Cambridge Defend Training was set up in late 2010 as portion of a huge wave of student activism, occupations, and protests towards rises in tuition charges and cuts to schooling. On 9 December 2010, as the coalition government voted in parliament to raise tuition charges, I was currently being beaten to the ground by police batons just 200 metres away. For people of us who have skilled first-hand the use of the violent force to suppress pupil dissent, it comes as no shock that the state is also inclined to resort to the underhand tactic of surveillance.
Indeed, this is not the very first time that the police have attempted to recruit spies in Cambridge to inform on fellow activists. In both situations, officers approached a person who had been the victim of an unconnected crime and contacted the police for assistance. They exploited this vulnerability to try to coerce these men and women into spying on their buddies. In latest many years we have seen that the police will go to any lengths to obtain intelligence on activist groups, like deceiving ladies into extended-phrase intimate relationships and stealing the identities of dead kids.
It is telling in this situation that the police defend their activities as the two legal and legitimate. Whilst it is handy for the police to denounce Mark Kennedy as a rogue officer, it is clear that surveillance of individuals who dare to dissent is in reality a central and schedule portion of police function. We know from our own experience of the two violent and covert repression that the police have played a vital position in enforcing austerity policies.
All more than the Uk, we are encountering the intensification of attempts by police, university management and the government to criminalise and suppress dissent in universities. In Cambridge, university management has colluded with the police to use each legal coercion and violent force against dissenting college students. Since 2010, university management has repeatedly invited police onto campus, resulting in the damage of its own college students, and has picked out and victimised individual students as ringleaders of protests, using the two punitive academic suspensions and legal proceedings. Far more recently, the university is suspected of engaging in its personal surveillance of picket lines in Cambridge for the duration of the 31 October strike by lecturers and employees.
The message students and academics have been getting from Cambridge University management, time and time once more, has been: “do not believe for yourselves if you know what’s excellent for you”. This is strikingly related to the suggestions of “Officer Smith” to “John Armstrong” to “try out not to consider as well deeply about it … you will commence tying yourself up in knots”. In spite of – or maybe since of – its cosy connection with the police, Cambridge University has refused to comment on yesterday’s surveillance revelations. Conveniently, in this distinct instance “the matter is a single for police to deal with”.
Of course, this scenario is not distinctive to students at Cambridge. Yesterday, the University of London pupil union president, Michael Chessum, was arrested, apparently for not getting gained advance permission for a protest. College students in Sussex have been banned from protesting on campus following a campaign towards the outsourcing of university jobs. Certainly, the role of universities as spaces of creativity, dissent and training for all is under risk, not only from cuts to funding and the rise in student debt, but also the repressive techniques of the government, police and university management.
Despite these multifaceted attempts at repression, we are witnessing a resurgence of student activism not noticed since 2010. As staff salaries are reduce and the government threatens to privatise pupil loans, college students, academics and workers are organising to fight back towards the commodification of our education. We refuse to be intimidated by these coercive and underhand techniques, and will proceed to resist – in our universities and on the streets.
It"s no surprise that police were willing to spy on Cambridge students like me | Rachel Young
Hiç yorum yok:
Yorum Gönder