It was celery soup, I believe, with tomato and potatoes in it. A very big pot.
The students wanted to take delivery of it, because they had been soupless
for the past three days while staging an “occupation” of the law faculty in
protest at Israel's actions in Gaza. The law professor refused to let them,
for reasons that were rather more vague but had something to do with health
and safety.
“I question your judgment!” said one protester, a disdainful young man with
sandy brown dreadlocks. “Well, I am a judge,” said the law professor. And
nobody even sniggered, except the security guards. For this was a serious
business.
For decades, student activism has been in the doldrums in this country. It is
hard to think of any large-scale student protests since busloads descended
on the capital in the late 1980s in a wave of anti-apartheid rage. But that
may be about to change. In recent weeks, British students on 24 campuses
have staged “occupations” of faculty buildings. So far, it hasn't received a
lot of coverage. Some sit-ins, such as the one at Oxford, lasted mere hours.
Others, such as at Sussex, lasted a full week. Some, such as the protests in
Edinburgh and Manchester, are ongoing.
I visited three. Oxbridge snobs will be pleased to hear that Cambridge was by
far the most impressive. The students in the Old Theatre at the London
School of Economics (LSE) were tired and ratty when I dropped by, and on the
verge of calling it a day. At King's College London, by contrast, they had
invaded a lecture theatre only that morning. When I turned up they were
holding a loud and slightly rambling meeting about what to do next.
“We need some organisation here!” shouted one North American student of war
studies. “We don't want to be here all night!” “Yes we do!” chorused
everybody else.
“Sorry,” mumbled the war student. “Slip of the tongue.”
Why had students started occupying university buildings in protest at Israel's
actions in Gaza? Tricky. Ask the students themselves and they will tell you
that, well, it was because of Israel's actions in Gaza. Only there's another
answer out there, and I reckon it's just as good. In Greece, remember,
students went on the rampage in December. In Iceland, last month, a mob all
but stormed the Parliament. Addressing a crowd in a Reykjavik cinema, Robert
Wade, the LSE economist, warned of potential large-scale civil unrest across
Europe. And then, bang on cue, the students got angry. Is it fanciful to see
this as connected?
“There is a strong contagious element in it,” says Professor Wade, now.
“Students see what has happened in Paris, or similar, on their TV screens
and are that much more inclined to do the same. It may be fairly arbitrary
as to what issue they use. The motivating force will be anxiety about
employment, or their parents' employment, their parents' ability to finance
them and so on, then becomes a matter of what is topical - Gaza, or loans,
or something else.”
Nina Fishman is an honorary research professor at the history department of
Swansea University. Her specialism is trade unions, but she was active in
the wave of student protests that rocked the LSE from 1967-69. Then, as now,
exact motivations were unclear.
Technically, the students were protesting about the appointment of a director,
Dr Walter Adams, who had links to Ian Smith's Rhodesia. But they were angry
about the Establishment, the Vietnam War and everything else.
“Vietnam was pretty hypothetical for us,” says Professor Fishman, “because, of
course, Wilson kept us out. But it was big news. What was driving us on?
Well, the French. I had friends who cycled to Paris. We were all in the
middle of our finals, but as soon as they were finished people wanted to be
there. Just because it was happening.”
Student protest was not invented in the Paris riots of 1968. “It goes back
hundreds of years, love,” says Fishman, gently. “Does 1848 mean anything to
you?”
I knew I shouldn't have packed in history after my GCSEs. Fishman means the
Spring of Nations, the wave of revolutions that swept Europe and resulted,
ultimately, in a unified Germany, the French Second Republic and kerfuffle
from Italy to Hungary to Switzerland. Students, says Fishman, were critical.
Students are always in the middle. They were there at Tiananmen Square and
they were there when the Berlin Wall came down. “They are young, idealistic
and have very little to lose,” says Fishman.
They got the soup in eventually at Cambridge, anyway, by means of a
side-stepping manoeuvre. The guy with the dreadlocks, soup champion, was
Jacob Wills, an English literature student. I catch him while he is on his
mobile phone, telling somebody the plans for the rest of the day. “There's a
vegan sushi-making workshop from six to eight,” he says, “then a class on
how to engage with the Israelis. After that I'm working on getting a band
together.”
Jacob is the Socialist Worker rep at Cambridge University, and the Stop The
War rep, too. “We couldn't have foreseen this a few weeks ago,” he says.
“Now we need to keep momentum, not just on this issue but on other ones.”
What sorts of issues? Standing next to Jacob is Decca (“just Decca, OK?”) who
is 19, blonde, reading English and wearing a Keffiyeh - the Palestinian
scarf that has become almost an icon of student rebellion. “This wave of
action is happening after an economic crisis,” she says. “We're coming to
realise that the systems that exist around us are not in the interests of
ourselves. Or those people in Palestine. It's not disconnected - if you'll
excuse my language - from the fact that we're about to get f****d.”
There is something approaching a movement here. Their views on Gaza may be
lopsided, and in my view fairly histrionic (nobody uses the word “Hamas” but
plenty use the word “apartheid”) but probe a little and you will find a
whole world-view. It's anti-capitalist, antiglobalist and ecological, and
has no innate respect for government, the media or any sort of institution,
including student unions.
The students I have spoken to tend to be uniformly scathing about the National
Union of Students (NUS). The words “supine” and “new Labour stooges” are
thrown around. True enough, look at a list of past presidents of the NUS and
the last one not to have been a member of Labour Students or the Labour
Party was our own David Aaronovitch, back in 1982 (he was a communist). Has
there even been such a thing as radical student politics since then? Only on
the fringes. A few days later, in a café by King's Cross, I meet three
student activists from the anti-airport expansion group, Plane Stupid. Dan
Glass is at the University of Strathclyde, Katrina Forrester at Cambridge
and Lucie Kinchin at Oxford.
“It's quite clear,” says Katrina, “that capitalism, globally, has failed us.
There's definitely a feeling that there must be another way.”
“Join the dots,” says Dan. “It's not that the economy is separate from climate
change, which is separate from war.There's a connection between oil in Iraq,
fossil fuels, climate change, unsustainable use and the economic crisis. And
all these things are being done in our name.”
“You have to imagine a future world that you would want to give to your
children,” says Lucie. “You can't have continuous growth in a finite world.
Millions of people don't have access to clean water, and that's going to
rise and rise. It's not about polar bears.”
“It's not just about polar bears,” says Katrina.
They're a smart bunch, this lot. Lucie talks about meeting Ed Miliband, the
Cabinet minister with the climate change brief, and is appalled, even now,
that he hadn't heard of Jim Hansen. She does not, as it turns out, mean the
guy who made the Muppets. Hansen is actually Nasa's leading climate change
scientist. A fortnight ago he told Barack Obama that he had four years to
save the planet.
Plane Stupid is a name and a network, not a group. There is no membership,
just a collection of co-operating individuals. Much like al-Qaeda? “Yes,”
says Dan. “But we don't have a Bin Laden. No man in a cave.” “We
organise non-hierarchically,” explains Katrina. They have thought about
this.
Such has been the impact of Plane Stupid that I have heard of both Dan and
Katrina already. Katrina had a mauling from the Daily Mail for flying to
meet fellow campaigners in New York last year, and Dan superglued himself to
Gordon Brown's sleeve at a reception at No 10. All three have been arrested
at various times, but Dan wasn't arrested for that. He remembers calling
fellow activists from the Downing Street toilet, after Brown had ripped
himself free. “I haven't been arrested!” he said. “I don't know what to do!”
He wandered off down Whitehall.
All the environmental activists I knew when I was a student in the 1990s were
pious, dull, wore sandals and eventually became management consultants. This
lot aren't like that at all. They are committed and outwardly normal. And,
unlike with the Gaza protesters, vast numbers of people understand their
cause and agree with it.
“I had that with my probation officer,” says Katrina. “He said to me, ‘I
wouldn't do it but somebody has to'.” If you go on a protest with Plane
Stupid - they call them “actions” - you are either in an arrestable role or
a support role, on the phone. Both Lucie and Katrina were arrested when the
group got on to the runway at Stansted in December. They won't tell me
exactly how they penetrated airport security, but they say it was easy. It
wasn't like they had to tunnel.
Fairly matter-of-factly, they tell me that they reckon the security services
monitor their e-mail and mobile phones. On protests, they say, the police
can be extremely confrontational. “They recognise us,” says Dan.
There is a cultish aspect here. A few times, each of these three will say
things that many people would find quite shocking. Democracy, they reckon,
has failed. They equate climate change deniers with Holocaust deniers. They
believe in the “four years to save the world” mantra to the extent that it
is very hard to get them to envisage what they, personally, may be doing
with their lives in more than four years' time. And, just occasionally, they
all do weird things with their hands.
The hands. Did you know about the hands? They all did it in Cambridge, too.
Nobody seems sure where it started; some say the US, others say the G8
Gleneagles protests, or the various “climate camps”. Whatever their history,
they are the tools of “consensual decision-making” - a means of making swift
progress in mass debates. Making a T-sign means that you have a technical
point. Raising both hands means that you have a response. Doing the dance
move widely known as “jazz hands” indicates agreement. This may sound
strange, but that's not my fault.
Your hardened activist can't help slipping into this sort of thing. To see the
hands in use in Cambridge, during a vicious bicker between the Gaza
protesters and a detachment of proctors in gowns and mortarboards, was like
seeing one weird tribe meet another. One side flapped around being little
teapots, like a furiously earnest dance troupe. The other wore white-tie and
silly hats, and was bemused.
Katrina Forrester tells me that consensual decision-making is a vital
component of activism. “It makes you feel empowered and like you're
contributing,” she says. “Some people think it's the main thing.” Others
feel that it's cliquey and that, if activism is ever to become a mass thing,
it has to go. There is no consensus on consensus.
Among those in the latter camp is Ed Maltby, a final-year linguist whom I meet
in Cambridge. “It's fairly esoteric,” he says. “As a new wave of people come
in, it has to become much less so. Just as Latin dropped a lot of
peculiarities when more people started speaking it, the decision-making
process will become much more straightforward. People are going to drop a
lot of activist jargon.”
Maltby is a member of a Trotskyist organisation called Alliance for Workers'
Liberty. Tall, dark hair, Northern, sideburns, he looks a bit like those old
pictures of Robert Burns. He describes himself as an “organised
revolutionary” and even calls people “comrade”. At one point, he and another
student have a minor disagreement over whether I should write down that one
of the security guards had been chuckling over the whole soup thing. The
other student didn't want to get the security guard into trouble.
Maltby insists that the guard is a worker, the proctors and professors are
bosses, and anything that sows dissent between the two has to be a good
thing. He's a bit old-school in that respect.
He is also a bit of a boffin when it comes to more recent student activism. He
talks me through the decline of the mass student movements of the 1980s and
1990s, and the way that the influence of the anti-capitalist movement was
growing just as that of the National Union of Students - with its links to
new Labour - was in decline. “Genoa,” he says. “Seattle stuff. People and
planet. Social forum movements. Not organised through unions.”
Most of the Gaza protests are over now. Most didn't get what they were after -
scholarships, expressions of support, disinvestment from the arms trade, the
rescinding of various honorary doctorates. It remains striking, though, that
anybody bothered to get out there and do anything. That's new. Or at least,
if it's old, it's back.
“The next time they close a library, the next time a popular lecturer gets
sacked or they're f*****g around with fees - the next time a big fight blows
up around these issues, people will remember the wave of stuff around Gaza
and it will inform what they do next,” says Maltby.
His point is that student activism comes in waves - and when students across
the country all take it upon themselves to start occupying faculty
buildings, that wave is evidently on the way up.
That is not to say that British studentry is about start manning the
barricades. The cafeteria at the LSE was far busier than the Old Theatre,
and there were a handful of cynics sniggering away outside the Cambridge Law
Faculty. For now, you'd still find a far greater cross-section of students
at a graduate careers fair. But pretty soon, graduate careers fairs aren't
going to be as much use as they were.
There is something out there on our campuses, brooding, and it's spoiling for
a fight. Even if only a consensual one. With jazz hands.
