Robbie Davidson, Manchester Socialist Students

Manchester and Salford Socialist Students travelled to the office of Labour MP Rebecca Long-Bailey. We handed in a letter discussing the necessity of a political voice for the Funding Not Fees campaign. Another letter called for international solidarity with students and workers facing brutal repression from Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey.

This was one of the next steps we agreed in our vibrant Funding Not Fees meeting a month ago. There, over 20 students and workers came together to talk about the need for a mass campaign for education to be run in the interests of students and staff.

Outside Rebecca Long-Bailey’s office, new members of Socialist Students delivered short, impassioned speeches about the need for a politician to lead the fight for a decent future for young people. We want Rebecca Long-Bailey, Independent Alliance MPs around Jeremy Corbyn, and other left-wing Labour MPs to raise an amendment to the government’s summer spending review.

Rebecca Long-Bailey was suspended as a Labour MP by Keir Starmer for opposing the government’s plan to keep the two-child benefit cap. But in February she was let back in.

An amendment to Labour’s spending review should call for an end to tuition fees, for grants not loans, for fair rents, an end to redundancies, no more course closures, and divestment from arms sales. The democratic public ownership of universities, won through a mass fightback from trade unions and young people, could achieve all this.

Manchester and Salford Socialist Students letter

Dear Rebecca Long-Bailey,

Higher education is in crisis. University vice chancellors have announced more than 2000 redundancies since the start of 2025 alone. For students, the threat of mass course closures comes on top of an ongoing cost-of-living crisis, as well as a planned tuition fee hike next year.

The Funding Not Fees campaign has been launched this year as a means to rally students alongside workers in a movement for fully funded and free education, instead of the cuts, cost-of-living crisis, and lifetime of student debt currently on offer to young people.

Funding Not Fees calls for:

• No to Labour’s tuition fee hike – scrap fees and cancel student debt
• Living grants, not loans
• Stop all cuts and closures on campus. End low pay and casualisation of staff
• Divestment from arms and big business – no place for profiteers from war and exploitation on our campus

Student campaigners have protested in support of the Funding Not Fees demands on over 35 university campuses this year. Members of the trade union Unison have balloted for UK-wide strike action in higher education. And the University and College Union (UCU) has recently launched a new national campaign, ‘Stop the Cuts, Fund Higher Education Now’.

We, the undersigned, think that all these struggles urgently need a political voice. Currently none of the parties in parliament offer any real alternative to the dire situation in education.

That’s why we are asking MPs to join the Funding Not Fees campaign, and publicly support the socialist solutions outlined above. Even just one MP boldly putting forward these ideas would provide a much-needed socialist parliamentary lead to the thousands of students and workers in education who are fighting back. It could inspire many thousands more to join this fight too, as we saw in the mass support for Jeremy Corbyn’s pledge for free education.

We would like to invite you to a meeting to discuss how you could play this role. Specifically, we would like to invite you to:

1) Raise the Funding Not Fees campaign demands in parliament – including by submitting an amendment (or private members’ bill) to any aspect of the government’s June spending review that seeks to make students and workers pay even more for the crisis in education.

2) Speak at a Funding Not Fees protest at Manchester University later this academic year.

3) Support our demands regarding Manchester University’s Fallowfield campus redevelopment to guarantee affordable, high quality, and accessible accommodation for all students to be managed by a democratic student body, which will ensure fair rents in the future.

We look forward to hearing your reply. In solidarity,

Manchester and Salford Socialist Students