Why I am striking today

I have worked as a university administrator for six years and was a university student for four years prior to that.  I have witnessed huge changes in the higher education sector during the last ten years, the most significant of these being the introduction of much higher university tuition fees.  Students now pay thousands of pounds per year in fees, while the state has cut the funding it provides to universities.  This funding plugged the difference between what students pay and the actual cost of teaching and I fully expect that universities will claw back the difference by raising tuition fees even higher in future. At least one university vice-chancellor is already calling for this.  I believe that universities should receive more funding from government and that this shouldn’t come from raising students’ tuition fees.  The coalition government and the Labour one that preceded it, who were responsible for introducing university tuition fees in the first place, have screwed over students and universities.  Students have to pay higher fees, but the extra money doesn’t benefit universities because at the same time the government has cut their funding.  This is part of an agenda to privatise higher education, to create a competitive market in a sector where collegiality is highly valued.  Students and university workers are the ones who will suffer as a result of this. 

I fundamentally disagree with this approach.  All of society benefits from having a well educated workforce - well-trained professionals help to train up others, initiate new research and invent new products, all of which generate money for the economy and improve the lives of everyone in society. The benefits that higher education brings to society as a whole merit more government funding, not less.  I think it is perfectly fair to fund higher education through taxation.  Yes, some graduates do earn significantly more than their peers who don’t go to university, but for the majority of graduates, who are in a market where jobs are scarce and who are finding it difficult to find any job let alone a ‘graduate job’, this is not the case.  Everyone in society benefits from having a well-educated workforce.

There is also the question of fair access to a university education. Education is a right, not a privilege, yet I am concerned that increasing tuition fees yet further will continue to dissuade students from lower socio-economic backgrounds from going to university.  Higher tuition fees force students to take out loans which many will have to spend their entire working lives paying back, when as I’ve said above, many won’t earn the astronomical salaries that the government seems to think all graduates get.  I grew up on a council estate where money was always tight, yet I always believed that if I worked hard at school I’d be able to go to university and make a better life for myself.  I genuinely don’t believe that if I had had to pay £9,000 a year in tuition fees that I would have been able to afford to go to university.

What has this got to do with me and striking today?  Ostensibly the strike by my union (Unison) and UCU and Unite is about pay.  Academic and professional higher education staff have had below inflation pay rises for five years, resulting in a net pay cut of 13% once inflation is taken into account. I can't afford for this to continue.  Like most of my colleagues, I didn’t go into higher education for the monetary benefits but for the love of the role I provide.  I don’t want to disrupt students’ education.  However, like everyone I need to eat and keep a roof over my head and if below inflation pay rises continue I won't be able to afford to live on my salary.

I love my job and I love seeing students achieve their potential. This is the first time in my career that I will have gone on strike and given what I've just said about my salary I cannot afford to lose the day's pay that will be deducted from my wages.  For me though this is about more than pay.  It's about watching university education turn into a market, about students being treated as a commodity rather than as learners and researchers, about courses and departments closing because they are no longer deemed to be profitable, about research for the sake of enquiry being abandoned. 

Over and above all of my other concerns however, for any students reading this, is my unshakeable belief that you should not be expected to fund your university education.  Successive UK governments have stitched you up and that is why I am taking a stand today.  I'm sorry to all of you reading this whose education will be disrupted today; I hope that you will now understand my motives a little better and will see that I am with you in wanting to ensure that you receive the best possible university education, without having to pay Etonian fees to get it.

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala Heat and Dust (1975)

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala died in April 2013, aged 85.  The Telegraph obituary of her was subtitled “more than Heat and Dust”. Jhabvala did write more than Heat and Dust: she wrote twelve novels, 23 screenplays and 8 collections of short stories.  She also remains, to this day, the only person to have won the Booker Prize and an Oscar (indeed she won two, both for Best Adapted Screenplay: A Room With A View in 1986 and Howards End in 1992).  Among her novels though, Heat and Dust is almost certainly the most well known, so perhaps the subtitle is justified in terms of making people aware of her other achievements.

Jhabvala was born in Germany, fled the Nazis with her family to north London, married an Indian architect and moved with him to India in 1951, where she lived for 24 years.  She explained in interviews that she felt like an outsider everywhere she went, especially while living in India, and the protagonist of Heat and Dust also expresses the sentiment of being fascinated by India, yet feeling like an outsider.  The unnamed protagonist is there to research the history of her step-grandmother Olivia, an Englishwoman who caused a scandal during the days of the Raj by leaving her husband after getting pregnant by an Indian prince.  Through flashbacks the reader sees the story from Olivia’s point of view, her narrative intertwining with that of the narrator.

Heat and Dust is a relatively short novel compared to some of the Booker winners that I’ve read so far, but despite its brevity it beautifully expresses Jhabvala’s fascination and frustration with India.  Her protagonist is captivated by a country with outstanding natural beauty but is also horrified at the apparent lack of humanity among some of the people that she encounters there; a dying beggar woman is ignored by everyone until the narrator intervenes.  She describes dressing as an Indian woman but still getting called names by the children in the streets (something that Jhabvala also described happening to her).  The narrator is not the only outsider in the novel; Chid, the British would-be ascetic who ultimately relapses into his Western ways, Olivia, the spoilt British Raj trophy wife, Leelavati, the dying beggar cast out by her family.  All these outsiders try in their own way to become part of their respective communities, but ultimately fail.  This reflects Jhabvala’s own experience; she left India for good not long after writing Heat and Dust and spent the rest of her life in New York.

Heat and Dust tells a fascinating story that the reader only experiences glimpses of; rather like Jhabvala’s India, it does not give up its secrets to outsiders but I would say that it is definitely worth making the attempt to find them.

Stanley Middleton Holiday (1974)

Stanley Middleton was jointly awarded the Booker Prize in 1974 with Nadine Gordimer.  Middleton’s Holiday is, on the face of it, a novel about a man who goes to a British seaside town for a week-long holiday.  In reality, education lecturer Edwin Fisher is escaping from the death of his son and his crumbling marriage to grieving, volatile Meg.  Through a series of flashbacks, prompted by events during his holiday, the reader sees how Edwin first met Meg, their courtship and eventual marriage, the birth and subsequent death of their son and how all these events affect them both.

Fisher returns to the fictional seaside town of Bealthorpe, where he holidayed with his parents and sister as a child.  It portrays an image of the traditional British seaside holiday, and it presents an interesting contrast to perceptions of the British seaside today.  Fisher returns to Bealthorpe to find solace at a difficult point in his life, but instead finds that Bealthorpe has changed compared to how he remembers it; he seems restless and unable to settle to anything, betraying the underlying tensions affecting him.  Bumping into his parents-in-law, ostensibly by coincidence, doesn’t help matters.  As his week progresses, Fisher gets to know the other guests in his hotel better, punctuated by periodic meetings with his in-laws to try and heal the rift between himself and Meg.

Mention is made of overseas package holidays, which were already fashionable by the time Middleton wrote his novel.  The reader gets the feeling that Bealthorpe is on the edge of decline, a town on the edge of nowhere on England’s east coast.  He presents Fisher’s jaunts around the town and surrounding country almost like a documentary; Fisher is remarkably forward and strikes up conversation with many strangers, tourists and locals alike.  In all these conversations he reveals little of himself; he escapes from his own difficulties by allowing others to talk about themselves and the town.  Fisher’s escape is temporary however; as his stay comes to an end, he knows he must face up to his past in order to move on to the future.

Middleton’s novel is not as far-reaching in scope as other Booker winners have been and seems less impressive when compared to the works of Gordimer or Farrell that went before.  I found it enjoyable enough, but will be selling the book on; I doubt I will read it again.  If anyone wants it let me know!         

Nadine Gordimer The Conservationist (1974)

The 1974 Booker Prize was the first to be awarded to two novels jointly; Nadine Gordimer’s The Conservationist is the first of the two that I have read. The novel’s title is interesting, in that Mehring, Gordimer’s white South African farm owner protagonist, would almost certainly not consider himself to be a conservationist, in the environmental sense.  At times boorish and misogynistic, Mehring is absolutely opposed to any changes in the status quo of apartheid South African political organisation and attempts to keep everything on his farm running smoothly by keeping firm control over his Black workforce.  Mehring can be said to be Gordimer’s personification of what was fundamentally wrong with the South African state at the time that she wrote the novel; a privileged businessman, who owns and runs a farm which he only visits at weekends, yet expects to be able to keep it fully under control. 

However this is too simplistic an assessment; Gordimer imbues Mehring with a real love for the land that he owns and she conveys this through the frequent paragraphs where Mehring contemplates the breathtaking beauty of the environment that surrounds him.  Mehring knows that his farm is neither particularly profitable nor productive, yet he keeps coming back to it because he is beguiled by its setting.  There are frequent allusions as to why Mehring bought the farm; it was intended to be a secret love-nest for him and the married woman who he was having an affair with at the time.  The woman is never named, and it is hinted that their relationship was brief, yet Mehring’s thoughts frequently return to the occasion when she came with him to look over the farm before he purchased it.  Her refrain “I’d leave it all just as it is” seems to haunt Mehring, and it is arguably this more than anything that makes him the conservationist of the novel’s title.

With the woman long gone, Mehring seems to only gain satisfaction from his relationship with his farm.  He finds his other human relationships wanting; his ex-wife in America is a pest, his (implied) gay son is a disappointment to him and he retreats further and further from his circle of fellow businessmen friends and their families as he seeks to avoid their company.  Mehring is seemingly haunted by this one conquest, although she is not the only one by any means; Gordimer portrays him as a suburban lothario, who also has an unhealthy interest in teenage girls.

This interest is systematic of what Gordimer intends the novel to represent on a macrocosmic level.  Mehring takes what he wants, without thinking through the consequences or of the damage he does, and this can be said to be representative of the South African state at the time.  On a couple of occasions Mehring appears to get caught out, but Gordimer’s stream-of-consciousness third person prose, lacking in quotation marks when characters speak, makes some of these episodes difficult to understand.  Perhaps Gordimer intended these revelations of discovery to be deliberately ambiguous but I did find them very hard to follow.  Although this makes the novel flow in a naturalistic way between prose and dialogue, the ensuing lack of clarity for me is the one flaw in what is otherwise a beautiful novel.

Mehring’s relationship with his Black African members of staff seems to be relatively neutral.  Although he doesn’t help them to achieve emancipation, he doesn’t treat them badly either.  He recognises that staff like Jacobus work hard for the farm, even if they sometimes take small liberties while he is away.  Gordimer makes it clear that she does not support the Blacks’ impoverished and inferior state (one particular passage concerning a Christmas coupon is particularly poignant) but she doesn’t use Mehring as a means of enforcing this system upon them; rather she criticises the political system itself, in the form of shadowy references to the police and what they do to Blacks who don’t possess the appropriate papers.

The Conservationist is a novel about apartheid, that isn’t explicitly political.  It makes a powerful statement against apartheid without directly condemning it; every word drips with anger at the injustice of the suffering of the marginalised Black South African characters, who are clearly metaphors for the Black South African community as a whole.  But these appear to be almost incidental compared to the size and power of the South African landscape, which is the true star of Gordimer’s novel.  This is a majestic paean to the rapidly changing South African countryside; a brilliant work that, while calling for change in its unjust politics, evokes a geographical location that truly deserves to be conserved.

Letter to The Guardian re: Camden Council's enforced relocation of families on housing benefit

Dear Sirs

Camden Council’s plans to move 761 families struggling under new benefit cuts to cities as far afield as Liverpool or Bradford (‘Camden council plans to move 761 poor families from London’, The Guardian, 13^th February) would be a terrible blow for social equality in London. These families will lose the social ties that bind them into the local community; they will have to leave their friends and family members behind and such a move will cause severe disruption to their childrens’ schooling. This is a terrible blow to force on any family. It also sets a dangerous precedent, as other London councils will see this as an opportunity to move poor families out of London and cut spending on their welfare budgets. Forcing these families out will contribute to the increasing social division that is already happening in London – inner boroughs such as Camden and Islington (where I live), where private rent prices are already well above the London average, will only be affordable to live in for the wealthy and privileged, with the poor being forced to live on the fringes of outer boroughs or outside London altogether. I am concerned that this form of what is effectively social cleansing will spread from Camden to other London boroughs, where rents are high and where there is huge inequality between rich and poor, such as already exists in Islington.

Having a good social mix makes Camden the attractive, cosmopolitan borough that it is, and I urge Camden Council to use all means at its disposal to prevent these families from being moved out of the borough and out of London.

Yours faithfully,

Alex Rendall