As a new semester begins, millions of students in higher education continue to face the brunt of the cost-of-living crisis. Maintenance loans fall short of covering basic living costs, leaving many students struggling to meet essential expenses.
For most students, rent is the biggest cost. Student housing companies and private landlords drive up rents year on year, and the quality of the housing only gets worse. In many cities, students pay through the nose for small rooms in cramped, unsafe, and poorly maintained houses.
After rent, many students are forced to take on multiple part-time jobs to afford the rest, which has a direct impact on grades and wellbeing. The rising cost of groceries means students skip meals to save money. Financial pressure also has an impact on students’ mental health. Surveys show that 78% of students experience significant stress as a result of financial worries. Students are cutting back on socialising and extracurricular activities because they cannot afford to take part.
Furthermore, tuition fees will continue to rise every year, amounting to over £10,000 by the end of this government. This is a result of Starmer’s Labour government refusing to fund higher education, blaming the financial instability of universities on the previous tuition fee cap to justify forcing the costs onto millions of students.
Therefore, the frustration of students and young people must be directed into organising a socialist fightback. Socialist Students groups are organising demonstrations, supporting striking workers on pickets, and building support for socialist ideas on campuses. Socialist Students calls for fully funded, free education, instead of more fees and cuts.
This week from Wednesday 14 to Friday 16 January, members of the University and College Union (UCU) will be taking industrial action over funding, pay and conditions. College students face many issues due to the lack of funding. Our education suffers due to higher class sizes and overworked and underpaid staff. This is what striking UCU members are fighting against.
Socialist Students sends its full solidarity to all UCU members taking strike action and our members will be on the picket lines in support. We will stand alongside workers fighting back against the funding crisis to fight for the education we deserve.
Young people across the country are desperate to find decent jobs with pay they can live on. They are being forced to pay the price for the weakness of British capitalism and face the brunt of companies slowing down hiring and getting rid of some jobs altogether. The overall unemployment rate is now 5.1% and one in seven young people are unemployed.
What’s the response from the Labour government? Pat McFadden, work and pensions secretary, announced before Christmas that a scheme will be launched that will take benefits off young people who don’t have a “good reason” to take a six-month job placement funded by the state.
The government fully subsidising a job for 25 hours a week at minimum wage would be great for the bosses. They get effectively free labour for six months, with workers that are forced to be there otherwise they lose their benefits, and with no guarantee of a permanent full-time job at the end of it! It gives employers a more exploitable workforce, which can allow them to drive down the pay and conditions of all workers.
This would be a return to the ‘workfare’ policies of Tory prime minister David Cameron. As then, the current Labour government is attempting to force young people into jobs with inadequate pay and terrible conditions.
We should point the finger at those who are really responsible for the unemployment crisis – the big bosses! There’s no end of productive work that could be done if the work was shared out, and jobs were created with decent pay, training and conditions.
We demand:
High-quality jobs and apprenticeships with democratic trade union oversight and trade union rates of pay
Abolish zero-hour contracts with a right to flexible working
A trade union struggle for the immediate implementation of the TUC demand of a £15-an-hour minimum wage for all as a step towards a real living wage, without exemptions. For the minimum wage to automatically increase linked to average earnings or inflation, whichever is higher
The right of all workers, including apprentices, to join a trade union
The TUC (Trades Union Congress) should follow up on its conference decision and call a national demonstration for high-quality jobs, homes and services for all
Circuit Go provides poor-quality and expensive laundry services to many. Profits are up at Circuit Go – over £13 million in 2024.
One of Circuit Go’s parent shareholders – Cinven – was fined £100 million for increasing medicine prices by more than 1,000%. This means that the company that charges us extortionate fees to wash and dry our laundry is effectively owned by a firm that has been fined for price gouging critical drugs used by NHS patients.
How can we trust this company to provide us ‘fair’ prices for laundry services? They are ripping us off!
If we don’t get organised, then our universities will let this private company continue overcharging each of us £100s a year for the poor service they provide. Students are already struggling to make ends meet.
While profiteering companies rake millions every year, ordinary students are expected to pay higher tuition fees, extortionate rents, and rising shopping bills. It can’t go on like this.
‘Circuit No!’ campaign, launched by Socialist Students in London, brings students together. We can organise meetings in all the different university halls to democratically decide the next steps for the campaign. This includes protesting outside Cinven’s headquarters in central London.
Newcastle University, which also has a contract with Circuit Go, provides subsided laundry services at £1.30 per wash on weekdays. If a university can provide subsidised laundry facilities during certain hours at one particular hall, why can’t all universities in Britain, including Newcastle University, immediately provide laundry services at all times for £1 per wash?
We also demand that laundry should be included in rent, and for there to be rent controls. Rents should be set by democratically elected representatives, composed of students and staff. This body could also provide oversight for laundry services, repairs, and maintenance.
This means kicking out these private profiteers from our halls and campuses, and bringing all privatised services back in-house. We call for investment to provide high-quality, safe, and accessible accommodation, including to meet the specific needs of disabled students.
We can win!
Socialist Students also says this is part of a wider national campaign to oppose marketisation of higher education. Students are seen as cash cows – people that private companies can profit from.
That’s why we say kick out the profiteers. Don’t make students pay for the university funding crisis through higher tuition fees and poor service – make the super-rich pay.
We demand:
Higher-quality, well-maintained laundry facilities, and a suitable number of machines per flat
An immediate reduction of laundry fees to £1 per wash – not rip-off charges
Laundry to be included in rent, and rent controls in university accommodation
Kick out private profiteers, and bring all privatised services back in-house
No to fee rises, for free, fully funded education – make the super-rich pay
Help build the campaign
Sign our petition. Spread the word
Organise a meeting in your hall
Come to our London-wide organising meeting – Tuesday 3 February, 7pm. Venue TBC
Protest the company that owns Circuit Laundry – Wednesday 4 February, 3pm. Where: Cinven Limited, 21 St James’s Square, SW1Y 4JZ. Nearest station: Green Park
Socialist Students’ statement on Your Party conference
The long-awaited Your Party conference took place in Liverpool at the end of last month. Socialist Students members intervened within the conference, including speaking from the platform, and are looking forward to the opportunity to work within Your Party to fight for young people and socialism.
Despite the summer enthusiasm dwindling after 800k+ signed up to support Your Party, and only 22k of 55k members registering to vote, the mood at the conference represented the appetite for a new mass socialist alternative. Frustrations about how the conference was organised, and spats among the leadership, underpinned much of the debate and influenced how the voting went, with a feeling that this political project needs to work.
Socialist Students national organiser Adam Gillman spoke about the need for Your Party to be explicitly socialist and have “the working class at its heart”. The conference attendees subsequently overwhelmingly voted this way. However, the necessary democratic structures for a mass socialist party of the working class were not established last weekend.
For example, it is regrettable that an element of sortition will remain in place for the next conference – rather than a system of representative democracy which allows Your Party branches, as well as affiliated organisations such as trade unions and other groups, to send delegates.
Socialist Students also believes that Your Party won’t become a mass workers’ party without taking the question of the trade unions – the existing mass organisations of the working class – seriously. In order for that to happen, the relationship with trade unions needs not only to be reviewed (as another motion outlined), but there needs to be a priority of bringing the collective voice of the trade unions into the party, through affiliation, under the democratic control of its members. By not approaching the trade union rank-and-file and campaigning for their collective voice to be heard in Your Party, it only makes it easier for trade union leaders to continue dodging the question of political representation for the working class.
Ninety per cent of voters backed an amendment for needs-based council budgets, rejecting cuts and austerity. Contributions from the floor emphasised how committing to no cuts would distinguish Your Party from the Greens. Zack Polanski, the Greens’ leader, was asked by Socialist Students if he would commit to a similar stand – Zack refused to do so.
However, the conference also chose to limit the number of election candidates for May 2026, which misses the opportunity for a wide anti-austerity stand. Only this could cut across support for Reform UK in a meaningful way: standing socialists on a no-cuts platform in communities where working-class people, out of frustration, are voting for Reform. It is worth remembering that in 2017, 1 million + UKIP voters from 2015 voted for Jeremy Corbyn’s anti-austerity manifesto.
Your Party has the potential to harness the energy of young people and students. Many of us are already struggling for free education, against the cost-of-living crisis, for rent controls, and many other things.
Young people were enthused by Jeremy Corbyn’s time as Labour leader – precisely because of his anti-austerity message, and the pledge to scrap tuition fees. Polls over the summer suggested that Your Party was the most popular among young people – this is not a surprise, considering the popularity of Corbyn and the increasing number of young people looking for a way out and towards socialist ideas.
Along with immediately establishing branches, Your Party must develop a formal youth and student section. This party must allow youth to organise and debate the way forward for the problems facing us and the working class, such as the cost of living crisis and climate change.
The slim vote by conference for a collective leadership was positive. The Central Executive Committee (CEC) – made up of 16 normal members, rather than MPs – should have a seat reserved for a youth representative. This would allow young people to democratically elect a socialist to represent their views on the deciding body of the party. The CEC is also preferable to a single leader model as it helps create and develop new leaders rather than dependence on individuals, which without proper contingency plans, can lead to problems when someone needs to step down for whatever reason.
Socialist Students invites the current MPs for Your Party – Jeremy Corbyn, Zarah Sultana, Shockat Adam, and Ayoub Khan – to do a speaking tour of the universities in the new year. We would be happy to help facilitate these meetings, as an already existing broad socialist organisation on campuses, with groups across the country. These meetings could potentially be ‘launch events’ for a Your Party youth section.
Socialist Students looks forward to a reply from Your Party MPs and to be able to organise within an affiliated democratic youth section.
Socialist Students organised a demonstration with the York uni Your Party society, opposing the bursary cut put forward by the university management. The £1,000 cut affects working-class students and others, struggling to keep up with the cost-of-living crisis.
But it also affects medical students and refugee students, who also face severe cutbacks. Refugee students were receiving £3,000, as an incentive for higher education. Now it’s £2,000.
Medical students receiving a HYMS bursary would be getting £1,400 less for every year at university. For students with a residual household income of less than £25,000, they used to be eligible for £2,400 per year. Now it’s down to £1,000. This adds up to £7,000 of student entitlements over five years of study that is now completely missing!
At the protest, we had speakers from the University and College Union (UCU) and York Rent Strike 2025.
We all know that Labour is not going to pay a penny to fund universities, unless it is forced to under pressure. Student protest can build the pressure. So can the struggles of university workers, organised in their trade unions. A new mass workers’ party – fighting for free, fully funded education – would strengthen our fight too.
The genocidal siege of Gaza. Climate breakdown that threatens the existence of life on our planet. Governments whipping up racism, sexism, and all forms of division. Attacks on the right to protest and more authoritarian laws. There is no shortage of issues pushing students and young people into the fore of mass movements, taking action for an alternative.
Internationally, the past year has unleashed a wave of mass protests and uprisings spearheaded by young people, from Indonesia to Nepal, Madagascar to the Philippines. In Britain, young people have continued to march in our hundreds and thousands to demand an end to Israeli state terror and war in the Middle East.
But despite the heroic preparedness of young people and the working class to fight back, the politicians, institutions, and the ‘profit-before-all’ system they uphold – capitalism – remain in place. And so the nightmare of war, poverty, and climate destruction continues, as our futures are sacrificed for the profits of a super-rich few.
What needs to be done to put an end to this nightmare? That is the key question that the Socialist Students conference 2026 is setting itself.
Socialist Students is a democratic, national organisation of students fighting for a socialist alternative to capitalism. We are active in schools, colleges and universities across the UK. Our conference is open to all students and young people who want to discuss, debate and make a collective plan of action for how to build a socialist youth movement in Britain today.
There will be plenty to discuss, including:
How can we build a mass socialist party to give students a voice in the fight against Labour and Reform? What role could Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana’s Your Party play? What about Zack Polanski and the Green Party?
How can students support workers in education fighting against cuts and low pay, and build a united movement to make the super-rich pay for the funding we need?
Why are so many student unions not on our side? And how can students build democratic student organisations that actually fight in our interests?
As a recent graduate attempting to find a reliable job, I took an interest in one of the hidden headlines in Labour’s Budget – graduates are being ‘stealth taxed’ £7.4 billion.
What is a ‘stealth tax’? The government is freezing the salary threshold at which graduates begin paying back their student loans.
This means, as wages rise with inflation, you are forced to pay back more of your student loan. The threshold was already kept low by the Tories, meaning more and more low-paid workers were forced to cough up.
Just like Labour’s income tax threshold freeze, once again, it’s an attack on low earners, working-class people, a political choice instead of going after tax-avoiding multinationals and big business.
This is little surprise. Labour is a party and government of big business and for big business. Certainly not for workers.
By the time the student loan thresholds are reviewed again in 2030, the Office for Budget Responsibility says the minimum wage for a full-time worker will be £28,995 a year. This is just £400 below the repayment threshold, meaning basically every single graduate in the country will be paying student loans back much quicker out of their pay packet. Masters and doctoral graduates repay 6% on earnings above just £21,000.
It is a bleak situation. It is hard enough to get a job when you graduate. Recently, there were 1.2 million graduate job applications for just 17,000 graduate jobs – 70 applicants per role.
It is little wonder increasing numbers of young people are desperately searching for a more radical solution to the crises of the capitalist economy. Labour has not delivered positive change. They’ve made things worse. Stealth taxes and increasing tuition fees being some of the ‘highlights’.
Capitalism cannot deliver the goods. It offers stagnation, squeezing of wages, and growing unemployment. Even after you spend years of hard work, doing things ‘by the book’.
We need socialist change to nationalise the commanding heights of the economy under democratic workers’ control, so it can be planned democratically, putting our skills and knowledge to good use.
A mass workers’ party, with the trade unions at its heart, armed with a socialist programme, is desperately needed to spearhead the fight for that. If you agree, please join Socialist Students in fighting for this.
Socialist Students conference 2026 takes place Saturday 14 February at the University of Manchester
Socialist Students has engaged in a campaign to establish trade union recognition within the Liverpool Guild of Students.
The Guild hires over 200 staff. This includes bar staff, cleaners, baristas, and other roles. Despite having many commercial staff, there is a lack of a recognised trade union to represent the rights of said workers.
This is an issue, given the cuts to universities across the country, from the 100 voluntary redundancies in the University of Liverpool, to the redundancies in many universities, including Cardiff. There is a fear among workers within the Guild that these cuts may affect the Guild and its staff, and without any union representation, the workers will not be able to fight back.
There are issues that staff are facing within the Guild already. For example, many student staff are under zero-hour contracts, meaning that they are not guaranteed shifts every week, and that their pay will not be enough with the ever-increasing prices of food, washing and other necessities. There is also a lack of employer-provided travel for staff who work late nights, and may have to walk home to places like Smithdown Road or Greenbank, which is a safety concern given the distance that they would have to walk on their own.
Socialist Students has been campaigning on this issue with Unite, in order to establish it as the recognised union within the Guild. Other Guilds, such as the University of Birmingham, have Guild staff in Unison, so it can be done. We will continue to fight until the workers are represented not only in Liverpool, but nationally.
The marginalisation of working-class students continues with this latest round of cuts at the University of York. Socialist Students has been doing campaign stalls against the 50% cut to bursaries for poorer first-year students. Instead of £2,000, they now receive £1,000.
With university life already hard enough for low-income households, this adds further difficulties and fewer incentives. Education should be encouraged, regardless of income barriers.
That is why we advocate for fully funded, free education. That extra £1,000 belongs in the pockets of the students who make up the university, not its shareholders.
Liverpool students oppose right-wing Labour minister on visit
Jess O’Shaughnessy, Liverpool Hope Socialist Students
Liverpool Hope Socialist Students came out to protest against Labour minister Alison McGovern when she visited our uni on 21 November. McGovern has supported Labour maintaining the Tories’ two-child benefit cap, keeping hundreds of thousands of children in poverty. She also supports Labour’s disability benefit cuts.
We stood outside the main university building, explaining why we opposed her – putting forward the dire need for a new workers’ party. The students we spoke to agreed.
Hope University management considers Alison McGovern to be a worthwhile speaker, while the university itself continues through cuts and redundancies, and has not opposed rising tuition fees. Socialist Students launched the ‘Funding Not Fees’ campaign to demand that tuition fees be scrapped, with extra funding provided for education.
Socialist Students 