Lecturers must stand with students to preserve the right to protest | Nina Power

Cops off Campus protest at London University. The authorities have turned a civil matter into a criminal one, argues Nina Energy. Photograph: Paul Davey/Corbis

3 many years ago right now, parliament voted by a narrow margin to triple tuition fees and lower the educational upkeep allowance. Outside, thousands of college students, lecturers and other individuals gathered in the freezing cold to protest against every thing the vote represented – the closing off of more and larger education to all but the rich and those prepared to get on 1000′s of lbs well worth of debt for a occupation that may possibly in no way come. Riot police charged horses into crowds, lashed out with batons to devastating result and kettled hundreds for hours on Westminster Bridge. Dozens had been later on charged with significant public buy offences, despite the fact that juries thankfully didn’t purchase it, acquitting 18 of the 19 who pleaded not guilty.

Three years later on, we find the right to protest however far more eroded. Following successful pupil actions in help of cleaning workers, “occupational-fashion protests” have just lately been the topic of an injunction at the University of London, turning a civil matter criminal, and current “Cops Off Campus” demos have seen a return of aggressive police techniques in the kind of bodily violence, kettling and mass police presence. The only issue the police seemed to have “learned” from final time was the short-term impact of mass arrests – as the 286 anti-fascist protesters arrested lately in Tower Hamlets will know. Protesters are loaded into police vans or specially commissioned buses, taken to police stations all more than London and sometimes even outdoors the city, held for hours, released on police bail with ludicrous situations (not to enter the city of Westminster, or to attend any protests, or to congregate in groups of four), then the costs are dropped several months down the line.

The velocity at which the police arrest protesters is mirrored by the slowness of the state to drop charges: bail is utilised as a temporal weapon to carry on punishment when protests are more than. University managements are complicit with this kind of prosecutions, calling the police to get action on their personal students, enabling police to film protesters and colluding with the authorities to ban students from campus, as the current suspension of five Sussex college students shows. All of this helps make really clear the place the battlelines are drawn: employees, college students, and absolutely everyone who keeps the university going on one particular side management, police and courts on the other.

As a lecturer, I was horrified to see the treatment of protesters during and after the anti-charges protests 3 years ago. I am equally concerned now, as police and management do their ideal to preserve the image of campuses as web sites of privatised, consumer-primarily based companies, rather than spots of dissent, disagreement and debate. The fees enhance has not created the docile, indebted students the government presumably had in thoughts – on the contrary, the anger is visceral and true: the future of increased schooling is as yet unwritten. College students are increasingly conscious of the accurate goal of the police: the middle-class compact that grants the police a protective position in some scenarios is becoming dissolved in the recognition that police brutality at a protest is the tip of an iceberg that contains the varieties of violence (daily stop and search, deaths in custody or at the hands of firearms officers) that some students would otherwise not experience.

A third national Cops Off Campus demonstration has been named for Wednesday, in spite of the threats and arrests. But this is not just about college students, who following all are fighting for the rights of cleaners and assistance personnel, as effectively as for open and public accessibility to greater education. Lecturers must stand with their college students against management and towards the police – the college students who fought towards the introduction of tuition charges are the identical ones standing with employees on picket lines: we owe our college students far much more than our livelihoods.

Lecturers must stand with students to preserve the right to protest | Nina Power