One Year On: Students March Again

From occupation to an army on the march — Occupy London’s student activists are to take to the streets again today over the Con-Dems’ education cuts.

Up to 15,000 students, schoolchildren, parents and educators are expected to storm the Square Mile today, rallying outside the University of London in Malet St before marching through Trafalgar Square and up the Strand to Occupy London Stock Exchange in St Paul’s Square -eventually arriving at London Metropolitan University in Moorgate Junction — the heart of London’s financial district.

Organisers National Campaign Against Fees and Cuts said in a statement the march was an attempt to “derail” the government’s higher education agenda — “a chaotic and regressive attempt to introduce markets and private providers into education, effectively ending it as a public service.”

The controversial policy includes plugging private universities, scrapping the education maintenance allowance for would-be school leavers and plans to cut university teaching budgets by a staggering 80 percent over the next three years — pushing administrators to drive up tuition fees and eke out new sources of revenue.

Today’s march comes as the occupation movement appears to have returned to Britain’s universities, with students at Birmingham University bedding down in its campus conference centre last week to protest staff cuts, increased fees and course closures.

Meanwhile students at St Andrew’s in Scotland seized the university quadrangle to highlight its new £9000 fees and living costs, making it the most expensive place to study in all of Europe.

Camp residents told The Occupied Times last Saturday they hoped to see a turnout as big as last year’s march on Tory headquarters in Millbank over the tripling of tuition fees.

Goldsmiths University student Ren told the Times she was still worried about how her younger sister would cope with fewer options and rising graduate debt.

But the second-year finance student said she also feared the changes would create a “two-tier system” of education, with working-class families and ethnic minorities missing out.

London Met would be one of the worst affected, she said: the university had the highest percentage of working-class students in the country and more black and minority ethnic students than Britain’s elite 20 ‘Russell Group’ universities combined.

But the university last year dropped around 70% of its undergraduate courses in the wake of government funding cuts, with further cuts predicted over the next year.

“They’re losing the only place in the country that does Afro-Caribbean Studies — you can see how it impacts minority groups,” she said.

So would Wednesday’s march be a replay of Millbank?

“I hope so; I think that Millbank really kick-started the movement.

Millbank had changed the media’s perception of students as apathetic, she said — but nor were they violent either.

“Smashing windows isn’t violent — it’s civil disobedience.

“Violence is destroying people’s futures; it’s forcing people to choose between food and heating,” she said.

Meanwhile union reps on last Saturday’s Occupy march told the Times the students had teachers’ support — even if they had to be back in the classroom.

The National Union of Teachers’ Lambeth branch secretary Sara Tomlinson said she believed the issues of rising fees, funding cuts and struggling family finances were “all tied together.”

Students who could not afford to pay their bills while studying usually turned to parents for help, she said: “It’s a pay cut for parents.”

Assistant secretary Jess Edwards agreed: students were channelling the fears of the entire education sector, she said, just as public sector strikes planned for later this month would channel anger over cuts to social spending.

The anti-austerity message was holistic, she said.

By Rory MacKinnon