The new age of student protest

Students have been staging sit-ins at campuses across the UK in protest against education cuts. Patrick Kingsley visited three and discovered a powerful coalition

Longhaired and big-booted, revolutionary socialist Luke stands up in front of a meeting at the Leeds university occupation, and prepares to speak.

"Comrades . . ." Luke begins – and, from the back of this lecture theatre filled with 200 undergraduates, school students, trade unionists and parents, comes an instant, shouted response.

"DON'T CALL ME COMRADE."

It's a familiar exchange. All afternoon at this meeting of the Leeds general assembly against education cuts, activists of all ages, backgrounds and political stripes have been needling each other. They've gathered here with one goal – to decide how they will escalate their protest against the rise in tuition fees and the scrapping of the Education Maintenance Allowance (a campaign that continues with tomorrow's national day of action) – but sometimes they're sidetracked by ideological difference.

"We can't afford to alienate people with different theoretical backgrounds," says one speaker. "We can run this country by ourselves – we don't need capitalism to do it for us," says the next. The trade union movement stands shoulder to shoulder with the students, argues a local unionist. The trade unions are a spent force, counters a member of Socialist Equality. And while the Greek who opens with "Hello everybody, I'm from Greece" gets a cheer from a doctrinaire section of the crowd, the postgraduate who responds with "I don't have a political allegiance" wins applause from another.

It would be easy to view this bickering as disheartening. But what I think I'm witnessing at Leeds – one of three occupations I visited last week – is not a fragmentation, but an embryonic coagulation of disparate groups, in a grassroots social movement the breadth of which some feel we have not seen since the late 1960s. Leeds is but one of 34 universities and colleges which over the past seven days have been occupied by students, schoolchildren, lecturers and union members in protest at the rise in tuition fees and scrapping of EMA. Some occupations have since ended – Oxford's takeover of the Bodleian library was curtailed when police used a battering ram to smash an inner wall of the building – but 15 continued yesterday.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2010/nov/29/new-age-of-student-protest

Revolution begins with self-criticism.

the sit-ins, shutting down UCSD and the conversations, all those conversations about real things and the effect they had on us.

Somewhere between nil and none?

Same old.

The charge of horse into idealist young people will allow them to bring marbles tomorrow.

The government started to ratchet it up, so there will be a response.

Smacking idealists down might mean that there is something worth standing up for.