I got the text while I was at work. But my phone was off and I did not read it till 4.30 that afternoon. By then my 17 year old daughter, S, had been “kettled” for over three hours. She was frustrated, cold and angry. I dashed over to Westminster.
It was the 24th November and the second national day of action against fee increases. All over the country an estimated 130,000 students and school students organised marches, occupations, and other direct actions.
Remonstration and pleading with the phalanx of bored officers facing me was to no avail. So I had little choice but to spend 2 ½ hours observing this surreally brutal snapshot of austerity Britain. A temporary Siberian gulag for dissenting children just yards from the seat of government.
Cordons of riot police fenced in a group of one or two thousand young people on Whitehall, most of them under 18. Temperatures hovered near zero. Kids were not dressed appropriately – they quite reasonably expected to march and be home before dark. High pitched chants of “we want to be free” wafted over the batons and shields. Fires were burning around the Cenotaph war memorial.
The police claimed to have released the youngest children after a relatively short time. But, like many of their other statements over the following days this simply wasn’t true.
Other examples: that there was no charge of police horses into the defenceless crowd. Or that a police van, subsequently decorated by fed-up protestors anxious to fill in the time constructively, had been abandoned by officers in fear when surrounded by marchers. Both exposed in video’s posted on youtube.
It was only from 6pm that a very slow trickle of children was released – initially restricted to 13 and 14 year old girls. I saw children of that age group still being released an hour later – frozen after 5 hours of open air imprisonment.
If the aim had been to quell their spirit or disperse the protest, it was a massive miscalculation. In fervent solidarity the mates of those kettled up had refused to go home. Each released “prisoner” was greeted by dozens of young comrades – whooping with delight and chanting slogans. These groups then engaged in spontaneous further protest – sitting down in Westminster Bridge road and blocking rush hour traffic – in solidarity with those still detained.
And it wasn’t just the young. A woman next to me anxiously waited for her 74 for year old mum, a retired school teacher, imprisoned by riot police in hypothermia-inducing conditions for 6 hours.
During the course of my wait I found out that my 14 year old daughter, R, who also attended the protest only narrowly escaped the kettle herself. The police cordon came down like a guillotine imprisoning her friends and leaving her on the outside with a line of burly coppers in between. Rather than give up and go home, she then spent two hours arguing, negotiating and cajoling until, worn down, the officers were finally persuaded to release her friends.
A large proportion, possibly a majority, of these young protestors was girls. Many were black or Muslim. Most were working class. They were also articulate, political, militant and reluctant to give up. I felt sorry for some of the coppers, forced into endless political debates with these angry kids about education, fees, cuts, policing, civil liberties, war and the state of the world.
S’s release at 7.30 pm was a moment of heightened emotion, of a kind I have not experienced in many years of political activity. I quickly bundled her and her friend, in states of shock, frozen and starving, into the nearest café for a hot chocolate and some food. But they didn’t come willingly. They felt guilty about leaving their friends behind.
They told me how ill people – including one person with epilepsy and another who was vomiting – were not allowed to leave. How just one portaloo was shipped in for which people had to queue at length, escorted out and then back in to the kettle, for the privilege.
Welcome to life under a coalition government, one part of which has long defined civil liberties as an immutable, core value. Ed Miliband claims to have turned his back on the Blair/Brown legacy, but not a peep of criticism has been heard from the Labour leadership.
Warmed up at home S and R told me the story of their respective days. 250 had walked out of S’s 6th form college. Well up from the handful that accompanied her for the first march a fortnight previously. And this at a college with no history of radicalism, where studiousness is the order of the day.
Like a flying picket, the group first marched to a neighbouring comprehensive school, hoping to encourage pupils there to join them and proceed into town en mass. But the head teacher had locked the gates there, barricading all the pupils in, so S and friends formed a protest outside chanting that they should be allowed to join the protest.
R was meeting her friends at the tube station – but they were confronted by police officers stationed to pick them off and send them back to school. One of her group was “arrested”, put in a police van and marched into school by unformed officers. The rest, not easily put off, had to resort to a roundabout route into town under the radar on a variety of busses.
From these and other anecdotes it seems there was a co-ordinated police campaign across London boroughs to prevent school students even reaching the march. But for this and head-teachers blockading school gates there would have been many thousand more school students in attendance.
Punitive measures have continued after the event. One 15 year old girl participant I know of was excluded for 8 days. Her older sister was given a dressing down for organising a 6th form walk out and her parents hauled up in front of the deputy head. Other parents have received stiff letters insinuating unlawfulness and neglect. Court action can’t be excluded.
As well as celebrating this upsurge in youth radicalism, students unions, trade unions and anti-cuts campaigns need to organise defence of these youngsters and their parents. The considerable public opposition to the fee increases must be harnessed allowing them the space and freedom to continue protesting as they see fit.
All this happened only a week ago, but it’s already old news. 30th November saw a further nationwide day of action, with many occupations set to continue for the foreseeable future.
The mass militancy has already had an impact. Lib Dem support is plummeting, heavily dependent as it is on young people. Its MPs are desperately seeking ways to avoid voting for the fee increase with the absurd result that Vince Cable, a government minister, has said he might abstain even though he backs it.
NUS president Aaron Porter, who first responded by denouncing “violence” and then dithered during a fortnight of local actions has been forced into a public self-criticism of his own “spinelessness” and backing for the occupations.
The school students who are so angry are the generation that stands to lose most. The vast majority will be slammed with the costs or deterred from higher and further education before any of them get a chance to vote about it, let alone be betrayed by mendacious political careerists. But this is only part of the story behind their anger.
The 14 to 18 year olds are “Blair’s children”, growing up under the shadow of New Labour education policies that were marked by authoritarianism, marketisation and a narrowing of the curriculum.
League tables, SATS and endless testing drove out the creativity, imagination, curiosity and experimentation that are a hallmark of adolescence. By the age of 10 they were being warned in stern terms that failing tests would jeopardise their future exam prospects, their chances of higher education and therefore their lives.
As a result, in contrast to older generations, young people have been placed in a continuous state of stress and anxiety about their future, forced to think about degree courses and jobs when barely into their teens. Many of their parents enjoyed education for its own sake, studied subjects because they expanded their minds and horizons and were given the freedom and space to take these precious years one step at a time.
Out on the streets today’s teenagers have had yet more to deal with. Subject to a government-generated frenzy of initiatives to control and criminalise. The notorious Anti-Social Behaviour Orders – now widely discredited – enabled senior police officers to declare gatherings of more than 2 youngsters in a public place illegal. Kids with hooded tops were prohibited from shops and other public places. School playing fields were sold off, play centres and youth clubs closed down. One shameful consequence has been the imprisonment of more children in this country than any other in Europe – including some, immigration detainees, who have done nothing wrong.
With a housing crisis, low wages, insecure jobs and “flexible working” – these children often live in crowded conditions and with parents forced to take several part time jobs. Modern family life for many – far from being a haven from school and street is marked by addictions, mental health problems, violence and teenage pregnancy rates that have placed Britain at the bottom of a UN league of advanced industrial nations in the quality of life of its children.
This philistine authoritarianism, born of neoliberal capitalist ideology, was sold to the young and the wider public as necessary preparation for work and higher education.
But then along came the economic crisis and this promised future has turned out to have been a mirage. The jobs have disappeared. Further and higher education are no longer a passport to security and employment, let alone a mythical social mobility. Indeed the message is: don’t even bother applying unless you are rich.
Youth participation in the recent protests is therefore no flash in the pan. They may be temporarily pushed back by police repression and school exclusions, but these young people will not easily give up. Neither is it surprising that many of those on the streets are working class, black and female. This is far from the “middle class” revolt that even the more sympathetic media like to portray it.
There is an understanding of how the fees hike is part of broader ideological attack on the whole concept of education. The school students didn’t have to read the Browne report, which advocated the assessment of educational value in economic terms defined by the market, to know what is in store. They know that educational choice is being blocked off and restricted down to vocation-based courses not just at university level but going right back to the beginning of Year 10, when they embark on GCSEs. And they don’t like it.
This background and the obvious fact that these young people come to political activism completely inexperienced – are all distinctive factors that mark this youth revolt out from the older student, trade union and community based anti-cuts movement. That the youth protests have been warmly welcomed across the spectrum – from national union leaders to Guardian letter writers – is very positive. But it is particularly important that the movement takes the trouble to properly understand this development and offer the right type of support.
Our job is to give encouragement, financial and material help and space to organise; and to defend them when the youths are attacked politically, legally or physically. Above all we need to ensure they have a voice and profile so that their needs, demands and priorities are listened to and become part of the wider movement.
The last thing they need is for adults or youth clones of adult groups to parachute in and organise them. They should be encouraged to continue and deepen the self-organisation they have already embarked on. This has been done before.
My own formative experiences were in the National Union of School Students in the early 1970s. In some respects the climate today is more favourable for such self-organisation. In those days teachers were largely hostile, to the point that in order to support them in a pay dispute NUSS marchers were forced to the very back of an NUT demo because we were thrown off it. CND had a large, militant and largely autonomous youth movement, YCND which was closed down when it became too radical. Similarly the Labour Party’s youth wing was periodically shut down if it became too vocal or vibrant. Right now there seems greater respect for these young people from their teachers, parents and elders. There certainly ought to be.
These school students are not just the leaders of the future. They are leaders now. Uncowed by authority or past defeats, with little to lose and much gain, they have fearlessly and at great risk shown the way.