HIJACKED BY THE HARD LEFT RD LEFT
The university lecturers’ strike has hit one million students who pay up to £9,250 a year. Now we reveal how a cabal of Marxists, Socialist Workers Party and one-time communist activists have taken over the union’s ruling committee . . .
To BE a card- carrying communist in Thatcher’s Britain was to occupy a lonely berth on an extremist fringe of politics.
Miles from power, in the dying days of a Cold War which had associated them with some of the most murderous dictatorships in history, the remaining true believers found themselves treated as a bizarre sideshow — eccentric oddballs who deserved to be laughed at, not feared.
one such man was Douglas Chalmers, head of Britain’s Young Communist League. In 1984, he admitted to the New York Times that his once-vibrant organisation had only 600 members. ‘Being realistic,’ he said, ‘people do not support us and we do not expect them to.’
Four years later, he stood on a Communist ticket in a by-election in Glasgow. It did not go well: he got 281 votes, 0.9 per cent of those cast.
Then, after the ailing Communist Party of Great Britain was wound up in 1991, he briefly ran its successor group Democratic Left, before finally conceding defeat in the battle to overthrow capitalism, and took a job at Glasgow Caledonian University.
Chalmers has been in the Department of Social Sciences ever since. But deep down, he’s never given up the political fight.
This week, he was manning barricades as one of the key figures behind a lecturers’ strike which, for three days, brought 57 of the nation’s universities to a halt.
The 60- year- old academic is vicepresident of the national executive of the Universities and Colleges Union (UCU), a 110,000-member trade union engaged in a rancorous spat over proposed changes to their pension system.
Like all industrial disputes, the row, which has so far inconvenienced around a million students who pay up to £9,250 a year in fees — and is set to shut universities down for nine more days over the next fortnight — is becoming deeply divisive.
on one side are the striking lecturers, who argue (with some justification) that their once-comfortable profession is being hollowed out as a result of years of paltry pay awards, while overpaid vice-chancellors who run universities grow filthy rich.
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THE other are the universities which say (again with some justification) that as people live longer, their generous pension — which on retirement paid all academics a guaranteed income based on their average career salary — is not sustainable.
Adding to the angry mood are recent suggestions that the UCU, which represents thousands of lecturers from across the political spectrum, has quietly been taken over by a cabal of radical hard-Left campaigners. They are accused of seeking to exploit the legitimate grievances of members to score political points.
Last week, it was revealed that Matt Waddup, the union’s full-time campaign chief who organised the walkout by around 42,000 staff, is a former rail union official famed for rabble-rousing speeches who has been planning disruptive strike action for seven years, according to The Times.
His deputy, Ed Bailey, is an anti-badger cull activist who has pledged to ‘dance on Margaret Thatcher’s grave’ and is linked to pro-Soviet groups online, including one which seeks to establish a ‘post-capitalist, communist society’.
Such firebrands bring us back to Chalmers. The onetime communist is not the only senior power broker on the UCU’s ruling committee who hails from this radical background.
There is his immediate superior, National Executive Committee ( NEC) president Joanna de Groot, a senior lecturer in history at the University of York. For decades, she was a prominent activist within the Communist Party of Great Britain, at one point in the Seventies sitting on its executive committee.
According to a 2006 book called Marxism In Britain, public school- educated de Groot achieved prominence among a group of ‘Communist women’ devoted to ‘serving the Marxist cause in Britain’.
Then there is Sean Vernell, who teaches English at City & Islington College and is a London representative on the lecturers’ union NEC.
In recent years he’s belonged to the hard- Left Socialist Workers’ Party and spoke at the ‘Marxism 2013’ festival.
An academic text titled The Communist Party In Britain Since 1920 calls Vernell a ‘British Communist’ who is ‘motivated Left groups’. It endorses candidates for the union’s elections to its NEC, including Vernell. It also seeks to use union resources to campaign on fashionable Left-wing issues such as liberalising abortion law or opposing Brexit and campaigning for the rights of refugees and migrants.
The other is called ‘ UCU Independent Broad Left’ and claims the loyalty of members of the Communist Party. It backs candidates including Douglas Chalmers, and seeks to pursue ‘a progressive trade union and equality agenda’.
With two hard-Left outfits seeking to get loyalists elected into key positions and take control of the union’s financial resources (its annual income from members is around £20 million), moderates have felt increasingly sidelined.
So it is that the UCU’s ruling committee contains figures such as Rhiannon Lockley, a social sciences lecturer from Halesowen College who describes herself on Twitter as an ‘intersectional Marxist feminist’, and Carlo Morelli, a business lecturer at Dundee University who stood for the
Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition in the 2015 election (finishing last in Dundee East with 104 votes).
There’s Renee Prendergast, a lecturer in economics from Queen’s University Belfast, who stood as a Sinn Fein candidate during the Seventies — when suspicion of the party’s involvement in armed terrorism was at its height.
Her leaflets stated that ‘Sinn Fein policy is based on the ownership and control of the wealth of Ireland by the working people of Ireland’.
Perhaps inevitably, given this motley cast, in recent years the UCU has chosen to pursue achingly trendy but divisive campaigns that have little obvious relevance to the lives of its members.
It controversially offered support to an academic boycott of Israeli universities in protest at the country’s treatment of Palestinians. The boycott is regarded as anti-Semitic by many in the Jewish community, since it singles out Israel for far harsher treatment than other nations that have equally (if not more) contentious governments.
Prominent Jewish academics have duly quit the union, and one (unsuccessfully) took it to court in 2013, accusing it of illegal racism.
In 2014, the UCU — whose 153 employees earn more than £50,000 on average, with General Secretary Sally Hunt on £138,682 a year — meanwhile decided to pay for a large delegation of staff to travel to Gaza (the self-governing Palestinian area) in order to, as one report put it, ‘view the effects of the Israeli blockade on the territory’.
Quite what purpose this jaunt served in improving working lives of British university lecturers is anyone’s guess.
Indeed, one of the few moderates left on the NEC, Northumbria’s Emma- Jane Phillips, vigorously opposed the trip, saying: ‘I don’t know how we can justify spending thousands of pounds of members’ funds on this trip when we have so many major disputes and battles to fight [nearer home].’
Fast forward to this week, and there are signs that the pensions strike is being used, at least by some in the organisation, to advance a wider political agenda.
Though the Government has not taken a side in the dispute, many of the union activists are clearly antiTory, with some organisers at a UCU rally in London filmed using loudhailers to encourage crowds to chant: ‘We’re out here in the snow, Theresa May has got to go.’
The UCU asked shadow Chancellor John McDonnell, who used his Who’s Who entry to describe his hobby as ‘fermenting [sic] the overthrow of capitalism,’ to headline a rally in Westminster.
And Jeremy Corbyn, whose top aide Andrew Murray spent 40 years in the Communist Party, sent his own message of ‘solidarity’.
WHETHER their contributions will help striking lecturers — who, let us again stress, hail from across the political spectrum — is open to speculation. Should these messages, however, offend the public, it may turn out to be a disaster.
Perhaps with this in mind, the UCU says the strike has support from members of all political persuasions, with 88 per cent voting in favour of action on a turnout of 58 per cent.
‘They are reluctant strikers, but determined and will not be distracted by attacks on UCU,’ says a spokesman. ‘The real hardliners are the university vice-chancellors refusing to listen to their staff and looking to slash their pensions.’
Chalmers and de Groot, for their part, stress that they have not been members of the Communist or any other party for around 25 years, and ‘represent everyone in the UCU — irrespective of their party affiliations or whether they have none’.
Whatever agendas are at play, an objective analysis of the dispute might find many indications that the lecturers’ cause is just.
Like many middle- class professionals, lecturers have seen a decline in their circumstances, with annual pay increases averaging around 1 per cent for each of the past six years. Increasing numbers entering the profession cannot secure full-time jobs, relying on parttime work or short-term contracts.
Against this backdrop, threats to their pensions have struck a raw nerve. With the pension fund nursing a £6 billion deficit, university vice - chancellors last year announced their wish to bring it into line with most private sector schemes by no longer offering a guaranteed income in retirement.
The UCU claims this will make lecturers £10,000 a year poorer when they finish work.
Vice-chancellors, who are represented by an organisation called Universities UK, counter that they already contribute 18 per cent of employee salaries to the fund (members put in nine per cent before tax) and cannot afford to spend more without seriously harming teaching and research.
That argument might attract sympathy were the same vicechancellors not currently enjoying some of the most bloated salaries in the public sector.
Vice- chancellors at Russell Group Universities, which include many of those caught up in the strike, earn an average of £332,000 a year, a figure recently described as ‘immoral’ by MPs.
They also enjoy extraordinary perks. A Channel 4 Dispatches documentary aired this week revealed that many are filing expense claims for Michelinstarred restaurant meals, overseas trips, fresh flowers, first-class air fares and even home furnishings.
PROFESSOR Steve West, who runs the University of the West of England, spent £43,000 on travel in 16 months, using executive cars to drive him to and from London at up to £400 a pop. He also ploughed through more than £7,000 visiting Malaysia and Australia.
The University of Surrey spent £1,600 flying a Maltese terrier from Australia, as part of the £15,000 relocation package offered to its owner Max Lu when he left the University of Queensland to take up the vice-chancellorship.
And Sheffield University’s vicechancellor Keith Burnett spent £ 3,107 staying at Singapore’s Mandarin oriental, one of Asia’s costliest hotels, for five nights.
other vice-chancellors claimed expenses for Fortnum & Mason hampers, Laura Ashley mugs and even a cocktail called a ‘pornstar Martini’.
As the UCU quite rightly puts it: ‘The lack of self-awareness while they feather their own nests yet hold down staff pay, use insecure contracts and try to slash pensions is quite staggering.’
The only people who certainly aren’t to blame in this mess are the students. Paying £9,250 a year in fees, often for courses that offer only a few hours of contact time a week, many are now being harassed simply for trying to learn.
on campuses, hard-Left activists have been running campaigns telling them ‘don’t be a scab’ by, for example, visiting the library on strike days.
In Exeter, a maths student was spat at as he crossed a picket line to hand in coursework. At Sussex University, protesters stormed a lecture theatre and demanded that students leave in ‘solidarity’.
Some students claim they are being fined for not returning library books when, thanks to the strike, their library is closed.
Little wonder that around 100,000 have signed petitions asking for compensation from universities for classes that have been lost. They are the real victims of this spat — caught in the crossfire between greedy vice-chancellors and a hard-Left trade union.