Police violence won"t stop this new alliance of students and workers | Laurie Penny

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

o, Lord Rothermere, when will you stop Mail Online from ripping off content?

Is Mail On-line ever going to place its house in purchase? Does it care about plagiarism? Has its editor, Martin Clarke, ever explained the that means of frequent journalistic courtesy – allow alone copyright – to his personnel?

I inquire these questions towards the background of but one more blatant rip-off by the Daily Mail’s web site.

This time, it requires an exclusive interview with Nelson Mandela’s granddaughter, Maki (Makaziwe Mandela-Amuah), obtained by freelance Sharon Feinstein and published by the Sunday Mirror yesterday.

Feinstein, a extended-standing freelancer with a terrific track record in interview scoops, was astonished when a pal known as to inform her that her interview was currently being run by Mail On-line.

Not only did it not carry any attribution for her or the newspaper, it had somebody else’s byline and bore an Associated Newspapers copyright line.

Feinstein sprang into action, calling the bylined reporter – Leon Watson – to demand correct attribution and that she be paid for the theft of her material. He advised her he did not have the authority to do so.

Right after several a lot more calls, the Mail Online copy was altered to contain a reference to the Sunday Mirror. But there was even now no mention of Feinstein.

She went on complaining – even emailing the editor-in-chief, Paul Dacre – and, eventually, the Mail took the total item down, however – of program – the Google reference remains, as above.

This morning, an additional Connected title, Metro, also ran estimates from Feinstein’s interview, again without any attribution.

Feinstein, who has frequently written for the Mail in the past, stays furious about the episode. She informed me: “It is ironic, is not it, that I was creating about Mandela, who stood up to oppression, and that the Mail, the bullies of Fleet Street, ripped off my interview. It really is journalistic oppression and it’s got to stop. It truly is just incorrect.”

When I wrote last month about Mail On the web plagiarising an interview with Emma Thompson by the Los Angeles freelance, John Hiscock, the Mail made amends and I think about they will do the same for Feinstein.

But that is beside the level due to the fact it shouldn’t take place at all. And these are not isolated situations. After my Hiscock-Thompson piece, I received emails from many journalists who informed of equivalent stories (though they had less luck in persuading the Mail to compensate them).

Similarly, I have had reports from American journalists of material theft by the Mail’s US website.

So that leads me to my ultimate set of inquiries. Does Dacre not have any energy above Mail Online and/or Clarke? If not, what about the owner, Lord Rothermere? Is he happy to let his website to steal other people’s journalistic work?

I am not expecting the site to sit on its hands when it sees that a rival has an unique. It is understandable for them to run a couple of paragraphs, but they must clarify their provenance and, incidentally, very best practice ought to also indicate the inclusion of a hyperlink to the original.

Milord Rothermere, I appeal on behalf of all freelancers all over the place – curb your Mail On the internet thieves.

o, Lord Rothermere, when will you stop Mail Online from ripping off content?

Government must stop treating sixth-form colleges unfairly

Sixth-kind college college students acquire significantly less funds from government in contrast to college pupils, because of funding cuts and VAT guidelines. Photograph: Howard Barlow

I am angry. I want to employ new teachers, lower down class sizes and boost personnel wages at the degree of inflation, but I can’t. Why? Due to the fact I am the principal of a sixth-kind college.

Between 2011 and 2017 my university will have skilled a 14% lower in funding per student. In genuine terms this quantities to a 29% reduction in funding. This is a end result of cuts to enrichment funding for sixteen- to 19-yr-old college students and the effect of a new funding methodology, which will hit sixth-type schools in September 2016.

As a sixth-kind university we’re obtaining to make a disproportionate contribution to the government’s austerity programme in contrast to major and secondary schools whose budget was protected in the 2010 comprehensive spending overview.

On leading of being hit tougher by funding cuts, we are not reimbursed for the VAT we devote on the purchases we make, as opposed to colleges, which get the money back from the government.

Just imagine for one fantasy minute that an training marketplace is the secret to driving up standards, a crucial dogma in Michael Gove’s policy. Absolutely, it really is entirely incorrect for competitors to be rigged to favour 1 set of suppliers to the disadvantage of an additional? Nevertheless this is exactly what is taking place with VAT. Colleges, which are in a position to claim back their VAT expenses, are in effect acquiring paid a greater value from the state for their sixteen- to 19-12 months-outdated students.

Final 12 months VAT price my university £310,000. That income could make a actual contribution to mitigating the worst results of the cuts. It could be utilised to employ nine additional teachers, which would let us to increase educating time for our A-level courses and reduce set sizes. It could enable us to improve staff wages at the degree of inflation, with income left more than to fund planned maintenance, sadly neglected in the final few many years. Or, it could reverse the planned cuts in our stock of personal computers and enable us to reintroduce meals technology or religious scientific studies – subjects we have had to axe. In essence, there would be much more funds to commit on the frontline – supporting college students and rewarding difficult-pressed teachers.

The failure to offer a degree playing area for colleges and sixth-type colleges in relation to VAT is not the only example of how the government promotes competitors as the most effective way of delivering schooling and but fails to manage that industry relatively. Particular privileges for totally free schools, this kind of as the correct to make use of non-competent teachers, sponsoring new school sixth-types in locations exactly where they are not necessary and pressurising colleges to turn into academies towards their will are all additional examples of approaches that the government is satisfied to set aside marketplace philosophy when it suits and use the energy of the state to support its pet tasks and prejudices.

David Adelman is the principal of Godalming Sixth Kind School.

Government must stop treating sixth-form colleges unfairly

Can you stop people swearing in front of children? | Lola Okolosie

‘Too a lot of of us can’t or won’t modify our utilization dependent on the context.’ Photograph: Martin Godwin

Those who know me properly know I am someone who swears a good deal. What can I say? I am emphatic about numerous items – surprise, anger, disappointment, joy, boredom. The record goes on. But with a 15-month-outdated, my swearing days are, needless to say, numbered. Now my speech is peppered with phrases I as soon as considered had been pathetically redundant, “what the puck” getting a specific favourite. Even so ironically it is utilized, it does not fairly have the identical emotional charge and oomph as the original. But that is one more price I and dad and mom across the country have to shell out. Tens of 1000′s of us, spanning the socioeconomic divide, live in dread that our little cherub’s early repertoire of phrases will contain “shit” and some choice others ones. Who wants such public shame?

Headmistress Davina Wakelin, of Meeching Valley principal college in Newhaven, East Sussex, is only saying some thing we all previously know we really should not be swearing in front of youngsters. Her letter to mothers and fathers requesting just that has produced information maybe since as well numerous of us are guilty of excusing our French in the presence of our young children: 9 out of 10 of us to be precise. The impact? Half of the 3,000 11-12 months-olds that had been polled on the subject admitted to finding this upsetting and two out of 5 use swear phrases regularly, citing their parents’ usage as the major lead to.

As a secondary teacher I have witnessed the severe finish of this scale. A number of many years in the past, teaching a class of 13-year-olds, I heard a pupil use the c-word. I rounded on him with all the may my newly certified self could muster, telling him such offensive language was unacceptable. I soon realised, nevertheless, he genuinely had no notion of its that means. For him it was merely a word, a single that the two adults and his peers utilized.

In most colleges students’ use of swearing is a behaviour management issue. It is not one thing they are permitted to do. Without having wanting to exaggerate, a minority of students can pay out an educational value for their liberal use of expletives. For some it can result in time invested out of lessons or out of college altogether.

Nevertheless, regardless of all of the over, this kind of blanket calls to thoughts our language do not give younger folks ample credit score. I have taught spoken language to students from 14 to 17 and each and every 1 of them, each yr I covered the subject, recognised that appropriateness of swearing is dependent on context. For that reason, largely, they refrain from cursing in the earshot of teachers or other adults. Contrary to popular belief, they are not a homogeneously stupid and disrespectful bunch. In my experience, rather than swearing, youthful people are considerably far more most likely to use their ever-changing and inventive slang as a implies by means of which they defy grownups.

Swearing is fine if you are capable to articulate your self well with no it. It is saddening if that is not the situation. In basic it has become significantly less of a social taboo. I have been taken aback by its presence in scenarios where my instincts are to self-censor. This perhaps explains why the headteacher was moved to compose the letter. Also several of us can’t or will not modify our usage depending on the context. If we are truthful, it is not just mothers and fathers who need to mind their Ps and Qs. Most adults are implicated. I am positive many studying this have employed the f-word and only realised as well late that they were in the presence of a kid and a suitably reproachful mother or father. But asking adults to quit swearing en masse will not and cannot happen. Ideal to depart it to these whose sense of shame and anxiety is so very easily pricked: parents.

Can you stop people swearing in front of children? | Lola Okolosie