FRFI 219 February / March 2011

Students across the country have continued to mobilise to defend the Educational Maintenance Allowance (EMA – the grant of up to £30 a week that enables many sixth-formers to stay in education) and the right to university education for all.

In doing so they have had to challenge the abject failure of the National Union of Students (NUS) to support their direct action (see FRFI 218), forming student councils in many universities to democratically guide the new movement, outside the control of the NUS. Labour apparatchik Aaron Porter, President of the NUS, who originally condemned students who occupied Millbank in November as ‘despicable’, was forced to apologise for his comments. However, students are clearly not fooled by this opportunist: at a demonstration against university fees called by the TUC in Manchester on 29 January he was jeered and heckled, eventually having to be escorted away by police ‘for his own protection’!

Earlier, the NUS had argued that the student-led National Campaign Against Fees and Cuts should not sponsor the 29 January demonstration in London because it would clash with the TUC march in Manchester and hence ‘split the movement’! It is clear that the opportunists are desperate to control the growing militancy of the student movement which shook cities around the country in December 2010.

On 9 December, over 30,000 students occupied Parliament Square in London as MPs voted to raise university tuition fees to up to £9,000. They were confronted by riot police batons and sustained charges by police on horseback. Angry students resisted police attempts to pen them in, pushing back police lines with shields improvised from metal fencing and wooden placards. Some students invaded the Treasury building and attacked the Supreme Court. Later in Oxford Street the windows of tax-dodging Topshop were smashed, and the royal car containing the parasites Prince Charles and Camilla was attacked.

On 11 January 2011 thousands of college students walked out of classes as MPs voted to scrap EMA. A second national school walkout on 26 January resulted in a violent police attack in Leeds after protesters targeted Lloyds TSB. Many were beaten and a student was violently arrested.

Many students were arrested on the demonstrations, and many more in the following weeks as police trawled through video footage. The courts are using political sentencing to deter future protests; 18-year-old Edward Woollard was sentenced to 32 months for throwing a fire extinguisher off the top of Millbank Tower – compare that with PC Simon Har­wood who was not even charged with assault after killing Ian Tomlinson during the G20 protests in 2009. FRFI will support all defence campaigns in whatever way we can.

Today’s youth face an unemployment rate of 20.3% for those aged between 16 and 24; the rate for recent graduates is 20% compared to a national average of 7.9%. The economic and political exclusion of British youth has fuelled the militancy of the protests. We should take inspiration from the insurrections in Tunisia and Egypt as an example of what is possible.

Rob Barrie