Your new UCLU Labour Committee for the academic year 2016/17:
President: Danny Filer
Vice-President/Treasurer: Omar Raii
Secretary: Mark Crawford
Campaigns Officer: Ben Towse
BAME Officer: Akif Rahman
Women’s Officer: Susannah Bain
Media and Communications Officer: Nazza Ahmed
Social Secretary: Vanessa O’Driscoll
For the Labour Students/Youth Conference in February UCLU Labour have been allocated a delegation of 12 by Labour Students, based on the size of our club. We have elected our delegation and it is mostly comprised of new members to the Society.
As conference details have been released it has become clear to us that the cost of us attending this conference is unfortunately prohibitively expensive – at a total cost of £1588.
UCLU Labour doesn’t have the funds to fully cover the costs of our delegates and with no other avenues of funding available to us we have launched a crowdfunding page to raise money for conference. Through this members will donate what they can afford – but this will not be enough.
If you are able to donate anything towards our delegates trip to conference in, to exercise our voting rights on behalf of our club and help shape the Labour youth movement, we would be most grateful.
The following person has put themselves forward for the Treasurer by-election at Thursday’s EGM:
Omar Raii:
We kicked off our events for the year with a fantastic talk from Cllr James Murray from Islington Council. James is Executive Member for Housing and Development on the Council and it was a pleasure to have him in to talk about the buy-to-leave problem affecting London’s housing market.
The phenomena of ‘buy-to-leave’ is increasingly spoken and written about and is a key campaigning issue in London. In short, it’s the idea that investors (very often overseas investors) buy properties and leave them vacant for months at a time – at a time when people are struggling to find affordable and decent places to live in London and the benefit cap will force many out of the capital.
James spoke about new developments that he’d seen advertised overseas as built before the development was even completed; the ways in which developers can get out of meeting affordable housing targets when building new accommodation and how Islington has gone about assessing how empty these so-called buy-to-leave properties are (for example, by looking at the electoral register).
James also spoke about what Islington Council has done to firstly (and importantly) recognise this problem and the steps they’ve taken to tackle it. A key point James made was the planning requirement that new properties must be lived in for 2 weeks out of every 3 months – a fairly modest requirement that will hopefully go some way in tackling this problem.
James has written more about the issue here: http://www.jamesmurray.org/new_housing
In terms of what we as UCLU Labour can do to help tackle this issue James said the most important thing was that London returned a Labour Mayor – Sadiq Khan. James told us how Sadiq understood the problem that London’s housing market faces and would be able to back up Councils when developers shirked their responsibility to provide affordable housing. Another key thing for us to do was to canvas across London – to have conversations with people about London’s housing problem and to promise the change that Sadiq will deliver.
Hi everyone,
Our event this week:
UCLU Labour: Extraordinary General Meeting
Thursday 28th January, 7pm at Rockerfeller 337 David Sacks, UCL.
We’re holding another EGM to put forward motions for the Labour Students Conference in February and run a by-election for Treasurer.
Labour Students Conference:
As a club we’re able to submit three motions at conference on three policy zones: Labour Students internal policy, Labour Students in the National Union of Students or policy to be sent to the Labour Party National Policy Forum.
We will be discussing and voting on which three motions we’d like to submit at this meeting. More information can be found below. Please drop us a line if you have any ideas or questions.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/yc3u5ia9r8autcd/Labour%20Students%20Democracy%20Toolkit.docx?dl=0
Treasurer by-election
The vacant position of Treasuer involves working with the President and Committee to manage and organise the Society’s finances.
If you are interested in standing for election as Treasurer, and are a Society member, please email uclu-labour.society@ucl.ac.uk by TOMORROW EVENING (26th Jan) with a short statement on why you would like to stand. These statements will be published on the blog to view before the EGM.
Questions will be taken at the EGM and voting will take place on the evening, with the successful candidate undertaking the role immediately.
If you’d like to put any other items on the agenda – please get in touch!
For directions to the room please see: http://crf.casa.ucl.ac.uk/screenRoute.aspx?s=386&d=141&w=False
A date for your diary!
We’re holding a social on February 6th Feb in the eve. Keep the date free and we’ll let you know more details soon.
Best wishes,
Anna
UCLU Labour President 2015-16
Standing in solidarity with junior doctors outside UCH this morning with friends from LSE Labour. 
Hi everyone,
Welcome back and wishing you all a happy new year.
As many of you know we held an event before the end of last term: ‘The State of the NHS – Junior Doctors Strike’, where Dr Martin Edobor explained why junior doctors were going out on strike. The December strikes were called off, but with an agreement not reached junior doctors are going out on strike tomorrow.
Central London Labour Clubs go to UCH Junior Doctors Picket
UCLU Labour will be supporting junior doctors on their picket alongside LSE, KCL and SOAS Labour clubs. We are meeting at University College Hospital at 9.30am TOMORROW (12/01/16) to join in solidarity with UCH junior doctors. Come for however long you can to show your support. Ring 0787651695 if you can’t find the group.
We’re launching our campaign against buy-to-leave property investment in London by inviting Cllr James Murray, Executive Member for Housing and Development on Islington Council, to come and talk about the buy-to-leave problem that London’s housing market faces and what can be done about this.
This will be held on Thursday 15th January at 6pm. The venue is still to be confirmed – but we will let you all know once it has been!
Keep checking the Facebook page for updates, as always.
Best wishes for a productive second term, and I hope to see lots of you tomorrow.
Anna
UCLU Labour President 2015-16
Hi everyone,
Thanks to all of you for an exciting first term with UCLU Labour. Unfortunately the Christmas Party last week was our last event of 2015 – but we have lots more events planned for next term. These include:
Launch of the Campaign Against Buy-To-Leave
We’re inviting Cllr James Murray, Executive Member for Housing and Development on from Islington Council, to come and talk about the buy-to-leave problem that London’s housing market faces and what can be done about this.
John Woodcock MP on Iraq and Syria
MP for Barrow and Furness John Woodcock is a member of the APPG for Kurdistan and has recently visited Iraq to witness the fight against ISIS. He will be sharing his thoughts with us on the subject of Iraq and Syria.
Treasurer By-Election
The role of Treasurer has become available on the committee. We will be holding a by-election to fill this position, with more details to be circulated in due course.
Keep an eye on the Facebook page and your emails for updates on these events. Also do feel free to get in touch if you have any suggestions about events you’d like us to run.
National Council
Nathan and Raquel were delegates from UCLU Labour to Labour Students National Council at the weekend. They’ll be posting a report shortly on the blog about how bad it was – so watch out for that.
Finally… Merry Christmas and a happy New Year! Take care of your mental health, catch up on missed lectures and enjoy the break 🙂
Best wishes,
Anna Sidebottom
UCLU Labour President 2015-16
The results of last night’s elections are as follows:
National Council
Youth Conference
Congratulations to all our new delegates!
This week we co-hosted an event with the UCLU Women’s Network about the role of women within trade unions and the benefits which being represented by a trade union can provide for women in the workplace. Our speaker was Caroline Hill, the co-founder of the Labour Young Trade Unionists network and a former president of UCLU Labour.
Caroline gave a fantastic overview of the support which joining a trade union provides and challenged the audience’s typical view of what a trade union does. Trade Unions do not just strike! Instead, we were walked through a scenario in which a worker was attempting to claim withheld sick pay and saw the various stages where having trade union representation could help hold the employer to account; in informal and formal meetings, at tribunal and, if necessary, by striking.
While these benefits are granted to everybody who joins a union, they are particularly important for women, who are an undervalued and exploited element of the workforce. The support of a trade union can help to challenge and address issues like harassment and unequal pay which women are still forced to deal with in the workplace. Joining a trade union involves you with an infrastructure that allows you far more influence; the most extreme action a trade union can take places every single member on strike. For unions like GMB that would mean 631,000 people and for Unite it would mean 1.42 million! Caroline urged women to involve themselves in trade unions for this reason, so that the greater influence can be used to hold employers to account and the issues which women face in the workplace can be addressed.
Lastly Caroline was kind enough to draw our attention to some of the wider campaigns which trade unions run like the GMB’s Fight for a Living Wage which is pushing for the implementation of a £10 hourly rate so that employees can live without needing to seek out other forms of assistance. Anyone interested in finding out more about this campaign, or indeed other large campaigns, should visit the GMB’s website.
UCLU Labour would like to thank Caroline for speaking at this event and, once again, we would like to remind you about our upcoming event – ‘The State of the NHS – Junior Doctors Strike’
uclulabour.wordpress.com 