While the SU of my institution is a craven and frail beast, other students are working hard to make sure that this government's attack on education as a public good isn't forgotten: Cambridge students forced David Willetts (who earlier this week encouraged discount institutions to start up in old office blocks, while admitting that he wouldn't want his kids to attend them) to abandon a speech, then occupied the building, and Birmingham University students have set up an alternative university in an occupied building (follow their exploits here).
You might question the tactics, especially given the UK's overwhelmingly rightwing media, but I think they should be encouraged. In the 1960s, students across the world, even the UK, occupied their centres of learning to demand that universities stopped being mouthpieces of hegemony, and started critiquing the status quo. I don't think our current crop of protesters are as engaged with theory: Marcuse, Laing and Gramsci aren't on anyone's lips now, sadly - but their aims are laudable. Take the banking crash: virtually no academic economists predicted it. Instead, influential academics operated as paid consultants and board members, producing the analytical work which promised everything would be all right. Only people outside the magic circle pointed out that the Emperor was dipping his dangly bits in our soup. It's time universities led opinion, not bowed to the fashionable orthodoxies.
Despite this afternoon's media students not knowing about the Leveson inquiry, or how the press operates, the vast majority are intellectually curious and idealistic. We shouldn't stamp on this, but encourage it. I'm on strike next week, because the space I use to examine cultural nostrums is being eroded. The students' struggle is just as valid. They aren't greedily demanding special privileges - they're demanding that we all recognise the liberatory potential of education and its benefits for all.
Invoking the spirit of Father Jack, Theresa May (she probably wouldn't) has decided that every answer to questions about the student demonstration will consist of the same boring and slyly insinuating response:
May says Corbyn should condemn the violence committed by a significant number of people on the demonstration.
4.10pm: Labour's Dennis Skinner suggests that the "nasty, rightwing government" is to blame. May criticises him for not condemning the violence.
4.09pm: May says she was concerned to see one of the stewards for last week's demonstrations refusing to condemn the violence.
Clearly this is the spin-doctors' line of attack: don't deal with the issues, peddle out this tedious trope. She doesn't mean police violence, by the way.
I don't condemn the violence. Some of it was over the top, but angry people subject to police violence respond unpredictably and sometimes irrationally. Swinging on the Cenotaph flag was a bit silly and bound to get the Daily Mail brigade whinging, but retaliating to horse charges seems perfectly acceptable to me.
The Tories have released a 'plain English' guide to what their plans for local government finance means. Some Tories have taken this a little too seriously and are actually saying what they really think:
Or rather, don't, judging by this pathetic response to an enquiry as to whether the SU was going to support the Day of Action:
The students' union has taken the decision not to support a local demonstration due to the possibility of public disorder detracting from our message.
Well, that'll show them. I wasn't expecting Emily Davison or the Buddhist monks incinerating themselves in protest at the Vietnam War, but this truly is shameful.
Or rather, to the Daily Mail, 'girls' who apparently 'led' the 'riots' yesterday. It's apparently much more shocking for females to express anger… even though it allows poor-quality misogynistic newspapers to use pictures of pretty ones to frighten the parents.
Rioting girls became the disturbing new face of violent protest yesterday.
Another faction simply came along for the excitement. They were remarkably young, and, in many cases, frighteningly naive. This was the Facebook and iPhone generation who posed for souvenir photographs against the backdrop of carnage for which they played truant or left school early to witness.
Thus, for the first time in a protest filled with confrontation and hatred, young girls took centre stage
They were mostly young, bright and pretty, the kind of girls who would ordinarily make their parents proud. One was going to study to become a lawyer, another a doctor.
This could be your daughter! Prettiness and righteous anger are just wrong together. Only ugly poor people get angry. But don't worry - it's all a fashion, like Facebook. This is what's known in the trade as a 'moral panic', and it's what the Mail does best.
But among the thousands of people who brought chaos to Westminster yesterday, a remarkable turn-out of well-dressed, well-spoken teenage girls swelled the ranks. In a corner near the Treasury building in Whitehall, I found the front line girls. It was a group of 17 and 18-year-olds and they were doing each other’s make-up. Not with mascara or eye-liner, but cat’s whiskers and painted slogans.
Now for action. If you had seen them in their short skirts and trendy scarves, you might have thought that a few chants and a bit of banner-waving would be the limit.
But almost as soon as some mindless thugs began trashing a police van abandoned in the middle of Whitehall, the girls went into battle. Elsewhere a group of female friends, maybe aged 16 or 17, put themselves within inches of the police line and began to scream abuse. It wasn’t quite Cheltenham Ladies College, but several of these girls, it emerged, were from respectable schools and decent homes.
Even more dishonestly, the photo of some fruity teens posing like the traditional A-level results day is captioned 'A New Facebook Photo?' as though this was selfish larks - despite the photograph bearing the copyright notice of a professional journalist. All the photographs are credited to photographers and news agencies, which makes me think that they were asking these kids to pose, knowing they'd be bought by rags like the Mail.
If it was your daughter - brilliant. There wasn't much violence - the cops left a van in the middle of the crowd (not, as the Mail lied, 'fled the van') and some hotheads trashed it, but that's the lot. Why shouldn't young women - even middle-class ones with good nails and delicate accents - be angry and vocal? This is the Guardian's version (and unlike the Mail, it didn't find a 'war' - the headline is 'Student Protest Largely Peaceful'):
It was just after 1pm that police van 313C, parked on Parliament Street in cental London, became the sudden, angry focus of youthful opposition to the government's plans to charge students significantly more for their education. The vehicle, unoccupied and stranded amid a sea of mainly teenage protesters, was set upon.
I'm really proud of everyone who demonstrated (and some occupations are still ongoing). French schoolchildren have a long tradition of participating, and the late 60s/early 70s in Britain saw a surge of youth protest - hence the infamous OZ Schoolkids' Issue.
However, much respect to Megan Thomas, aged 16. She knows exactly what the Daily Mail's news agenda is - not that it stopped them.
Megan Thomas, 16, stood in front of the police van in a bid to stop people vandalising it. Dressed in her school uniform with her tie around her head, the Year 11 pupil from Dunraven School in Streatham, South London, shouted at people to stop, claiming: ‘It’s a set up. They wanted it to get smashed up. All it is doing is giving the impression we are violent youth.’
If she wants to come to The Hegemon, I'll reserve her a place.
Predictably, I'm complaining to the PCC about the van claim under Clause 1 of the Code of Practice. Do the same.
Sorry about the advert at the start of this. Middle-class ladies: take heed!
No walkout or demonstration here at The Hegemon, as far as I can see, but London and Manchester seem to be pretty active, with Leeds and Bristol doing good work. There's a mass walkout at nearby Birmingham University too, and a lot of schools have seen very effective walkouts - great to see the younger generation radicalised.
Despite some difficulty from security guards preventing many of our students getting in more than 30 birmingham students are currently in occupation of the aston webb building the site of the prime ministerial debates. this is a copy of our written statement.
Students at the University of Birmingham have embarked on this occupation because we believe the Government's cuts to be economically unnecessary, unfair and ideologically motivated. We stand in solidarity with unions and seek to be active members in a broader anti-cuts coalition. The government must understand that if they continue to destroy the livelihoods of the majority to benefit the rich and powerful minority, they will face increasingly widespread and radical action.
The government is however not the only catalyst for our action. This university currently adheres to a strategy which prioritises corporate profit above the value of education. To this end we have set out an alternative budget proposal that fairly shares the burden of government cuts. If the Government and University continue with their marketisation of people's lives this will only be the beginning.
Plymouth Uni's occupation is so sophisticated that there's a live web feed. Royal Holloway students got started yesterday!
(As an example, 20% of Oxford University's outreach programme to recruit 'non-traditional' students went to private schools, including Eton, from which 46% of Oxford's intake is drawn - 7% of the school population is privately educated).
UPDATE: the London protest is getting heated, helped by the cops' decision to 'kettle' them - kettles tend to boil. Live pictures here.
Meanwhile, the Metropolitan Police has closed down Fitwatch (links to an alternative version for now), a website which collects material related to heavy-handed policing, illegal evidence-gathering and police criminality. According to the Met, Fitwatch's advice to students (grow a beard, chuck away your protest clothing, don't volunteer for arrest but let the cops do the work) is criminal (rather than obvious - if you've managed to get into university, you should probably be able to work this out by yourself). They haven't asked for the post to be taken off: they've ordered the entire site to be banned for a whole year - without benefit of evidence or trial.
Oh really? Why not arrest them then, rather than pressure the site hosts to close it? This is the kind of thing we see in Iran. If advice like this is criminal, we can find out through the courts rather than just shut sources down.
This is what Milton said in Areopagiticain 1644: don't pre-censor, let people publish then use legal channels to test the limits of what's acceptable. You don't have to agree with Fitwatch to recognise the importance of this principle.
OH YES. A little snippet for you students who voted for the Lib Dems because they publicly promised - on camera with big signatures - to abolish student fees: I believe the appropriate word is LIARS.
The Liberal Democrats were drawing up plans to abandon Nick Clegg's flagship policy to scrap university tuition fees two months before the general election, secret party documents reveal.
A month before Clegg pledged in April to scrap the "dead weight of debt", a secret team of key Lib Dems made clear that, in the event of a hung parliament, the party would not waste political capital defending its manifesto pledge to abolish university tuition fees within six years.
