Will the Students Succeed in Triggering a Rebellion?
Gary Younge is right when he says that the students won’t likely embody a deep rebellion against the government’s austerity cuts, but they sure could inspire one:
So while it’s true that others have it worse than students, it also entirely misses the point. Protesting against tuition fees is not a sectional interest. For most, student years mark a transition from youth to adulthood, which means the burden for these increases do not just fall on individuals but families – who will already be suffering from the crisis in others ways. Thatcher’s cuts blighted isolated communities, whether they were pit villages or northern cities. These attacks are not just deeper but broader. Clearly, how students’ resistance to these cuts pans out will have ramifications for successful opposition to the entire austerity programme. That is reason enough to deserve our support.
But while students can be the spark for the broader struggles ahead, history tells us that they are unlikely to be the flame itself. Students and the young might be the most likely to protest, but they are among the least likely to vote – if indeed they are even eligible to vote – and cannot withdraw their labour to any devastating effect. McCain’s stand gave courage to the sharecroppers and domestic workers; the French students in 1968 bolstered the confidence of factory workers. The threat British students pose – much like the financial crisis bringing them on to the streets – is of contagion. That their energy, enthusiasm, militancy, rage and raucousness might burn in us all.
As the video shows, the student rebellion is succeeding in drawing wider consciousness to the double standard the ConDem coalition doesn’t want you to know about. On the one hand they’re happy to more than triple the debt students are expected to carry merely to get themselves educated (whilst making it nigh impossible for much poorer students to do so at all), on the other they’re as indifferent as ever to tax avoidance by business magnates and corporations. If they can keep demonstrating how ideological the cuts agenda is across society – not just to their interests – Younge could turn out to be right.
These protests are labelled ‘fascist’ by some – a charge which makes no sense to me. Most of the country voted against this in May, and protest is an entirely legitimate (and protected) tactic available influence public opinion and government policy. Younge argues:
This is all too easy to dismiss and disparage as a toxic cocktail of naivety and privilege. Such sleights are flawed. First, in Britain at least, the notion of students as a wealthy strata on a three-year hiatus from real life is outdated. A third of students in higher education are from working-class or lower-middle-class backgrounds, and work during term time to pay for basic needs and books and equipment. Just under one in five of those with jobs works more than 17 hours a week. One in five lives at home. Add further education and school students into the mix and you have a demographic that looks more like the characters in The Office than Brideshead Revisited.
Second, even if they were middle class, so what? Beating up on the middle-class does not help the working-class. Indeed, by eliminating the notion that education is a public good you eradicate the primary means by which working-class people can better themselves. They are not just an attack on finances, but on aspiration.
It can never be pointed out too often – if only because it is so frequently ignored – that this situation was not created by excessive public spending but by an international banking crisis brought about by an unregulated binge in the private sector. In a sordid redistribution of wealth from poor to rich, working-class kids will be denied the possibility of a university education because wealthy traders were in denial about economic reality.
I don’t think it’s just students who get this. Lib Dem ministers may toe the coalition line and refuse to talk about the bankers or debt, but the moment the equation gets embraced by the wider middle class (for it is they who determine election outcomes still) they have a serious problem. I do hope so.
Students vs the Shock Doctrine
The @UCLOccupation says you should ‘come and have a cuppa’. Quite brilliant – have a watch to understand what the UCL student occupation is all about.
Beware Rebelling Against the State
The Metropolitan Police are making it abundantly clear that, as ever, the state’s will will be enforced by force. The violence at the entirely peaceful climate camp protest at the G20 demonstration last year was not an aberration, and they’re now no longer afraid of admitting it: rebel against the state and there’ll be a price to pay. Check out the police’s response to today’s peaceful #ukuncut protest against Top Shop’s Sir Philip Green:
Suzanne Moore criticises the media’s narrative about the student protests:
It is fantastic that these young people, who we have been told have been blinded by celebrity culture and are mainly Facebook narcissists, soon made contact with other causes. Students at UCL also campaigned for a living wage for their cleaning staff. When I was there union leaders were talking solidarity with them. These kids, unlike their elders, are not scared of the word “class”. Into this hub of activity come other, younger students wanting to see how its done: polite, well-spoken boys who want to stage occupations in their sixth forms about the removal of the Educational Maintenance Allowance (EMA).
The media of course has banged on about tuition fees as the children of media people go to university. Little has been said about EMA, a means-tested benefit, possibly because those who live on less than £20,000 a year are not in the middle-class bubble. To remove this in effect prohibits a whole sector of society even getting the qualifications they need to get university.
It baffles me when I’m told that the students don’t understand what they’re protesting about, equally so when students from middle class backgrounds, less likely to be adversely affected by the huge hike in tuition fees and (the dreaded word) the debt arising from them, are criticised for protesting on behalf of those less well off than them. Is it somehow a betrayal of their class to want the world to be less polarised and divided by wealth than it already is? And why is there not a national explosion of rebellion in response to the state’s treatment of these kids? The answer is clear: it’s not just an ideological battle which is being waged, but a generational one. We complain that children and young people are supine, uncritical and apathetic, yet the moment that’s proven wrong we respond with violence. We don’t want young people to actually take action against tax avoiders who, if they paid their fair share, could contribute to lowering the severity of key cuts in public services.
Laurie Penny elaborates on the students’ position, well, more than she already has:
What has been taken from them to make them so angry? Hope, that’s what. Hope, and the fragile bubble of social aspiration that sustained us through decades of mounting inequality; hope and the belief that if we worked hard and did as we were told and bought the right things, some of us at least would get the good jobs and safe places to live that we’d been promised.
Hope was the emotional engine of a decade of dizzying economic growth. Now it’s gone. Thatcher and Reagan knew you couldn’t take away hope altogther, which is why they replaced the politics of collective bargaining with a cynical, but seductive, politics of aspiration and individualism. The coalition has forgotten that it’s not enough for millionaire politicians to preach the politics of austerity when all they have to offer is more austerity.
Back on Oxford Street, as the police vans scream into view, the children’s crusade stands firm. “They want to marketise our education,” says Ben, 21, his breath clouding in the bitter air. “So we’re going to educate their market.”
I don’t think it will, but this rebellion, and the state’s ruthlessness in trying to crush it, should bring down the ConDem coalition. Either way the student movement is only going to grow and grow, and we should all start supporting it. The next generation is taking the lead in aiming for the good society, not the Big Society – the media in turn should be celebrating their achievements.
It’s Pointless to Protest?
Deborah Orr sure seems to think so:
It is sometimes suggested that there is little protest against the cuts, except from students and schoolchildren, because adults are too craven and apathetic to stand up and be counted. The truth is that they are too wise to waste their energy on something so silly. Protesting against the cuts is like protesting against water’s stubborn habit of flowing downwards. Pointless, unless you are a committed anarchist, in which case everything is worth protesting against.
Protesting education cuts and tuition fee rises is silly?! That commentary reminds me of BBC Question Time last night where noone but noone wanted to talk about the morality of subjecting university students with much higher levels of debt. Of course right wing talking head Nadine Dorries thought it was perfectly fine, indeed she believed her constituents were against funding higher education out of taxation, implying that students were lazy good-for-nothings who should be bullied into contributing more. What of the majority of students though who don’t fall into that convenient category? Should they just sit and take this attack on their futures, when the financial mess we’re in isn’t down to them, and there are so many other alternatives available? I think it’s bizarre to suggest that anyone fighting these cuts and others (Lewisham Town Hall was just the start) is an anarchist.
It is interesting how much the student protests have relied on exploiting the political weaknesses of the Coalition, rather than concentrating on promoting the sound intellectual arguments that can be mustered against the reform of higher education. A protest that started out insisting that it filled a vacuum left by the failure of politics has remained obsessed with the promises the Lib-Dems made in its manifesto for government, and the hypocrisy the party has shown in ditching them for coalition.
I think it’s a horribly flawed perspective on the demonstrations. True the students are angry at the unfairness of the Lib Dem betrayal, having pledged in public that they would not support rises in tuition fees. But their anger is clearly much greater than that. As Elgan John points out, this is fury at what Naomi Klein calls ‘Shock Doctrine’ or disaster capitalism being aimed at them in particular:
Today in the UK we are positioned between a Mary Louise Smith and a Rosa Parks; not of course in terms of civil rights but insomuch that the angry youth have put their bodies forward in disobedience, their skulls smashed by batons, their blood has speckled the snow. They have done this in protest against tuition fees that they would never pay. But more than that, it is far larger protest, one against this government of extremists and their shock doctrine. These students have readied the way for the dignified marched of those with impeccable character, the quiet and the well behaved, to truly shock those in power and to bring this illegitimate government crashing down.
Britain’s new youth movement has evolved. The white-hot energy that exploded at Millbank three weeks ago has cooled into a hard-edged organising tool, making links with Trade Unions and anti-cuts groups up and down the country. What started as a riot has become a movement. At UCL, one of the movement’s strategic hubs, serious-faced teenagers take detailed notes and man the phones to liaise with the media whilst others are already at their laptops, getting the word out via Twitter and Facebook about what’s happening on the streets. These young people have been underestimated – by their parents, by their teachers and lecturers, and by successive neoliberal administrations -and that underestimation may yet shake this government to its core.
I only see informed, intellectual objections to the ConDem’s higher education reforms underpinning the ongoing student rebellion. And the fact is the protests have brought this issue up to the very top of the political agenda, and are already causing deep ruptures in the coalition. The students realise that, for reasons I’ve repeatedly cited, the attack on them is ideological and that the social values being put forward by the government for these reforms do not and will not lead to the social good. I too can’t agree that saddling the next generation with unbelievable levels of debt and letting the bankers get off scott free is just or necessary, when we have more than enough money to fight pointless wars and to contribute to bailing out whole countries. As other commentators have said, Atlee built the NHS at a time when he too had no money to hand because it was the right thing to do. Having dismissed students for too long as unable to critically evaluate the world, we should be championing them now for pointing us in the right direction this time.
Two Perspectives on the Student Protests
Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Paul Stephenson this morning said:
“I think parents have a responsibility. I know what I would be telling my kids. My kids would not be going on a demonstration, because I do not think it is appropriate for 13 or 14 year children – not my children.
“That is for other parents to make their decision, but in coming to that decision, they’ve got to look at the events that have taken place. The vast majority of people who come have come wanting to peacefully demonstrate, but regrettably, there have been people who have turned it to violence.
“Do people really want their young children exposed to that? There’s a responsibility on me and there’s a responsibility on parents.”
Investigative journalist John Pilger said effectively the exact opposite:
Your action, and the action of your fellow students all over Britain, in standing up to a mendacious, undemocratic government is one of the most important and exciting developments in my recent lifetime. People often look back to the 1960s with nostalgia – but the point about the Sixties is that it took the establishment by surprise. And that’s what you have done. Your admirable, clever, courageous actions have shocked and frightened a corrupt political class – coalition and Labour – because they know you have the support of the majority of the British people. It is you, the students on the streets – not the Camerons, Cleggs and Milibands – who are the authentic representatives of the people. Keep going. We need you. All power to you.
Stephenson neglects to mention that the people who turned the last two protest to violence were the Met themselves. Silly him.
How to Escape a Kettle
Priceless footage from yesterday’s #dayx2 #demo2010 student demonstration against the ConDem coalition’s planned huge rise in tuition fees and university budget cuts. Late in the day the Met swore blind they had no intention of kettling the student demonstrators on Whitehall (despite bountiful evidence and testimonies to the contrary), but the students themselves knew otherwise and the #catandmouse chase, as you can see, made fools of the cops.
The Met however remained determined to infringe the students’ right to protest peacefully, as you can see:
The territorial support group (TSG) riot officers even returned to their old tactic of covering up their identifying shoulder numbers. The more things change the more they stay the same.
Be Kettled (for no reason) Or Else!
Guardian reporter Paul Lewis discusses the Met’s pre-emptive kettling attempt earlier today, and how it may itself not be legal (twitpic by Jonathan Warren):
In terms of the letter of the law, there is a chance that Scotland Yard overstepped the mark today. I’ve just been in touch with Louise Christian, the human rights lawyer who is bringing a test case against the Met’s policy of “kettling” to the European Court of Human Rights. The Law Lords previously ruled in the Met’s favour in the Lois Austin case , hence the force’s repeated claims that the tactics has been deemed “lawful”. But it is not as simple as that, as senior officers need to prove that containing people was “proportionate” to the threat posed by a crowd. The notorious kettling of climate camp activists at last year’s G20 protest is currently before a Judicial Review at the High Court over exactly this point. The stakes are high as the Met could lose money – and a lot of it – if it is shown to have arbitrarily imprisoned thousands of people.
If today’s reports are true, and the Met tried to kettle students before their march had properly even begun, the commissioner could find himself in the dock yet again. There i evidence to support those reports – lines of police and pre-prepared barriers suggest there was a pen in Whitehall, into which police planned to funnel students. A kettle needs to be a response to evidence of disorder, rather than an entirely preemptive tactic that suppresses protest before it has begun. “I think what has happened runs contrary to the Law Lords ruling in the Austin case,” Christian said. “It makes clear that they need to have an evidence-based approach. If they decide in advance that they are going to do it, then I suggest that would be unlawful.”
Legality aside, there is also the question of whether the apparent plot worked. It is clear that when the march saw the kettle awaiting them, they sprinted off in various directions. The Met is currently dealing with a public order nightmare; separated groups of protesters marching their way around the London, on an ad-hoc route. Tweet reports of “feeder” marches in the Oxford Street, the Strand, Victoria, Embankment and Tottenham Court Road. My colleague Matt Taylor said there were “shambolic” scenes. How do you deal with that?
And this is the public order nightmare they created, selected from a small number of tweets:
@OwenJones84 What an indictment of British democracy that demonstrators have to think outside the box to try and exercise democratic right to protest
@monstris Phalanx of horses coming up Whitehall. Traf Sq being kettled off at Nat Gallery.#dayx #demo2010 #dayx2
@CarlRaincoat Kettle attempt has done 2 things: made it harder 4 police 2 track; curbed the right to protest. Police failure.#solidarity #demo2010 #dayx2
@sofiebuckland Police are causing chaos chasing groups of protesters fleeing kettles, kids falling over and scared. We had agreement to protest. RT #dayx2
@eastlondonlines Police attempted to form a kettle on Aldwych. Strength of the massed protesters was too much and the kettle collapsed #demo2010
@guyaitchison Crowd dodged another kettle by aldwych and now heading towards City#dayx
@mrmatthewtaylor Police op looks increasingly shambolic as they chase 1000s on #catandmousedemo up regents st and into oxford st#demo2010
@nmec #dayx2 protesters kettled outside Buckingham Palace http://twitpic.com/3blxlw (that twitpic illustrates this article)
@copwatcher Seems to be no violent incidents on today’s student protests. That’ll be because the police are unable to orchestrate them.
Speaking of orchestration, here are the Met Lies of the Day:
The Met police worked with organisers in advance to agree a suitable route from Trafalgar Square down to Parliament Square for a peaceful protest.
However, today’s march set off at an earlier time than agreed. This meant that the march began without a police escort. The police escort was essential due to gas main works on one side of Whitehall.
As a result, a line of police officers formed a cordon across Whitehall. This line of police officers intended to steer the march to one side of the road and the agreed route. There was never any intention to contain the protesters.
The march then broke into small groups, travelling in different directions.
The march continues peacefully, however, it is causing some disruption for Londoners in the West End, in what are already difficult conditions due to the weather.
And yet the Met are kettling people, suggesting there’s not a single shred of truth to this press release. Even if the comment about ‘steering’ was true, how does it explain the picture above, or the many accounts of attempted kettles? If they acknowledge the march is continuing peacefully, it doesn’t square with their acknowledgement they were planning to do just what they say they weren’t, nor with their behaviour on the ground. As one protester said:
@Becca_Boot THE PROTEST STARTED EARLY BECAUSE THE POLICE STARTED TO CLOSE THEM IN ON TRAFALGAR! Please stop lying! #dayx2 #demo2010#UNIty #solidarity
Students Continue Opposing the State
Protest under the ConDem coalition, as under New Labour, is tolerated on the one condition that it doesn’t threaten or embarrass the state. Take a look at the photo above of the police’s response to today’s third student protest. Then read this:
@2MillionFollows ATTN #DEMO2010 TRAFALGAR WHITEHALL – TSG Officers are on the streets armed with CS Spray. Can be identified by a ‘U’ in their shoulder nos
So we have evidence that a decision was taken to kettle children and young people marching, without any evidence of violent intent, before the march even took place. We now appear to have evidence of high numbers of Met riot police offers, armed to enforce the will of the state. Resist the ideological attack on your futures? Get beaten, pepper sprayed, and charged at by horses.
And given no reports of any violence by demonstrators, even with the agreed route completely blocked by TSG officers, a new #baitvan appears to have been strategically placed:
@Paul__Lewis Sky News reporting another police van left in middle of protests, with complaints of “red rag to a bull”#demo2010
Having upset protesters through their entirely unnecessary intimidatory behaviour, they will of course now want to generate justification for the intimidation. Just like last week. And just like last week (as Barnaby Raine quite rightly pointed out in his speech I blogged yesterday), the media are letting them get away with it:
@danielnobody Hello UK Media! why isn’t #demo2010on the news? Or are you only interested after the kettles boil over? #dayx2#solidarity #unity
Olly Zanetti argues of the student protests:
justifying education cuts by claiming the state can’t afford it is an illusion too. State finances aren’t great, but recent government actions show it’s hardly scrabbling for pennies in the gutter; the government wants to cut bank taxes by £1.4bn; they’ve let Vodafone off around £6bn of tax; and were quick to rustle up €3.8bn to go directly to Ireland’s failed banks.
Higher education is a good thing and it must be available (and feel accessible) to everyone who’ll benefit, not just those who can afford it. Time at university is about opening eyes to different ways of thinking; it’s about learning how to deal with complex ideas and to persevere when they get difficult; and it’s about education simply for the joy of it. All this costs money, but it’s a worthy investment and one a civilised society should be happy to prioritise, even in the tough times. Applying market economics to such a thing and seeing it as a commodity that simply enables its buyer to tick the box marked ‘educated to degree level’ when applying for a job, is an insult to both lecturers’ and students’ time and skills.
The ideological battle continues.
Third Student Demo Pre-Emptively Threatened With Kettling
I’ve seen what I’ve found to be a surprising amount of support for the police’s tactics in dealing with last week’s student demonstration against the proposed massive hike in tuition fees and university budget cuts. Today, before the third demonstration has even started, we have learned this from the Guardian’s Matthew Taylor:
In Trafalgar Square there is a handful of soggy protesters and a few journalists. The plan today is that students will arrive here from 11am and then at about 12noon march down to Parliament Square – where there will be speeches and an “open mike”.
They had agreed with police that the demonstration would finish at 3pm but interestingly some of the shopkeepers around Parliament Square say they have been told by the police that the students will be “held” there until 6pm.
Students who are setting up in Parliament Square are furious: “The police already seem to have decided to kettle the protest despite what happened last time and despite agreeing with us this week that the demo should finish at 3pm,” said Maham Hashmi, from Soas (School of Oriental and African Studies).
Let me repeat: this is a tactic which has been decided before anyone has even arrived. It’s not based on any other factor such as the age of the participants, the behaviour of the protesters or any other criteria. It’s sheer bloody intimidation for its own sake. What on earth do the Met think will be the response to this?
Students vs the Met: Round Three
Bob Broadhurst (the man responsible for the G20 policing disaster) is back on his high *ahem* horse today:
Commander Broadhurst said today: “The Met will always respect the right to protest peacefully, but I would urge all those considering taking to the streets of London again this week to think carefully about the consequences of engaging in violence and disorder.
“This behaviour doesn’t help anybody, least of all those who have a genuine and peaceful point to make. We will always work with protesters and consider their needs and aims, but we have to balance these against the needs and rights of other Londoners.
“While protesters should be able to march peacefully to highlight their concerns, they should not be able to seriously disrupt the lives of Londoners and prevent them going about their daily business. People have a right to go to work, go shopping or sight see without fear of violence and disorder.”
He continued: “We are gathering intelligence from a wide variety of sources and developing an appropriate and proportionate policing plan for the day of action on Tuesday. This plan will be flexible and be able to adapt to whatever unfolds on the ground.
“Again I would urge those planning to protest to get in touch and work with us to make sure that the point they want to make on the day is not lost in a sea of violence and disorder.”
The Met rarely respects the right to protest peacefully. They certainly didn’t last week, when they incited the very limited violence which did take place by students, were guilty of the rest themselves and then lied about it. Given his and his TSG goons’ behaviour last week, does he really imagine for a moment that the people organising tomorrow’s protest could ever consider making their names known to him, let alone communicating with him in any manner? Give me a break. Film maker Ken Loach argues that the function of the police is to enforce the status quo through violence. From the G20 through last week’s violence, manipulation and lies, Broadhurst has shown that that’s quite true for at least a corner of the Met. That leaves the situation quite ominous for the student protest tomorrow, and I’m quite concerned for people’s safety, despite supporting what they’re doing wholeheartedly.
Apathetic Students? Think Again.
Barnaby Raine is an example of what the government and Met certainly didn’t count on. A highly articulate and intelligent school student, angry enough about the ConDems’ pending hike of tuition fees and university budget cuts to actually join university students out on the streets.
I couldn’t agree with him more and couldn’t be more pleased to see young people standing up for their futures, rather than obsessing about the ‘X-Factor’.
They think that if they kettle us now we’re not going to come on a demonstration ever again. … They can’t stop us demonstrating. … Those are our streets. We are the generation at the heart of the fight back.
Wow. The police and media did themselves untold damage last week. Bob Broadhurst may be patting himself on the back, but direct action was given its biggest boost in a generation for the upcoming generation by his atrocious treatment of young people demonstrating peacefully for the future they want. Given that his opinions and ideas currently have no place whatsoever in current mainstream politics, watch protest and direct action grow out of all recognition in the four years to come.
Students vs Nick Clegg – Who’ll Win?
I think David Mitchell has it pretty much right about university students, their demonstrations and Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg and his pre-election lies:
Student “unrest” is embarrassing for the coalition because even its slavish supporters in the press can’t resist talking up a bit of pushing as if it heralds revolution. A few short clips of jerkily televised vandalism make the government look like it’s failing to govern. The fact that more damage gets done to public property every day by people turning round quickly while holding something hot is irrelevant. A photo of broken glass is a thousand times more politically threatening than a kid with an unwise haircut whining about his allowance.
Another reason to support the fisticuffs is that Nick Clegg doesn’t like it at all. Before last Wednesday’s demonstrations, he appealed for people to “examine our proposals before taking to the streets. Listen and look before you march and shout”. Sounds like a protesters’ green cross code.
One of the many problems with the proposals is that you need to examine them so carefully before you realise that they’re not quite as awful as they initially seem. The fact that the vast amount of debt that students will accrue will only be repayable when they earn more than £21,000 a year and will be written off after 30 years of failing to do so elevates the scheme from an utter disgrace to a huge disappointment. But this scant silver lining is barely noticeable. Kids, especially from poorer backgrounds, will just see the giant cloud of future debt and infer that higher education isn’t a welcome opportunity but a big financial gamble.
Very well put indeed. As he put it earlier, of course the demo wasn’t going to hit the newspapers without something controversial happening. I don’t imagine for a moment that the NUS’ strategy ever involved attacking the Tories’ Millbank HQ, but the fact is that event changed the entire tone of the stand-off to one which suddenly matters. The fact is too that his final line is especially poignant. Yes the Browne Report isn’t the total disaster on paper which many students and commentators are attacking, but what’s been noticeable from those arguing against the student demonstrators has been their dismissal of the massive increase in future debt, and how the now inevitable variation in tuition fees across the country will skew the entire higher education system.
Under Browne everything will be skewed on class grounds. When Oxbridge, the LSE and others surely start charging extortionate amounts, which in the future will be much harder to pay back unless you’re from a wealthy background, as Mitchell puts it, kids from poorer backgrounds, with a completely different experience of money and debt, will be more predisposed to going to universities which charge less (and which have lesser reputations – a crucial factor in the age where even this government wants 50% of young people to go to university) to avoid the crushing debt. We’ll end up with a two-tier education system. Didn’t Clegg want to abandon tuition fees to prevent this? Why is it ideologically correct for graduates to be saddled with ever greater debt?
I remain confused why so few commentators seem to grasp why the students are angry. I’ve seen them accused of stupidity, jumping on bandwagons, political naivety and ignorance, but that’s not my experience of the main body of them. Michael Chessum and Jonathan Moses put their case very effectively:
mobilise we must. The coalition’s proposals represent a nigh irreversible transformation of higher education, and the commodification of knowledge and learning. Dressed in the semantics of deficit reduction, it has been easy to play one sector off against another. Yet, as a recent report by the Higher Education Policy Institute acknowledged, these measures will increase public expenditure through this parliament and into the next. It is ideology, not necessity, that ultimately informs the coalition’s agenda.
I’ve argued myself about the commodification of knowledge and learning, and how this will damage civil society. If an outcome of the Big Society is to increase the inequality of access to knowledge, how on earth can Clegg support that? It’s an argument unconnected with the education debate, which presupposes that everything has a market value – how can he possibly expect the main body of students to agree with that? Mitchell concludes:
National wealth comes and goes, we have good times and bad. A rarer commodity, one vital to effecting change, is political will. If there’s a will for a progressive reform, statesmen instinctively find a way. That’s why Clement Attlee persevered with setting up the welfare state in the late 1940s, even though the country had never been poorer. He sensed that, if he waited for better economic times, the political will would have gone. In this less statesmanlike era, when the political will existed to reform the banking system in the immediate aftermath of the financial crisis, the government bottled it and now the Tories are in and the will is gone.
The student protests just might be demonstrating a growing political will to reform our higher education system, to have it paid for out of income tax. I think that would be fairer. Maybe it’s unrealistic but it’s what happened until 12 years ago before the proliferation of courses. If, as a nation, we really cared about higher education, we’d find the money. If the Lib Dems cared half as much as they claimed, they’d welcome this movement.
And the Higher Education Policy Institute concludes of the proposed changes:
The reality is that we cannot safely extrapolate from the introduction of fees in 1998, and then their increase to current levels, to predict the effect of the new arrangements. It seems quite plausible that some potential students will be deterred from entering higher education, but we do not know how many. Their actual impact will depend to a large extent on perceptions. To the extent that loans are not distinguished from ordinary debt from banks, then fees will act as a deterrent. How the new arrangements are described and “sold” will be crucial.
And that’s the battle going on, which is being played out 0n a weekly basis on the streets. Nick Clegg was elected on a platform of being the one party leader who wouldn’t lie, yet look where we are now. The fury at his and his party’s betrayal is only likely to grow, the more he publicly embraces a political ideology alien to the majority of students, many of whom voted for him. Granted there are still calls of ‘Tory scum’, which as I said the other week are entirely misplaced (Browne was a Labour idea), but this appears to sit on top of a broad identification by most students that Browne (as Mitchell agrees) isn’t the only possible solution to the problem of university funding in the middle of the economic crisis. The Higher Education Policy Institute rightly points out that it’s impossible at this stage to determine the impact of the imposition of Browne, and which side in this increasingly angry debate eventually wins out will no doubt be determined by how eager the coalition is to repress rebellion – the evidence of the last weeks suggests it’ll just get uglier. Either way, if the coalition really doesn’t budge I can’t imagine how Clegg will manage to keep his job as Lib Dem leader for much longer.
No Horseback Charge? Really?
The Metropolitan Police would like you to think that the police violence was necessary in order to counter #dayx #demo2010 student violence on the protest this week against massive tuition fees rises and university budget cuts:
“We have been going through a period where we have not seen that sort of violent disorder,” [Commissioner Sir Paul ] Stephenson said. “We had dealt with student organisers before and I think we based it too much on history. If we follow an intelligence-based model that stops you doing that. Obviously you realise the game has changed. Regrettably, the game has changed and we must act.”
In recent years the Met had reduced the numbers of officers deployed to tackle demonstrations, he said. “Regrettably, we are going to have to review that. We are going to have to take a more cautious approach.”
Check out my blog post before this one, about the events that actually happened on the day. The violence began in response to pre-emptive police kettling, first on a large scale, and then an increasingly restricted one, and that’s not even taking the #baitvan police van into account. Stephenson also said that there was no horseback charge against the students:
Sir Paul Stephenson faced the Metropolitan Police Authority panel at City Hall today to respond to criticism that police charged student protestors on horseback, and were heavy handed during student protests in Westminster yesterday.
Sir Paul Stephenson said that there was “no reference at debriefing or record” of charging by any officers on horseback.
Sir Paul Stephenson in his briefing at City Hall described the actions of the students protestors as “quite shocking” and the scenes were “very violent scene, and very difficult”.
The Guardian reports an entirely different reality.
So for all their claims about having learned their lessons after the G20 disaster, all the old tricks are back. Pre-emptive violence and then lying about it is just the tip of the iceberg I’m sure, compared to what’ll happen next. They got away with it with Jean Charles de Menezes and Ian Tomlinson – why should they stop there? The Met have clearly realised their big problem on those previous two occasions was an inability to spin the situation to their advantage – now they have a Tory government who think they’re doing a ‘good, professional job’ in attacking children on horseback, and kettling them for hours, at night and in freezing temperatures. The next four years are going to be very dangerous indeed for anyone who dares to rebel against the ConDem coalition.
Back to G20 Policing
Laurie Penny reported directly from the London #dayx #demo2010 second national student protest against the proposed massive hike in university tuition fees and budget cuts:
Outside Downing Street, in front of a line of riot police, I am sitting beside a makeshift campfire. It’s cold, and the schoolchildren who have skipped classes gather around as a student with a three-string guitar strikes up the chords to Tracy Chapman’s Talkin Bout a Revolution. The kids start to sing, sweet and off-key, an apocalyptic choir knotted around a small bright circle of warmth and energy. “Finally the tables are starting to turn,” they sing, the sound of their voices drowning out the drone of helicopters and the screams from the edge of the kettle. “Finally the tables are starting to turn.”
Then a cop smashes into the circle. The police shove us out of the way and the camp evaporates in a hiss of smoke, forcing us forward. Not all of us know how we got here, but we’re being crammed in with brutal efficiency: the press of bodies is vice-tight and still the cops are screaming at us to move forward. Beside me, a schoolgirl is crying. She is just 14.
Let me make this clear: children were being kettled. What do I mean by ‘kettled’? Here:
@PME200 To anyone not aware what “Kettling” is, it’s being trapped by armed police without food/water & being forced to piss or crap yourself. Nice.
Now why would the Metropolitan Police end up kettling children in freezing temperatures at night? It all seems to hinge around the attack on the police van:
Why was the van there, and was it there deliberately to draw out the violent protesters? Steven Sumpter believes so:
During the protests in London today the police stated that they had started “containing” the crowds after they violently attacked a police van. I contend that the van was deliberately planted in order to provide an excuse.
At around 12:30 I started watching BBC News which as showing live footage of the protests from a helicopter. The police were already blocking the route of the planned march with a huge amount of vehicles and offices. I watched that van be driven through the crowd from behind, angering all the people that had to jump out of the way. It was quickly surrounded by furious protesters and forced to stop. A little later, a few (unknown) people started to attack the van, trying to break the windows, roll the van over and paint graffiti on it. Some brave kids tried to stop the attacks, but were eventually pushed aside.
[But] there is something really interesting about this van.
- It has no number plates
- It is painted in the OLD livery of the Metropolitan police.
- It has been out of service long enough to get rusty.
He might be right. Emma Rubach offers the case of Canada’s G20 policing:
Protesters were led to or allowed to march or run past bait cars (police cruisers abandoned in the middle of Toronto streets) and one was definitely trashed and burned fairly quickly according to media reports. A man has been taken into custody.
The other bait cars were left mysteriously abandoned in the street for a long period. In one video peaceful protesters are seen sitting on a car and hanging around it, doing nothing violent at all. No police show up to claim it in a city downtown where you can’t walk down many streets without fear of search and arrest. Then the video shows a suspected agent provocateur wearing an expensive jacket appear. He jumps on the hood and bounces the car, asks a peaceful protester to move aside. Kicks out the windshield with a steel toed boot. He then goes on top and smashes the lights. People oppose him verbally, he studies his work from the street then others appear (rather shadowy in the video) helping him as he sets up the interior of the car. Likely for later burning. And it appears that the burning was set to be done from the inside. That gas tanks of these cars were likely left at the near the empty mark.
So it appears bait cars were placed, but they didn’t rely entirely on protesters to simply burn them. They had police agents on the ground to make sure it was done. Other activist video shows protesters or police agents dressed in black (it’s hard to be sure) setting up a couple police cars by slowly setting fires in their interiors. Again, the cars were simply left in the street as bait or decoys and no police attempt to save their own equipment. Whether police agents or protesters destroyed the cars, it makes little difference. There is such a thing as entrapment. If police know that by leaving a car abandoned in the middle of the street on a protest route will eventually lead to it being vandalized. They have in fact entrapped the vandal, who otherwise may have done nothing. In this case it is worse because with 20,000 police and riot police they could have easily pulled the cars out quickly.
In Toronto in times when people take to the streets, like soccer fans or whatever. Police do put cruisers at a slant to block the road and the two officers stand outside by the car. Never do they abandon it, and if they had to they would put in a quick call and the police cavalry would come to the rescue. At the G20 they just put cars out and left.
Look at how things do appear to add up. Here’s the van surrounded by the crowd:
And here’s a little evidence of agents provocateurs:
@simoncollister Just seen plain clothes cop get himself out of the kettle. Agent prov?
But what of the rest of the crowd? Alex Thomson adds another crucial perspective:
The word from protesters in Whitehall was that the police left their transit there as “bait” for the protest to turn nasty. The reality of it is that it became surrounded by the march and a number of officers were lucky to get out without serious injury.
Never mind this debate though. What I saw perfectly encapsulates today: a group of students, so young as to still be in school uniform, surrounded said van and persuaded the half-hearted and under-equipped would-be attackers to leave the thing alone.
As far as I am aware it is still there with a new gloss of grafitti and various swear words. But it has not been burned. Your average west Belfast teenager might look upon all this as the rather genteel affair that in truth it was.
Here are the kids who stopped the attack on the van:
Yet the police kettled (and attacked) them all:
@UKuncut We are cold, tired, hungry and being illegally held against our will. This is not justice #ukuncut #demo2010
@new1deas Police detaining students/schoolchildren for 4 hours pre-emptively, not allowing them to move.
@NeilAFM2011 Officer U2128 kicking 15yr old girl caught on camera. Chant of “your going on YouTube” #demo2010 #dayx
@MelodyShine Jeez did I just see right – very young girl hit over hands, hit around face and pushed back and forwards by police?#demo2010 #london
@CarolineLucas Just raised point of order in HoC about kettling of schoolchildren for hours today in freezing cold, asking for Home Sec be questioned
@PennyRed Kids streamuing through double line cops, yelling ‘let us through! We have the right to protest!’ Police kidney punching a child #demo2010
@Penny Red Just got hit in back of head by cop fuyck fuck #demo2010
For the record PennyRed is the Laurie Penny whose report I’ve quote from at the top of this post. Given the evidence, what possible justification could there have been for such a severe response? The Met said:
“The containment continues in Whitehall to prevent further criminal damage,” the Met said in a statement.
So it looks pretty likely that they set the van up for attack, might well have provoked darker elements in the crowd to attack it, then giving them justification (in their eyes) to attack back and kettle everyone. Kettling has been judged (domestically) to be legal, but the ECHR has yet to rule on whether or not it breaches human rights law. Given that peacefully protesting children were held for hours, into the night, and in the freezing cold, you can’t help but wonder what the final ruling might be. Aside from that, the Met’s tactics were utterly counter-productive:
Research into how people behave at demonstrations, sports events, music festivals and other mass gatherings shows not only that crowds nearly always act in a highly rational way, but also that when facing an emergency, people in a crowd are more likely to cooperate than panic. Paradoxically, it is often actions such as kettling that lead to violence breaking out. Often, the best thing authorities can do is leave a crowd to its own devices.
Laurie Penny offers a positive perspective on the civil engagement of the protesting kids nonetheless:
But just because there are no leaders here doesn’t mean there is no purpose. These kids – and most of them are just kids, with no experience of direct action, who walked simultaneously out of lessons across the country just before morning break – want to be heard. “Our votes don’t count,” says one nice young man in a school tie. The diversity of the protest is extraordinary: white, black and Asian, rich and poor. Uniformed state-school girls in too-short skirts pose by a plundered police van as their friends take pictures, while behind them a boy in a mask holds a placard reading “Burn Eton”.
“We can’t even vote yet,” says Leyla, 14. “So what can we do? Are we meant to just sit back while they destroy our future and stop us going to university? I wanted to go to art school, I can’t even afford A-levels now without EMA [education maintenance allowance]“.
But the Met, having completely bungled their response to the previous protest, seem to want to make it clear they don’t want a repeat. Led this time by the infamous Bob Broadhurst (who was responsible for their disastrous G20 effort), the only logical interpretation of their tactics was that they terrorised the kids deliberately, having generated an excuse to get away with it in front of the mainstream media and in the face of social media’s even closer view. And why (apart from restoring some wounded pride)? Take a look at the political response to yesterday’s protest:
Michael Gove, the education secretary, has urged the media to deny violent student protesters the “oxygen of publicity” as he called for the “full force of the criminal law” to be applied to activists “smashing windows” to make their point.
Gove evoked the language of former Tory premier Margaret Thatcher as he made clear his fury at demonstrators involved in skirmishes as thousands of students took part in demonstrations staged around the country today in protest against higher tuition fees and university budget cuts.
Gove has said he won’t budge at all on the tuition fee hike, and now has the advantage of the police trying to crush student resistance to his policy, supported by a Home Secretary who has no problem whatsoever with their violent, unjustified behaviour. As at G20, there was a political strategy here; the Met’s behaviour was no accident. Commissioner Sir Paul Stephenson has today said:
He added that, in the future “we are going to be much more cautious. We are into a different period I am afraid. We will be putting far more assets in place to ensure we can respond properly. Essentially the game has changed”.
and by all accounts I’ve seen completely misrepresented the Met’s response to distressed, kettled protesters:
Sir Paul acknowledged that letting people out from the cordon last night was “frustratingly slow” but “water and toilets were requested and delivered”.
Spin and cooperation with the government like that sets a chilling precedent for the cuts and price hikes to come.
‘Tory Scum’? Missing the Point, Students!
I understand the anger felt by the students demonstrating yesterday against the proposed trebling (and beyond) of tuition fees and university budget cuts. I was also at Millbank as a small number of them took their anger out on the Tory Party’s current headquarters, and heard the constant refrain ‘Tory Scum’. Whilst I agreed with that particular epithet, it completely and utterly missed the point about the Browne Report – this was picked up on on Twitter:
Today, some students torched the Tory HQ, over a change of mind by the LibDems concerning a report commissioned by Labour.
Despite all the authoritarian nonsense and right wing policy drift at the heart of the New Labour project, a significant number of students thought it suitable to blame the Conservative Party for implementing a report which the Labour Party commissioned (and would almost certainly themselves have followed). Did mass amnesia take hold? Did students not notice as ID cards moved closer under Labour, as the Independent Safeguarding Authority said we all had to prove we weren’t paedophiles under Labour, how the maximum legal period of detention without charge shot up under Labour, how control orders came to be under Labour, how the gap between rich and poor increased out of all sense under Labour, and how tuition fees were themselves introduced under Labour? Why on earth was this necessary:
Don’t like these policies? Stop voting for any of the big three parties, when have all bound themselves into the neoliberal economic model which got us into this situation in the first place! They are all equally part of the problem; yesterday’s violence was an exercise in utter futility.
