A police officer warns college students not to ram the gates of Senate House, Bloomsbury, throughout a Cops off Campus protest on 5 December. Photograph: Lee Thomas/ Lee Thomas/Demotix/Corbis
It’s kicking off on campus once more. Practically 3 years because nationwide university occupations, marches and strikes against tuition charge rises led to the first wave of crackdowns on pupil protest, undergraduates are mobilising, and meeting unprecedented retaliation. Last week in Bloomsbury, central London, students organising for fair wages for workers at their institutions explained they have been beaten bloody. There had been mass arrests, and the sort of court injunctions banning all more protest that wouldn’t be tolerated in any country that valued freedom of speech.
“We are facing a concerted attempt to silence a nascent pupil movement before it gets off the ground,” explained Michael Chessum, president of the University of London union. Nevertheless, despite the clampdown on protest, college students, lecturers, support workers and their allies are preparing to rally in their 1000′s tomorrow afternoon.
The University of London described the activists last week as “violent”. But it was students who reported possessing the teeth punched from their mouths and the crutches kicked away following a peaceful occupation in London’s Senate Residence – the setting for the Ministry of Truth in the Michael Radford film of George Orwell’s 1984.
Just what is it about this bunch of undergraduates, as properly as their much more enlightened lecturers, that has scared the Metropolitan police into cementing their reputation for skull-knockery? Perhaps the truth that they aren’t just defending their own interests. Instead, they are producing new demands, fighting for workers’ rights, and winning.
The root of the dispute is the 3 Cosas campaign, a joint effort with outsourced service staff at London universities that demands 3 things – sick spend, vacation pay out and pensions. These minimal-waged, largely Latin American workers formed an autonomous union, and college students and allies helped crowdsource a strike fund. On strike day, hundreds swelled the picket lines, and the employees have won concessions on two of the demands.
In December 2010 thousands of youthful individuals were kettled, batoned and charged with horses outside parliament. In the three years since, pupil and graduate activists have been topic to relentless harassment: surveillance, repeated arrests, draconian prison sentences for activists such as Charlie Gilmour and Edward Woollard, and drawn out trials for others such as Alfie Meadows, who was left with bleeding on the brain from the savage headwounds he obtained in the 2010 kettle.
In London this summer a pupil was pinned down, handcuffed and charged just for creating slogans in chalk. The University of London attempted to disband its student union, and Michael Chessum was arrested. Then, final week, officers from the territorial help group stormed Senate Property. The Tory push to raise tuition charges was meant to modernise larger training. Today, if British universities had been a nation state, they would be a military dictatorship.
That hasn’t prevented the rumbles of dissent against privatisation and worker exploitation turning out to be clamorous. At colleges up and down the country college students and lecturers have begun to organise with, and on behalf of, the people who serve their meals and clean their toilets. Last week I visited Sussex University, in which a “pop-up union” was produced to support support workers this week hundreds of students and workers marched in help of folks who have been expelled for political exercise. They linked their movement with the victorious and explicitly socialist pupil struggles in Quebec.
Middle-class students are beginning to realise that they have much less in widespread with the millionaire vice-chancellors running their universities than they do with the lower-waged employees sweeping their lecture halls. Many undergraduates will discover themselves carrying out similar jobs following their finals, if they can find perform at all. The dream of university as the route to social mobility and protection has died, and college students now accrue debts of £50,000 by the time they graduate. Right now students and precarious workers encounter the exact same battle – not just for schooling, but for justice and dignity at work and outdoors it, for freedom in the encounter of austerity and state repression.
What is happening in Bloomsbury, in Sussex and elsewhere is a shadow perform of what this government fears most: precarious staff coming collectively across divides of class, race and nationality to resist wage repression and police violence. As a single of the activists I spoke to this week explained, three years of intimidation, surveillance and state bullying have furnished today’s students and graduates with the sort of training that can’t be purchased, not even for 9 grand a 12 months. “It taught us,” he mentioned basically, “how to battle.”
Police violence won"t stop this new alliance of students and workers | Laurie Penny
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