Cardiff University has announced plans to cut 400 jobs, merge schools, and cut entire subjects such as music, in order to cut costs – mere months after Starmer’s tuition fee hike.
Scandalously, among the courses scrapped are the nursing courses. This announcement has been a shock for many.
In response, hundreds of staff and students turned up outside the Senedd for The Royal College of Nursing (RCN) and the University and College Union (UCU) protest on 5 February to demand that the government stop the cuts, with further action planned.
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What’s the context?
These cuts are not just taking place in Cardiff.
The crisis in higher education (HE) runs far deeper than many may realise. And the solution of government ministers and university vice-chancellors is to make university staff and students pay for it.
According to the Office for Students, 40 percent of English universities are running unsustainable deficits. Universities such as Huddersfield, York, Coventry, and Kent have reported severe deficits.
What is referred to as the ‘marketisation’ of education began during Blair’s New Labour government. And it has been ramped up ever since the 2008 crisis of capitalism.
By massively reducing direct government funding, opening up campuses to private contractors, and having universities compete with one another like businesses, we were told that efficiency and innovation would flourish in the HE sector. Instead, it’s leading to bankruptcies.
Marketisation was just plain old austerity: slashing public spending, and clawing back the money used to bail out the banks and keep the capitalist system chugging along.
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This brings us to the absurd situation we are in now. Whilst the vice-chancellor of Cardiff University, Wendy Larner, is on a £290,000 salary, we are told “there is no money” for socially important courses, to prevent cuts, or offer wage increases to the staff.
If “there is no money”, why does the government miraculously have billions of pounds available for military spending? They’ve always got the cash for bombs, but not books.
There’s plenty of money. But the ruling class prefers to use it for their own imperialist purposes, and to line their own pockets.
Why is this happening?
The attacks on HE are not an ideological choice. They flow from the logic of capitalism in crisis.
British capitalism is in chronic decline. It has been out-competed and out-muscled on the global stage for decades.
Quick profits have been – and still are – prioritised over investment in technology and skills. Finance capital demands instant profits. And markets are driven by immediate gains for speculators. Over decades, steel and ships were dropped in favour of stocks and shares.
This is now all catching up with British capitalism. This lack of investment continues to impact productivity in Britain, which is currently 20 percent lower than in France and Germany, and 30 percent lower than in the USA.
At root, this is the reason why workers are stuck working in precarious, low-wage jobs; and why public services like the NHS and education are starved of vital funding.
To temporarily overcome the problem, the government has borrowed money to fund public services. This has resulted in a public debt that is unsustainably high, at over 100 percent of GDP.
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Now, instead of helping, this debt has turned into its opposite and is dragging the economy down. It is costing the government almost £100bn in interest payments alone this year, all going to the bankers and speculators, leaving even less to spend on public services.
In turn, less investment in higher education means fewer skilled graduates, which will further hurt the development of British capitalism.
The UK economy is stuck in a downward spiral, fuelled by the logic of the capitalist system itself.
Because of this, even capitalist economists are predicting that Britain may have to receive an IMF bailout! This would come with demands that the government attack workers and the poor, by cutting public services like higher education even further.
The cuts that we are seeing today will be nothing compared to the tsunami of attacks looming on the horizon.
Labour will do nothing about it, because they’re to blame. They are the ones managing capitalism on behalf of the ruling class, the rich, and the bankers.
All this is the thin end of the wedge. Tariffs and trade wars in the coming period will crush British capitalism between the hammer and anvil of European, American, and Chinese competition.
A period of ‘stagflation’ – of high inflation and economic stagnation – is opening up for British capitalism, with workers and students being made to pay.
What to do?
The cuts at Cardiff are just the first domino. We can’t fight the entire crisis of capitalism here on our own. But we can show the way forward.
We need to have a widespread, united struggle. Students and staff should unite their struggle against university management, and fight to spread this across the entire HE sector.
And this struggle, in turn, should be connected to a wider struggle against the government and the big-business system they represent.
This struggle should include the nurses, NHS staff, and workers across the entire public sector. A massive, generalised movement is the only thing that could force concessions and prepare the way for a bigger, broader fightback.
One of the first tasks is to build stronger connections and coordinate activity across the country and across sectors.
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University management has worked hand in glove with successive capitalist governments to manage the decline of HE – starving it of funding and opening it up to the market.
They do not represent our interests. Ultimately, we must fight to take universities out of the hands of these fat cats, and put our campuses in the hands of staff and students, to be run for need, not profit.
First among our demands should be: open the books. If they say we are out of money, well let us take a look at the accounts, so we can see what money there is, and how it’s being invested.
We demand not just no cuts, but a massive programme of investment in Cardiff and across the entire HE sector.
The money is there to do it – it’s the bankers and the mega-rich who have it all. We need to expropriate them and put that wealth under the control of working people.
- Open the books! For staff and student control over our universities!
- Coordinate the fightback! Students and workers – unite and fight!
- No to cuts! No to fees! Make the billionaires pay for this crisis!
Is your RCP branch looking to campaign against cuts and closures? Use our template leaflet to hand out on campus?
