Around 4pm on Tuesday afternoon around 30 students from London Metropolitan University (LMU) staged occupied the fifth floor of a University building on Commercial Road. The occupation took place in the context of threats to axe over 550 jobs at the institution. The university is greeted with massive bills from the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) following the misreporting of the number of students who had completed degrees. As a result of this mis-reporting the university is threatened with funding cuts and repayments, it has responded by proposing massive job cuts. University College Union members took strike action on Thursday 7th May in response to the proposed job losses.

Reports from those on the ground suggested that the University management called the police in at 9pm on Tuesday evening in an attempt to have those occupying the building ejected, only for the police to inform university management that as the students posed no thread to the property nor were they breaking any laws.

By the time members of Communist Students arrived on Tuesday afternoon to express solidarity with the occupation at a rally held outside the building, campus security were refusing to let any ‘new faces’ inside. Despite this a representative of the students occupying the building came down to greet those who had assembled at the rally. She called on other Met students to occupy different parts of the university, noting that to remove the students the university management would require an injunction that would take at least four days. The Met student noted that the university management had shown little interest in a dialogue with the students, nor any interest in their demands, with no official statement from the management at the time of the rally.

The comrade was followed by Mark Campbell, representative of University College Union. Mark recognized the misreporting of figures as the reason for the debt the institution is in, suggesting that neither students or the university’s workers were responsible for the misreporting of these statistics, yet they were being asked to “pay for the financial crisis”. The comrade suggested that we should turn to the example of the Visteon workers, who had occupied their work place at four minutes notice, as an example of effective action that can win demands. Our task must be to stand up and fight, only then can we win.

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