (and that before any consideration of mortgages and likely personal debt). As there are over 120 universities currently in the UK it is likely that some will go bust (and the government has explicitly stated that it will not ‘underwrite’ the finances of the existing HE providers), especially given the likely falling away of full-time student numbers consequent on higher fees. And the drive for ‘efficiency’ in the HE sector will be pushed ever harder, with the government setting up the Diamond Review into how universities can be run more efficiently (if this doesn’t entail recommending that universities ‘outsource’ much of their central services like Finance and Human Resources it will be a surprise).

The most obvious and predictable effect of these changes is likely to be a move away from full-time HE by 18-21 year olds, reversing the decades-old trend for more school-leavers to go to university. The precise extent of this is likely to depend on the buoyancy or otherwise of the job market, with those who can often choosing employment and relevant training over university and a lifetime of debt. It is also not difficult to predict a rise in the coming years of students studying part-time and flexibly alongside their employment, in many cases linking one to the other through programmes of negotiated work-based learning, for instance (another one of the growth areas in HE in recent times) where people receive academic reward for their personal learning in and through the workplace.

A sane society

It is clear that many potential students have already been put off university for life. But of course, as the old saying goes, it doesn’t have to be like this. Education should be available for those needing it and people shouldn’t expect to have to commit themselves to a lifetime of drudgery to pay for it either. Indeed, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with studying a subject like history or art simply because you are interested in it, but this has become more difficult in recent years and will now be more difficult still as pressures from business and through the job market dictate that students have to study what will make them employable.

Nevertheless, one of the more interesting developments in the last ten years or so has been the whittling away of some of the old snobbishness and elitism that has existed in universities across the country. An unintended consequence of the rise in vocationally-oriented courses has been that some have discovered that what is often called the ‘knowledge capital’ of society exists mainly outside the Ivory Towers. To many professors this is a frightening concept that challenges their very legitimacy as ‘the experts’. But experiential learning – that is learning by doing, typically in the workplace – has started to come into its own, along with reflection on how people work and learn together this way. The deliberate division between learning passively in a seminar room or lecture theatre and learning through doing has sometimes been necessary but when reinforced systematically as has been the case in HE until recently it became a strangely lopsided way for an education system to operate – the ‘University of Life’ is indeed a valuable and important place and universities were in denial about it for quite some time. Stripped of the functionalism required by employers and the market, this could be a useful educational development.

We can certainly add to this that a co-operative society of the future would seek to ensure that a university education would be genuinely meaningful – not just for the participants but for society as a whole, being finally freed from the narrow constraints of the market and money, loans and liabilities. Situated within a society of common ownership and with common purposes for the dissemination of wealth and happiness it could indeed, finally, be part of a rounded University of Life.

Dave Perrin

Dons on the dole - part 2 (1981)

From the September 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

(In the June Socialist Standard a correspondent who is also a university lecturer reported on the financial cuts being planned for universities by the government’s University Grants Committee (UGC). The measures have now been announced and our correspondent looks at their effects.)

The statistics have already had detailed coverage in the media. Roughly they add up to the loss of 3,000 lecturing jobs and 20,0000 student places over the next three to four years. The Association of University Teachers (AUT) said the government had tried to give “academic respectability to a savage cut”. The National Union of Students called the measures “crude educational vandalism”. The pro-Vice Chancellor of one of the worst hit institutions, Salford University, said: “We are shocked, appalled and dismayed”.

In my own university we are still unclear on precisely what is going to happen. Our overall reduction in grant is smaller than most of us expected, but some departments, including my own, have been recommended for “concentration” with corresponding departments in other nearby institutions. Talks among the authorities of these institutions and my own will decide in which university each subject will be concentrated and whether “concentration” will mean losing jobs or just moving house for those of us whose subjects are_transferred.

The local AUT’s view is that the university will take the course that it sees as being in its best overall interest and that we must therefore be prepared to resist if necessary. What has appeared to make Union resistance more possible now than it seemed before is that the UGC had a last-minute change of heart and, instead of telling universities in precise detailed terms how to achieve their economies, simply issued figures of percentage cuts for each institution and told each one in only very general terms as to where its cuts should be operated. The AUT claims that its own representations to the UGC were responsible for this change of emphasis and that Union pressure can also therefore bring unhoped for changes of emphasis (from individual universities). This may be so, but it’s still hard to see how saving one lecturer’s job in one subject will not automatically result in another lecturer’s job being lost in another subject. No matter how much juggling is done, money will only be there for a certain number of salaries. What the UGC have not yielded on is the cuts themselves. They are allowing individual universities more flexibility in distributing their share of the cuts but have made it quite clear that, whatever the attitude of the Union and the universities, the cuts will have to be made.

What surprised most people was not the extent of the grant reductions but the way in which they were spread. A minority of institutions have been particularly hard hit, while the majority are suffering rather less than expected. The Sunday Times (5/7/81) explained this by pointing out that “what really lay behind the UGC’s decision was . . . cost-effectiveness”. In other words the main factor in assessing where the axe should fall was the cheapness with which universities had shown themselves capable of operating their courses. Those whose unit costs were expensive were most heavily penalised. Those whose cost per student was low came off best. As the Vice-Chancellor of the least affected university of all, Bath, was proud to point out: “We’re getting better results for a lower investment” (Sunday Times 5/7/81).

For a number of years now both Labour and Tory governments have talked about the need to make universities more receptive to the “needs of society”. For, although education has grown up in response to the ever increasing needs of the profit system for an increasing number of educated intellectually flexible wage slaves (which is what politicians mean by the “needs of society”), the university sector, because of its traditional “independence”, has been more difficult to mould to capitalism’s requirements and has developed in a more willy-nilly and more expensive fashion than the rest. Governments now want to bring the universities into line, to make them respond more efficiently and more cheaply to the economic needs of capitalism. And what better time than in a period of depression when cuts in so-called “public expenditure” seem especially justified and when so many people in other occupations are losing their jobs.

It’s possible of course that the government is being short-sighted and that, if the depression doesn’t last, employers in Britain will soon find themselves short of the skills of university graduates and will find it difficult to compete in producing and selling their goods on an expanding world market. But capitalism is nothing if not unpredictable and governments committed to running it have to take chances—even if this means wasting human talents and energies on a large scale and having, as a possible end result, increased economic chaos.

The cuts also highlight another kind of wastage of talents and energies that has arisen out of capitalism’s unmanageability. During the 70s universities throughout the country were told that the only way to keep their staff was to increase student numbers. With competition from the polytechnics and a decreasing number of 18-year-olds in the population it was assumed that universities would not be able to do this and that the government would be able to point to this as a reason for making cuts in finance. But a different thing happened. Instead of waiting for students to come to them, (as in the past) universities started to recruit vigorously. Academics put an enormous amount of time, energy and ingenuity into finding ways of attracting new students, and many students were found where before they seemed not to exist. Then came 1979 and a UGC visit to universities told the academics that they’d been finding too many students and they would have to cut down. Now in 1981 they’re being told even more forcefully that all that time, energy and ingenuity has been wasted and that they should have been looking for ways of saving government money not spending more.

The UGC’s letter to universities announcing the cuts said: “Reductions in resources are being imposed at a time when demand for university educations is still rising”. And this was an unwitting admission of the kind of society we live in—a society in which goods and services, including education, are not there to satisfy people’s needs but are only available when the needs of the profit system decree they will be available. The highly educated people at our “centres of academic excellence” should think hard on this and ponder on whether there isn’t a less irrational more harmonious way of organising human affairs.

Howard Moss

The Row About Overseas Students (1976)

From the August 1976 issue of the Socialist Standard

Students who come to the UK from abroad to study make another part of the education pot that is at boiling point. But as with the reasons for the cuts in the education system (discussed last month) so also with the explanation of the row about overseas students. The causes have nothing to do with so-called academic freedom, or colour prejudice, or the duty to help developing countries. The cause of the dispute is within the economics of capitalism itself in one of its periodic crises.

Cuts are demanded in state expenditure by the capitalist class and in education in particular. One of the things which have been cut back on is the “subsidy” to overseas students. This so-called subsidy relates to the fact that the fees paid by all students to universities and colleges of higher education do not in fact represent the true cost of the course they will be attending. The real cost will be many times higher and the balance comes from central and local government grants to the universities and colleges, together with whatever else they can squeeze from private sources. Overseas students (estimated to be about 95,000 for the academic year 1973/4) therefore apparently cost the capitalist class considerable amounts.

For example the “price” of one year of a 3-year course in science at University College London, for the academic year 1975/76 was £157. But this figure probably represents no more than 10 per cent of the true cost of providing the services and equipment available to each student on a science course at UCL. So the call grows from the politicians (the mouthpieces of the capitalist class) and others involved to make students who come here to study from abroad pay the market price.

Material Reasons

The facilities for overseas students are claimed to be given on the basis of the moral duty of the country to help educate those of poorer countries where an education system is not provided. At times it almost gets down to the level of the charitable good souls of the do-gooders’ camp versus the mean lot of the other side This is all window-dressing with as much relationship to the real issues involved as blow-football to an FA cup final. Cheap or cut-price education for people from other countries is merely part of what is known as overseas aid, something which most of the advanced capitalist countries have been doing for years. Overseas aid has never been given for other than purely material reasons—how much will the “giving” country make on it at the end of the day? It is the same with overseas students.

The furore really began when a Cabinet committee recommended an increase in the fees to overseas students of between 2 and 5 times to bring them up to more than £2000 p.a. for advanced students in the year 1976/77 (see The Times, 11th February 1976). This provoked Mr. Alan Phillips, General Secretary of the World University Service, to say that the suggested increase would destroy Britain’s reputation as a haven for academic refugees (The Times, 12th February). Whether he himself really believes that the UK is a “haven” for refugees, academic or otherwise, only he knows. But when education is regarded as merely the best way to train man-power for the production line (as it is under capitalism), it does seem stretching it a little to make such wild statements! Is it a haven for those refugees that come to this country and cannot afford to keep themselves without doing a full time job, making studying if not impossible, at the least a most difficult task?

The arguments of the side supporting the move to increase the fees are equally spurious and at times nauseating. A letter was written to The Times (17th January 1976) by the Medical Officer of Warwick University, asserting that it is not only the fees that these students get on the cheap, since they also use resources other than academic ones. They are a drain on the National Health Service (he claimed) and they have different diseases and psychiatric problems from those of their British counterparts, costing considerable sums to treat. Worst crime of all “not only do the students themselves use the NHS but also they may bring their wives and even children.” What will he say to General Gowan (the butcher of the Biafrans but now respectably studying at Warwick University itself) when he comes in to see the medical department asking for some aspirin? It is often quite unbelievable to see the length the working class will go in defending their masters’ interests, or what they take to be their masters’ interests.

Profitable Investment

But capitalism does not need university medical officers to tell the workers the amount it has to pay to provide education as a form of aid. It has august bodies who will do some proper research for it, such as the British Council. They reported on 20th January this year that in the long term the overseas students were of great economic value to what the council called the country but of course means the capitalist class. And in a long analysis by The Times education correspondent (10th February 1976) the facts and figures to back this up are given.

He starts by saying that his initial reaction to the proposals for increasing the fees charged to overseas students is “one of guts abhorrence” to anything which would threaten the free movement and international concept of university and college education. There has never been any such freedom; but let us pass on to the more serious part of his report which, as even the most ill-educated member of the capitalist class (and there are plenty of those) will tell you, means money. The Times correspondent goes on to give some very sound reasons why it would not, paradoxical though it may seem, be in the interests of the capitalist class to raise the fees charged to overseas students, thus causing some of them to look for their studies elsewhere. He draws up the equivalent of a balance sheet showing the profit and loss from the overseas students trade. The cost is some £83 million p.a. But on the credit side, it is estimated that overseas students spend something like £75 million p.a. whilst they are over here. Add to that the fact that it is estimated that £40 million p.a. is spent at private schools which get some of the academic backwash of the so called “free movement” of students to the country. The capitalist class as a whole are already in credit. But the best is yet to come:

Add to all this the intangible, unquantifiable, but logical advantage to British exports. Students highly trained in this country who then proceed to important posts in their own country can exert great influence on contracts entered into with Britain for equipment, buildings and technical skills . . . And Lord Caradon, Britain’s former representative at the United Nations, said: ‘It is unanswerable that the foreign students who come to the country contribute in the money they bring with them far more than anything that is paid by this country on their education.’ The millions of pounds we spend on foreign students each year should be recognised as a considerable investment in the future prosperity of our country as well as a cheap and effective form of aid programme.

One can only add: “Q.E.D.”

Free Learning

Education is of course a carrot which can be used when the representatives of the British capitalist class are trying to sell goods abroad. "Buy British and get some education on the cheap.” One of the Professors of the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine recognised that when he wrote to The Times (18th February 1976) discussing Barbara Castle’s visit to Kuwait for the purposes of expanding the British export trade to that country. What better way to sell your goods has been invented? What was all that about academic havens and free movements . . .?

However, despite the fact that it obviously not profitable in the long-term interests of the capitalist class to increase fees, the increase took place. As explained last month, capitalism is not capable of being a rational efficient system, even within the confines of its own interests. Either short-term exigencies do not permit it, or those advising the capitalist class get it wrong. Either way it is haphazard and no “right” answers are possible.

Education under capitalism is not “free” and never has been. Freedom is a concept which is almost completely debased by its users within the confines of capitalist society. One of the most important aspects of Socialist society will be free access. This does not only mean unrestricted ability to take from what is produced and to be able to use and enjoy the means of production. In a Socialist society (and only in such a society) knowledge will be freely available for the benefit of all. Studying and education will merely be a part of a life-long process of physical and mental enrichment; not as now, a drudgery to be suffered when young. And in case anyone has missed the point, as there will be no countries but only one world society in Socialism, so the problems of the overseas student will quickly be placed in the dustbin of the problems of a previous society.

Ronnie Warrington