The Education Activist Network, run by the Socialist Workers Party, called a London wide ‘planning meeting’ at Kings College on Monday. The people answered – two or three hundred crammed into the Safra lecture theatre. A large portion of the crowd was SWP, but there were a lot of Counterfire comrades, some Workers Power and AWL members, a handful from the Radical Anthropology Group and a couple of people from Permanent Revolution. A not-insubstantial minority of non-organised people turned up too.

Conspicuously not in attendance was slimy NUS head honcho Aaron Porter. the meeting had been arranged before November 10, when everything was just peaches and cream between the NUS bureaucracy and the r-r-revolutionary left. (A few weasel words in his defence came from Clare Solomon – hadn’t he done an awfully good job organising a massive demo, after all?) After his disgraceful comments about the Millbank protest, if he had turned up, he probably would have been strung up from the balcony. Speakers were Alan Whitaker (UCU pres), Alison Lord (Tower Hamlets UCU, wheeled out by SWP every time something happens in London) and a radical NUS executive member. The vast bulk of speeches, from the platform and the floor, were identikit SWP interventions – strongly worded rhetoric cloaking relatively modest proposals, in particular to build for big numbers on November 24. Two Workers Power comrades were called (John B and Simon H), who said more or less the same thing albeit with more strongly worded calls for UCU strikes.

The issues in dispute, such as they were:

Violence: Alan Whitaker was careful to stress that the statement he and other UCU exec members signed did not condemn or condone the violence at Millbank – but nevertheless supported the students against victimisation and demonisation. A youngster from an FE college a little out of town was extremely angry about clashes with the cops – he had seen the prone form of a female copper and, it seems, been overcome with empathy. Elements of the crowd were howling him down, and others hissing that he should be allowed to speak. The SWPers were quite clear – the ‘real vandals’ were the government. (What’s a bank robbery compared to the founding of a bank?) Of course, there was a lot of discussion about whether violence was simply ‘out of order’ or justifiable, and no discussion of whether it was tactically useful.

Democracy: an American comrade from the EAN exec spoke quite early on, pointing out that EAN had already called its protests on November 24 in a press conference earlier that day. He had obviously not been informed; we can surmise that it was simply the work of SWPers. He said having the press conference before the planning meeting was upside down. But then, as the meeting drew on, it became increasingly clear that EAN/SWP had no intention of this meeting planning much at all. There was no time to actually make decisions on actions. A disproportionate amount of time was given to identical SWP speeches. The rumbling tensions finally exploded at the end, when an anarchist idiot just got up and started ranting. The room was against him, but there were a lot of calls to extend the meeting by half an hour (Counterfire’s James Meadway, incidentally, cringed at this point – ‘how can you have a two and a half hour meeting?’ he muttered incredulously, as if such an event was unheard of in all human history). General bedlam ensued – many people (a guy from PR, Camilla) were very unhappy that they’d had their hand up all evening and had to listen to 20 SWPers instead. After the semi-competent chair regained order, there was one more speech, and then an awful lot of announcements.

The moral of the story: be careful what you wish for, because it might just come true. A packed and diverse crowd, much of it newly radicalised, was never going to swallow this level of control-freakery, which in the end just caused the meeting to descend into bad-tempered farce. The numbers were encouraging, but above all it was a wasted opportunity.

Harley Filben
Kings College London