Students start campus campaign against Nice treaty

national | miscellaneous | news report

Monday October 07, 2002 13:29

by Libertarians against NiceLibertarians against Nice

contactLAN at yahoogroups dot com

Third Level Students involved in Libertarians Against Nice are set to step up their on-campus campaign against the up-coming referendum, with mass leafleting of the student body and postering of the campuses. Libertarians Against Nice now have a presence in University College Dublin and in The National University of Ireland Galway.

Press Release - Oct/7/2002
Students start campus campaign against Nice treaty

Successive governments have effectively disenfranchised students by holding referendums and elections on week days, making it extremely difficult for students go home to vote. However, the upcoming Nice Referendum, taking place on a Saturday, provides a valuable opportunity for students to express their view on what way Europe should go. As the basis of their campaign, the students involved in Libertarians Against Nice, will be focusing on the effects the amendment to Article 133 will have on the future path education will take.

The Nice Treaty sets out a program of 'harmonisation' i.e. that the policies of all E.U. states should be the same, in matters of 'liberalisation' which is the polite way of saying privatisation. The E.U. is committed to the introduction of GATS, the General Agreement on Trade in Services, which is the long way of saying privatisation. Under the World Trade Organisation's GATS treaty, practices which 'discriminate' against foreign businesses in favour of native companies (including the state owned public sector) are outlawed, this can include, in the context of third level education, grants, free fees and any state subsidy to universities or colleges (if they are not equally applicable to all private education). To privatise a public service, first of all it's got to be making a profit, to attract investment, so you have to have people paying for it. Privatisation, in order to turn a profit, attract investment, and compete in the market place, makes for increased costs for the consumer (because the more money a company makes the more shares it can sell), and lower wages and worse working conditions for the worker.

The Nice Treaty excludes, for the moment, E.U. wide 'harmonisation' in the privatisation of education, however it makes the E.U., rather than individual governments, responsible for negotiations with 'international organisations' i.e. the W.T.O. . Thus individual governments can hold their hands up and claim that they are being forced into introducing the W.T.O.'s privatisation assault.

Its child is two tier services, with the capital of private investment being poured in to develop services that provide for whoever can pay for them while under-funded and over-crowded state owned service must provide for the rest. The Big business lobby group behind the E.U. is the European Round Table of Industrialists (E.R.T.) which includes among it's select elite the bosses of Unilever, Carlsberg, Fiat, Vodafone, Volvo, Philips, Nokia, Renault, Pirelli, and Shell, as well as those of the aforementioned BP and the Smurfit group. According to one of it's number, Gerhard Cromme, of the ThyssenKrupp corporation, there is a "culture of laziness" in "the European education system" where students "take liberties to pursue subjects not directly related to industry. Instead they are pursuing subjects which have no practical application" .

As such it is a step forward in the E.U.'s and the W.T.O.'s education privatisation programme, and that is their goal, the EU's chief negotiator for GATS, Robert Madelin, describes the education sector as "ripe for liberalisation".

James Redmond, a student in UCD said
'This kind of liberalisation has already had a disastrous effect on education in countries like Spain and Italy. Instead of opening up the colleges, privatisation closes them further to the fast majority of society. Grants and subsidies to third level institutes have been slashed left, right and centre. Students are now forced to pay full tuition fees regardless of background. The financial obstacles already in place become magnified as new ones are added to the benefit of business, further hindering access to education. We recently fell victim to the governments attempts to pave the way to liberalisation with a 'reintroduction of fees through the back door' disguised as an increase in registration costs. If the Skilbeck Report issued by the Higher Educational Authority a number of months ago is anything to go by, we can expect attempts to scale back the grant as well as more links with industry. While French Students spray-painted 'Nike University' over the entrance to the Sorbonne in protest against privatisation, students here in UCD already graduate from the Smurfit School of Business and Tony O' Reilly Hall. Our Arts faculty was recently split in two to encourage a greater uptake of courses with a 'practical application' to business.'

Terry, a student involved in the campaign in NUI Galway described how European Students have reacted to such moves by their government.
"The liberalisation agenda, and resistance to it, has already hit the education systems across Europe. For instance, in May and June students across Germany went on strike, demonstrated, blocked roads and briefly occupied a TV station and the buildings of the ruling SPD party, in response to the introduction of fees for what was formerly free education. Likewise Spain has seen massive demonstrations, and the mass protests at E.U. Summits in Brussels (last December), and Seville (June) have had 'student blocs'."

After the manner in which the government binned the last rejection of Nice, the students involved in the Libertarians Against Nice don't think that a vote will stop attacks on education. Those students active in LAN see the only way to get anything or stop something is the sort of mass direct action described by the Galway student above. However as a first step, as a protest against the policies of the E.U., the Irish government and the World Trade Organisation, LAN Students will be concentrating on maximising the no vote on campuses across Ireland.

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Libertarians against Nice
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