Richard Reeve

Members holding up "We are the university" banner

We are the University! and we are currently balloting to take action for better pay, job security, and respect of national agreements ✊ Let's smash the 50% turnout threshold to make our ballot count! Post your ballot ASAP 📮 @ucu.org.uk #WeAreTheUniversity

To be clear: deportations to increase cultural homogeneity is the text book definition of ethnic cleansing. Demands that come even close to this are so far outside any democratic norm and the rule of law. What has happened to a country when this is not condemned in the strongest possible terms?

1 Nurse: It’s become a real problem in this area 2 Nurse: We’ve seen the whole community lost to addiction 3 Show a building sign posted: Westminster ‘X’ Addiction Clinic With various Westminster people or looking at their phones outside it Nurse: Ministers, Spads, Researchers… 4 Nurse: Most mornings we’ll get a call about someone acting strangely [Nurse on phone taking a call] Ok - we’ll be right over 5 Nurse: We just have a gentle chat [Nurses approach a minister –Robert Jenrick? - standing in the Palace of Westminster Minister: I understand your concerns… 6 Nurse: Are you OK love? Minister: Yes I’m just hearing legitimate concerns from real voters 7 Nurse: That’s a robot, a Nazi and a poorly-disguised Russian [Show that the people he is talking to are precisely these characters] Nurse 2: Give us your phone, love 8 Nurse: At the clinic we put them in a Grass-Touching Pod, with a real voter to talk to [We see them back at the clinic, holding the minister's head and pushing him into a glass isolation booth with a grass floor. And it is a baffled looking woman, on a chair, ready to talk to him.] 9 Minister: YOU MUST BE WORRIED ABOUT THE COMING CIVIL WAR [woman looks baffled] 10 woman: I just want a bus service Minister: LOOK AT MY FLAG [produces a St George's flag] [ends]

When you first heard me speak against this genocide, you heard my words as betrayal. But they were meant as love | Sarah Schwartz Not speaking would go against everything I was taught to honour: the righteous among the nations – those who refused to be bystanders to injustice

'The very act of oppressing others has changed us as a people. Our boots may be on their necks, but those same boots also shackle our feet.'

www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Lots of people in this country need to hear the message - it isn't the left's fault that everything you wanted and fought for is absolute fucking dogwater. I, too, am sorry that you won and imposed this shit on us, but we actually tried to stop it.

UCU: Fighting punitive ASOS deductions Motion from UCU Congress 2022-2023: Fighting punitive ASOS deductions

UCU policy: “To work with the TUC and other TUs to campaign for a change to the law to prevent such deductions, including lobbying government and opposition parties”

Maybe while @drjogrady.bsky.social is at @tuc.org.uk in Brighton she can work on thi… oh!

policy.web.ucu.org.uk/motion-infor...

Drafting a more extensive response, but for now we think that (1) @uniteucu.bsky.social rock [branch position, voted on in motions], (2) that this is no way of treating staff [union position, voted on in Congress], and (3) everyone should read this blog: uniteucu.wordpress.com/2025/09/04/u...

Yvette Cooper: Some 'don't know the full nature' of Palestine Action Defending the group's proscription under terror law, she said the organisation was "not a non-violent organisation".

It is inherently absurd to proscribe a group as terrorists based on acts the public doesn't know about. Terrorism *by definition* involves violence intended to intimidate a civilian population. How can the target population be terrorised by acts they know nothing about?

www.bbc.com/news/article...

🎓 40 brilliant Palestinian students have pushed through war, loss & destruction - just for the chance to study.

Now UK bureaucracy is standing in their way.

✍️ Students & alumni: sign & share the open letter.
We’re at 3,000 - let’s hit 10,000 by Sunday.

🔗 linktr.ee/thegaza40

#Gaza40

GCIV, art. 55 would like a word.

Letter to Home Secretary

Letter to Home Secretary

While remaining complicit in Israel’s genocide, the UK government is now shamefully blocking young Palestinians in Gaza from taking up places at British universities this September.

We have written to the Home Secretary @YvetteCooperMP demanding these students be welcomed. 🔽

What are @ucu.org.uk up to? Do they realise they are a trade union themselves and their appalling behaviour encourages disrespect from our employers when we ask for rights that are being denied to our own staff (as well as being unacceptable in its own right).

Meet the Scot who who suggested schoolchildren be given free milk

John Boyd Orr was once a household name in Scotland

Convinced of the nutritional benefits of milk, Boyd Orr was appalled it was wasted when poor families could not afford it, but his proposals for a government scheme to supply free milk to schools were first ignored ...

The Cost Allocation Death Spiral and the University The Cost Allocation Death Spiral and the University Accountants, as people whose business it chiefly is to bring hard news to powerful people, generally avoid emotional terms. They prefer softer, nuan...

I was told that managers argued for potential cuts and closure of departments by looking at their contribution margins, i.e. their financial contribution to the university. I wonder if these managers have ever heard about the 'cost allocation death spiral'.

#UKHE

www.linkedin.com/pulse/cost-a...

Paywall free

Now I Understand Why Israel Is Denying Journalists Access to the Appalling Scene in Gaza'

One of the only historians studying the Gaza Strip, Jean-Pierre Filiu, spent a month in the killing fields there, and documented everything

archive.is/2025.07.05-1...

The UK must not fail Gaza—a call for government action For nearly 20 months, since October 2023, Palestinians in Gaza have endured a relentless campaign of annihilation. The statistics alone defy comprehension: over 56 000 people killed—one third of them ...

Great open letter about genocide in #Gaza in @bmj.com

"It threatens to set the most dystopian of precedents demonstrating a brazen disregard for international humanitarian and military law; an exercise of power without accountability"

Sign and share lnkd.in/eH97sibP

www.bmj.com/content/390/...

Breaking news – Redundancy notice (Section 188) removed

The University of Dundee has confirmed that the section 188 letter issued in March 2025 has been formally withdrawn! This is a direct result of the industrial action we took and the action we threatened.

This is our victory! 1/3

If thousands of us stand up and say "I support #PalestineAction", what is the government going to do? Lock us all up for "terrorism" offences?
This is where we show them how solidarity works.
My latest with the great @doubledown.news

Our branch has declared no confidence in UCU’s SMT to protect the well-being of staff, nor in its commitment to improving industrial relations.

With the increasing victimisation of our reps, and SMT now repeatedly imposing changes in working conditions and policies, our dispute continues.

A MASSIVE WIN AT NEWCASTLE UNI ICU

NO REDUNDANCIES at the University of Dundee.

Fantastic news in our fight to save jobs, as interim Principal Prof Nigel Seaton confirms that there will be no redundancies. A massive victory for everyone who has supported us.

Looking forward to receiving the removal of Section 188 in writing.

Lancaster University to cut one in five academic jobs Institution says it is ‘not immune’ to financial challenges as it looks to axe 400 jobs

'The university has informed staff of plans to cut 400 full-time equivalent (FTE) positions by July 2026, with academics the first to go.'

Professor Andy Schofield, VC at Lancaster University since 2020, will take up position of Principal & VC at Glasgow University on 1 October 2025.

AN AMAZING WIN INDEED. Whilst we had this massive win, our dispute is not over! Negotiations will follow, and we hope we can come to a meaningful agreement, but for now strikes are on! Members voted overwhelmingly for Open Day Action next Friday and Saturday!

🎯

On the upside: this current crop of VCs, consultants, and “regulators” will make an excellent case in business school handbooks on How To Fuck Up Spectacularly. For a couple of decades. And then they forget about it and do it all over again…

Large number of UCU members at Edinburgh rally

Incredible support for our staff at @ucuedinburgh.bsky.social on picket lines today in their fight against management's plans to slash budgets and jobs ✊

NEW and major report out now about the situation in our universities, which is... not that good. It's clear that morale has collapsed, as predicted. There are of course all sorts of problems with self-report surveys, but this isn't surprising given that the HE topsoil has now been burned off. (1/3)