Everyone on campus should be raging about the rent

University is awash with left-wing rhetoric; far more than that which exists in ‘the real world’.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s important we have a strong sense of social liberalism at university and, despite definite issues surrounding no-platforming and freedom of speech, acceptance and understanding of one another’s identities is an integral part of our development that university should serve to accommodate.

2015 election posters

However, I regularly take issue with the emphasis on fiscal liberalism at university. Every year around this time, posters are plastered across Malet Place, on the windows of Print Room and on the doors of toilet cubicles as generic faces advertise unrealistic (potentially undesirable), promises of free education and ends to capitalism. This is coupled with protests demanding the same thing, and those who don’t share these views can feel marginalised amidst the leftism prevalent at university.

Let’s be clear, it’s not fascist to suggest higher education should not be free, or to vote Tory, or to think Jeremy Corbyn is deluded, and I’m confident a large proportion of the student body would agree. Yet, at times, you’d think the opposite.

As a result, it’s easy to become disenfranchised with student politics generally, and switch off from what they’re all saying: collectively muting their voices. This presents a problem because it means many miss the problems which would otherwise be universally condemned, like quite how abhorrent the rent crisis on campus is.

The campaign group leading the charge against the obscene costs is UCL, Cut the Rent, and The Tab have covered countless stories in the past year of their various successes including, most recently, when over 500 students announced they were refusing to pay their rent.

UCL, Cut the Rent identify the key facts as these:

• UCL enjoy profits of £15.8 million annually from their residences
• The new proposal (a rent freeze or reduction for 30 per cent of rooms) UCL has laid out does not include any changes for students in halls this year and still entails an increase for 70 per cent of their rooms, maintaining an estimated surplus of £14 million (on top of the costs of running halls)
• Even with the new proposal, less than 100 out of 5000 rooms at UCL are affordable according to the standards set by the NUS (that rent should be 25 per cent of students’ income)
• UCL say they need to take money from our rent for future investment, but at the same time they spend untold millions on UCL Stratford, rather than using that for refurbishing halls

The increase in rent prices at Max Rayne since 2010 as reported on BBC London News

This is, whatever way you look at it, outrageous. So outrageous in fact that it’s been reported absolutely everywhere in the last few days, including on page two of the Independent earlier this week.

Everyone around the country is enraged by it: it’s been reported on The Guardian, on Vice, on Indy Online, on BBC News – and yet on campus it still feels like a bit of a non-entity. It’s as though we’re oblivious to the media storm engulfing our place of study.

This is surely because it’s got caught up in this collective mute which loud, combative voices from the far-left on campus have ironically forced. It’s all very well screaming and protesting about wanting free-education, and people are well within their rights to do so, but this does cause issues like the rent-strike to fall in to the same bracket as seemingly unwinnable battles like that, which in turn leads to a loss of interest to those of us who are not as left-inclined.

Though perhaps I’m being unfair, for it’s certainly true that UCL, Cut the Rent often deploy ‘militant’ tactics themselves in order to force decisions. For example earlier this week they took to the roof of Portico with red smoke to announce the expansion of the rent-strikes, something many people find intimidating or excessive to the extent they wish to remain uninvolved.

Nevertheless, one must question what other option they have: in a university where the management concede it’s “a fact of life” that some can’t afford to study here, and a blatant acceptance for students’ lack of welfare and consequent wellbeing, what option is there but to take decisive, bold action.

It’s therefore important for more conservative-minded students to join with campaigners from the traditional left in condemning the unnecessary profits from rent at the expense of students, and form a united student-body who can even more effectively take a stand against UCL management and prevent further exploitation of students already paying obscene costs for their education.

You won’t catch me on the roof of Portico, you probably won’t see me at a rally amongst protestors demanding free education and the canonisation of Jeremy Corbyn, but I’ll at least offer my solidarity and openly share my disagreement with the social cleansing unfolding around us.

I think we all should.