HARD LEFT HIJACKS UNIVERSITY STRIKE
Students face being called scabs if they defy pickets
STUDENTS and academics face being branded ‘scabs’ if they turn up for classes today as hardliners picket universities in an increasingly bitter lecturers’ strike.
Walkouts will be held at 65 institutions over the next three days, with 45,000 staff refusing to hold lectures in a row over pensions.
Many of the picket lines originally set up by tutors have now been hijacked by rabble-rousing hard-Left student groups. Undergraduates desperate to access libraries and carry on working are being ordered by their peers to stay away to show ‘solidarity’ with the strikers.
Activists have been running online campaigns telling peers ‘don’t be a scab’, while posters on campuses tell students to stay at home even if classes are not cancelled.
One undergraduate at Exeter was even spat at as he tried to hand in work last week. The University and College Union (UCU) will hold 12 strike days over the next three weeks over changes to pensions which will see academics losing up to £10,000 a year of retirement income.
As a result, up to a million students face cancelled lectures. As the strike enters its third day, universities minister Sam Gyimah demanded universities divert lecturers’ pay to compensate students for cancelled classes.
The strike, which began on Thursday, is the largest walk-out for at least a decade. Union leaders warn more strike days could be scheduled to coincide with final year exams.
Many academics are not saying whether their lectures are cancelled until their students turn up on the day to cause maximum disruption. Today, staff are due to walk out at a string of top universities including Cambridge, Oxford, UCL, Bristol, Durham, Exeter, Imperial, Warwick and York.
Witnesses on the ground said that while most protesting lecturers were behaving in a professional manner, many pickets were being hijacked by ‘rowdy’ students. Jack Morewood, 19, a secondyear maths student at Exeter, said he was spat at by a young protester as he crossed a picket to hand in coursework on Thursday.
He said: ‘There were 100 people on the picket, including a lot of students from the campus socialist group. I actually chatted to some lecturer protesters who were quite jovial and offered me coffee and food. But when I had passed the picket, I walked 30 metres to the toilet and then looked down to discover spit on my leg.’ The students’ union at Warwick has allegedly been censoring online comments that are critical of the strike.
Durham politics student Tom Harwood, 21, said he had seen online abuse from activists trying to stop peers attending lectures. He said: ‘Students are just trying to get on with their lives.’
Birkbeck University lecturer Ashok Kumar shared a poster on Twitter that joked about drowning a kitten every time someone crosses the picket line. Posters at Cambridge urged students: ‘Unite! Don’t go to lectures’. Sheffield literature student Rachel Atkin posted on Twitter: ‘Support the lecturers that support you and don’t be a scab.’ However, Andrew Buck, a history tutor at Queen Mary University of London, said he felt ‘made to feel like a traitor/scab’ for not taking part.
Yesterday, Mr Gyimah called for lecturers’ pay to be used to compensate students for lost teaching hours. He said: ‘I expect all universities affected to make clear that any money not paid to lecturers will go towards student benefit including compensation.’
After visiting a picket line in Manchester on Friday, he called on Universities UK (UUK) and the UCU to get back to the negotiating table to avoid further disruption. A UUK spokesman said: ‘This industrial action is targeted at students. It will be young people and the next generation of students who will also suffer if their education deteriorates because employers are forced to make cuts to pay more into pensions.’
The UCU said any bad behaviour on picket lines was ‘not representative’ of its members. General secretary Sally Hunt said: ‘The best thing universities can do for students now is to apply pressure of their own to get UUK back to the table with us for talks without pre-conditions.’
‘Just want to get on with our lives’