TUITION FEES PROTEST: Anarchists cause chaos as 50k students take to streets | Daily Mail Online Share this article Share Later Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Paul Stephenson admitted his force had failed to predict the trouble, with just 20 officers holding back surging crowds at the main flashpoint. He said: ‘It’s not acceptable. It is an embarrassment for London and for us.’ Student leaders condemned the violence. National Union of Students president Aaron Porter described it as ‘despicable’. Going wild: Young students trashing the entrance to Millbank Tower No control: Protesters used furniture to smash windows at Millbank Unprepared? Injured police officers are led away from the clashes Enlarge He blamed the trouble on a small minority who he believed had arranged it beforehand. Mayor of London Boris Johnson said: ‘I am appalled that a small minority have today shamefully abused their right to protest. ‘This is intolerable and all those involved will be pursued and they will face the full force of the law. ‘The Metropolitan Police Commissioner has assured me that there will be a vigorous post incident investigation.

He will also be reviewing police planning and response.’ The protest of 50,000 students, lecturers and supporters – including at least one Lib Dem MP – started peacefully with a march from Whitehall past Downing Street and Parliament. But it turned violent when demonstrators halted outside Millbank Tower, home to Tory HQ, facing the Thames. Even though the march had been publicised for weeks, Scotland Yard had policed the event with just 225 officers. The 20 officers lining the route at Millbank faced an impossible task of trying to hold back thousands of demonstrators. Officers watched helplessly as protesters charged the entrance lobby and caused hundreds of thousands of pounds of damage by using chairs and fire extinguishers to smash the glass frontage, effectively opening up the atrium to the entire crowd. Anger: Thousands gathered outside Tory Party headquarters Demonstrators waving a flag from the roof 30 Millbank after storming the building Riot police standing guard inside the wrecked entrance to Millbank Tower One policewoman with a bleeding head wound was led away by two colleagues. Troublemakers stood on tables, ripped fire alarms from their fittings, pulled down ceiling panels and sprayed graffiti.

They made their way to the roof, quickly followed by dozens more who flooded into the building. A veteran of the Leftist anarchist group Class War, which has a history of violent clashes with police, was spotted while police sources said animal rights activists were also present. One bearded man in his 30s was using a loud hailer to incite the crowd. Graffiti was scrawled on buildings along Millbank and a war memorial was defaced with the words ‘Fight back’. Many students condemned the troublemakers but some said violence was an acceptable form of protest. One student from King’s College said that 450 Cambridge students had attended the protest and she believed some from her college were on the roof. Demonstrators chanted 'Tory scum' and daubed 'Tory pigs' on the walls of Millbank in protest Demonstrators clashed with police as they clambered through a smashed window at Millbank On top of the world: Protesters on the roof of Millbank, home of Tory party headquarters ‘It was students from King’s who made the effigies of Cameron and Clegg. It’s been fantastic. The atmosphere is amazing and everybody is really nice.

‘The majority is a completely non-violent protest. I’m not really worried about violence against property or objects, smashing buildings is completely fine, it’s a great image of our anger. I’ve got no problem with that at all as long as nobody gets hurt.’ The volatile situation started to calm down at about 4.30pm when the Metropolitan Police sent in hundreds of riot officers, who drove protesters away from the building. There was concern that some would be pushed into one of several bonfires started in the crowd and police made efforts to disperse the crowd. By 7pm, police began to let the several hundred protesters cordoned on the road in front of Millbank Tower out in ones and twos. Vandals: Youths took hammers and sticks to the glass of Millbank Tower Flashpoint: Thousands of students outside Millbank Tower yesterday afternoon Chaos: A protester lights a flare outside the besieged entrance to Tory Party headquarters It is not known whether there will be more trouble tomorrow. An unsolicited text received by a student at a 6th form student in London read: 'No Student should attend School/ College/Uni Tomorrow!!! Instead participate in the march for Student Loans and EMA to continue funding.

'Even if you don't want to join in with the march just don't attend School/ College/Uni. Leave the class rooms empty! Let them know that the young people of today too mean business!!! This is our futures, they shouldn't be allowed to scam us like this!!' Inside the severely damaged lobby of the tower, a group of around 25 protesters could be seen surrounded by police. Officers led them down from various floors of the seven-storey building where they were found after running inside at the peak of the riot. Anger: Students protesting against tuition fees rises in Westminster on Wednesday Peaceful: Students on the official march yesterday Conservative Party staff remained in their offices throughout with chairman Baroness Warsi among those inside. The protesters in the Tory HQ building and on the roof released a statement which said: ‘We oppose all cuts and we stand in solidarity with public sector workers, and all poor, disabled, elderly and working people.

‘This is only the beginning of the resistance to the destruction of our education system and public services.’ Under the Government’s proposals, which represent the most radical shake-up of student funding for decades, the fee cap will be raised to £6,000, with universities able to charge up to £9,000 – triple the current cap – in ‘exceptional circumstances’. ALL STUDENTS 'WILL PAY FEES OF £9,000' By LAURA CLARK and JAMES CHAPMAN Almost all universities will charge £9,000-a-year tuition fees to avoid their courses being seen as poor quality, a report will warn today. The vast majority will charge the highest possible fee within a few years because students perceive costlier courses to be more prestigious, analysts said. They warned that charges of £9,000-a-year across the board would significantly increase the cost to taxpayers of offering students subsidised loans to cover fees. This would potentially force the Government to further raise interest rates on loans or lower the £21,000 salary threshold for repayments to start. Ministers have claimed that universities will charge £9,000-a-year only in ‘exceptional cases’.

They even say some will charge less than £6,000. But the report, by respected think-tank the Higher Education Policy Institute, says: ‘Those institutions that are over-subscribed will charge £9,000 without hesitation. ‘Those that have struggled to recruit students will initially be more cautious, but, within a few years, we believe that almost all universities will charge the maximum £9,000 fee. ‘No doubt, as now, some further education colleges will charge less than the maximum, and so may a small number of higher education institutions, but our expectation is that the great majority of students will be charged the maximum. ‘The evidence from the U.S. suggests that a higher fee makes the institution more, rather than less, attractive.’ The report also suggests the ‘savings that will accrue to the Government will in reality be much lower than expected’. Today’s report follows David Cameron fanning the flames of student anger yesterday by admitting higher fees would subsidise charges for foreign students. Challenged by a Chinese student during his trip to the country, the Prime Minister revealed that the higher fees were partly designed to limit rises for international undergraduates who can pay around £20,000 a year.

Fees protest thugs must be punished, says Cameron | The Independent Fees protest thugs must be punished, says Cameron Thursday 11 November 2010 07:51 BST Click to follow Indy Politics David Cameron called today for "the full force of the law" to be used against people who assaulted police or damaged property during yesterday's student demonstrations at Conservative Party HQ. The Prime Minister said those who opposed his plans to raise the cap on university tuition fees had a right to protest but insisted that "violence and lawbreaking" must not go unpunished. An urgent investigation was under way today into how police were caught out when violent protesters turned a demonstration against higher tuition fees into an ugly battle. Fourteen people were injured, including seven police officers, when dozens of activists stormed the tower block housing the Tory party headquarters in Millbank, Westminster. Tens of thousands of pounds worth of damage was caused as protesters smashed windows, damaged furniture and daubed walls with graffiti, sparking a four-hour stand-off. Fifty-one people were arrested for offences including criminal damage and aggravated trespass and many more were photographed and identified as police prepared to scour footage for evidence of crimes.

A Metropolitan Policespokesman said it is not known if anyone has been charged or how many remain in custody at police stations across central London. Speaking during a round of TV interviews at the G20 summit in South Korean capital Seoul, Mr Cameron told Channel 5 News: "People who assault police officers or who smash windows or who break property are breaking the law and yes, those people I hope... will be prosecuted. They should be. "People long in our history have gone to marches and held banners and made protests and made speeches and that's part of our democracy. That is right. "What is not part of our democracy is that sort of violence and lawbreaking. It's not right. It's not acceptable and I hope that the full force of the law will be used." Mr Cameron said that as he watched footage of the Conservative office under attack, he was worried for the safety of friends and colleagues inside. "I was worried for the safety of people in the building because I know people who work in there, not just the Conservative Party but other offices as well," he told the BBC. "So I was on the telephone. I wanted to know what was happening. I wanted to know that people were safe.

"And what I felt when I saw those pictures was of course people have a right to protest peacefully, but I saw pictures of people who were bent on violence and on destruction and on destroying property and that is completely unacceptable. "And we need to make sure that that behaviour does not go unpunished and we need to make sure that we don't, as the police put it, see scenes like that on London's streets again. "I thought it was extremely serious. I could see a line - a thin blue line - of extremely brave police officers trying to hold back a bunch of people who were intent on violence and destruction." Mr Cameron said he agreed that police had lessons to learn on how they handled the protest. "They were very brave, those police officers, but as the police themselves have said, there weren't enough of them and the police response needs to reflect that," said the Prime Minister.

"So I'm very glad that the Metropolitan Police Commissioner has said what he said and I think we need to learn the lessons very rapidly." Mr Cameron insisted that the new fees structure - under which universities can charge up to £9,000 a year for tuition and graduates will pay the money back over their working lives - was "a more progressive system than the one that it will replace". And he added: "I think the right place for the debate and argument to take place is in Parliament, is in debates rather than the scenes that we saw. "But of course people have a right to protest and I'm sure that people will do that - as they do under all governments and as always happened in our country. But the scenes of our violence, that is not acceptable." Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Paul Stephenson said the unexpected clashes were an "embarrassment to London and to us" and pledged to examine what went wrong. He also apologised to those left inside 30 Millbank for their "traumatic experience" and said police were caught out as there was "no real history" of that level of violence during student protests. Sir Paul added: "I think we've also got to ask ourselves some questions.

This level of violence was largely unexpected and what lessons can we learn for the future. We are already doing that and asking those questions. "Certainly I am determined to have a thorough investigation into this matter." The violence was sparked as a peaceful march involving thousands of students mobilised from across Britain by looming fee rises passed the landmark building on the River Thames. A small group of police and security staff were forced to retreat as a mass of people surged forward, led by a smaller group, many of whom were masked, who stormed the building and smashed windows. An angry stand-off ensued as a handful of police officers attempted to stop more people entering the building as up to 50 protesters ran amok inside, smashing windows and hurling missiles from the seventh-floor rooftop. One man was seen armed with a hammer while others brandished metal poles and wooden sticks used to hold placards, as others started fires and lit fireworks in the forecourt to the sound of drums and dance music. London mayor Boris Johnson said he was appalled that a small minority "shamefully abused" their right to protest and warned that those involved with "face the full force of the law".

He said: "The Metropolitan Police Commissioner has assured me that there will be a vigorous post-incident investigation. He will also be reviewing police planning and response." National Union of Students president Aaron Porter described the violence as "despicable" and said a minority of protesters who planned to cause trouble had "hijacked" the march. The police inquiry is likely to focus on police preparation for the march, including the decision to categorise it as low risk and to draft in only around 225 officers to marshal more than 50,000 people. The tactics of public order commanders once violence erupted will also come under the spotlight after officers were ordered not to intervene as protesters attacked the building. Representatives of the police rank-and-file will want to know if senior officers did all they could to reduce the danger faced by those left to try to hold the embattled front line. Students and staff were protesting against government plans to charge students up to £9,000 a year from 2012 - triple the current £3,290 fee. Union leaders say the increase, along with swingeing cuts to university budgets, will mean the end of affordable higher education.

Mr Cameron denied Britain was facing a repeat of the 1980s, when unpopular cuts helped spark violent demonstrations and rioting. He told Channel 5 News: "I think there's a very big difference to the 1980s. This time we have a coalition Government, we have two parties that have come together in the national interest that's trying to take the country with us as we do difficult things in terms of dealing with the debt and the deficit. "I think most people understand we have to take these steps, we have to get Britain out of the danger zone. "I think the will of the public was expressed at the time of the election when they rejected debt and deficit and putting off these difficult decisions under Labour and they chose a new approach and we've got to be true to that and stick to that. "We'll be absolutely resolute in pursuing that path." Mr Cameron insisted there was no question of overturning the decision on fees, telling ITV News: "We won't go back. Look, even if we wanted to, we shouldn't go back to the idea that university is free." He denied that expected cuts in police numbers would make forces less able to deal with similar demonstrations in future.

"What the police themselves have said - and to be fair to Paul Stephenson he has himself said - is that the police response was inadequate and that the lessons have to be learned," said Mr Cameron. "There are something like 30,000 police officers in London. There were a very small number of police officers against a very violent group of people. "I think the police themselves have said that the problem here was about the planning, was about the intelligence, was about the resourcing of that particular operation. "I am quite convinced that the reductions in police spending that we're making can actually be done without losing the visibility and the activity of the police officers on our streets." Mr Porter said students had "lost a lot of public sympathy" because of the violence. In an interview with BBC Breakfast, he said: "What we had done was assemble 50,000 students which I'm sure would have got a hell of a lot of attention and would have sent a clear message to Government.

"But if we're now having to spend time talking about the rights and wrongs of violence and criminal damage, actually in many respects I think it undermines our argument rather than allows us to concentrate on the devastation to our universities and colleges, and the issue that we could rightly point out, huge cuts to what students will be receiving." He added: "I think we have to accept that we have lost a lot of public sympathy and actually that does undermine our case. Cameron spells out hopes for foreign students By Nigel Morris, Deputy Political Editor David Cameron suggested yesterday that steep rises in tuition fees would help to prevent bigger increases in the prices charged to foreign students. He urged Chinese youngsters not to let their fears about the expense of courses deter them from applying to British universities. The Prime Minister’s comments, which risked further antagonising student protesters in Britain, was asked to explain the Government’s decision to allow universities to charge up to £9,000 a year in tuition fees. Speaking at Peking University, he said the controversial increases would ensure that “our universities are well funded and we won’t go on increasing so fast the fees for overseas students.” Tuition fees for foreign students in Britain currently average £20,000 a year.

Mr Cameron said agreeing the increases for domestic students had been a tough decision for the coalition, but was crucial to help Britain compete with universities in the United States, India and China in attracting the world’s brightest students. He added: “In the past we have been pushing up the fees on overseas students and using that as a way of keeping them down for domestic students. “We have done the difficult thing. We have put up contributions for British students. Yes, foreign students will still pay a significant amount of money but we should now be able to keep that growth under control.” He told the undergraduates that he was keen for Chinese people to study in Britain as the links formed could later lead to business ties between the two countries." More about: Other Campaigns | Campaign for the Public University York Occupations and Reclamations November 2011 – ‘ Students begin wave of occupations to back public sector strikes ‘ (as of 23/11/2011, Birmingham , Cambridge , and Warwick were in occupation) News from Greece – departmental occupations across the country, click here for details.

Glasgow, August 2011 – After occupying the Hetherington building for almost 200 days, Glasgow University students are celebrating the management’s agreement to impose no further cuts to courses, no compulsory redundancies, and to instate a new postgraduate club at the university. It is reported to be the longest running student occupation in UK history. For more, see here and here . London Metropolitan University occupied on 4 May 2011 in protest against the cutting of 70% of its courses, mainly in the humanities (see also here and here ) USA… Resistance to corporate power and ‘austerity’ politics have erupted across the United States this spring as well, beginning most visibly with the occupation of the Wisonsin State House from 14/2 – 2/3 and its reoccupation on 8/3. The month of March also saw sit-ins for campus workers’ rights at the universities of Rutgers, Emory, Wisconsin, William and Mary, Tulane and the University of Texas, and at the University of Minnesota , in solidarity with Wisconsin Students and Workers and Against University Budget Cuts (for a reflection, see here ).

On 30 March, the State House in Albany (NY) was occupied by students and academics protesting budget cuts in education. And on 13 and 20 April, there were multiple sit-ins across the campuses of California State. In a continuing struggle against Arizona’s Senate Bill 1070 and in defence of the preservation of Ethnic Studies as a taught discipline, University of California students began another hunger strike in late April 2011. New year, more resistance… A number of universities have been occupied or re-occupied in the new year! Students of Stop Fees, Stop Cuts Birmingham University occupied a space known as the Physics Bridge for one day on 17 January 2011; they were forcefully evicted and went through a gruelling disciplinary process, after which all were acquitted (for the early petition in their defence and further information, see here ). Students at Glasgow University occupied the Hetherington Research Club on 1 February 2011, organising a wide programme of meetings, discussions, films and activities. Students at Hull University reoccupied the Staff House on 7 February.

In another move, students at the LSE occupied the Senior Common Room (and later Howard Davies’ office) on 22 February to demand the university sever its affiliation with the Libyan regime and with PhD alumnus Saif Gadaffi (Muammar Gadaffi’s son); the occupation finished the following day when the university took actions that satisfied all but one of the demands. Manchester students also re-occupied the Roscoe Building on 23 February, with the space being used in multiple ways for organising and alternative education. On 24 February, members of the Royal Holloway Anti-Cuts Alliance began a sit-in of the Arts Building to coincide with a major meeting of Universities UK in London, demanding open debate about the budget cuts, increases in tuition fees and democratic process and rights on campus. They were forcefully evicted on 3 March. On 28 February, students at University College London occupied the Old Refectory ‘to provide a space to organise against the cuts and highlight our grievances with management’ and on 21 March occupied the Registry in solidarity with striking lecturers and administrative staff. On 23 March, students at SOAS occupied the Faber building in solidarity with the University and College Union as well.

Universities are not the only public spaces being occupied now. Following the nationwide ‘read-in’ to defend and affirm the value of public libraries on 5 February, a group of anti-cuts campaigners occupied New Cross Library until 6 February. For more information, see here . On 23 February, Lambeth Save Our Services interrupted the Council budget-setting meeting and occupied Lambeth Town Hall after the meeting decamped to private quarters. For information, see here . A similar scenario unfolded at Leeds Council Chamber on the same day; for information, see here . For information on university and public space occupation/reclamation during 2010, see the Edinburgh occupations page, the National Campaign Against Cuts and Fees occupations blogroll , and the Really Open University’s Occupation Count .

Of related interest: seminar on the Logics of Occupation (Nottingham Critical Pedagogies, 23/2/2011); Abserwyth’s post-occupation newspaper, The Alternative Politics of protest and policing ‘Dealing with dissent: the view from the authorities’ by Jonathan Moses (OpenDemocracy, 22/02/2011) is an insightful report on how the government, police forces and right-wing think tanks are reconceptualising and responding to the new forms of resistance, and on its implications for democratic protest and political action. Since the events at Millbank (Conservative Party HQ) during the first national demonstration against fees on 10/11/2010, protests and direct action to oppose education budget cuts and tuition fees have been increasingly heavily policed, and incidents of violence during protests increasingly visible. Of particular concern are police tactics of ‘kettling’ (containing protesters’ movement, see explanation here , report here and accounts here ), mounted officers charging into crowds of protesters on horseback (on 24/11/2010 and 9/12/2010 ), and deliberate aggravation, aggression and physical attack.

The case of Middlesex undergraduate student Alfie Meadows, who required brain surgery after being struck on the head with a police truncheon on 9/12/2010 (details here and here ), is presently being investigated by the IPCC and championed by his family, friends and colleagues. The case of Jody McIntyre, a protester who was pulled from his wheelchair by police, is also being dealt with extensively in the media ( details here and here ). Resources Human rights group Liberty sues Metropolitan Police for ‘kettling’ children during a demonstration on 24/11/2010. For further information, see the Guardian article here and updates on this page. The Coalition of Resistance and National Convention Against Fees and Cuts together held a press conference on ‘Student protests and police “kettling” tactics’, the video of which is available here (25/11/010). To read and sign the ‘Ban Kettling’ petition, click here . The National Campaign Against Cuts and Fees has also issued a press statement on ‘Police Violence and Vote on Tuition Fee Increase’ (9/12/2010), and has published legal advice for anyone participating in future demonstrations.

A number of websites have been formed to collect and disseminate information about the use of police force at protests, including Copwatch , FITwatch and the November 10th Defence Campaign . For critical commentary, see Peter Hallward’s article in the Times Higher Education, ‘A new strategy is needed for a brutal new era’ (13/12/2010), here . Andy Field has also written a thoughtful piece, entitled ‘Towards a new rhetoric of political action’ (14/12/2010) — ‘How can we create a poetry of protest, that remakes the conventional symbols and mechanisms of our lives as powerless consumers? A form of political action that doesn’t just anticipate a better future, but is already making it.’ Click here to read the essay. Websites and Publications Post-16 Educator is a bi-monthly magazine produced by and for activists in all sectors of post compulsory education.

Share this: Adventures in the Sausage Factory: A Cursory Overview of UK University Struggles, November 2010 – July 2011 | Mute Adventures in the Sausage Factory: A Cursory Overview of UK University Struggles, November 2010 – July 2011 By Danny Hayward , 25 January 2012 Nearly a year after the attenuation of a wave of further and higher education struggles against state-led ‘decomposition’, Danny Hayward looks back at the faultlines within this resistance and the future which follows its defeat Decomposing Higher Education: Stage One During the 1990s, as the transition of the British economy to a giant services station continued apace, and as British manufacturing shriveled into a kind of nostalgic mantelpiece ornament, British politicians and ‘independent observers’ cast about in search of a new ‘driver’ for long term British economic growth. 1 In their quixotic quest for a saviour, or at least for a convenient footstool for the financial services sector, the politicians turned to the universities. And the British universities seemed the perfect solution to Britain’s long term macro-economic discontents.

Their mix of dreamy spires and robust benchmarking in international league tables offered the kind of synergy that management consultants are willing to die for. On the one hand, cutting edge global competitiveness; on the other, feudal nostalgia. The State had found what it needed. Quicker than a stock market flash crash, a thousand thousand page reports were commissioned on how best to exploit this invaluable national resource. The future seemed golden. A ‘high-skill economy’ would revolutionise domestic production. In the tiny but overheated imaginations of public policy planners, the ‘stream’ of British university graduates would meet a stream of capital credit from the booming financial services industry, and these together would make up a river which would fertilise the fields of national capital accumulation. Dynamic entrepreneurs would live together in harmony in this bucolic postindustrial paradise. And then the dotcom bubble burst. And then growth failed to accelerate during the upturn in the business cycle. And then the credit crisis happened. The slow death of this particular accumulation fantasy concluded on 12 October 2010 with the publication of a report on university ‘sustainability’.

The Browne Report – named after the ex-BP Chief Executive who chaired the review leading to its publication – advised that the State withdraw almost its entire financial subsidy to university teaching. The report advocated a new system of financing in which the degree holder rather than the State would be liable for the costs of her education. English students, who since 1998 had been required to pay a ‘top-up’ fee to complement the State’s inadequate student subsidy per capita, were now to acknowledge that, as the ‘primary beneficiaries’ of their degree in view of projected future earnings, it was their responsibility to bear the majority of the costs. 2 Exploiting the crisis rhetoric which had echoed and re-echoed in the bourgeois media since 2007, this moral argument was immediately desublimated into an argument about economic necessity. As Browne wrote in his Executive Summary, a degree is of benefit both to the holder, through higher levels of social contribution and higher lifetime earnings, and to the nation, through higher economic growth rates and the improved health of society. Getting the balance of funding appropriate to reflect these benefits is essential if funding is to be sustainable.

3 The new ‘balance’ which Browne proposed would involve the removal of the cap on university fees, set in 2010 at £3,290. The cap would be raised to £9,000 on the understanding that state subsidies for teaching in English universities – still £4.4 billion in 2011-2012 – would be scaled down to near zero, with a continuing (though in absolute terms equally reduced) subsidy only for those students in disciplines where education is more capital intensive. These were the so called ‘STEM’ subjects: Sciences, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics. Because even the one time Chief Executive of BP is aware that most students cannot afford to pay £9,000 per annum plus monies for accommodation and maintenance, Browne’s proposal was that the new fees would be financed in the first instance by an expanded system of state loan provision. Education would be ‘free at point of access’ in the sense that students would be guaranteed access to credit both for their fees and for their living costs.

These students once graduated and earning more than £21,000 per annum would repay their loans at either rates of interest fixed to inflation or at the rate of inflation plus 2.2 percent, depending on how far above the repayment threshold their wages fell. On the specifics, Browne’s report adopted a kind of studious evasiveness: it was not clear (nor is it now) what level of earnings would constitute a high earner, and readers of the report were expected to accept its myriad bullet points and graphs as a comforting proxy for detail as yet plainly undecided. One month later, while several thousand students celebrated in the courtyard, the windows of the Conservative Party headquarters – now referred to, after the area in Westminster it was situated in, as ‘Millbank’ – were kicked in. While police looked more or less helplessly on, the building was trashed. It was the riotous opening ceremony for several months of unusually intense domestic education struggle.

The following analysis, focusing on the period from late 2010 to mid-2011, will dwell at length on what one gentleman correspondent in the London Review of Books called, in reference to the Browne Review and the state policy which it partially inspired, ‘the tired debate on class’. It will do so because the possibility for effective linkage between a narrowly ‘education-based’ and a broader class struggle seems to me to derive from the failure of the process of domestic capital recomposition which growth in the university sector was intended to ‘drive’. This includes the signal failure of university expansion to produce an extensive ‘high-skill’ service sector, or, in other words, its failure to assure anything other than highly- policed jobless or at best ‘casualised’ misery for most of its graduates; and because I’m unconvinced that there is much of interest to be said about the function or structure of British Higher Education or about the Humanities without reference to class organisation and class values; and because with the benefit of a half-inch of hindsight it is easier to itemise the class foundations of many of the most widely canvassed arguments against increased fees and university ‘marketisation’. And so the following will attempt an anatomy.

Since I assume that the majority of its readers will not be working class teenagers but will instead be the ‘kind’ (the class) of person who might be apt to make a case for Higher Education as a ‘social good’ or for the value of academic ‘autonomy’, its objective (insofar as it has one) is to call for a materialist reevaluation of those categories. The Timid (‘Anti-Market’) Battle Cry of the Professoriate Much indecorous intellectual mud wrestling followed the publication of Browne’s Report. Disgruntled academics jostled in their in house organs (the Times Higher Education, the London Review of Books) to complain about the declension from social democratic principle. The official complaints of the liberal academics were several. Their arguments were initially provided with a great deal of airtime. They might be worth summarising at the outset. Firstly, Higher Education is a ‘social’ and not as Lord Browne’s report implies a ‘private’ good.

Secondly, higher education is a noble practice, requiring time for ‘reflection’ and ‘contemplation’ and unable to thrive where a report on research productivity has to be mailed to the oiks in human resources every fifteen seconds on weekdays (or, if not to them, then to their bureaucratic imagos assigned to the assessment of research ‘impact’). Thirdly, students and lecturers ought to possess a collaborative relationship in which each party is entitled to challenge the other, and this relationship cannot survive after student-consumers have been raised onto a throne made of cheap beer and unfinished essays and declared sovereign. Fourthly, the State’s athletic genuflection before the golden calf of ‘market-discipline’ is asinine, because closer inspection reveals that it is forced to build into its new funding system checks and safeguards to prevent student choice from perverting the supply of labour-commodities to employers.

In short, quoth the enlightened professors, human calculators like Lord Browne were welcome to perform their tricks in the private sector kennel assigned to them – and the Orphic journalists of the Financial Times were welcome to sing their praiseful rhapsodies – but the wholesale supervention of market logic on the sweet cloisters of English Higher Education was a gross imposition not to be tolerated. There are, the professors argued, values which cannot ‘flourish’ in the sprit vacuum of a market, and whether those markets are ‘natural’ or ‘artificial’, these high values must be preserved against the ‘consumer relativism’ to which idiotic political beefcakes like David ‘two brains’ Willetts, Minister for Universities and Science, are likely to defer, as surely as Pavlov’s dog to its bell. Some of these complaints were borne out by later developments (to be discussed below); but in any case these were popular arguments, aired in well circulated journals and often dressed up with close textual reference to the relevant state policy documents. The documents were routinely sneered at for their febrile adherence to basic standards in business speak, ripped off from superannuated management textbooks now patiently gathering dust in the Sale sections of university bookshops.

The cool and careful periods of State paternalists of the distant past – i.e., of the mid-1960s, from an era before Thatcherism, the destruction of the coal mining industry and the wholesale degeneration of the educated English of the enlightened bourgeoisie – were reconstructed and elegised. Nevertheless the arguments suffer from an obvious explanatory deficit. Accounting for the changes in Higher Education, Stefan Collini writes that British society has been subject to a deliberate campaign, initiated in free-market think tanks in the 1960s and 1970s and pushed strongly by business leaders and right-wing commentators ever since, to elevate the status of business and commerce and to make ‘contributing to economic growth’ the overriding goal of a whole swathe of social, cultural and intellectual activities which had previously been understood and valued in other terms. Such a campaign would not have been successful, of course, had it not been working with the grain of other changes in British society and the wider world. Very broadly speaking, the extension of democratic and egalitarian social attitudes has been accompanied by the growth of a kind of consumerist relativism. 4 It is surely necessary to resist this account.

On its terms, a business ideology, supported by a heterodox or confused alliance of free market think tanks and ‘democratic and egalitarian social attitudes’, has marched its rag-tag banner into the heart of the British State. The enemy and victim of this alliance is the University, which relies on a strict hierarchy of values and on the ‘educational judgment’ which (it is implied) is exclusively competent to arbitrate between them. It is the characteristic feature of this kind of argument that it demands the restitution of a paternalist social democratic system whose internal decline was what accelerated the ‘privatisation’ of formerly public institutions in the first place: the argument takes a prurient interest in the inability of markets to assure their own self-reproduction not, as it might at first appear, in order to demonstrate the deep relationship between UK Higher Education and the full market system in its crisis, but in order to convince markets that its contradictions are amenable to resolution if only academic counsel is heeded. The real relationship of English Higher Education to the wider British ‘business climate’ – in whose toxic environs new graduates are currently expected to suffocate – and the relationship of the wider British business climate to the total global capital – is therefore perfectly obfuscated.

This is not surprising, since academics have not until now been the principal victims of large scale economic crisis. Student Struggle: November 2010 – March 2011 The 2010-2011 cycle of UK student protest began with the smashed windows of the Conservative Party HQ in Millbank; accelerated into a long sequence of occupations alternately (and often simultaneously) serious and farcical; dwindled into the introspective political manoeuvrings of an activist core during the long sequence of marches and demonstrations which culminated in late February; and, at last, sublated itself in the black bloc which formed at the Trades Union Congress demonstration on 26 March. 5 During that time its composition underwent a sharp expansion and contraction, as its initial – pre-eminently white and middle class – formation expanded to incorporate black and Asian inner and outer city youths, only then to dwindle again, to the agonised puzzlement of the students who were therefore denuded of their ‘movement’. For those whose last recollection of a domestic popular protest was the anti-war march in 2003, the spontaneous redesign of conservative party HQ was, if nothing else, refreshing.

All those chairs forever doomed to be used as seating, how tedious – why not hurl them through this window. The riot also put a swift end to the ideological hegemony of the National Union of Students – which, stocked as it was (and is and will forever be) with vapid centre-left aspirants with designs on a parliamentary career – proved unwilling to endorse any campaign demand which might get up the noses of the politicians whose endorsement could aid their prospects at future party political meet and greets. At the beginning of the academic year in October 2010 the NUS was conducting a gloriously lacklustre campaign to ‘freeze’ the fees, i.e., to maintain 2010 fee levels for all future students, beating its chest and demanding a reversion to Labour Party endorsed social misery. This was a compromise oddly inconsonant with the destruction of the Tory Party headquarters.

The NUS’s (then) president Aaron Porter, who, whatever his failings, was just about cunning enough to know when he might be stepping on the toes of his future benefactors, instantly squirmed into the arms of the national media to denounce the actions of the 2000-4000 participants in the ‘splinter demo’ at Millbank. The splinter demo, Porter declared, was ‘despicable’. The NUS was committed to peaceful protest and orderliness and the rapid introduction into students of diversified repertoires of soft skills; interested viewers could read its policy documents online. All this had occurred by 12 or 13 November. The ideology of what might distastefully be called the organising core of the student movement was not as visibly reactionary as the NUS’s, though, as the above ought to suggest, it would be hard to be more prodigiously reactionary than Aaron Porter. The germane features of that ideology (and allowing of course for significant individual departures from it) can be worked out of a narrative of events running from the aftermath of the Millbank demonstration until the protest planned for the day of the Commons vote on 9 December.

The standard metaphorical vocabulary for the emerging student movement is now as fixed as the new fee regime: during the weeks of November, a ‘wave’ of university occupations ‘spread’ or ‘swept’ across the country. The spirit of ‘68 was reborn, before being farmed out for a photo shoot in Vogue and used to sell some T-shirts. Already this phraseology is very disgusting and boring. The occupations were of course in fact waves, big and small, long and short, depending to a large extent on the class profile and region of the institution in which an occupation took place; its physical infrastructure; and the (shall we say) quasi-autonomous ideological commitments of the most active participants. There were long occupations at UCL, Cambridge, SOAS, Bradford and the Slade, a short, strategic occupation at London Met, abortive occupations in Camberwell and Birmingham, a Deleuzian occupation at Edinburgh. 6 The list could continue. There were, nonetheless, enough marked continuities in the statements issued by occupying students to attempt a brief sketch. First, University occupations tended to demand that their managements resist cuts to state provision for British Higher Education.

7 The argument was often framed in terms of imprescriptible rights, in this respect pace the endless avowals to the contrary in the commemorative headstones quickly erected by radical publishers – less 1968 than 1789. 8 As one of the more imperiously insipid student slogans ran, Education is a right, is a right, is a right, education is a right, not a privilege. Most students in the English university system have of course always had most of the things which they have a right to (which isn’t to say that life is sweet) – but it is this which above all and unstoppably invests the word ‘rights’ with its magic aura.

In their ‘Education is a Duty’ – which includes in its footnotes its own representative smattering of quotation from student occupation communiqués – The Wine and Cheese Society of Greater London suggested that the materialism of the student movement was ‘a strangely mediated and submissive materialism’, which is to say that it tended to accept that the principal function of ‘UK HE’ is to generate economic growth; and also to agree that finding yourself stuck between the contracting mandibles of the ‘labour market’ after the ‘free’ champagne at the graduation party has run dry was not, after all, so bad. 9 In the months following the occupations, large numbers of student ‘activists’ generated whole data nests of thrilling online gossip about the availability of new ‘horizontal’ organisational media, at last superseding such inherently totalitarian technologies as the telephone and the human mouth.

This particular circle of indulgent introspection was squared by enthusiastic nothings about ‘generational’ divides, including especially polemics against the elder ‘generations’, living it up with their totalitarian landlines and cars and their plunging private sector pensions, in a position invidiously contrasted to the impecunious underfunded British student of 2011, whose part time call centre job and 1/267 prospects of graduate employment were the result of insufficient abstemiousness by ‘baby boomers’ in – one assumes; the argument was always vague – the 1980s. Like most transiently appealing forms of social analysis, this one was obviously generalised from the social circumstances of whichever student chose to voice it. Few students with access to column inches – and this itself is often if not always a function of social privilege – said much about the closure of elderly people’s day centres and other state resourced institutions then being retrenched from under the feet of the proleterian retiree, but then the users of elderly people’s days centres cannot often be fruitfully accused of implicit totalitarianism (nor, for that matter, do they often appear to boom).

10 All this first person plural posturing about ‘networked resistance’ would have been more laughable had it not had a social guarantor. This is to say that, unlike the liberal ‘anti-market’ professors, the students did pay attention to some basic facts of social exclusion. At about the same time as the Browne Report was thumping onto the desk of every education journalist in the country, the Schools Minister Michael Gove announced that the State would be cutting the so-called ‘Education Maintenance Allowance’. This was a derisory grant paid out to students over the age of sixteen conditional on attendance. The grant was means tested and set to between £10–30 per week. (A note: since the maximum pay out was set around £20 per week below the monies paid out to British unemployed benefits claimants of comparable age, EMA would be better known as Education Below Subsistence Allowance, but we’ll stick with the recognised designation in what follows.) Student activists regarded the cuts to EMA as a means of forging cross class solidarity with expropriated college students. In this respect they were not exactly incorrect.

If you type ‘We’re From The Slums Of London’ into the search bar on YouTube you can watch a video from 9 December. It’s very short. In it an Asian teenager, hat on and masked up, makes his case: ‘We’re from the slums of London, yeah? How do they expect us to pay £9,000 for uni fees? And EMA, the only thing that’s keeping us in college – what’s stopping us from doing drug deals on the street anymore? Nothing.’ He doesn’t look like one of the ‘youths’ that left parties like to use as props to invest their campaigns with some local colour. Nor does the transcription do justice to the statement, which is not muttered from a crib sheet but spat out in hot disgust. This might in part be because the speaker is addressing a camera held by a white bourgeois journalist. The footage is not untypical. When I arrived late for a demonstration at Westminster Bridge at the end of November, a kettle had been put in place. Those who had travelled South from the University of London Union building in Bloomsbury were safely ‘contained’.

As I walked down the street the first group of people whom I noticed on my side of the police lines were a dozen black and Asian teenagers, male and female, all in school uniform. One of the kids, standing about five yards from the police line, leaned down to pick up a discarded Socialist Workers Party placard. The police watched him as he placed the sign under his foot and, nonchalantly enough, snapped off the stick. This was not the way that most students used placards. At the demonstration on 9 December this kind of low level readiness for confrontation determined a much wider arc of collective action. Fighting between ‘protestors’ and police was ferocious: temporary fencing was ripped up and used as barricades or as shields as appropriate; groups of teenagers masked and hooded then used the bent and torn remnants of this fencing to smash out the windows of the Treasury; and in the square where the main kettle had been fixed in place, police lines were broken repeatedly. A friend providing legal observer functions in the kettle in Parliament Square spoke to a kid who had somehow acquired one of the larger police issue riot shields. He advised the kid that if he was going to carry the shield then he should for fuck’s sake cover his face.

The kid replied that he’d rather go to prison than spend £9,000 a year going to uni. This sort of anecdotalism is obviously pressingly limited as social analysis, but without the self-willed and emphatic arrival of working class teenagers in ‘the movement’, the student discourse would have degenerated into polite badinage about the emancipatory potential of open source and web 2.0, i.e., it would have become nothing more than the public witterings of the self-anointed representatives of moderately disgruntled middle class 20-somethings who, if anything, were likely to benefit from the new fee regime, since one of its effects would likely be a long-term reduction in the uptake of Higher Education degree-commodities and, therefore, a (statistical if not perceptible) easing of competitive pressures in the graduate labour market. Because working class teenagers did, fleetingly, ‘enter the movement’, i.e., burst out into the streets, the demonstrations from late November onwards were more defiantly and generally disruptive than the demonstration in early November, despite Millbank and despite much more enthusiastic brutality on the part of the Metropolitan police and its specialist public order units.

11 Wanton press releases from the Met confirmed this fact, as the authoritarian PR service pumped out anxious declarations about how ‘extremely disappointed’ the service was ‘with the actions of many protestors’, who were evidently becoming more confrontational, quicker and more spirited, more prepared to abandon routes and disregard ‘advice’ issued by frantic ‘organisers’ wherever the balance of forced on the ground demanded it. Rapid diversification in class composition also meant (for a moment at least) an expansion in the geography of confrontation. Out in the provinces, college students began to mobilise, and their actions were often taut with energy, in some respects more akin to the Bristol riots which flared up in April than the banner waving exercises which NUS Executive Officers like to fantasise as they vegetate with their desk toys. A report from the Brighton demonstration gives a good feel for the pulse of a mob intelligence acting without any prompt from a Guattari-citing Masters student: 2000 people, 90 percent school and college students, marched: they ignored the designated end point for the demo and set off on a volatile and cheerful meander, with periodical attempts to block roads.

When the police attempted a kettle it was broken: of those who broke the kettle and didn’t disperse, 200 went to take refuge in the new occupation at the other, less ‘political’ university [Brighton], where they were refused entry – then went into the bobo shopping streets and got kettled. 400 (school and college kids mainly, with a few, cheerful homeless guys) went off mob form to attack Vodafone, then looted Poundland (’I got three Toblerone’), before arriving cheerfully at the other, kettled group. The police crumpled under the strategic pressure – they were outnumbered and uncertain – and released the group they were holding. The 400 then set off expressly to block roads and cause maximum disruption, launching an attempted attack on the police station before heading to the roundabout at the pier to block it. There, the momentum failed and the police successfully kettled 100 of the slowest.

Students who urged ‘EMA kids’ to join their demonstrations and whose political organisations printed placards that said ‘defend EMA’ did understand that it was working class teenagers who would suffer in truth from the imposition of fees, much like the youngest of them would suffer in truth from the retraction of exiguous below subsistence bursaries for impoverished college students. But what the students in their descants on cross class solidarity didn’t much mention was that it was working class kids who were likely to suffer in truth from the whole exercise in the conversion of ‘stagnant’ state welfare into ‘dynamic’ private sector policing; and from the imperious drudgery of wage labour which it is no longer accurate to say is ‘on offer’, when increasingly it is compelled on threat of starvation; and from the long convulsive contraction of British capitalism in general. Drifting right through the discourse on ‘building the movement’ was the stench of class contempt. Its principal form was the assumption that ‘deprived’ working class College students wanted nothing more than to be like ‘us’. It assumed that they wanted to be like us in a particular sense.

Working class students might be strung up on a different (lower) rung of the labour market, but we would delegate to them our own snuff of social aspiration. Did we not have a universal right to it? Such a view of social aspiration is inherently appealing to bourgeois students, because the contradiction in its ideal of universal bourgeoisification is always resolved in their favour. The formal right of access to degrees – in this respect like the formal right of access to citizenship or to legal representation – makes no specification of what the content of a degree is or ought to be: but training can be dire and suffocating whether it goes on in a call centre or the University of Sussex or an asylum. And yet the bourgeois conception of educational justice is not only ineffectual in resolving the contradictions of class, soothingly renamed ‘relations of exclusion’ as per the official lexicon of top down social management. The conception generates another limitation.

By imputing to working class teenagers the desire to ‘protest’ up to the point where they resemble us in the cracked mirror of our own (bourgeois) sociological concepts (i.e., up to the point when they possess the minimal resources required to compete with us – at a safe disadvantage – in education and labour markets), the conception tells us nothing about the real complexity of class based impulses or aversions or about how they might be put to work ‘on the ground’ in the production of a real movement against capital and its servant institutions. I’ll come back to this point, as they say, in conclusion. Decomposing Higher Education: Stage Two While the student movement stumbled into exam season and expired, the State attempted to problem shoot its malfunctioning reforms. Its first error was almost amusing. The Browne report had assumed that, once ‘freed’ to set their own fee level, smaller and less prestigious institutions would scale down their prices in order to remain competitive. Instead, desperate not to besmirch or otherwise tar their pristine brand equity, almost all of the universities set their fees at near to the £9,000 p/a maximum.

This act of herd insubordination compelled the State to revise its forecasts for the cost of loan provision, with the result that it could no longer afford to remove the ‘supply side’ recruitment caps whose removal had been one of the principal justifications for fee ‘flexibility’ in the first place. If this doesn’t get you going, just imagine David Willets falling over a banana skin. As the academic year drew to a close, the government published its White Paper on Higher Education, which, among other exercises in sidetracking and obfuscation, proposed a convoluted quick fix to the above ‘supply side’ problem. The quick fix operates a ‘core/margin’ model which ‘allows’ (translated out of bureaucratese and into English, this means 'forces') universities to compete for students above the State imposed quota. These are drawn from ‘pools’ of students of a certain type – for example, high ranking school leavers. Evidently this model has little to do with the creation of a free market without supply side restrictions and much to do with stuffing yet more competitive pressure into the Higher Education turkey. But the most important role of the White Paper was to open the UK HE field to ‘new providers’.

Describing this process in detail would be exhausting, so the following will offer a stylised sketch. The State proposes to withdraw from the sullen and corporate universities their monopoly on degree issuing powers, distributing this faculty to dynamic, thrusting ‘independent’ institutions promising step changes in efficiency on the intensification/pile-em-high model. These changes in tandem with a steady decline in the resourcing of now existing institutions are likely to lead to the collapse of at least some traditional universities who, once stranded in administration, can be swept up into the steroidal bosom of private providers like the US Apollo Group, whose market leadership in IT solutions allows them to drive down costs by dispensing with previously ‘sticky’ overheads like (e.g.) wages for lecturers. As the CEOs mount their white horses and descend from the sky to bestow the blessings of market efficiency on ‘under performing’ working class institutions like London Metropolitan and Liverpool John Moores, research in the humanities will be increasingly concentrated in a handful of elite institutions, each with a handful of ‘elite’ (translated out of bureaucratese and into English, this means bourgeois) students.

The ‘practical’ vocationalisation of all other institutions will work itself out on a model similar to the one currently ‘operating’ (i.e., churning profit) in the US, where capital intensive advertising campaigns lure working class students into programmes of study which issue in devalued degrees, sub-zero job prospects and an insupportable debt burden which bulges further with each passing year until, like a monstrous paunch, it fills the whole horizon. It is a fact well enough known that almost half of ‘propriety’ students at Apollo Group institutions ultimately default. But these are not new processes. What Andrew McGettigan calls the ‘deliberate under-resourcing’ of UK University’s began perhaps as early as the late 1970s and has accelerated up until now. By a war of attrition, the senior managers of English Higher Education institutions have been reduced to pathological (if fabulously well remunerated) brand custodians, dreaming of founding new campuses in the growth sectors of the Middle East which, until now, have provided Britain with oil commodities and which today, in consequence of that export industry, offer up a new resource, i.e., untapped fields of under-educated bourgeois teenagers, ripe for harvesting.

This global context is significant. The decline in per capita funding for English university students might be lamentable, and it might even be ideological in the contemporary sense of that word, i.e., voluntary and not fiscally exigent; but it isn’t clear that maintaining levels of student funding would mean better lives for students. As British capital has ferociously restructured itself there has been a precipitous decline in the number of ‘good’ jobs for which qualified students might apply. This may, in part, be due to ‘the destruction of manufacturing’ (and most readers will know intimately this caricature of the rise of ‘neoliberalism’), but it is also attributable to the increase in global competition in the upper echelons of the value chain, in the misty realms where university graduates with bulky flexible skill sets are expected to thrive most emphatically. This is to say that it isn’t clear that the production of ‘more skills’ by the maintenance of high levels of university resourcing is at all likely to lead to more or better jobs. Between 1995 and 2003 the global supply of university enrolments doubled to 63 million.

As a report by the State financed Economic and Social Research Council put it in 2007 – note: in 2007, i.e., before the crisis had caused investors to become doubtful of their own omnipotence – ‘Many [...] companies were increasing the proportion of university graduates within the workforce. But it was difficult to assess whether this reflected an increase in the proportion of jobs involving technically difficult roles or "over-qualification" [...] because "anyone half decent has now got a degree".’ Though employers continue to yammer about a ‘skills gap’, the skills which are referred to are not ‘hard’ (i.e., technical) skills but ‘soft’ skills, which include competencies which could well be programmed into students at secondary school level – IT skills is the primary example – but which are defined above all by repressive pseudo-categories like ‘self-management’, ‘customer-facing skills’ and (best of all) ‘high-end empathy’. In other words, what British capitalism lacks is not educated students but obeisant employees.

The employer’s tribal dance to the gods of skill acquisition is nothing more than a prayer that their human resources will acquiesce voluntarily to intensified degradation and, what is more offensive, recognise in that degradation the continued acquisition of ‘skills’. Skill acquisition along these lines is just virtualised accumulation for the exploited. In 2008, the then Prime Minister Gordon Brown gave a speech on the skills race. Jetting as he then was around the globe to ‘co-ordinate’ and ‘problem solve’ the global credit crisis, it is perhaps unsurprising that Brown was nurturing some high fantasies. ‘A generation ago,’ Brown rambled, ‘a British prime minister had to worry about the global arms race.’ But no longer, because today, instead, ‘a British prime minister has to worry about the global skills race’. Brown’s comparison was both accurate and inaccurate.

It was accurate because, like commodities produced during the arms race, the commodities which a British skills race is likely to produce are non-productive, by which I mean in economic terms a waste; but the comparison was inaccurate also, because unlike (say) the commodity called a Thales lightweight multirole missile, a highly skilled student is likely to become infuriated if he or she isn’t ‘used’. ‘Used’ in this instance of course means ‘paid’. This was not, perhaps, Gordon Brown’s point, as anyone attending one of his after dinner speeches is of course welcome to ask him. The Future: What Not to Do and How Not to Not Do It The point of this sketch is to carry us back to what I called above the liberal ‘anti-market’ ideology. I have argued that that ideology appears by virtue of its enlightened sneering to oppose ‘markets’ and to resist their undesirable ‘social outcomes’; but that in fact the ideology does not oppose markets but instead contents itself with a polite request that the university be cordoned off from their operations. This doesn’t work. The ideology does not deserve to be repudiated because it is ‘reformist’ but because it has a class basis.

That is to say, it assumes that the ‘values’ which it wishes to protect ought to be protected only within the university and therefore (if implicitly) only on behalf of those who have access to it. And there is a second problem. Conducting a reified tirade against the stupefactions of interested exchange and the idiot grunting of its public policy slaves is surely all well and good, and it might well be a noble thing to prevent the market from encroaching too far into Higher Education, where, who knows, it might wreak all sorts of havoc on the life of the mind. But the limitation of this safeguard is that however much money might in principle be canalised into the swag bags and current account of the UK University Research Councils – students will continue to graduate. (Professors, of course, do not.) And while it might seem somewhat impertinent to conclude an analysis of UK student struggle in 2010-11 with a discussion of life outside of the university, or to slough off to the footnotes and margins all discussion of the good things that do go on in UK Higher Education institutions, the exercise of analytic tact is misguided.

The market decrees that students will be thrown out of the university (with or without their certification) even if ‘analysis’ of student struggle remains fixed there, in ascetic restraint, paring its fingernails and hoping vainly for a research grant. What is the future of Humanities Education in the UK? There isn’t any point in asking this question in this forum: if humanities education is worth anything then it will not die after ‘students’ and other members of the proletariat new and old fight for the life resources which provide the precondition for that education. And yet the riposte swells up: doesn’t ‘higher’ education (as in education finer and more spiritual) require independence from the ‘social’? Doesn’t it require autonomy? But this doesn’t mean very much. There must be better forms of autonomy than the type required for the production of ‘basic’ research which – we learn from a University lobby group – contributes vastly more to the haemorrhaging value of HE licensing and spin-outs (the sector specific jargon for commercial enterprise) than so-called ‘applied’ research. These forms would be better worked out spontaneously in the process of collective action than ‘in principle’ at the end of an article.

While it might be true that contemplative reflection can in certain respects contribute to the cultivation of social antagonisms, the moment that the struggle for ‘autonomy’ lapses into demands for ‘blue sky thinking’ it becomes the inalienable possession of the official management theory which invented that category and which is stabilised by its propagation. It is now 31 August. Two or three minutes ago I received an email which states that 87 departments in Greek universities are now under occupation. The Greek students are acting in protest against a recent education bill, part of the imposing edifice of ‘austerity’ (the word is in this case infinitely euphemistic) now being hammered through the country’s fine and democratic parliament. In the last week, two Chilean students have been murdered by state police; both were participants in a much older and more mature student struggle than the one currently in remission in the UK. In other words, the UK student struggle from 2010-2011, with all of its smashed glass and all of its waves and networks, is already very much old news, as indeed are all of the associated acronyms – NCAFC, NUS, EMA, EAN.

Even in the national context the domestic spokespersons of capital are much more hotly concerned with the riots which took place between 6 and 10 August. On the ‘left’ those riots are still treated with a stunned confusion: who among the hordes of those who looted during those five days can be selected as a spokesperson? And how can we communicate our ideas to a political subject who has about as much interest in being the ‘new’ 1968 as Guy Debord had in being the new Burger King? In response to this quandary, and in conclusion, one lesson of late 2010 stands out. As was argued above, students repudiated the suggestion that their ‘rebellion’ was no more than a paroxysm of middle class discontent by pointing to the working class teenagers who attended the street demonstrations which they organised. These teenagers were the ‘EMA kids’. The label did more than stick: it implied an analysis. The analysis in turn implied that what the ‘kids’ had to protest against was the withdrawal of their below-subsistence grant. This was of course in part a claim of convenience, necessary for a practical politics structured around ‘inclusive’ demands.

It was, in other words, the sort of thing that could be crammed into a press release and floated out into the media ether to fuel the enmity of proto-fascist newspaper columnists. But it was also an honest assumption. What the ‘middle class’ students had to offer the ‘working class’ college kids was an organisational framework in which those college kids could protest against a particular act of state-led resource withdrawal. And in fact when the college kids acted ‘disruptively’ or violently the middle class students often became perturbed and spoke in wounded tones of their beautiful pacifism and their high ideals, and tugged dolorously at their keffiyehs. That the EMA scheme was a pathetic crust tossed by the State to ‘lower income’ teenagers in compensation for a lifetime spent being churned through an under-resourced and overcrowded state education sector (and for a thousand other iniquities better known to EMA recipients than to their bourgeois comrades) was not on the collective bargaining cards. But what student demonstrations offered to the working class teenagers in fact was not an ‘organisational framework’.

What the demonstrations offered was a material setting in which working class students could partake in aggressive and confrontational collective action in conditions of relative security. It is difficult to make this point without sounding as if one is speaking through a mouthful of Habermasian ideal speech situation. The students did not offer to the working class college kids an ideal speech situation (more than this: all the execrable sign waving and sloganeering at the demos ensured that the students didn’t offer even a passable one): but in spite of the assumption that working class kids just wanted to keep their EMA, it is nevertheless true that the student demonstrations and the middle class demonstrators did offer to working class college kids something for which they had a use.

This was not the rhetorical straitjacket of a sensible demand politics, and nor was it 30 quid a week and the promise, sometimes in the future, of a certificate qualifying you to trim the ornamental hedges in the gardens of some of the idealist students you went on the march with, or in any case it was not just these, because the ‘student’ demonstrations also offered to the college protestors the material suspension of the balance of forces whose permanent imparity is active in determining the results of working class struggle. What that material suspension provided for a lot of ‘kids’, in other words, was the opportunity for an intense collective expression of social agency whose object was not peremptorily confined to an inadequate programme of state provision but which could outstrip the limits defined by everyday (isolated) struggle against repressive authority, and which moreover could know each time that it clattered against a riot shield exactly who was on its side.

And as the left toils to imagine what ideas it could ‘offer’ to the inscrutable young men and women who went rioting in early August, and as the job market continues to stagnate, and the profits of McDonalds and Tesco to rise, and as the academics continue to bid for a role on the market steering committee and to dream, not of 1968, but of 1965, and as the EMA scheme ends and the housing benefits plunge, and as new students begin to arrive on bright Autumn mornings at the campuses of their chosen training camps – this is something which might yet be worth learning. For so long as the material conditions in the universities have not been equalised, ‘access’ to university, whether or not it is universal, and whether it costs £9,000 per year or nothing, will continue to mean access to educational commodities of wildly discrepant value, distributed across institutions whose ‘diversity of missions’ at last promotes nothing besides a diversity of class positions. Shall we ask then, access to what? And access to what with what exit onto what?

These are questions, in good Beckettian prosody, which will have to be asked in Beckettian fashion, which is to say, again and again. Middle class students might piously hope that working class teenagers will be allowed to ‘access’ universities and become more like them; but in fact the similarity is more likely to become visible not at the ‘point of access’ to universities but, instead, at their exits. And it’s the view from the exit, from which can be seen the greatest expanse of nothing at all, which will perhaps give the clearest indication of how UK education struggle ought to proceed. Danny Hayward <dannyjhayward AT yahoo.co.uk> lives and writes in London Footnotes 1 Thanks are owed to JBR for György Kurtág and other critical inputs. 2 It’s important to note that the reforms did not apply to Scottish students, where Higher Education continues to be ‘free’ in the limited sense that the State covers student fees.

Question: The UK Conservative Party HQ in London, trashed during student protests in November 2010, is known by its address of 30 'what' ?
Answer: Millbank