Fees and EMA: organise for the next stages!

Submitted by martin on 10 December, 2010 - 2:33 Author: Martin Thomas
Students

The big turnout on the student demonstration on fees and EMA on 9 December shows that this campaign will continue.

About 30,000 students and supporters turned out. The demonstration was never able to assemble in one place at one time, so estimates are difficult.

Today, Friday 11th, groups like the National Campaign Against Fees and Cuts are meeting to plan the next steps.

As on 24 November and 30 November, there was a huge police mobilisation against the demonstration.

The police did it "efficiently", in their own terms, which means that they "kettled" thousands of demonstrators in Parliament Square from about 3.30pm.

Later on, the "kettle" was moved to Westminster Bridge, when students were kept, penned together in the cold without food or toilets, until after 11pm.

Mounted police were used against the students in Parliament Square. The figures tell the story: 43 students hospitalised, but only 22 arrested. Not only thousands "imprisoned" in the kettle for hours without charge or trial, but many more students battered and injured than the police could even hope to make a case against in court.

Predictably - and we have to assume that this result was deliberately planned for by the police - the police tactics generated anger and frustration.

Thousands of demonstrators who had escaped the kettle, or been allowed to trickle out of it, gathered in surrounding streets. Most just milled around and tried to make out what was happening behind the police lines. Some went off to essay gestures like an attempt to burn the Christmas tree in Trafalgar Square and a scuffle around Prince Charles's car later on. Those two incidents - unlike the police tactics - resulted in no injuries to people.

Support for the right to demonstrate - without being "kettled", i.e. arbitarily imprisoned - should be added to the demands of the movement.




Make Labour fight!


For the first time in ready memory, an official Young Labour banner was on the march.

And the "official" protest sponsored by UCU and NUS leaders, a dreary affair of speeches from on top of a bus on the Embankment, just round the corner from Parliament Square, saw a long queue of Labour MPs speaking.

The rally around the bus was small - maybe a thousand, tops - and noticeably unable to hold the attention of the trickle of protesters who were allowed from the police to "escape" from Parliament Square to the Embankment.

Not only a police line, but also a line of private security people, presumably hired by UCU and NUS, prevented people at the rally from joining up with those in Parliament Square. Towards the end of the rally, people there broke through the line of private security guards, but were unable to break the police line behind it.

Several of the Labour MPs addressing the rally said (truly) that they themselves had voted against the 1997-2010 Labour government over tuition fees, and urged Lib-Dem MPs to follow their example. All said that the struggle should continue after the vote.

John McDonnell MP won applause for declaring that if the government measures cannot be defeated in Parliament, then they will be defeated on the streets and in the occupations.

John Cryer MP was clapped loudly for a mild but well-made speech in which he argued that the issue is one of the basis of society, and explained why we must fight for socialism.

David Lammy made a speech surprising from someone who has been a Labour front-bencher since 2001. He started by denouncing the police "kettling" in strong terms, and repeatedly described the issue as one pitting the millionaires in the cabinet against "the working class".

Plainly he has been putting something different in his drinks since leaving government office.

Inside Parliament, Ed Miliband refused to commit Labour to reversing the coalition measures when it returns to office.

The RMT supported the demonstration, and the rally also had speakers from UCU, Unison, and Prospect. We must fight to swing the whole labour movement into unequivocal alignment with the students.




Discussing the way forward


AWL, SWP, Socialist Party, and Counterfire put out leaflets on the demonstration.

The AWL leaflet said: organise for a joint union/student demonstration in January; demand an emergency NUS conference; organise on each campus to take over the student union; build an activist committee in every school and FE college...

The SWP leaflet was a vignette of SWP method. Instead of offering any ideas at all on strategy, it clutched for a catchphrase - "kettle Parliament!"

As the leaflet explained it, what the SWP meant was not "kettling" Parliament (surrounding it and not letting anyone out), but the converse: making it so that Tory and Lib-Dem MPs would "have to fight their way through a sea of protesters" to enter Parliament.

Since the student demonstration did not assemble (and then, some distance away from Parliament) until after the Parliamentary session had begun, the demagogic "call to action" was utterly empty.

The SWP called for "bringing the government down", suggesting (though never quite stating) that a militant enough march on 9 December could do that, but saying nothing about what we should fight for, and how, to replace the coalition administration.

Counterfire, a recent splinter from the SWP, has obviously picked up a lot of money somehow. It distributed a free tabloid broadsheet, printed in full-colour on expensive paper, as well as handing out thousands of "Coalition of Resistance" placards.

The content was bland other than a call to "set up Coalition of Resistance groups" round the country.

"Coalition of Resistance" is the anti-cuts operation which Counterfire and some allies launched recently, its equivalent to the SWP's "Right to Work" and SP's "National Shop Stewards' Network".

The statement at the COR conference on 27 November said that COR supported having a single united labour-movement anti-cuts committee in each area. Does the broadsheet mean that Counterfire now wants to renege on that and go for setting up COR groups as rivals?

The SP leaflet was more dour and "propagandist", saying that "we need to replace capitalism by socialism" and people should join the SP to do that.

Almost all the leaflet's text, other than the introductory sentences mentioning fees and EMA, could be cut-and-pasted word-for-word into any other SP leaflet about any other issue.

The authors did not think they needed any specific thought on the current struggle, and correspondingly the leaflet offered no new information or ideas.

Comments

Submitted by martin on Fri, 10/12/2010 - 14:59

I went to the demo with a delegation from Middlesex Uni - about 80 staff and students went. The students union is quite strait-laced but prepared to be cajoled into campaigning by a small and increasingly organised left wing.

I thought the demo was big but I don't know how big - I was near the back and never managed to get near the front. Only glimpsed AWL banner late on in the demo. Surreal moment realising we were going to march through Admiralty Arch and a small way down the Mall! Red flags flying and Buckingham Palace in the distance. One of those moments when you remember what we are actually up against... The irony of it did not seem to hit many of those around me. Perhaps it's an age thing.

We skirted Horse Guards Parade. When the back of the demo got near Parliament Square a rumour went around that people were being kettled already (apparently, it wasn't true) so a few hundred wheeled around and dispersed around Horse Guards, some people ran off into St James Park. A lot more police appeared - I think they had been lurking in the bushes. The ones with the powder blue baseball caps that quickly turn into riot helmets.

And then I had to go to work for two hours!

At about 5.30 I was back on the Embankment at the NUS vigil with a splendid backdrop of Big Ben. Many people were heading away as I arrived, but even with them it would have been quite small. Most people who were there were refugees from the main march. The last speaker was Aaron Porter who was demagogic. You wouldn't think he had played such a terrible role recently; most people in the crowd, however, did seem to know about it and he was booed quite a lot.

Then came the great moment of waving the glowsticks, which lasted only a short while and was even more of a spectacular non-event than you might imagine. Then they played 'Liar, liar' on the PA. Then an older bloke - I don't know who - performed the thankless task of suggesting that the safest thing now was for everyone to go home; when they didn't he gamely led some chanting of 'They say cutback, we say - erm, what was it, oh yeah - fightback'' and 'They say bankers, we say, erm, wankers'. It was all very tragic-comic. Then they announced the vote and people seemed crestfallen.

And then the older bloke launched into a speech that, he told us, General de Gaulle had made in 1940 when the Nazis invaded France and he had to escape to Britain: "La France a perdu une bataille ! Mais la France n'a pas perdu la guerre !"

Bemused and unimpressed, the crowd milled about and a few people showed signs of wanting 'to do something' to demonstrate our anger at the (closeness of the) vote other than just go home to fight another day.

A few of us persuaded enough other people that we could easily push through the flimsy NUS security line to go and stand eyeball to eyeball with the real security line of the police. (I think we need some training in 'leading a crowd' because the people down on the Embankment could be led to do something but most of them lacked... confidence. Most people are still very isolated from each other on these demonstrations. It's striking how they tend to talk to their mates but not much to people around them.)

Then we stood next to Parliament and in front of Portcullis House and shouted for a while. There weren't that many people, and there was one of those moments when someone says I've got a good idea, let's go to xxxx instead, so we all went to xxxx instead, which was Whitehall. There a few hundred people, blocked off by a line of police and a line of police on horses, milled about, threw some fireworks, and eventually a core of this crowd decided to head up to Trafalgar Square for some 'action' or, probably, Covent Garden for something to eat.
 
Further surreal moments followed when people decided to burn the Trafalgar Square Christmas tree which was a sitter. The riot police turned up to extinguish the flames before they really took hold, averting a nasty diplomatic rift between the UK and Norwegian states.

At that point I came home. A strange day. I could say that I'm mildly disappointed that the student protests haven't enticed, for example, public sector unions in Barnet to turn out, but then the public sector unions in Barnet are fighting a battle to save 500 jobs immediately and the mass privatisation of council services, today and for the weeks and months to come. Every sector is run ragged with its own issues.

So for me it's back to Barnet to build the links on the ground.

Submitted by martin on Fri, 10/12/2010 - 15:03

The Daily Telegraph reports that the NUS line in talks with the Government has been not to oppose cuts in university funding, but to suggest "alternative" ones.

"In private talks in October, the NUS tried to persuade ministers at the Department for Business to enact their planned 15 per cent cut in higher education funding without lifting the cap on fees.

In one email to the department’s officials, dated Oct 1, Mr Porter suggested that £800 million should be 'deducted from the grants pot' over four years. That would cut total spending on grants by 61 per cent. Mr Porter also proposed the 'introduction of a real rate of interest' for student loans.

In an email the following day, Graeme Wise, an NUS political officer, suggested that ministers seeking cuts should start with the 'student support' package of grants and loans.

He wrote: 'It would be better in our view to first mitigate the cuts to provision by seeing how student support can be better focused at lower cost.' Mr Wise also suggested that the cuts in support could be imposed on students currently at university.

The NUS plans also called for £2.4 billion to be cut from the universities’ teaching budget over four years, a reduction of 48 per cent."

Submitted by martin on Fri, 10/12/2010 - 18:17

The Daily Mail reports that police were "within seconds" of opening fire on demonstrators when they jostled Prince Charles's car on Thursday 9th.

The Mail also reports that one student beaten around the head by cops needed a three-hour hospital operation to save him.

Yet the Mail still denounces student "yobs" and not the trigger and truncheon-happy cops.

Submitted by vickim on Fri, 10/12/2010 - 20:00

Alfie Meadows, a Middlesex University student, was the young man (he is 20) hit on the head so hard he had bleeding on the brain. He is in Charing Cross hospital now, and recovering, I understand, though he has suffered a major injury. Alfie was very active in the campaign and occupation to save the Middlesex Philosophy department, and he has also been one of the people that helped to mobilise so many people from Middlesex for the recent demos. (I said in my report that 80 people came from Middlesex to the demonstration on 9 November, but the students union thinks it was more.)

Several friends and supporters of Alfie were at Charing Cross hospital today to have a vigil for Alfie and protest against police violence. Anyone who has seen the riot police at close quarters recently will be starting to appreciate how absurd it is to think that the police are basically the same as us and on our side. I do think we are going to have to have some education on this in the coming period, because there are going to be many more protests where we need to be prepared for what the police might do. Your local beat bobby might be a decent wo/man and you might have a liberal local commander, if you're lucky, but they are, like the old cliche, the soft side of the police. They are always backed up by the hard side when the state feels it needs to deploy them.

The sort of police we are encountering on demonstrations are tooled up, trained nutters whose basic job is... to smack people over the head. What are we going to do about it? We had better get organised fast.

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