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

We won"t be bullied into allowing our university to be privatised | Michael Segalov

Students at Sussex University protest against plans to privatise parts of the campus. Photograph: Martin Godwin

On Wednesday evening, following coming house from operate, I found an email in my inbox from the vice-chancellor of my university. It informed me that I was suspended from the University of Sussex, which means I am unable to go on to campus, attend lessons, or be involved with any societies and campaigns. I am unable to entry educating, assets, or even attend my doctor’s surgery.

I am presently one of five college students suspended from Sussex University on disconcertingly vague grounds. It seems to be since I am linked with the campaign towards privatisation on campus, which has been element of a national mobilisation of students towards the commodification of education. We have not been charged with any crime or informed of the distinct motives for our suspension. My tutors, who have had no say in the matter, have expressed confusion and alarm. Our suspensions appear to have been made on the grounds of “wellness and security”, however exactly how our presence on campus compromises wellness and safety has nevertheless to be explained.

The campaign at Sussex has been fighting privatisation on our campus for nicely above a year. The emphasis of the campaign is clear. It calls for a halt to the privatisation approach instigated by management. It also demands an overhaul of democratic processes inside of the university. Given that 2010, three campus occupations have been organised by students and personnel members linked with the campaign. Every single occupation was the product of aggravation, soon after university management rebuffed attempts by university members to negotiate on the privatisation proposals.

Because September, the campaign has been standing alongside academic employees in their fight for fairer pay and has called for the management group to assistance a vision of training available to all. This is observed as intrinsically linked with the wider aims of the anti-privatisation campaign which fights for fairer spend, greater doing work circumstances across the board and democratic representation inside of university systems.

Just this week, we have noticed nine university occupations, a strike from the 3 main larger education unions, the arrest of college students by police – such as the arrest of 3-quarters of the sabbatical team of the University of London Union – and pupil suspensions from university grounds and routines. It is more and more clear that universities are willing to take excessive measures to quash dissent, and intimidate individuals who are standing up.

We are drawing power from support we have received more than the last two days, which has been heart-warming and hugely appreciated. There have been close to 5,000 signatures on a petition in support of us, an early day motion has been tabled in parliament and far more than 500 men and women attended a campus demonstration on Thursday afternoon, with another on Friday. It seems that the underlying structural concerns in the governing of our universities are now being challenged..

The university’s authoritarian response underlines how crucial our protests are. As an alternative of allowing us freedom of expression and a appropriate to protest – a fundamental component of discovering our political voices as younger people – the university has alternatively attempted to control and quash dissent.

I feel we have been targeted for suspension, to intimidate the expanding campus movement against privatisation. Our occupation received nationwide focus and the assistance of crucial political figures, activists and journalists. We are continuing to humiliate management. So they have tried to silence us whilst professing their help in principle for protest. Only yesterday afternoon, the university launched a statement, saying they “completely assistance students’ rights to protest lawfully”. Their actions recommend otherwise.

Sussex has traditionally been a home for vital believed and difficult the status quo. Sitting at house surrounded by my fellow suspendees, it is simple to see how this is changing. The predicament at Sussex is representative of the marketisation of increased training across the country – a damaging growth for students, equality of opportunity, and the principle of cost-free, universal training itself.

The campaign at Sussex will proceed. It is a testament to the operate that thousands are undertaking across our universities that the backlash to actions this kind of as this is so strong. The relationships and solidarities that have been created at Sussex more than the many years are not able to be easily destroyed. These sanctions can and will be challenged. In the meantime, I’ll be taking up the offers of my tutors to meet me at the pub rather of on campus, and it looks that drinks are on them.

We won"t be bullied into allowing our university to be privatised | Michael Segalov

The Coalition may sabotage Gonski, but the Greens won"t stand for it | Penny Wright

As the Coalition’s leader of the home Christopher Pyne understands, government is all about the numbers. As training minister, although, he’s attempting to pretend numbers really don’t matter. In an umpteenth flip-flop on his party’s dedication to the Gonski college funding reforms, Pyne says he’s now going back to the drawing board to assessment it, with just weeks to go just before the new 12 months. 

Although it’s a broken promise, it shouldn’t be a surprise. Ever considering that the Gonski review was launched, Pyne has been promoting the propaganda that it is not a dollar figure that will repair declining educational overall performance, it is “teacher quality”.

Setting aside the aspersions this casts on one of the most difficult jobs in our society, a Coalition government of all governments knows that funds matters, especially in training. That’s what the Gonski review conclusively showed. Directing extra resources to the most disadvantaged college students raises the overall regular of educational outcomes for the complete country.

When buildings fall down around students’ ears and the toilets won’t flush, cash issues. When they sit huddled in blankets since the heating doesn’t perform, income matters. When the school can not afford sufficient paper for the 12 months – allow alone new textbooks – funds issues. When the personal computers cease operating, income issues. And when struggling children miss out on the extra focus they need since the school cannot afford far more teachers – just before we can even debate so-known as “teacher quality” – income definitely matters. After all, if it did not, why did wealthy private colleges battle so hard to make confident they wouldn’t lose a single dollar?

As laid out by Gonski panel member Ken Boston, the preceding Labor government manufactured some fairly big problems in cherry-choosing the Gonski reforms. The Australian Greens would argue they made some problems in the politics as well. But the basis was there: a college funding system based, for the initial time, on the needs of college students, and a plan to make a big investment in the potential of our country by boosting funding levels.

Yes, Gonski’s suggestions came with a quite large dollar figure connected, but the OECD says investing in children from a disadvantaged background is an financial winner – with the positive aspects currently being as much as twice the outlay.

Pyne says the added funding to states and territories is guaranteed for 2014 – but the money and the model need to go hand in hand. Further money for state government bureaucrats and private sector executives won’t aid our most disadvantaged college students to attain their prospective if it does not get to the colleges that want it most. Any try to undo a far more equitable funding model would harm Aboriginal children, children in the country, kids with a disability, little ones with English as a 2nd language, and youngsters from lower-income households. We cannot continue to compete on an worldwide degree while the gap among the most privileged and most disadvantaged is so massive. Analysis by Cost Waterhouse Cooper says that failing to reform our nation’s college method now could expense the economy much more than $ 1tn bucks by the finish of the century.

The Coalition government has no mandate for the position they have taken right now. They went to the election saying they would match the preceding government’s Gonski reforms this u-turn is a betrayal of people who believed that promise and, worse, it is a betrayal of our nations’ college kids.

The Australian Greens are committed to producing sure making certain each and every Australian youngster has the likelihood to do well, no matter their postcode or household income. We will be making use of our numbers in the Senate to block any changes to the legislation and we hope every single mum, dad, instructor and friend out there will use their numbers to let Abbott and his team know we won’t let them get away with walking out on our youngsters.

The Coalition may sabotage Gonski, but the Greens won"t stand for it | Penny Wright