Over a third of HE institutions are running at a loss.
Concretely, in Scotland, we need to campaign both against redundancies and for free education, but we cannot stop there. While it is right to pressure Holyrood, it is ultimately Westminster that makes decisions about HE. We need, therefore, a UK-wide response, which accounts for the complexities of the devolved settlement of the national question, but which also puts effective pressure on the state in London.
Such an approach means that we can champion Scotland’s successes, like free tuition for Scottish students, as policies that ought to be improved and extended, both in Scotland and in the UK, and not curtailed, as we will soon come to be pressed to do. All this should imply the need for a more united and outward looking trade union and student movement, that builds links with others in the wider public sector, and beyond, and makes political demands of the establishment and the state. Mass demonstrations, days of action, public rallies, petitions, specialist and popular publications, activist trade and student unions with an industrial strategy arm-in-arm with a campaign in defence of a free and properly funded higher education, are all needed both in Scotland and at UK level.
We should not settle for devolved neoliberalism in Holyrood and a re-cooked Blairism in Westminster. We can do better, and we can do so by reviving the best traditions of the Scottish and British labour movements, which require us to act independently of the mainstream political parties and to build power from below. It will not be easy. But, to quote the late Bob Crow, the leader of the RMT, one of Britain’s most militant unions in recent times: ‘If you fight you won’t always win. But if you don’t fight you will always lose.’