A snowy march down the Canongate, Edinburgh (photo: Eddie Truman)

Yesterday saw another national day of action against tuition fees and education cuts, as momentum continues to grow ahead of the parliamentary vote in Westminster on tuition fees, expected within three weeks. Although it didn’t attract as much media attention as the two previous days of student protest (on the 10th & 24th) -- in no small part due to the lack of mad riots in London that they could focus all their attention on -- tens of thousands of school, uni and college students took to the streets across the UK.

In Scotland, there was three main protests. In Edinburgh, around 400 students marched on the Parliament and pelted it with snowballs. As keen readers of this blog will have noticed, rumours were flying around the night before that Nick Clegg would be in town on the day, appearing at 3pm to help unveil the ‘Scotland Bill’. Maybe it was the snow, maybe it was the students, but either way he relegated the task to Scottish Secretary Michael Moore, who escaped the ire/snowballs of the assembled students by sneaking in the back door.

In Aberdeen, students from the Defend Education campaign audaciously occupied the local Tory party offices for a period, gaining coverage from the BBC, before a 200-strong protest in the afternoon over council cuts to music education services. SSY Aberdeen correspondent syebot reports that it was freezing, but that the dozens of schoolchildren there playing their instruments struggled on!  And at St Andrews Uni, students staged a sit-in and student assembly at the Psychology Library for several hours.

There wasn’t any action in Glasgow yesterday, with lots of people making the trek through to Edinburgh to show solidarity with the occupation there. However, the previous night, a meeting of about 50 students properly established a Glasgow-wide organising network, following on from the mass city-wide meeting at the Art School two weeks ago. The group, which last night settled on the name Glasgow Against Education Cuts, is now looking to have regularly mass meetings, held in a democratic, participatory manner, to discuss, co-ordinate and plan action across the city’s schools, unis and colleges. In itself this is pretty significant -- there’s already a decent-sized base to work from, judging from last week’s demo, and by organising in this way it’ll make it far easier to plan ahead and co-ordinate action collectively, putting us in a good position for the struggles to come in the new year. In the meantime, check out the shiny new blog here.

In England, there’s still loads of occupations ongoing -- Newcastle, UCL and Brighton among them. It’s well worth checking out the occupation blogs and seeing some of the inspiring stuff they’ve been up to, from direct actions against tax evaders to awesome banner drops around their cities and visits from exciting celebrity guests/seemingly omnipresent Guardian bloggers. Yesterday also saw mass demonstrations take place across English towns and cities.

In London, once again, it was school students who stole the show, with thousands of them pouring onto the streets. Having learnt the lessons of last week’s kettling, horse charges and general we-learned-nothing-from-G20 attitude from the Met -- which saw hundreds of teenagers forcefully detained in a kettle until after 10 at night -- yesterday’s protesters were far more savvy of cop tactics. So instead of letting the police funnel them wherever they wanted, they charged around the city in a game of ‘cat and mouse’, evading kettles and police instructions. Hardly surprising when the police had by that point already tried to pre-emptively (ie. illegally) kettle a peaceful march before it’d even started. The video below is a stark illustration of what the students were up against though, fortunately, cops lumbered down with body armour and weaponry are slow as fuck at running around after young people. Students one -- Met nil.

But revenge would come yet, with the police arresting 150 students in one go later in the evening, for the heinous crime of refusing to obey a draconian dispersal order, ie. they were still standing about in the street. In Brighton meanwhile, there’s reports that the police resorted to using tasers on the student demo.

Paul the Psychic Octopus at the Newcastle Uni occupation

Future days of action have been called for Sunday 5th, Thursday 9th and Saturday 11th December. Local protests are expected to take place on these days, similar to the wave of Vodafone tax protests that took place at the end of October. But all eyes are beginning to focus on the day of the parliamentary vote on tuition fees itself, which is expected within the next 2-3 weeks. Significantly, both the NUS and the UCU are backing protests on this day. In the case of the NUS, President Aaron Porter has suddenly realised that the student movement ran ahead and left him behind weeks ago, with de-facto leadership passing to the National Campaign Against Fees and Cuts who’ve been calling the recent days of action. So after weeks in the wilderness, presumably ‘lobbying Lib Dem MPs’, he emerged on Sunday at a uni occupation in London, announcing that he’s suddenly reached the conclusion that uni occupations, Tuesday’s protest and future days of actions are actually a pretty good idea. It’s a valuable lesson for anyone struggling against right-wing bureaucrats in the trade union movement -- seize the initiative and they’ll soon be forced to follow.

The demonstrations on the day of the Westminster vote could be huge, and we need to think carefully now about the course of action we should take in Scotland on the day. The government are playing a cynical game, refusing to announce it and calling it as close to Christmas as possible. But with even the minister responsible for the legislation saying he might not vote for it, there still stands every possibility of defeating it. Everyone to the streets!

The first of many treats in the SSY advent calendar.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 1st, 2010 at 2:33 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.