By Callum Williamson.

Thursday 9th of December saw another huge protest in London, one month after the inspirational occupation of the Tory HQ at the Millbank building. The weeks after the HQ incident saw a determined fight by students across the country. School walkouts, demonstrations and university occupations have taken place from Glasgow to Southampton. This period of struggle has seen police brutality, NUS scabbery, media witch-hunts and the corridors of power in Whitehall shaken.

In the immediate aftermath of the storming of Millbank the NUS distanced itself from the rapidly growing movement of resistance with outrageous public condemnation, but this left the organisation dangerously detached from the developments on the ground. What NUS president Aaron Porter called the ‘violence of a tiny minority’ was in fact an inspirational moment for the thousands present and a symbolic victory over the ruling Conservative party. On November 24th the various leftist groups in the student movement, NCAFC and EAN being most prominent, called for a day of action and we saw 100,000 students take actions up and down the country without NUS backing. It did not take long for Mr Porter to realise the need to usurp leadership of this struggle. He admitted to ‘spineless dithering’ and vowed to change his stance and that of the organisation. However, it did not take long for criticism to rain down once more on el presidente. Fresh from allegations that he’d tried to stifle the autonomous organisation of black and Asian students, he was now being accused by some of the students involved in occupations of misleading the students with his U-turn statement. Legal advice that was promised was expected to be on a case-by-case basis helping those involved in the individual occupations. However, it became clear that all that was meant was that the NUS would provide broad guidelines for students which many clearly felt was inadequate. The NUS also continued it’s favoured rather…timid… method of activism, letter writing campaigns. These campaigns are famously feared by politicians and won students many a victory in the past.

Of course recent history shows us otherwise.

However what alienated many students I know most was the way in which the NUS repetitively showed tremendous cowardice when in came to interviews with the media. Again and again a reporter would nudge an NUS official to condemn the ‘student violence’ and they would comply without a mention of the police brutality on display. Our glorious leader even called for ‘violent’ students to be banned from demonstrations and face legal action. To anyone present at the protests, particularly the last one, it would have been clear who was committing the violence. The media took the stance they were always going to take regardless of fire extinguishers, Churchill statue graffiti and attacks on our beloved royal family. Once the media and politicians began to well and truly froth at the mouth, the behaviour of the police became an irrelevance to them and it began to deteriorate as their attack dogs came off the lead culminating in a horse charge into a group of students trying to escape a kettle. Yet even this did not bother the likes of the ‘neutral’ BBC much, at least not once Camilla had been poked by a protester. It took images of police forcing a protester off their wheelchair to divert talk, momentarily, away from the unruliness of the students.

Students are not the only ones to be cast with villainy by the press in recent months. BA workers, fire-fighters, tube workers and any section of the working class entering struggle suffered the same mistreatment. It was encouraging to see workers from Unite, RMT, UCU, GMB and other unions join the students in parliament square on the 9th. It goes without saying that we must strive for the maximum unity in fighting these cuts, and co-ordination between students and workers is key. Wherever possible, students should get in touch with local anti-cuts groups and union branches. The entirety of the working class must be mobilised.

In the end the bill to increase tuition fees was passed through the Commons by a 21 vote majority, smaller than it would have been if not for the tenacity of the students, but this is really an irrelevance now. It was always on the cards that this bill would be passed but even now it is possible to defeat the government. One only needs to look as far back as the poll tax for an example of how our class can defeat these kinds of attacks. What is required is a mass movement with the political will.

The NUS can continue to whine at politicians and hold candlelit vigils, the students and lecturers will stand up against these measures. We cannot apply the tactics advocated by the NUS because they reduce political activity to letter writing and private MP’s surgeries, stifling real collective action. They do not want to build a radical movement, nor one which is democratic and grassroots. Their role is to behave as some sort of consumers union, trying and failing to act in the interests of the students who access the commodity that education has become. They have no alternative vision of what our education should look like and very rarely have any positive demands to make. Instead they remain forever on the back foot as they fail and fail again to withstand the assaults which successive governments have made. Whilst there is no reason why we cannot work within the NUS as much as possible and argue for our ideas within it, we should not allow ourselves to be constrained by it. We need a movement that addresses the cuts head-on, leading it inevitably to conflict with the NUS leadership.

While rejecting the endless lobbying of MP’s as an utterly inadequate strategy, we must recognise that demonstrations are not the beginning and the end of militant student activism. Actions at every school, college and university, alongside regular meetings to decide our strategy and political direction, are what we have to build for. This means solidarity strikes with teachers and lecturers, occupations, walkouts and teach-ins. Only the unity of students and education workers will leave us with a hope of fighting back. A united student movement is needed in the here and now and the same applies for the struggle outside of education. Only a single organisation with a programme and a vision of where we go from here can co-ordinate this effectively.

The politics we need go far beyond ‘anti-cuts’ slogans. The public sector cuts are partly a symptom of the neo-liberal ideology of the coalition but are mainly in defence of capitalist profit. Our movement must engage in a battle against the forces of the market, against capitalism itself. The fees increase and the cuts to courses are a direct attempt to further marketise our education system. Any notion of education as a public good, or of learning being a good thing in itself for the individual and society, is thrown out of the window. Students are expected to be ‘rational’, calculating consumers weighing up the benefits of going to university in terms of costs versus the possibility of increased earning power after graduation. The universities that do not close down will act as competing firms seeking the investment of students and business alike, the latter of which will continue to use universities and factories of skilled labour and intellectual property.

The students have shown their willingness to fight to defend the education system we have now. Even without an effective organisation to help with mobilisation, students have shown themselves capable of making an impact and setting an example to other sections of society facing attacks. There is no reason why students should not be asking bigger questions and raising demands around how we’d like to see our education system work. If there is an alternative to the alienating classroom experience as it is now, to the state curriculum and to learning for the sake of exams so we can fit neatly into our place in the labour market (and I believe there is), students are the ones who should be building for it. In the same way, the working class must address the need to change society itself. We are being made to pay for an economic crisis that we had no part in creating. Replacing capitalism is the only long term solution.