Britain's Universities Are Striking Again. The Bosses Never Fixed a Thing the Last Time.

This autumn, UCU members at the University of Edinburgh began 25 days of strike action spread across five weeks -- the longest walkout of the current wave -- over £140 million in cuts and 1,800 threatened jobs at one of Scotland's wealthiest universities. Dundee staff are already mid-strike over compulsory redundancies. Glasgow Caledonian workers just started six days of action. The University of Essex is fighting plans to axe 400 jobs. Birmingham, Exeter and Heriot-Watt are balloting or already out. None of this is new. It is the same dispute the sector never actually settled.

Go back to 2018 and you find the same script: management claims a funding crisis, announces cuts framed as unavoidable, and staff walk out to defend jobs and pensions. That fight produced 69 cumulative strike days by late 2022 and climbed past 87 by spring 2023, one of the longest running industrial disputes in British higher education history. Vice-chancellors signed pauses, restructurings, and promises. Then the money ran out again, or was said to, and the layoffs resumed under new names -- "restructuring," "voluntary severance," "programme closures." Edinburgh itself admitted earlier this year it had no deficit while still pushing through the cuts driving this strike. The crisis is the policy, not the exception to it.

What makes British universities structurally vulnerable to this cycle is the same market logic sold to students as consumer choice: institutions compete for tuition revenue, expand where it is profitable, and treat academic staff as the first cost to cut when income dips or executive priorities shift. Marketised higher education does not produce occasional crises. It produces permanent austerity for the people who teach and permanent bonuses for the people who manage the spreadsheet. Every round of strikes is workers absorbing the cost of a business model designed to make casualisation and redundancy the default lever, not the last resort.

The union side keeps proving it can shut a campus down for weeks at a time. What it has not yet forced is a structural guarantee -- something like a binding no-compulsory-redundancy floor written into funding law, not university policy that a vice-chancellor can suspend the moment a new consultant's report lands. Strikes without that kind of enforceable floor win a pause, not a peace. The cycle of 2018, 2020, 2022, 2023 and now 2026 says the pause always ends the same way.

Solidarity here isn't abstract. Every redundancy notice at Edinburgh or Essex is a smaller, more precarious, more frightened workforce the next time management wants to push something worse through -- fewer permanent staff able to strike, more casualised contract workers too exposed to risk it. Defending the picket line now is defending the capacity to fight the next round at all.

Sources

The Tab: Eight UK universities plan to strike over job cuts, autumn 2026

UCU Edinburgh: Five-week strike, September 2026

UCU News

Wikipedia: 2018-2023 United Kingdom higher education strikes

UCU: Winning for USS 2020-24 (69 cumulative strike days)

UK Parliament briefing: University strike action in the UK