Lambeth College plans £3.5 million cuts

I’ve learnt that up to 100 workers, many of them support staff, low-paid women and men, could lose their jobs. The University and Colleges Union (UCU) wants to ballot for strike action.

I was at a meeting of Lambeth Activists, a group of socialist Unison members in my branch, last week and heard Dave Esterson, convenor at Lambeth College UCU, explain how a number of colleges, including Tower Hamlets, where workers won a four-week strike last year, were facing cuts of 10%.

Lambeth College is a vital resource for our community. At its best, the Vauxhall site is buzzing with students learning real trades, like engineering, motorcycle maintenance, and painting and decorating. Increasingly school, like my own, rely on the college.

With the school leaving age soon to rise to 17 and a million young people without work, we need to expand the colleges and offer all young people the choice of academic courses or work with training on the job – real apprenticeships with real wages. Instead the government is decimating our colleges.

Dave said that the UCU may go on strike around mid-April (to be decided democratically). Lambeth Activists agreed to help our fellow Unison members in the college in whatever way we could.

I sometimes support school students at Lambeth College and have always rated the staff – support workers and teachers. I will do whatever I can in my campaign to help their fight and urge others, including Kate Hoey and her supporters, to do so, too.

But Labour leaders are driving this anti-working class policy of unemployment punctuated by low paid jobs. That’s why, in Tottenham, Jenny Sutton, a lecturer and branch secretary of the UCU at the College of North East London, will be standing as a Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition candidate against higher education minister David Lammy.

I wish Jenny and the Lambeth UCU comrades all the best in the struggles ahead.