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Ah yes, Rayner champion of the working class.

Staff and students have been demanding that Durham University stop banking with Barclays since the 1960s.

What is the actual national strategy for opposing cuts/redundancies outlined here? "a rounded UCU approach" Reject the pay offer but vote no to IA over pay to "send a clear[?] message to UCEA that this is unacceptable" Instead focus on "amplifying local redundancy disputes" No strategy at all.

There's a funny contradiction between the North-East as a provincial and distant region from the wealth of London and it's role in providing Labour's political elites. Sidney Webb, Ellen Wilkinson, Ramsay Macdonald & later Blair et al all used (exploited?) Labour's strong vote here to get seats.

There should be no decision for @andyburnham.bsky.social, the oil.and gas in Rosebank and Jackdaw needs to stay in the ground!

I know of a colleague who quietly got promoted to prof. No song and dance about their promotion. I think there's a lot to be said for that frankly.

I was in SW France in 2023 when there were big fires. We saw a long line of Polish fire fighting trucks in convoy going to help. It terrifies me that we're in the foothills of this and that so little has been said about climate by Labour this summer. www.theguardian.com/world/live/2...

France evacuates Cap Ferret peninsula as Spain battles to prevent wildfires merging near Madrid – Europe liveEvacuees have been told to leave using hundreds of mobilised boats or the only road linking the area with the mainlandwww.theguardian.com

‘The real point about the Public School is that it is a social & political institution embodying, & essential to, class privilege. They are the schools of the rich & the ruling class. Their abolition... is essential in any democratic system of education & in a true political & economic democracy.’

"abolition of all school fees would indeed save the wealthy money, but they would pay increased education rates. The scholarship system,... 'merely a plan to subsidise the precocious at the expense of the normal,' would then disappear." A 1917 critique of fees in secondary schools, good for HE now.

"R. H. Farrah, delegate of the National General Workers to the TUC in 1916, observed that 'the whole system is rotten, and since University men have been established at Whitehall, the line of partition between the middle and working-classes is greater than ever'" Steedman 1992

He continues: "[If we do that] We are simply contributing to the perpetuation of the “knowledge” of the few, and the ignorance of the many. Academics may be satisfied with that role: revolutionary intellectuals cannot be."

"If, then, we “full-time” intellectuals restrict our knowledge to those who have been fortunate enough to get full-time education and to work in universities, we are simply reproducing ... the unequal distribution of knowledge and education in our societies." www.bostonreview.net/articles/whe...

When We Are All Enemies of the StateA recently discovered 1974 speech by Stuart Hall on Walter Rodney—and why fascists fear ideas.www.bostonreview.net

"The peculiar British circumstance, that state education provision has been largely determined by people who do not participate in it and who adhere to quite different educational priorities for their own class, militates against educational egalitarianism" Morant in 1902, Gove/Cummings/Wolf now