Patrick Kingsley
Longhaired and big-booted, revolutionary socialist Luke stands up in front of a meeting at the Leeds university occupation, and prepares to speak.
"Comrades . . ." Luke begins – and, from the back of this lecture theatre filled with 200 undergraduates, school students, trade unionists and parents, comes an instant, shouted response.
"DON'T CALL ME COMRADE."
It's a familiar exchange. All afternoon at this meeting of the Leeds general assembly against education cuts, activists of all ages, backgrounds and political stripes have been needling each other. They've gathered here with one goal – to decide how they will escalate their protest against the rise in tuition fees and the scrapping of the Education Maintenance Allowance (a campaign that continues with tomorrow's national day of action) – but sometimes they're sidetracked by ideological difference.
"We can't afford to alienate people with different theoretical backgrounds," says one speaker. "We can run this country by ourselves – we don't need capitalism to do it for us," says the next. The trade union movement stands shoulder to shoulder with the students, argues a local unionist. The trade unions are a spent force, counters a member of Socialist Equality. And while the Greek who opens with "Hello everybody, I'm from Greece" gets a cheer from a doctrinaire section of the crowd, the postgraduate who responds with "I don't have a political allegiance" wins applause from another.
It would be easy to view this bickering as disheartening. But what I think I'm witnessing at Leeds – one of three occupations I visited last week – is not a fragmentation, but an embryonic coagulation of disparate groups, in a grassroots social movement the breadth of which some feel we have not seen since the late 1960s. Leeds is but one of 34 universities and colleges which over the past seven days have been occupied by students, schoolchildren, lecturers and union members in protest at the rise in tuition fees and scrapping of EMA. Some occupations have since ended – Oxford's takeover of the Bodleian library was curtailed when police used a battering ram to smash an inner wall of the building – but 15 continued yesterday.
Two years ago, there were comparable sit-ins at several universities – in protest at the Israeli bombing of Gaza. But these were smaller affairs, carried out almost exclusively by university students from the organised left. By contrast, today's incarnations constitute a rallying point for a raw, emergent movement of school and sixth-form students directly concerned about two key issues – EMA and tuition fee hikes; an established left movement of university students and union organisers, who view these cuts as part of a tapestry of wider political concerns; and a growing band of previously disengaged university students who perhaps lack the urgency of the former and the perspective of the latter groups, but who nevertheless find themselves in growing solidarity with those teenagers of Britain who will be most affected. As a result, today's university occupations have morphed from being islands of isolated protest to focal areas of community activism.
What I find most inspiring is the involvement of school and college students. Before I set out, I half-expected them to defer to the leadership of their elders at the university – but, if anything, the opposite holds true.
Cambridge is one such example. "These sixth-form students are impressing me because they're incredibly independent and self-organised and they call their own days of action," postgraduate Jessica tells me as we sit in a swirl of snow outside the occupied Senate House. She continues: "We're almost taking the lead from them sometimes. It's amazing, we had 11-year-olds who walked out of Parkside School [last Wednesday]. A hundred of them came running down the street, really angry. They can't vote, and they don't have political channels. We talk about university students in occupations not using the right channels to protest – but these guys don't even have any channels."
In Newcastle, university students spent the weekend chairing meetings of pupils from nine local schools. "It was the young people who decided what action to take," says Saskia Neivig, 16, who studies at Heaton Manor school by day and sleeps at the occupation by night, and who spoke to me by phone. "The students said: 'The second day of action is for young people to decide what to do. We'll help you out in whatever way, but the schoolchildren – it's their generation that'll be affected.'"
However, relations between Leeds university students and local teenagers seem more complex. Teenagers from four schools attend planning meetings organised by the occupation, and the one I'm at runs smoothly. I meet Alex Claxton-Mayer, Liam Murphy and Seyamak Shaghouei, three year 11 pupils from Allerton Grange school. They're only 16, or thereabouts, but they are some of the most eloquent speakers at the occupation – and last Wednesday, they encouraged 800 of their schoolmates to walk out of school in protest at the cuts. They laugh at the idea that they might be doing this to get a day off school. "I think just by being here at five o'clock on a Saturday afternoon shows how committed we are," says Shaghouei.
However, it's clear that a separate meeting for college students has ended rancorously. Three students from Notre Dame sixth form are fed up with attempts by the more leftwing members of the group to locate the campaign within a socialist framework. "Stop talking about overthrowing the government – what's that going to achieve? This is about what we're going to do on Tuesday," says one.
But in other occupations the lack of defined leadership is a strength. When I arrive at the University College London (UCL) occupation on Sunday morning, one of the first people I see is Aaron Porter, president of the National Union of Students. Porter, however, has not been leading the sit-in – he has only just arrived, and he's sitting sheepishly among a crowd of occupiers.
In fact, Porter is about to apologise for his lack of support for the UCL occupation – indeed for student occupations in general. Porter had been criticised for not attending the national day of action last Wednesday, where school and university students were "kettled" in Whitehall for several hours by police, and for taking several days to issue public support for university occupations. He's only here because UCL's twitter guru, Jess Riches, called for a vote of no confidence in his presidency.
"For too long," he says to the assembled group, "the NUS has perhaps been too cautious and too spineless about being committed to supporting student protest. Perhaps I spent too long over the last few days doing the same." He adds: "I just want to apologise for my dithering in the last few days."
It's a staggering U-turn, and one that occupiers feel demonstrates the power of the protest. "Rather than Aaron Porter waking up with a change of heart," says Sofie Buckland, 24, one of UCL's media team, "this is a direct result of the pressure we put on him as a grassroots movement. If we're in a position where groups of ordinary students are occupying universities and becoming so popular and attracting so much coverage that NUS has to swing round behind them – then it's clearly the students who are directing NUS, and not the other way around."
During my visit, singer-songwriter Emmy the Great turns up with a guitar and plays a 45-minute set. Appropriately for this leaderless room, Emmy rejects my suggestion that she is some sort of Bob Dylan or Joan Baez figure – "their songs were political, mine aren't . . . I'm just here to entertain". But Emmy does play a cover of Cheryl Cole's Fight For This Love – adapting the lyrics to: "We gotta fight, fight, fight, fight, fight . . . these cuts" – and she later suggests the occupiers coin the term "Clegging out", which, she says, means to renege on all your principles.
A striking aspect of the UCL occupation is how newly politicised many of the occupiers seem. Alessandro Furlotti, 19, says he's actually a member of the Conservative party. "I'm not leftwing but I firmly believe these cuts on education are unjust," he says.
Two years ago, Hugo Rifkind in the Times wrote about the precursor to these occupations – the Gaza protests – and concluded that there was "something out there on our campuses, brooding, and it's spoiling for a fight." It's still not clear what that something is, or what it will become. But it's stopped brooding now, and it's no longer just spoiling for a fight. It's right in the middle of the melee.
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