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Participation and Non-Participation in Student Activism
Paths and Barriers to Mobilising Young People for Political Action
By Alexander Hensby Rowman & Littlefield International Ltd.
Copyright © 2017 Alexander Hensby
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78348-695-3
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
MILLBANK TENDENCY: A TALE OF TWO MARCHES
On 9 November 2011, approximately 2,000 students marched through London to protest the Government's Higher Education White Paper and its proposed marketisation of the sector. University funding had been a campaigning issue for more than a decade, but this was no ordinary demonstration. Despite the modest turnout, the Metropolitan Police deployed twice as many officers for the event as there were marchers. Moreover, Scotland Yard announced in the days beforehand that police were authorised to use rubber bullets, baton rounds, and water cannons on students – a threat which reportedly had the blessing of Prime Minister David Cameron (Daily Mail, 8 November 2011). On the morning of the march, police distributed flyers at tube stations warning marchers to avoid 'outbreak[s] of violence and disorder', as being caught in the wrong place at the wrong time might lead to arrest and a criminal record that 'could seriously affect your future employment or educational opportunities'.
Unsurprisingly, these threats contributed to a tense and paranoid atmosphere as the march progressed through central London. Demonstrators were effectively encircled by a police line throughout its four-hour duration, with every side street closed, barricaded, and patrolled by officers. As the march crossed into the city's financial district – a pointed gesture in its own right – office workers from the overhead buildings peered from their windows at the marchers below – some cheered, one or two flicked V-signs, while others took photos on their smartphones. Students kept up their spirits by singing and chanting, even if their repertoire had started to shift away from the familiar campaign slogan 'No Ifs! No Buts! No Education Cuts!' to commentaries on the march itself: a group of female undergraduates chanted at police officers, 'You're sexy! You're cute! Take off your riot suit!', whereas others sang, 'You can shove your rubber bullets up your arse'.
Meanwhile, on the event's Twitter hashtag (#nov9), activists were monitoring the demonstration and its media coverage: some blamed the police for being too aggressive; others criticised the marchers for being too timid, stressing the need for direct action to attract more press attention. On the ground, however, opportunities for disruption were limited: with each passing barricade, tension built between marchers and police, boiling over on some occasions into direct confrontations and arrests (videos of which were soon posted on YouTube). By the time they reached London Wall, a police dispersal order saw marchers tightly encircled by a fixed police line – a tactic known as 'kettling' – with small numbers allowed to filter out at set intervals. By 5:00 p.m., the demonstration was over. The general feeling was that the protest had been snuffed out: aside from the left-leaning Guardian, there was very little coverage in the national press. In the now-opened side streets, union representatives took roll-call of names before boarding their minibuses back home.
Among attendees interviewed for this book, Yvonne, a first-year undergraduate at the University of Warwick, admitted that she had also been partly attracted by a union-subsidised trip to London. Ronnie, a Warwick postgraduate and experienced activist, recalled enjoying attending because it ultimately represented 'a day out with people who I get on with'. For many participants, however, the march was recalled with much negativity, described as 'unpleasant' (Peter, Edinburgh), 'really bad' (Marianne, Cambridge), 'disempowering' (Brett, UCL), and 'the worst demo ever' (Rhiannon, Edinburgh). Clearly, the police tactics were designed to stifle any confrontational or spontaneous actions. For Edinburgh student John, there was no question as to why this was the case: 'It was because of Millbank. No-one was pretending it wasn't. It was because of Millbank, and they didn't want it to happen again'.
Rewinding one year, the landscape of student activism in the United Kingdom (UK) looked quite different. Having recently abandoned its free education doctrine, the National Union of Students (NUS) had not organised a national demonstration for four years. The early 2000s had seen students mobilise in large numbers against the Iraq War and variable tuition fees, yet by 2010 their campaign agenda had fragmented, with some favouring Climate Camp activism while others engaged in actions with Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP). Nevertheless, the financial crisis of 2007/8 had begun to engineer a change in activists' focus, as did the newly formed Conservative-Liberal Democrat Coalition Government's 'austerity agenda' to cut public spending and control the UK's national debt. Its first major expression came in the form of a proposed bill to treble the tuition fees cap for students in England – due to be voted in Parliament seven weeks later.
The proposed increase incurred widespread opposition from students, and though the policy would not affect current undergraduates, their hostility was intensified by the controversial position of the Liberal Democrats. In the preceding election, many had voted for the party because it pledged to oppose any tuition fees increase in Parliament, while promising to abolish fees altogether if elected to government. Given this twin grievance, the NUS arranged a national demonstration for 10 November 2010. Although London had seen violent protests during the previous year's G20 summit, the Metropolitan Police anticipated little in the way of disruption from students. With around 10,000 expected to attend, 225 police officers were deployed for the event. Instead, it drew 52,000 students, with over 100 universities represented from across the UK (The Guardian, 10 November 2010). As the march began to progress from Horse Guards Parade, the scale of turnout was as much a shock to students as it was to the police:
I came out of the train station and literally just stood for about ten minutes doing a whole 360, like, what the hell's going on? It was very positive – there was a sense of pride that this many people had come together to support the campaign, so there was a sense of 'I'm really proud to be a student – so many people here!' (Hayley, Roehampton)
I'd been on a few demos before but it was absolutely incredible, like, the streets being packed with students – everywhere you looked, there were people. And I guess there was that degree of optimism as well, you know – this is huge, this is the biggest demonstration that's happened in years, we can actually achieve something! (Andrew, Cambridge)
For experienced and first-time marchers alike, partaking in this spectacle generated feelings of pride, empowerment, righteousness, and community – a combination almost unique to protest, and perhaps validating Jasper's (1997: 220) claim that it provides 'virtually all the pleasures that humans derive from social life'. Yet events were about to take an unexpected turn. Some activists had covertly planned a number of potential 'escalations', and with the demonstration route unusually short, many marchers felt a surplus of energy as they approached its rallying point outside Tate Britain. Police officers had been guarding nearby Liberal Democrat offices in anticipation of vandalism attempts, yet few paid any attention to the looming presence of Conservative Party HQ as the march proceeded down Millbank. At approximately 1:30 p.m., a small group broke off from the main route, urging marchers via SMS, leaflets, and word-of-mouth to 'follow the red flags'. As they made their way into the offices of 30 Millbank, police, and NUS stewards were unable to prevent thousands of students from surging towards the lobby. With windows smashed, smoke bombs thrown, and bonfires of placards being lit in the surrounding courtyard, events quickly descended into carnage:
It escalated very quickly. People had smashed windows, someone threw a sofa. ... People just went absolutely bananas, absolutely crazy. (Hayley, Roehampton)
We took Millbank, we got in through the doors, and there were thousands of people outside. ... The police had batons but they didn't use them, partly because they realised they were hopelessly outnumbered. (Anon)
Around 50 students made it onto the roof of Millbank Tower, whereupon they hung banners and waved anarchist flags. Meanwhile, large numbers were departing NUS's rallying point to watch events unfold in the courtyard. Until Territorial Support Group (TSG) officers arrived approximately 45 minutes after the initial attack, protesters were virtually given free rein. For many involved, this engendered a sense of empowerment that surpassed the scale of the demonstration itself: in occupying Conservative HQ, they were defying the Government and the police. Once the TSG arrived, however, the costs and risks to participation soon became apparent. Students outside were kettled, while 35 people were arrested and later charged with criminal damage and/or trespass. Most controversial of all, one protester threw an empty fire extinguisher from the roof, narrowly missing students and police officers in the courtyard below:
What was amazing for me standing there watching was the fire extinguisher coming down from the roof. I have a particularly distinct memory of me and this guy – who's a revolutionary socialist – saying 'fuck, this is a bit much!' (laughs). (Lindsey, Edinburgh)
Although quickly condemned by activists, the incident was arguably symptomatic of the chaos that had enraptured the demonstration. Much of this was uncoordinated and impulsive, but as an overall spectacle it had not been entirely accidental. With little time to pressurise Parliament into voting down the fees bill, activists recognised the importance of generating actions that would attract the interest of the UK press. In this respect, the Millbank attack was a conscious attempt to create a radical, almost certainly divisive, yet necessary, 'moment of excess' (Free Association, 2011). Not only did it create new possibilities for collective self-expression that transcended the sum of its parts, it also succeeded in hijacking the mainstream media narrative. For media-savvy students especially, seeing themselves on the front pages of the newspapers and broadcast live on television represented a moment of true agency. Millbank was the news, and they were the ones making it happen:
There was a TV in the lobby [of Millbank] showing Sky News, and suddenly just seeing the Skycopter filming this massive crowd that were outside – it was like, 'oh, I'm stood inside there! That's a lot of people!' (Anon)
There were two issues of the Evening Standard that day: in the first, the protest was on page four and it was, like, a picture of two pretty girls holding a placard, and a little piece about, like, 'twenty thousand students went on a protest ...' And then two hours later, it was, like, front page, with a picture of a boy smashing up Millbank, and '50,000 students on the protest ...!' (Donna, UCL)
With mainstream media firmly focused on students, it is fair to say that 'Millbank' – as the event became known – provided the campaign with its 'scale shift' from campus grievance to national talking point (Tarrow and McAdam, 2005). Moreover, it imbibed the rest of the campaign with a radical and provocative ethos: three more large London demonstrations followed, as well as a coordinated day of lecture walkouts, and a reported 51 occupations of campus buildings across the UK. In other words, for seven weeks in autumn 2010, UK students evoked – and arguably, surpassed – the actions and radicalism of their 1960s predecessors.
Yet despite this scale of anger, media attention, and participatory opportunities, the protests mobilised only a fraction of their student support base. Although it is questionable whether a higher turnout would have overturned the fees bill – which Parliament passed, albeit narrowly, that December – the failure to achieve this certainly contributed to student activism's almost-as-rapid downward-scale shift shortly after. By the time of the 9 November 2011 demonstration, activists were struggling to mobilise even a tenth of what they had achieved the previous autumn. The event's organisers, the National Campaign Against Fees and Cuts (NCAFC), blamed low participation on the lack of leadership from the NUS, which had distanced itself from campaigns post-Millbank. Ideological fault lines also seemed more manifest than the previous year, with students unsure over whether they should be campaigning for 'free' or 'affordable' education. In the end, the strongest uniting factor was, as Ronnie put it, to 'remind people that we hadn't forgotten about last year'. Yet this was not a strong enough reason to mobilise students en masse – indeed, many seemed unaware that the demonstration was even taking place.
Of course, non-participation has always been a feature of social movements, and the student protests of 2010/11 were no different. Nor should 'participants' be taken as a homogenous category: after all, the vast majority of students did not occupy Millbank, nor did they join the NUS demonstration, well attended though it was. Even at its autumn 2010 peak, most students did nothing at all. This is not to belittle the campaign's mobilising efforts: rather, it is to draw attention to its value as a case study. On the one hand, those who took part participated in different ways, be it signing petitions or occupying university buildings. On the other hand, it cannot be assumed that those who did not participate were not engaged in the fees grievance: Opinion Panel (2010) surveyed students shortly after the fees announcement and found that 81 per cent opposed the increase. In sum, the student protests make for an ideal opportunity to study the relationship between participation and non-participation: Why did participants participate in the way they did, and why did so many supportive non-participants not participate at all?
STUDENTS, PROTEST, IDENTITY, AND DEBT
These are curious times to be a student. The expansion and professionalisation of higher education has transformed the sector, so that today, universities enrol in greater number and diversity than ever before. Students have a wider range of institutions, courses, and qualification levels to choose from, and can opt to study part-time, overseas, or online. Yet these transformations have come at a cost. Across the world, declining government subsidisation requires that students pay considerably more for their higher education than in the past. In the UK, graduates owe tens of thousands of pounds via decades of fees and loan repayments on a scale increasingly comparable with those in the United States (and without the scale of endowment funds and scholarships). Furthermore, they enter a labour market that rewards undergraduate qualifications far less than in previous generations, often necessitating taking on additional work experience, unpaid internships, vocational training, or further study to progress towards their chosen career.
Such is the importance placed on the governance, finance, and administration of higher education that we are left unsure as to why students come to university, and – in the words of Stefan Collini (2012) – what universities are for. Emphasis on producing an educated, flexible, and creative workforce that will generate economic growth has seen higher education transformed into a competitive marketplace. Given this rationale, universities are repositioned as 'service providers', and students as consumers. Any commitment to universities delivering a public good is increasingly compromised, as the provision of courses which are not deemed to directly serve the interests of the economy are now placed under greater scrutiny.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Participation and Non-Participation in Student Activism by Alexander Hensby. Copyright © 2017 Alexander Hensby. Excerpted by permission of Rowman & Littlefield International Ltd..
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