Tower Hamlets College – endgame?

Michael Farley, the beleagered Principal and widely blamed for precipitating the crisis at the college, may have blinked.
With the strike continuing, boosted by a well-attended rally last Saturday, the Principal has offered some concessions, such as finding alternative work for some of the 13 sacked workers and better voluntary redundancy packages.
Perhaps the Governors want the whole episode closed. After all, it can only embarrass some of them.
Well, the strike still goes as the offer was rejected.
It is obvious that a miscalculation was made with a heavy-handed ‘private-sector’ approach of giving employees 30 days notice, while bringing in a well-paid Vice Principal (when there hadn’t been one for years, and the college didn’t seem to notice)… and talk of an expensive computer system… plus Business Consultants…
Sounds like the NHS, doesn’t it?

What was the rush? Why did the Principal not come in more gracefully, consulting with employees, persuading them of his vision and thus convince them to adopt his strategy?

Another question concerns the role of Governors. Councillors and other local politicians and ‘ community leaders’ had a vote. Did they all vote for or against the Principal’s decision?
Did some Bangladeshi councillors, for example, agree to the culling of ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages) to the obvious detriment of Bengali (and Somali) students – many of them women and / or elderly?
They need to dispel this doubt and mobilise the local people to the cause of improving access to education and allowing people to join the mainstream.
After all, the goal is meant to be integration, rather than segregation, isn’t it?

Farid Bakht

ESOL Rally at Tower Hamlets College

ESOL stands for ‘English for Speakers of Other Languages’ though it is more common to hear ‘English as a Second Language’.
Whatever the distinction, funding cuts means that 1,000 places for classes will be lost.
Already 2,000 people are waiting for ESOL classes in Tower Hamlets, with many more in Hackney and all over London.

Thirteen people could lose their jobs.
Thousands more will lose the opportunity to learn.
The college also wants to cut youth & enrichment provision, mentorship schemes, learning mentors, administrative & tutorial support workers, health & social care courses, literacy and hair & beauty courses.
The choice is between profit and education.

Come to the rally on Saturday 12th September, from 2pm to 4pm. It will be held at Altab Ali Park, near Aldgate East Station, just south of Brick Lane.

Farid Bakht

Rally for Tower Hamlets College

Please show your support to the lecturers and students of Tower Hamlets College this Saturday, 12th September, 2009.
A rally will be held at Altab Ali Park, near Aldgate East station – at the southern end of Brick Lane/Osborn Street. It will start at 2PM.
This is part of an ongoing campaign to reverse the cuts in ESOL (English as a second language) courses which mean 800+ people will miss out on these vital language courses.
Cuts also mean lecturers losing their jobs.

Student anger is spreading

The Sunday Times has brought out a piece on student discontent with cuts in quality, hours, and teachers while fees continue to climb.
The latest stand-off at London Met can be seen in this light and confirms that it is not a one-off but a sign of a widespread malaise in a crucial part of a ‘knowledge economy’ or service economy, or whatever it is they call it these days. The Times does not come to any conclusion and is content to place this as another pressure point against New Labour. They cannot because they supported policies which have brought us to this point.
Unfortunately, both main parties have put market before commonsense and rich before poor. If your parents have money, use it… if not, get into debt…..
University professors in the eighties had to watch aghast as the Conservatives laid siege to their ‘ivory towers’.
The following generation of lecturers are well versed in the ways of the market, as are many professionals, and are adept at cutting budgets to ‘balance the books’. Or thought they were. Some are now on the sharp end.
London Met shows that both lecturers and students are victims and unprepared to survive in the post-credit crunch world.

Some students have been vocal in their objections to war in the Middle East. Others have had a long-standing affiliation with the green movement and demanded something be done about runaway climate change.
Looks like they will have to join the dots and figure out which political force has a coherent position linking the economy, war and climate change.

Meanwhile have a read of some of the Times take on student anger:

“Last weekend, it emerged that hundreds of finance and economics students at Bristol had lodged a detailed complaint with grievances ranging from marking being done by fellow students to rising class sizes and cuts in exams from three hours to two.

The latest large-scale protests have broken out at Manchester, forcing the law school to drop a plan to reduce teaching time by one-third.

When undergraduates heard of the plan, they walked out of a lecture theatre and started to protest outside the offices of Alan Gilbert, the vice-chancellor, who has since ordered officials to reconsider.

Students have set up a Facebook group called Reclaim the Uni, which so far has more than 700 members. It asks: “Do you think the university treats you as a number on a computer and milks you like a glorified cash cow? Dissatisfied by the horrendous value for money? Not enough contact hours?” “

Farid Bakht

Commercial Road student protest

From UCU and UNISON’s Save London Met campaign committee:

Students in the Sir John Cass Department of Art, Media and Design have occupied rooms in Commercial Rd in protest at the proposed cuts to staff. We understand that they are demanding that Management drop the proposals to make staff redundant and that managers come to explain to students what is happening.

It is encouraging to find such levels of support among our students and to see them so active in defence of education. We sympathise with their frustration and with the sense that management will not listen to any arguments, however well reasoned or constructive.

Rumour has it that, unlike all the other universities occupied earlier this year, London Metropolitan will not allow this to run its course and that management is taking the students to court to regain possession of the coffee bar. No classes are being disrupted as far as we know.

We are therefore calling for a brief demonstration outside Commercial Road at 5.30 today. Please come and show students that solidarity works both ways!

Save London Met University

This is to both update you on the situation at London Metropolitan University and to thank you for the many messages of support and help offered to our campaign so far.

As you know, London Met UCU have been balloting on industrial action to oppose our management’s insistence on the loss of 550 FTE posts – which will result in up to 800 job losses (1/4 of our entire workforce). The result of our ballot was announced yesterday. We managed to achieve a massive vote for action (64% for strike action, as well as 71% for Action Short Of Strike) on a high turnout.

Strike Action – Thursday May 7thWe have now decided to action that ballot with a university-wide one day strike next Thursday (May 7th). The timing is such that we will be taking action to avoid disrupting our students’ exams – that start the following Monday, in order that our strike is combined with student action to save our university.
To that end, we will have picket lines from 8am across the University (our main campus buildings are located very near to the following tube stations: Holloway Road, Moorgate, Aldgate East, and Whitechapel) where we, together with our students, will be collecting signatures for our petition, etc…
In addition we will be holding a mass rally at 1pm outside Tower Building, Holloway Road (just opposite Holloway Road tube on the Piccadilly line). Please make every effort to join us in the morning if possible and to send delegations (and banners) from your branches to our rally in the afternoon.
Further updates will be posted on our website: www.lmuucu.org.uk and daily blog (www.savelondonmetuni.blogspot.com).

March and Rally – Saturday May 23rd

In addition to next Thursday’s strike we have also jointly, with PCS and Unison, organised a London-wide March and Rally for jobs on Saturday May 23rd, starting at 11am, from (see: www.ucu.org.uk/index.cfm?articleid=3680). Again, we would like to encourage you, particularly London-based branches/members, to make every effort to join us.

We believe that the situation at London Met, though very specific on one-hand re the serious financial mismanagement of our institution, is also far too generic re the response of university/college management generally to attack staff, students, and the very education ideals we believe in, to pay for either their own, or Government induced, financial crisis, or to use the threat of financial crisis to remould the shape of education institutions to the dictates of what can best be described as the failed neo-liberal market model of education. We are only the tip of the ice-berg, as the threat to jobs at 100+ HE institutions nationally indicates.

This is therefore not simply our fight, but the first salvo in a much bigger fight for the sort of education system that all of us – students, staff, community, deserve.

Please join us.

In Solidarity

Mark…

Mark Campbell
UCU Co-ordinating Committee – London Metropolitan University
UCU National Executive

Labour playing politics with policing

Hold the front page!
Well actually last week’s issue of East End Life did just that for the ‘news’ that a new 20-strong team of police offices would be walking the “beat this year and next” thanks to council funding of £600,000. The new team of officers was “launched” at Bow Road police station.
Did they open the police station especially for the announcement? (It is only open during the daytime)
The “news” covered the whole of the front page but right at the bottom was a ‘bullet’ point which read “crime on decrease –see page three”. On page three the details of the crime statistics in Tower Hamlets for the past year was set out in some detail.
Latest figures show that the number of crimes in Tower Hamlets was down by 17 per cent. The figures are impressive for the categories outlined in the report.
Councillors were made all too aware of how behind every crime statistic there is a person who has suffered as a result of somebody else’s actions after the vicious attack upon a member of the council recently for which he was lucky to survive.
Crime is an issue where Labour in years gone by has felt to be vulnerable to attack by opponents that they were ‘soft on crime’, especially the Conservative Party. That may well have been the case in this instance as the Conservatives proposed in their recent budget plans to fund an additional 34 officers as opposed to half that number in Labour’s budget.
Traditionally Labour politicians have argued that crime was as a result of social conditions such as poverty and deprivation. That all changed when Tony Blair became Labour’s spokesman on crime in the early 1990s.
The James Bulger case gave Blair the opportunity to signal that New Labour would in future put the emphasis on personal responsibility (echoed now by David Cameron). Tony Blair outlined the change in direction in a speech a week after the murder. He made the point that the murder struck at the sleeping conscience of the country and a new sense of direction was needed.
It is not a new sense of direction that Tower Hamlets Labour council is seeking by paying for additional officers but a new mandate in next year local elections. Readers will note that the funding is for “this year and next”.
After the elections I expect that Tower Hamlets will share from the increased London police budget in the year before the Olympics and 2012.
Tower Hamlets council may also have been influenced in its decision to pay for extra officers by the recent budget consultation that was presented to the cabinet in February. The outcome showed that crime was their chief concern. It therefore makes my point that the extra officers will allow Labour next year come election time to use policing as a political football.
By coincidence the front page of last week’s issue of the East London Advertiser was also on the issue of crime. It told of how a schoolgirl had been attacked and kicked unconscious by several other girls. The police arrested three girls but “due to lack of evidence” they were released.
One wonders what would have happened had there been evidence and the girls convicted.
Figures from the national police computer showed that less than one in five convictions for crimes involving knives results in a jail sentence. There were 27,644 offences involving the possession of a knife.
Last year’s figures disclosed that adults caught with a knife had been fined on occasions as little as £20, while fines for children had also been as low as £5.
There were 8,368 offences involving knives that were punished only by a caution. What the figures show is that Labour has failed to reduce or deter the use of knifes. That is something you will not read on the front page of East End Life.

Terry McGrenera, Tower Hamlets Green Party