Comment: A coalition of alienation?
The violence at Millbank has alienated the very people who should be working with students to fight government cuts.
By Matthew Champion
It seems hard to believe now but just a few hours before Gordon Brown left Downing Street on May 11th there was still genuine faith that a progressive coalition could be formed between Labour, the Lib Dems, Scottish and Welsh nationalists and Green MP Caroline Lucas.
The hoped-for scenario for us on the left was of a rainbow alliance that could keep the Tories out of office for a generation through electoral reform. It was undone by major discontent from senior Labour and Lib Dem figures – the would-be progressive coalition’s principal actors. The adage that the political spectrum widens as you head left, compared to a narrowing of ideologies on the right, was proven correct.
On Tuesday the Tories and Lib Dems faced the greatest public challenge to the work of the coalition when around 50,000 students – myself included – and lecturers marched in London against cuts to higher education and a proposed £9,000-a-year upper limit on tuition fees. It was, according to NUS president Aaron Porter, the largest student protest in a generation.
But returning to the library after the afternoon’s rally I learned the march had been overshadowed in the eyes of many by around one-fiftieth of the protestors besieging Millbank Tower and 30 Millbank, Tory campaign HQ.
The extensive coverage of the violent scenes witnessed there eclipsed not only an overwhelmingly peaceful rally but the powerful subtext of the wider context of the tuition fees row.
Drastic reductions to state funding of UK universities at a time of rapidly rising fees is unavoidably connected to the programme of cuts unveiled by George Osborne in last month’s comprehensive spending review.
The response to the cuts has been overwhelmingly gloomy, with the government itself admitting that just about everyone in the UK will be worse off in the short-run, albeit with the caveat that the cuts are necessary to safeguard the country’s economic future.
But no matter how miniscule the analysis of how individuals will be affected, the basic accusation levied against the coalition that the cuts are unfairly targeting those worst off is sound: people with lower incomes have greater need of public services.
This argument does not, however, translate perfectly into the furore over higher education; an emotive issue made even more so by the fact that the majority of student marchers voted Lib Dem in May not only on Nick Clegg’s pre-election promise to vote against a rise in the tuition fees cap but on the basis of that party’s longstanding ideological objection to tuition fees in the first place.
Rises in tuition fees are not as black and white in terms of unfairness as severe cuts to housing benefit, although many people on today’s march would (and did) disagree with me on this. World-class universally-free university education is not practical and the record levels of graduate unemployment in the wake of the recession were a testament to the false message that university was a cure-all symptom for every school-leaver.
But it’s hard to get that across in a placard or via a chant, just as it is difficult to explain through the medium of march to onlookers or TV viewers that the flat-rate £9,000-per-year fees will hit humanities and modern languages students the hardest as opposed to the more heavily-subsidised subjects such as chemistry or economics.
It is likely that the vast majority of those marching will not be directly affected by the intended rise in fees, most having already completed their studies or about to do so, and that’s one of the reasons why Tuesday’s protest had such potential in providing the first glimpse of a truly-unified front against a programme of extreme cuts that places the individual in the firing line rather than the favourable tax conditions and outright avoidance schemes that prevail in the UK.
The student march coincided with David Cameron taking a bloated trade delegation to China, and as he toasted champagne with leaders in Beijing what could have been the start of a united, concerted effort against the cuts to welfare and public services was being undone by a violent minority at the site of the prime minister’s own party campaign HQ.
The hundreds who blockaded Millbank, the scores who burned placards and the few who smashed windows distracted attention, media and otherwise, away from the march itself, including speeches outside Tate Britain from the presidents of the NUS and University and College Union, as well as the deputy TUC general secretary. In a mirror image of the coverage of the G20 protests in 2009 the entire culmination of the demonstrators’ argument was obscured by broken glass.
And that’s why Tuesday represented such a missed opportunity. It took 50,000 students and lecturers to present the first significant public challenge to the coalition government, students and lecturers who are informally part of the ‘Coalition of Resistance’, founded in August as a broad national campaign against the looming cuts.
The misguided minority at Millbank might have thought their actions were unifying but they were engaging in exactly the opposite; acts of alienation that distance the student movement from the pensioners, jobless, union members, low income families, single parents and so forth who stand to lose out.
It was gloriously sunny in Westminster while students marched, but the much sought-after rainbow alliance now seems that little bit further away.
Matthew Champion is a postgraduate student at the School of Oriental and African Studies and a freelance journalist based in London
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