Keir Starmer’s New Labour government has announced its plans to raise tuition fees for the first time in nearly ten years. And such is the depth of crisis in university finances, this will not be enough to solve the funding crisis in higher education. Uni bosses will still go ahead and attempt to make cuts and redundancies, and the government has plans for widescale uni funding reform.
Socialist Students has initiated the Funding not Fees campaign, opposing the fees rise and demanding free, fully funded education. Joe Fathallah, Cardiff West Socialist Party, looks back at the 2010 student movement and its lessons for today.
The latter part of the year 2010 saw a mass uprising sweep across university and college campuses in Britain, in response to David Cameron’s Tory-led coalition government increasing the cap on tuition fees from £3,290 to £9,000 per year. The movement is rich in lessons for upcoming struggles over the future of higher education.
The 2010 general election took place in May, against the backdrop of the 2007-08 financial crash and subsequent recession. The New Labour government, which had been in power since 1997, led by Tony Blair and subsequently Gordon Brown, was initially responsible for the introduction of university tuition fees and the abolition of the student grant as one of its first acts.
As the impacts of the recession started to bite, Brown was thrown out and Tory leader Cameron became the new prime minister. To govern, the Tories needed to form a coalition with Nick Clegg’s Liberal Democrats, who had toured university constituencies signing pledges not to increase fees and subsequently won large numbers of student votes. The ‘Con-Dem Coalition’ was born.
Austerity
The Con-Dems aimed to restore profitability to British capitalism by driving down the living standards of the working class through austerity. One of the first measures targeted higher education funding. It pushed students into the vanguard of resistance against austerity.
The initial trigger came when former Chief Executive of BP, Lord Browne, who had been appointed by the previous Labour government to conduct a review into university finances, released his ‘findings’ on 12 October. These included recommending the complete abolition of the cap on tuition fees, and the ending of almost all state funding for universities.
A week later, the Con-Dems published their spending review, which included increasing the cap on fees to £9,000 per year, while also scrapping the Education Maintenance Allowance grant of up to £30 a week for 16 to 18-year-old college students.
At this time, the leadership of the National Union of Students (NUS) was comprised of Blairites and political careerists. Yet, such was the anger from below at the government’s proposals, the NUS bureaucracy had to be at least seen to be organising a fightback. A national demonstration was called in London on 10 November. President Aaron Porter and those around him, who were in privileged positions and largely distanced from the mood of the students, had envisaged this as just a steam-letting event. No proper stewarding was organised, and the NUS website stated that the march would only last for half an hour!
The reality on the day was very different, reflecting the rage across the campuses. More than 50,000 turned up, with coachloads from students unions, and many college students organising independently to attend. The mood was electric. The streets were awash with homemade banners, many with choice language aimed at the Con-Dems, and especially the Lib Dem leader Clegg, who was seen universally as a traitor for abandoning his election pledge not to increase fees.
Without proper stewarding organised by the NUS, the demo split halfway through. One section finished up at the rather lacklustre closing ‘rally’ outside the Tate Modern gallery. A more combative layer headed for Millbank, where the Conservative Party HQ was located. Spontaneously, hundreds of students moved to occupy the building and hundreds more protested outside.
Police moved inside and set upon the students. The crowd of protesters congregating outside the building were ‘kettled’ by the police until at least 6:30pm, and many missed their transport home as a result. Over 50 students were arrested. One of those was Edward Wollard, who dangerously dropped a fire extinguisher from the top of the building, missing those below, but for which he was sentenced to 32 months in prison. The judge decided to make an example of him, aiming to strike fear into future protesters.
Compare Edward’s treatment by the courts to that of PC Andrew Ott, the only police officer to be convicted of any offence in relation to the 2010 student uprising. In 2015, Ott was convicted of actual bodily harm for knocking out a student’s tooth with a blow from his shield at the protest and was sentenced to only eight months. Other officers who used violence against the protesters got off scot-free.
At a later protest on 9 December, officers pulled disabled student Jody McIntyre out of his wheelchair, hit him with a baton, and dragged him across a road. Another almost killed student Alfie Meadows with a truncheon blow to the head on the same day. The Metropolitan Police closed ranks on these assaults, and nobody was ever held to account. Alfie was taken to hospital suffering from bleeding to the brain and required an emergency operation. The Met settled with him out of court.
Pro-capitalist police
These events clearly exposed the pro-capitalist character of the police and the legal system to the students, and to workers who were following the events. Lecturers at Goldsmiths University put out a statement which included: “The real violence in this situation relates not to a smashed window but to the destructive impact of the cuts and privatisation that will follow if tuition fees are increased and massive reductions in higher education funding are implemented.”
Many students commented that the biased reporting of the media on the protests meant that only the occupation of Millbank Tower gave the protest the coverage it warranted. Occupations of buildings can be an effective strategy as part of a wider struggle. But this requires democratic discussion over tactics and strategy, as well as a clear demands, something the NUS leaders did not do. In fact, they helped contribute to the Tory attempts to demonise student protesters. Aaron Porter appeared on Newsnight on the evening of the demo to describe the protesters as “despicable”, failing to put a position of opposition to fees.
Socialist Students put forward a clear strategy on the demonstration, handing out over 10,000 leaflets outlining steps to take the movement forwards. The demand for student walkouts nationwide on 24 November was enthusiastically taken up.
On the day, an estimated 130,000 took part across dozens of towns and cities, college and uni students organised walkouts and protests – 3,000 marched in Brighton, 2,000 in Bristol, 3,000 in Manchester. These took place alongside another protest in London, during which the police kettled a large crowd outside Whitehall. Police numbers were beefed up from two weeks before, intent on taking the students on, and protesters retaliated. Police on horseback charged at the crowd and 41 students were arrested.
At a third London protest on 30 November, police blocked the route of the march and the students were dispersed through the streets. It was snowing, and many students got lost in the cold, with some being targeted by officers. It was on this day, however, that the movement scored its first victory. The Welsh government announced that it would pick up the tab for any increase in tuition fees for Welsh students studying in Wales – although students coming to Wales to study would still be affected by any increase implemented by the UK government.
Plans were made for ‘Day X’, when the vote was to take place in Parliament. The Socialist Party argued the case for the trade unions, in education and beyond, to send delegations to the protest.
From the very first protest, the Socialist Party had been raising the need for the student movement to link up with the developing anti-cuts movement and the trade unions. In the editorial of the Socialist following the first fees protest we wrote: “The students need to continue to develop their own democratic and mass movement, including building anti-cuts unions in all the colleges, sixth forms and schools as well as the universities… But it is particularly important that students link up with the trade union movement and the working class to build a movement powerful enough to stop the Con-Dem cuts.” We raised the demand for a national trade union-led demo as soon as possible, to oppose all cuts and as a step towards a 24-hour public sector general strike.
Students could see the need to link with workers. Socialist Party members who took part in the demos as students at the time recall marching past building workers on scaffolding, thousands chanting: “Students and workers – unite and fight!” with the workers shaking their fists in solidarity.
Day X came on 9 December. Two more protests took place in London on this day, again with clashing and kettling, over ten students were treated for head injuries.
Police brutality and victimisation of individuals was a key feature of the movement. Greater organisation and stewarding on the protests would have gone some way to preventing this, and was something Socialist Students had argued for through, including for the involvement of the trade union movement in organising stewarding. Socialist Students initiated the Youth Democratic Rights campaign, aimed at defending the right to protest and calling for the release of those facing criminal charges because of the protests.
After 9 December, the lack of coherent organisation and strategy coming from the NUS leadership resulted in students gradually losing heart and drifting away from the movement. Also crucial in this was the lack of action from the leadership of the trade unions in organising support for the student movement.
Nevertheless, occupations of hundreds of students continued in universities like Manchester, Leeds, Warwick and Birmingham. These occupations, whilst committed and courageous, did not hold out. They were largely organised on a ‘horizontalist’ basis, without an official leadership. In practice however, this resulted in the crystallisation of an unofficial, unaccountable leadership of those activists with the loudest voices and the most time on their hands. Socialist Students and Youth Democratic Rights argued for democratic structures based on an elected, accountable leadership without material privileges, and for space for full discussion on programme and strategy on how to take the movement forward.
Student organisations
The NUS today is even more undemocratic and has even less authority than it did – in part because of the role it played then. But the lessons of 2010 show the need for student organisation, locally and nationally, with a fighting programme and accountable leadership. Socialist Students aims to be a key part of developing that – through transforming existing students union structures and, where necessary, developing new ones.
Finally, the political lessons need to be learned. The Lib Dems, a party representing the interests of capitalism just like the Tories and New Labour, were able to win the support of a layer of students in the 2010 general election by dishonestly pledging to keep the cap on tuition fees. But the capitalists wanted a generation of young people to shoulder the burden of the cost of higher education.
To stop this, we need to build a new mass party of the working class, armed with a socialist programme to abolish tuition fees, and to end and reverse all cuts and privatisation in higher education. Student organisations could play a role in founding such a party.
Socialist Students up and down the country continues to build links with trade unionists, including supporting lecturers and other university workers fighting to defend their living standards and against cuts and privatisation. The Funding not Fees campaign is a key part of this.
By doing so, we’re confident that student struggles in the future can go hand-in-hand with mass movements of the working class, with a programme to end capitalism and bring about a socialist transformation of society, where education is a means to expand horizons and experiences, not just a production line for next generation of exploited young workers.
