The Lecturers’ Union and the Betrayal of the Intellectuals

A few weeks ago, a congress in Glasgow of the University and College Union (UCU), of which I’m an active member, passed a ‘Stop the War’ motion that called for an end to military support for Ukraine. Many UCU members – not least Ukrainian academics working in the UK – were appalled by this and several immediately resigned from the union. 

UCU’s General Secretary, Jo Grady, expressed herself “deeply disappointed” by the motion and described it as sending “the wrong message about our union”. For this, she was attacked on social media by its supporters, who alleged that her statement was undermining UCU’s democratic structures. UCU Left, a grouping that had promoted the motion, also claimed that those behind it “have been subjected to a witch-hunt online and smeared as ‘pro-Putin’ despite this motion calling explicitly for Russian withdrawal and condemning Putin’s war crimes”.

It’s true that the motion condemned the invasion, expressed “solidarity with ordinary Ukrainians” and called for the withdrawal of Russian troops. But in the same breath, it characterised Ukraine as “a battleground for Russian and US imperialism” and speakers arguing for it at the UCU congress explicitly blamed the war on NATO “warmongering”.

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The Ukrainian View – Gaslighting

For Ukrainian academics, who have seen their country’s universities repeatedly targeted by Russian shells and missiles, and many of their friends and colleagues killed or maimed in attacks on civilians or while actively resisting Putin’s forces, this was gaslighting of the worst sort and a gross betrayal of the most basic principles of solidarity. 

Yuliya Yurchenko, a Ukrainian senior lecturer in Political Economy at the University of Greenwich, described the attitude of the ‘anti-war’ left, “who somehow manage to simultaneously recognise Russia’s right to ‘defend its interests’ while denying the right of Ukrainians to defend their very lives or assert their national self-determination”, summing this up memorably as “the anti-imperialism of amoral idiots”.

In a long Twitter thread, Tymofiy Mylovanov, President of the Kyiv School of Economics, wrote: “The union passes a resolution against freedom and self-determination of Ukrainians. Thus, the union betrays its own values.” He pointed out that the motion’s claim that “wars are fought by the poor and unemployed of one country killing and maiming the poor and unemployed of another” was a false description of the situation in Ukraine, where people of all classes, including many academics, have enlisted (and died) in the fight-back against the invasion.

“The union assumes that people in Ukraine do not want to defend their country and that only poor and unemployed are drafted. This comes from complete ignorance about what is happening in Ukraine,” Mylovanov wrote, observing that insult had been added to injury when an amendment to the motion, aimed at making it clear that any peace should be based on freedom and independence for Ukraine, had been rejected by UCU congress delegates. “Can I ask the union to reflect how many more children would have died this last night if Ukraine had not had air defence?” he asked.

Many UCU members felt the same and a statement condemning the motion has now been signed by more than 550 academics. As it says: “To actively call for the disarming of the victims of imperialist aggression who are fighting for their existence as a people following invasion by another nation’s armed forces is to disregard the immediate threat that the people of Ukraine face and denies their right to defend themselves against Putin’s aggression.”

No speaker from Ukraine was heard during the congress debate on the motion, or at the fringe meeting held by the Stop the War Coalition ahead of this, where the platform comprised two members of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), an Afghan refugee, and Andrew Murray, a former vice-chair of Stop the War and close adviser to Jeremy Corbyn who for many years was a leading figure in the most hard-line Stalinist faction of the Communist Party of Great Britain. A frequent guest on the Russian propaganda channel RT, Murray has been banned from entering Ukraine since 2018 on the grounds that he is “part of Putin’s global propagandist network”.

The only Ukrainian that Stop the War appears to have found to support its position on Putin’s war is Yurii Sheliazhenko, a man who has written that the Ukrainian nationalist leaders and wartime Nazi collaborators Stepan Bandera and Roman Shukhevych should be recognised as “Heroes of Ukraine” (a weird irony, as Putin regularly refers to Ukrainians as “Banderas” in an attempt to falsely depict Ukraine as a nation in the grip of Nazism).

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Stop the War and the Socialist Workers’ Party

While Stop the War styles itself as a “coalition” and has succeeded in attracting support from an assortment of people broadly on the left of politics, including celebrities such as Brian Eno and Mark Rylance, it was set up essentially as a project of the SWP and the group’s convenor since its inception has been Lindsey German, who for many years was on the SWP’s central committee. It gained a large following at the time of the illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003, but since then has faced frequent criticism that it is concerned only to protest against Western imperialism and has failed to stand up for the victims of war criminals such as Vladimir Putin and Bashar al-Assad.

In 2015, a group of previous supporters of Stop the War, including the veteran human rights campaigner Peter Tatchell and a number of Syrian civil society activists, wrote that: “The Stop the War Coalition has lost its moral compass and authority. Stop the War has failed to organise or support protests against the Assad dictatorship and the regime’s massacre of peaceful democracy protesters in 2011 – and since. Nor has it shown solidarity with the non-violent Syrian civil society movements for democracy and human rights and with the millions of innocent civilians killed, wounded and displaced by Assad’s barrel bombs and torture chambers.”

Although Stop the War has frequently protested outside the US Embassy in London, it has never once done so outside the Syrian or Russian embassies, and some of its prominent supporters have sought to obfuscate or deny war crimes by Assad and Putin, including well-evidenced chemical weapons attacks on civilians in Syria. 

The left-wing journalist Mike Marqusee, who for a time served as a member of Stop the War’s executive, described the way the SWP dominated the organisation: “Decisions are taken by the SWP leadership and foisted on the StWC [Stop the War Coalition] with barely a semblance of democratic consultation […] What has disturbed me most in working with the SWP has been their flagrant ethical relativism. This is an ancient foible of the left – a conviction that the class struggle, or the building of the revolutionary party, or the sheer evil of the forces we find ourselves up against justifies any behaviour, no matter how dishonest, duplicitous, or destructive to others.”

Although Lindsey German quit the Socialist Workers Party in 2010, Stop the War remains in lockstep with the SWP position on Ukraine and it was an SWP member, Sean Vernell, who moved the ‘Stop the War’ motion at the UCU congress, where it was also supported by members of another Marxist faction, Socialist Appeal (an offshoot of the International Marxist Tendency). Socialist Appeal takes much the same line on Ukraine as Stop the War and the SWP, though it has criticised Stop the War’s “weakness when it refers to the virtues of diplomacy, the UN, and sweet reason”.