KCL student killed: Management honours student with dog food statue
Leo Gionleka, KCL Communists
On Tuesday 11 March a student was tragically killed while another was heavily injured by a drugged driver on the Strand.
There was a lot of fear, sadness, confusion, and anger among students as emergency services began to pile onto the main campus of KCL. Despite these shocking events, the university took no immediate action.
The response from the university was shockingly cold. No information was given other than there was an accident and that a pedestrian was killed.
It was up to the students and friends of the victim to pay tribute. A vigil was organised by students, in which management turned up 20 minutes late.
If that was not disgusting enough, only a day after the tragic accident, a massive dog statue was built on the Strand – metres away from where the student had been killed – for a dog food advert.
It is obvious that the university did not give a damn about the death of this student. They saw it simply as an incident to deal with and move on. Not a tragic loss of life which should receive the attention and respect it deserves.
Students deserve better than parasitic managements that treat students as cash cows and respond flippantly when they die. If the university was run by students and staff such tragic accidents would be treated with the care and dignity they deserve.
Thoughts from a cab driver
Lewis Griffiths, Cardiff
While in work today, a friend and colleague shot me a message on their way home:
“Got in an Uber home. Driver was Pakistani but lived in Russia for a while. A few sentences go by and he says ‘brother, I’m sorry to say this but capitalism is just awful’.”
He tells me how the driver went on to explain that 80-90 percent of his customers are just so tired and stressed because all they do is work and are desperate for change.
He pointed out that we pay plenty in tax and yet we have nothing to show for it, and how government building projects always shoot past five or ten times what they should cost because of people syphoning off the top.
The fact this driver had felt the need to apologise before decrying capitalism shows that it took a lot of consideration.
Breaking mentally with the system that you have been taught to trust in your whole life isn’t an easy thing to do, but when face-to-face with people every single day who are at the sharp end of the crisis, who can blame him?
Sometimes you get a real sense of the fury out there. Millions are drawing similar conclusions.
Have you read the news lately?
Tom Wood, Liverpool
If anything will turn you into a communist, it’s reading the news.
Today (19 March), I picked up a copy of The i newspaper. Page after page, it laid bare the crisis we are living through:
Front page – Generation Z faces benefit cuts for anxiety and depression.
Page 4 – A 16-year-old dies after an asthma attack in an understaffed hospital ward. Pages 6-7 – £5 billion slashed from benefits by 2030, impacting 1.8 million people.
Page 9 – Antidepressant use has skyrocketed: 4.8 million prescriptions in 2015-16, rising to nearly 6.9 million in 2023-24. The number of people out of work due to depression or anxiety has risen from 276,000 in 2019 to 315,000 in 2023.
Right next to this? Reports of civil service credit card spending jumping by £520 million in four years–blown on yacht clubs and parties.
Then come pages 10, 11, and 12, dedicated to war. We’re told British special forces are on standby for Ukraine “peacekeeping”. The EU has an €800 billion defense spending plan, while Britain’s army is “in crisis”—setting the stage for even more military funding.
Page 14 – Hundreds killed as Israel resumes attacks on Gaza.
Page 15 – A teenager plotted the worst school shooting in UK history. Over-50s are struggling to cope with the soaring cost of living.
The conclusion is inescapable: the system is in crisis. Things are getting worse. A deep sense of malaise grips society.
And who pays for it? Workers. While we suffer, politicians and state officials scramble to fund war and max out taxpayer-funded credit cards. Their yacht clubs and missiles come at the expense of our books and our medicine.
If these headlines make you angry, don’t despair. You’ve done the right thing by reading The Communist and supporting the building of a revolutionary party.
Capitalism’s dirty laundry
Lexi Sharratt, University of Sheffield
Sure as night follows day, if you wear clothes you’re going to have to wash them.
And if you’re a student, then you too can wash your clothes – as long as you pay up to £6 for every load of laundry, plus the cost of detergent!
All this is thanks to Circuit, the UK’s biggest washing machine rental service.
Circuit rent out their machines, saving university bureaucrats the hassle of running their own, while charging students monopoly prices and pocketing the cash. Just one of many parasitic contractors who have latched onto the marketised higher education system.
Circuit claims that the rollout of a new update, will have environmental benefits – reducing power usage in their laundries by up to three million kilowatt-hours a year.
Put another way, the update will save Circuit – and the private equity group who own it, HgCapital – around £800,000 every year, of which students and education won’t see a penny.
Laundry’s a chore. In 1917, the Bolsheviks in Russia strived to establish a system of public laundries, eliminating the drudgery of such tasks which primarily fell on women’s shoulders.
With today’s technology we could eliminate the drudgery of laundry and reduce its environmental impact. The only obstacle to this is the private ownership of these machines under capitalism.
As an owner of washing machines, Circuit’s CEO would probably claim to know all about spins and cycles. But I, for one, can’t wait to show him what a real revolution looks like!
Closedown for Notts TV
Valerie Baker, Nottingham
Notts TV, the university-run local news broadcaster that has operated for over a decade, will shut down in November – one of dozens of small broadcasters losing their licenses this year.
Notts TV provides hundreds of Nottingham Trent University (NTU) students with valuable work experience and launched many careers.
NTU, meanwhile, have cited the broadcaster’s limited student involvement as the reason for ending its investment, stating, “the numbers involved have been too small to warrant continued investment.”
However, a closer look reveals the true cause: mounting debts. Notts TV owed £1.7 million to creditors, including £765,000 to NTU itself.
And so after failing to increase revenue from 2023 to 2024, the broadcaster was deemed financially unsustainable. In short, it simply wasn’t making enough money for the university to keep it running.
This decision reflects a wider issue: the relentless demand for ever-increasing profits. Notts TV wasn’t in financial decline; it just didn’t grow fast enough.
In today’s system, steady profits aren’t enough – businesses, even those tied to public institutions, must expand continuously or face closure.
We must eliminate the profit motive from education and put universities firmly in the hands of students and staff.
Mayday for capitalism
T.W., Milton Keynes
On February 18, a Delta Airlines plane flipped over at Toronto Pearson Airport in Canada, injuring at least 18 of the 80 passengers on board. Two adults and a child remain in critical condition. It’s a miracle no one was killed.
The Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) is currently investigating icy conditions and strong winds as potential causes.
The lack of fatalities has been credited to the “textbook” response of emergency services. Yet these responders, who risked their lives battling flames and saving passengers, earn a fraction of what these airline corporate executives do.
And this isn’t an isolated incident – far from it. This marks the fourth commercial aviation disaster this month.
Across the industry we see fatigue, burnout, and breakdowns. Airlines’ cost-cutting practices are an open secret, much like corporate tax evasion – and the “mysterious” deaths of aviation whistleblowers.
Should our lives come second to profit?
Show Israel the red card
Owen Colbon, Liverpool
Football is a sport that naturally divides – us versus you, my team against yours – but it can also inspire moments of unity for a greater cause. This has been made clear with the “show Israel the red card” campaign.
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Started by Celtic fans, the campaign is based around fans holding up red cards to protest the crimes committed by the Israeli state against Palestinians.
Celtic fans are already well known for their left wing politics. At a game against Lazio – an Italian club infamous for their vocally antisemitic and Nazi ultras – Celtic fans displayed a banner of fascist dictator Mussolini hanging from a lamppost, with the words “follow your leader!”
The difference with this current protest is that it has sparked an international campaign of copycat protests, with 72 protests across 25 countries.
The aim of the campaign – organising a sports boycott of Israeli teams – reflects the international solidarity with Palestinians felt by workers across the world.
To really show Israel the red card, however, we need to go further than that: bring the fight to ‘our’ imperialists, use our power as workers to bring the war machine to a halt, and topple all these warmongers!
