Ashok Kumar is the full-time Education Officer of the London School of Economics. Until recently, the LSE was under occupation in protest to the cuts, and the LSE Students' Union has been central in the fight-back against austerity measures. In addition to sitting on the Steering Committee of the Education Activist Network (EAN) he is an activist in the National Campaign Against Fees and Cuts (NCAFC).
SR: Coming from the US student and radical movement, were the student struggles a surprise to you?
AK: The US has a rich history of student activism and in recent years we have seen mass student action, occupations and strikes in California in particular. However, the national scale of the student movement in the UK is structurally difficult in the US. For one, we do not have a viable national students' union. The United States Students Association (USSA) is funded by the US Department of Education, is not a union and doesn't have the resources of one. While national-level action at the scale of the UK becomes difficult, state-wide action as seen in California in recent years has been large-scale and militant. The structural problems in the US extend beyond the geographic. For example, there are far more private universities in the US than in the UK and when public funding or fee battles are fought in the US they are at the state levels, since states are responsible for setting fees and making funding decisions. National education policy for higher education primarily impacts grants but has no impact on fees or overall General Purpose Revenue of the individual state universities.
SR: Had you expected the wave of radical election victories in students' unions?
AK: I was surprised to win the elections at the LSE Students' Union but the elections at the other universities shouldn't have come as a shock. Most universities had one radical student elected to 4-member sabbatical teams. What comes as a real shock is the politicisation of those who had been elected. People who ran on relatively moderate platforms have shifted dramatically. Even in the NUS, we see that the leadership, while not where we want it to be, has been forced to move to the left to remain relevant within a movement that's alive with or without them.
SR: Students have been under attack for a number of years. What is new in the situation that suddenly made them take to the streets in such numbers? Is it simply the Con Dem government?
AK: It is difficult to isolate the variables when it comes to understanding the reason why any social movement rises or falls. There are a few reasons for the scale of the protests. The anti-war demos, mass walkouts of the early 2000s and the university occupations against Israel's invasion of Gaza normalised these tactics for the current generation of students. In other words, it wasn't a stretch to call for walkouts on the 24th of November and university occupations up and down the country immediately after.
The last time we witnessed cuts of this level and an attempt to lift the cap on fees completely was in 1985 under Thatcher. In the wake of the bitter losses of the miners' strike, mass student unrest resulted in the fee hikes never coming into fruition. Since that point we've witnessed the Labour government pushing through hikes in fees, cuts to education and an abolition of maintenance grants. The National Union of Students (NUS) never opposed these measures in constructive ways because of the intimate relationship the official student movement had with New Labour, as well as the strength of Labour Students (the student wing of the Labour Party) within NUS. Indeed, the fact that we now have a Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition has broadened the coalition of resistance to those sympathetic to the Labour party and the soft-left. Beyond that, a critical mistake of the coalition government was the abolition of Education Maintenance Allowance (EMA), one of the only genuine reforms by New Labour, pulling tens of thousands of outraged FE and sixth form students into the struggle.
Another factor that contributed to the rise of the movement was at last spring's NUS conference, left factions were able to pass a motion for NUS to call for a national demonstration in the autumn. It was on the back of this call that Aaron Porter, to his credit, called for a University and College Union (UCU)/NUS joint demonstration. By drawing the organic links between students and workers we have been able to see a level of support by trade unionists in recent days. The National Union of Students and the Metropolitan Police expected a mere 10,000 students to march that day, yet over 52,000 students came out, making it the largest student demonstration in British history.
The movement was built off the back of the Millbank occupation that occurred on November 10th. Before the demonstrations there were many targets that affinity groups had planned to occupy. Hundreds of students went to the Treasury, the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS), as well as the Department of Education. All of these were occupied, none were reported on. The defining moment of that day was Millbank. At 33 Millbank, we found the headquarters of the Tory Party. By 1pm, over 5,000 students had smashed through the front lobby, taken over the roof and had completely surrounded the building. If history remembers anything from these protests I believe Millbank will be at the top of it. It was this impetus that inspired the 130,000 Secondary (age 14-16) and Further Education (FE) (age 16-19) school students to walk out on 24th of November. After this the ball had already begun rolling, what followed were mass demonstrations on 30th of November and 9th of December, and over 35 universities going into occupation.
At LSE, we occupied the corridor of Lib Dem MP Simon Hughes' constituency office for 4 hours before being escorted out by police. Our action led to a meeting with Hughes and subsequently an agreement by him to vote against the fee hike. A week later, the students union fully backed the occupation at LSE after an emergency union general meeting (EGM) was called of over 400 debating the issue for over an hour. The motion of support passed (464 in favour and 291 against). Immediately after the EGM we went into occupation. The 9-day LSE occupation, as a microcosm of the larger movement, saw hundreds of students and lecturers occupy, give lectures, and organise more targeted demonstrations with delegations from other university occupations. The mood of the occupations themselves gives you a sense the organic nature of the movement itself, where the initial organising, if successful, has a snowball effect and escalates both tactically and in terms of numbers.
SR: What is the connection between the university students and the young people from schools and sixth form colleges? Are the reports true that the younger students are more radical?
AK: Students at the sixth form and FE colleges became politicised primarily around the proposed abolishment of the EMA. Sixth form and FE colleges are still free and therefore have substantially higher numbers of black and working class students than universities. Also, the fact that higher education (HE) students are not directly impacted by the increase in fees, accelerates the radicalisation and militancy of college students who realise that they will be those worst affected by the proposed changes. It's hard to say whether the college students were "more radical", but at the demonstrations it became clear on November 24th and 30th, that in terms of numbers, college students far exceeded university students.
SR: How has the police response affected the way students look at the cops?
AK: There is now a universal anger amongst student activists at the police. There is a genuine evolution in the consciousness of students involved in the demonstrations and with some of the public especially after the high profile cases of police violence against disabled activist Jodie McIntyre and Middlesex student Alfie Meadows. Though many working class black students have always experienced police violence in their communities, to many middle class white students it came as a shock. There was little to no analysis of the police for many of the students involved, the sheer brutality has led to almost universal understanding amongst demonstrators of the true role of the police. However, there has been some victory by the police, media and political elite in painting protestors as 'violent' and the police as reacting to violence. This has been seen time and again, from the Gaza protests to the G20, and we still have a lot of work to do to counter their propaganda.