Manchester and Liverpool Socialist Students

35 universities have become founding members of a new initiative launched alongside the Ministry of Defence, the ‘Defence Universities Alliance’, which aims to use the resources of universities around the country to ‘strengthen research and innovation and build the highly skilled workforce needed to support the UK’s future defence capability. After almost 100 universities applied, Manchester and Liverpool were among those chosen to be founders.

This is happening in the midst of the worst funding crisis the higher education sector has ever seen, with nearly half of UK universities presently running at a deficit – whilst young people more broadly are struggling with crises of unemployment and the rising cost of living.

On his way out of office, Keir Starmer announced an annual ‘defence’ spend increase to £80 billion by 2029. Andy Burnham, Starmer’s successor, has since then indicated support for increased military spending at the expense of welfare spending. This is alongside similar, and in some cases more extreme, moves in other countries. Our universities have made clear that they seek to be a part of the capitalist class’s drive towards militarisation.

Wanting to help build a fightback against a system in crisis, that offers no future to young people, Socialist Students recently joined a Europe-wide youth assembly in Cologne with other anti-war youth and student organisations. The outcome of this meeting was an agreed international youth strike on Friday 20 November. Over twenty groups from eight different countries have agreed to support and build for the strike so far. This includes German youth organisations who recently helped lead a strike of 55,000.

We are pleased that Liverpool Guild’s [equivalent to a Student Union] officers have come out and opposed the university’s actions, and we hope they will join us in November. Liverpool Socialist Students believes that the resources of the Guild should be used to build among the widest possible layer of students at our university, while making contacts with officers in other student unions to seek support from other universities, particularly those directly complicit in the drive toward militarisation.

Help us build towards the strike on 20 November under the banner: “Fight for our futures, not their wars.”