Below is a recording and transcript of a speech given by Birmingham Socialist Students member Lluís at the NEU strike rally in Birmingham on February 1st

Hello everyone, my name is Lluis and I am a PhD student and teaching assistant at the University of Birmingham.

The effects of the cost-of-living crisis are biting students like never before. Some have had to go through this winter with almost no heating, with houses reaching as low as 7 degrees inside. Students must complement their meagre maintenance loan with one or two part-time casualised jobs. 29% of students around the country reported they were skipping non-mandatory lectures or tutorials to save money, while around the same figure said they were choosing to study from home and attend lectures remotely. All the while they receive an increasingly substandard education, thanks to management cutting every single corner when it comes to the workload, pay, and permanence of their staff. There comes a moment where all the passion, sacrifice, and enthusiasm for teaching of academic lecturers, however immense, is not sufficient to mitigate the effects of their appalling work conditions in their teaching.

All of this can happen because when you look at Westminster there is no voice battling for students. Labour introduced tuition fees in 1998, raised them in 2004, and the Tories and Libdems raised them again to absolutely unaffordable levels in 2010. These decisions force students to face a lifetime of unrepayable debt, only to be told that their “contribution” is not enough to maintain the budgets of unis. No, they depend on international students being fleeced even harder! They went to universities with grants and no debt, but to them the suffering of students is almost like an inevitability, like it is in our nature to live in squalid homes with dodgy landlords and worrying about how to pay for groceries. It should be possible in this country to both be a student and live in a modicum of dignity! No student and no worker in this country should be deprived of their dignity!  

And after their education, what can students expect? Casualised jobs with low pay and terrible working conditions! It is so encouraging to see you all striking, because in doing so you are not only protecting your work and life conditions, but you are also protecting the future work and life conditions of today’s students.

Lecturers will be striking for 17 days more in the next two months, and I hope that in many of those days they can be accompanied by the warmth of their striking peers in other unions, a fraternal warmth that is like hellfire to the employers. You all provide a living example to students, and hopefully your courage shall prove to be contagious. It is time to put a stopgap on the constant erosion of our living conditions and show politicians and businessmen who really makes the country go around. Enough excuses, enough dilly-dallying: students and workers united in struggle can and will reconquer their life conditions and their dignity.

The night they have plunged us into is dark, but now we are bringing in the dawn of a new day, let’s make it ours, let’s win our lives back together.