Hull Left: The birth of something beautiful...

A couple of questions...

Do you want to leave uni with debts in excess of £15,000?

Do you think students should be given help with living and childcare throughout their course?

Do you think students should be treated fairly at work?

Should our unions be run on the sly by right-wing sabbs?

And finally, do you think it’s worth students actually FIGHTING for REAL student issues like these?

One of the main reasons for starting this blog was to break the right-wing status-quo that is student activism at Hull, to provide a base and network for left-wing student activists and to hopefully to get some active. So, why are we here? We believe in grass-roots activism – ordinary students standing up together and being counted. We do not believe in a few select individuals talking to government ministers behind our backs, especially when this government has shown nothing for contempt for students.

So, putting aside laughably useless lobbying, what do we think we can do that will actually work in our favour as students (not as political careerists). Well, on the continent fellow students have successfully fought for their rights through militant direct action like demonstrations and occupations of university buildings. In Denmark students have won universal grants and in Greece and France students have taken on their governments and won. Obviously this involves mass grass-roots action, and that means ordinary students.
This blog hopes to inform, but we also want you to join us. Student politics isn’t all about the council and the union, but also about getting involved in political activity free from the structures of the union. Various local and national events that we student activists get our hands dirty with will be posted here as and when they happen.

Yesterday some of us went down to the picket lines of the National Union of Teachers and the University and College Union (UCU). These workers were on strike over an appalling pay offer by the government, which - taking into account inflation – is essentially a pay-cut. The reasons we as students feel it necessary to show our solidarity is because workers face the same threats as us: cuts to our allowances and conditions. It should also be said that the lecturers union, the UCU, has a better position than our own Students Union on stuff like fees, calling for free education and a return to free living grants.

We will be updating this blog regularly with reports, news items, actions and other bits and bobs of relevance. If you’d like to comment - go ahead, you don’t even have to agree with us!