Tories Out, Students In!

Scottish students assemble at ULU

If you’re reading this blog, you’re probably already well aware of Wednesday’s huge demonstration against education cuts that took place in London. Over the past few days a massive amount has already been written about it, both in the mainstream press and all over the internet and social media.

It was a brilliant demonstration. Myself and a few other SSYers attended along with the 1500 or so other Scottish students who took the gruelling 18+ hour round trip to London. Dropped off at the University of London Union early on Wednesday morning, after breakfast the Scottish contingent grouped and set off on an impromptu feeder march through the streets of central London. The fact that no police showed up during the feeder demo, not even to direct traffic, was a bit of a surprise – and would turn out to be a forbearer of the events of later on.

Arriving at Horse Guards Avenue – in Whitehall, surrounded by government departments – at 11am, there was already thousands of students assembled, and an immediate sense that this would be a very angry, and very big, demo. And this was a whole hour and a half before the official marching off time. As more and more students piled in, it became impossible to tell how many were there – estimates of 50,000+, more than double what march organisers the National Union of Students had been predicting, seem reasonable.

What was on display was a very palpable rage – in particular at Nick Clegg and the Liberal Democrats, with the most popular chant of the march turning out to be ‘Nick Clegg we know you, you’re a fucking Tory too!’. Coach loads of students came from across the country – from probably every university in Britian and hundreds of colleges. For many, or even the majority, of those attending, it was their first demonstration. The grounds have hopefully now been laid for a mass struggle against the imposition of the fee rises and drastic cuts to the higher education budget over the coming months.

The demo set off at 12.30pm, passing through Whitehall, Big Ben and the Parliament. In theory, the march was divided into different sections by region, with Scotland coming nearer the front of the march. A lively section, complete with smoke flares and constant chanting ,centred around the Glasgow and Strathclyde Uni Anti-Cuts Action Network banners, drew in several hundred students. This then provided a critical mass of people that, when the demonstration passed the Conservative headquarters, in Millbank towers on the banks of the Thames, was able to charge in the direction of the building and successfully break through the doors.

What happened next, over the course of a few hours, has dominated almost all the media coverage of the demo. Initially around sixty protesters broke through the locked doors of the building and entered the foyer, at about 1.30pm. At this stage there was no police around, but when a few cops showed up, half the students inside the building panicked and ran back out, leaving about 30 inside. Hundreds, however, began to gather around the building, laying siege to the glass panelled walls and putting 10-15 police in the position of holding back hundreds of protesters. Over the next half hour, a few people did succeed in breaking through the police line, but with our numbers still pretty low, we decided to leave the building in victory rather than risk arrest.

But this was far from the end of it. Numbers continued to swell outside of Millbank, and hundreds more began pushing to enter the building. It was at this stage that missiles began to be thrown, and before long, the windows were broken, one by one, as over a hundred students stormed the building once again, with a smaller group gaining access to its roof. At the pictures illustrate, thousands were now gathered outside. I had to go and get my bus back to Glasgow at this point – and pushing my way through the assembled masses was a tough job in itself.

The march organisers, aided by the media, have gone out of their way to condemn these actions as those of a small minority of ‘idiots’ and ‘violent anarchists’, the implication being that those carrying out these ‘violent’ acts weren’t even students. This flies in the face of the facts – thousands of students taking part in a spontaneous act of civil disobedience. When things did get taken too far – like the now infamous fire extinguisher incident, they were shouted down by the mass of the protest. When someone was about to throw a paving slab at a line of police, it’s reported that other protesters stepped in to stop them. Endangering peoples’ lives cannot be condoned – but it’s important to point out that it was isolated to a few tiny actions, which pale against the wider picture of the Millbank occupation, let alone the march of 52,000 students.

One thing is certain – the smashing up of Tory HQ was significant. A glance at any of the coverage of the demo proves as much. It gave the march maximum media exposure, meaning it entered public consciousness in the way that the it would, in all likelihood, otherwise not have. For evidence of this, look no further than Paul O’Grady, fast becoming Britain’s best populist agitator against the cuts, who while talking about ‘the riots’, said on his teatime show yesterday that ‘education should be for everybody, not just for those who can afford it’.

I’ve seen it myself: the aftermath of the demo has led to students up and down the country talking about fees, cuts and the fightback in a way that would have been unimaginable even a week ago. As a whole, the march has given a huge confidence boost to workers and students across the UK. It was a timely display of the anger that exists, and will continue to grow, in large swathes of the population.

The question now is: where next? The NUS, taking a break from shamelessly attacking the people they’re supposed to represent, have said that they’ll be ‘lobbying Lib Dem MPs’, and working out more ways to attack the left. The momentum that has been built up over the past few days needs to be maintained. Grassroots student groups are calling for a nationwide day of action on Wednesday 24 November – of occupations, strikes and walk-outs. Students across Scotland are expected to organise demonstrations on this day, reportedly the same day on which the government will vote on their plans to raise tuition fees. The SSY site will bring you all the details as we get them – for the moment, students in Glasgow will be meeting both at their own unis and colleges next week, and then for a city-wide meeting at the Art School on Thursday 18 November to finalise their plans.

The student movement must also strive to build up links with wider layers of society facing the same government attacks – the labour movement, claimants, pensioners and school students among them. While HE students may have set the ball rolling, the struggle against cuts and austerity cannot be won by students alone – the fight is on to build a unified movement that can overthrow the Coalition.

For more on the government’s proposals for Higher Education & fees, read here.