Showing posts with label Brent Green Party. Peter Murry. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Brent Green Party. Peter Murry. Show all posts

Saturday 1 May 2010

Greens Support Kilburn College

Last night's meeting about the closure of Kilburn College was crowded, angry and militant. Lecturers, students and local residents came together to denouce the closure plans and put forward ideas for active resistance. The main political party candidates for Hampstead and Kilburn spoke platitudes from the platform and soon disappeared.

Speaking from the floor, Peter Murry, an ex-lecturer at Kilburn and a council candidate for  the Brent Kilburn ward spoke passionately of this attack on local people who face challenges such as learning English and getting into employment. He outlined how further education could transform their lives and said that the removal of their access to education was a crime. He supported calls for non-violent direct action and remarked that such tactics were a proud Green Party tradition. He called for further education colleges to be brought back under local authority control.

Bea Campbell, Green Party parliamentary candidate for Hampstead and Kilburn, spoke about how further education had improved her parents' life chances and suggested that another dimension to the campaign should be a legal route.  She urged the campaign to seek legal assistance to use the recent Equalities legislation to show that the community had not been properly consulted on the proposals, (now a statutory requirement).

Students from the ethnic minority communites spoke movingly of their attachment to their local college and the difference it had made and was making in their lives. There were accounts of the shock they had felt when the announcement was made and their feelings of being completed disregarded by the college governors.

A large number of people, including Green Party members, volunteered to be part of a delegation to the college governors, to try and persuade then to reverse their decision.

Thursday 29 April 2010

Kilburn - Blame Privatisation

Peter Murry, Green Party candidate for Kilburn ward, looks ahead to Friday's Save Kilburn College meeting at the Kingsgate Community Centre, Kingsgate Road, NW6 (7pm).


As a Green Party candidate for Kilburn ward in the council elections and a former lecturer at the College of North West London’s old Kilburn site and retired member of the college’s UCU branch, I am obviously concerned about the closure of the new Kilburn building and its impact on students and staff. This will drastically reduce educational provision for adults in the Kilburn area, many of who are BME communities and women.

However, although I support the campaign against closure the present funding current management arrangements limit the power of any local council or MP to reverse the decision.

The root of the problem lies in earlier government policies of the quasi-privatisation of Further Education that took place in the 1990's. This took the control of Colleges out of the control of local government, which whatever its faults, had some democratic accountability. Now colleges with large budgets are controlled by governing bodies which are in effect self perpetuating quangos that often just rubber-stamp management decisions