UCU Left - ESOL - Report on East London Demonstration

The UCU Left is a national organisation of University and College Union activists. It is committed to ensuring that the new union has a democratic structure through which members can determine policy, and elected officers and professional officials can be held accountable. It seeks to defend educational equality, and to oppose the consequences of neo-liberal marketisation. It is opposed to all forms of racism, sexism, oppression and imperialism.

1,000+ Demonstrate in East London to save ESOL

By Richard Payne
ESOL/EAP Coordinator, London Metropolitan University

Photographs of Saturday's demonstration by Sherrl Yanowitz

Three marches merged into one on Saturday, 28th April, filling Hackney Town Hall Square with over 1,000 protesters.

Such synchronicity prompted Jeremy Corbyn, Islington north MP and speaker at the rally, to remark that it showed its organisers possessed a degree of joined-up thinking absent from the government’s education policies. The policies in question were Adult Education in general and ESOL in particular.

When, amongst more pressing priorities, there is a gaping skills deficit for the 2012 Olympics and nearly half the population in the five ‘host boroughs’ come from communities with ESOL needs, it makes no sense to slash spending on adult courses and impose unaffordable fees on ESOL.

These decisions, taken in the remote isolation of Westminster were why so many people from Hackney, Haringey, Islington and Tower Hamlets and beyond came together to protest.

A local initiative of UCU activists in Hackney to set up a ‘Save ESOL Campaign’ found a shared enthusiasm to act in the other boroughs and was stoked by the announcement of more generalised cuts of £25m to London’s adult education. The support of London Region and the union at national level greatly assisted its success.

The size of and broad composition of the march and rally demonstrates, not only that UCU activists, can work effectively with students and local community organisations, but also that there is a basis and urgent need for a national demonstration. The strategy of lobbying and pinning our hopes on collecting sufficient signatures on the Early Day Motion 383 for combating the ESOL issue clearly does not go far enough. The protest action in North East London, and the many others around the country, this May Day are preparing the national union for the inescapable conclusion that a larger national mobilisation is the next step forward. The left inside the union need to repeat this refrain.

We have an issue that can garner broad-based public support. Adult Education contributes greatly to the quality of people’s lives but is fast vanishing. Language, as the director of ‘Ghosts’, Nick Broomfield, said on Saturday in his message pledging support, can be vital in a literal sense. It was one of the key reasons why the Chinese cockle-pickers were drowned on Morcombe Sands in 2004. They could not communicate their impending plight to the emergency services.

The action gave us a platform not only to air the issues locally with speakers like Paul Mackney and Jeremy Corbyn but provided a way of including and using the talents of newer members and students too. We have a powerful case and we can make it heard by pushing for and pulling off more action like last Saturday’s.

BBC Online - Report of the demonstration (available here)

Response to Livingston's £15M ESOL Pledge (leaflet here)