Carnival of Resistance 24th Nov 2010 for National Day of Action

Nick Clegg talks to the hand

Daily Mail report and brilliant photos HERE.

The Guardian HERE

We were in the Financial Times, the Metro, on BBC News at 6 & 10pm then also the next day.

On Wednesday, what Nick Clegg intended to be a beautiful publicity stunt turned into a PR disaster when students

managed to grab the media attention. This photo I took inside 70 Whitehall demonstrates, perhaps, how scared the government are at the moment.

12 students from higher education and school students were invited to ‘discuss developing policy on the future of Higher Education Funding’ on the day that the coalition government released their report on education cuts.

He invited me, Clare Solomon, and 11 other education representatives, all of whom have colleges in Lib Dem constituencies, to what I can only describe as a sham consultation.

At 12.30 he released his report into the Brown Review. We were to meet him at 1pm. This gave us no time to download, digest and analyse the content therefore making a mockery of his attempt to pass off the meeting as though he had discussed it thoroughly with us.

Prior to the meeting we decided to write Hands Off Education on the palms of our hands a couple of us wore t-shirts with slogans on them underneath our regular clothes and managed to get past security with them concealed.

When Clegg invited the BBC to do a 3 minute panoramic shot of him looking cosy with students I was able to remove my shirt and tie and expose the message “Remember, Remember, the 3^rd of November: The Coalition Government Plot Blows Up Education’. His minders quickly tried to hide my striking t-shirt by surrounding me but I kept moving and waving my palm in the air.

This set the tone of the meeting, at which all students were very angry with Clegg, his bogus meeting and his defending of the massive cuts to education that he and his party are supporting.

Mr Clegg, along with all his Liberal Democrat colleagues, signed a pledge to vote against any rise in tuition fees. This Wednesday it was confirmed that the Deputy Prime Minister intends to break his promise and vote for fees to be trebled to £9,000 a year, despite having proposed their abolition at the general election and signing a pledge to “vote against any increase in fees.”

We demanded to know why the LibDems broke their manifesto promise of removing fees. Clegg said ‘you may live in a bubble but in the real world we have no alternative; what’s YOUR alternative then?’ he asked!! What a cheek. We told him to stop allowing companies like Vodaphone to dodge taxes, to halt the 55% pay increases for the bosses, to implement a progressive tax system across society, to stop funding war and Trident.

He said ‘that is complete nonsense’!!

When he tried to justify the loans scheme that poorer students will have to take to afford the fees one of the school students asked ‘are you saying that debt is acceptable?’

Elliot from Leeds Uni brought up the fact that Muslim students may not be able to take out loans because of the interest that is associated with the loans so large swathes of people will also not be able to afford the fees.

Elliot also pointed out that since education benefits the whole of society not just the individual who receives it (an educated society is more likely to vote, to have lower infant mortality, is more healthy etc etc) and that, therefore, it should not be the individual that pays. We need to push for progressive taxation across the whole of society so that the rich pay more tax and the poor less. This is the only fair way to fund the best education system.
We told him that we are committed to fighting both the cuts to education and to wider society and also against fees. We told him about the NUS & UCU demo; and we told him we will be hounding the LibDems wherever they go (like the EducCamp students in London have been doing to Vince Cable)

See you on November 10^th. Don’t forget the Big Demo and Breakfast at ULU from 8am, banner & placard making and student press conference at 10.15 all at ULU. Ask your coach to drop you at Mallet St.

Email campaigns@ulu.lon.ac.uk to book your breakfast. We have over 1,200 booked in so far so make sure you let me know asap.

see: http://ulucampaigner.wordpress.com

See more videos on this playlist: http://www.youtube.com/my_playlists?p=5A612FD02298763C

Fees rise to £9k, 100% cut to Arts & H-tell me ur protest details by 1-2pm...

Remember, remember, the 3rd of November. And I'm going to parliament! I've just heard that 20 coaches from Sheffield University are fully booked up for the demo next Wednesday. If this is representative Nov 10th will be the biggest anti-cuts demo yet. The uprising starts here and with the students...send me photos of your protests today so I can tell the government!

Fees to rise to £9k, 100% cut to Arts & Humanities funding and much worse.

This is the beginning of the proverbial nail in the coffin.

We need huge response from students today.

As you may know, I've been invited to Nick Cleggs office today. I need msgs from students and unions by 1-2pm about what your response is.

Hold a flash protest or more at 1pm today, email, twitter, Facebook, leaflet if poss etc to get as many people out on the streets, shout at something, make some visuals, a3 paper makes a simple placard!

Dress up in funeral black. Paint messages on your hands/face/Walls and anything visual.

Send photos/videos to me atc.Solomon@ulu.lon.ac.uk by 1-2pmand/or by text on both 07850177637 and07535629289 so I can inform media at Parliament. Spread the news.

Sent from my iPhone

t 07850 177 637

w www.ulucampaigner.wordpress.com

w www.counterfire.org

Westminster occupy over fees and cuts

Read more at my ULU Campaigner blog .

Take Back Education teach in at KCL this Saturday.

There is an unprecedented attack on tertiary education with cuts estimated as high as £2.5bn - or 1/3 of total HE funding. Upwards of 14,000 jobs could be in the firing line and many institutions could close altogether. We need a united campaign, not just to save jobs but also to defend education.

3 days left 'til the teach-in – share this message with everyone you know:

TAKE BACK EDUCATION: A TEACH-IN TO BUILD THE RESISTANCE:
THIS SATURDAY 27 FEBRUARY 11AM-4PM, KINGS COLLEGE LONDON

Tickets available at http://educationactionlondon.blogspot.com/
(£6 waged, £3 unwaged)

The No Cuts @ King's campaign and King's UCU are hosting a mass teach-in this Saturday. The event is aimed at both students and education workers from across the country and will be full of alternative lectures and tutorials. Hundreds are signed up already; make sure you're there too!

Sessions include:

• The crisis in our universities and the battle for education
• The tasks ahead – building resistance that can win
• The corporate takeover of our universities
• Reclaiming our students' unions
• Education for liberation – what could our education look like?
• Education for all – challenging Islamophobia, racism and points based immigration
• 1968 – what can we learn from the fire last time?

The line up includes:

• Terry Eagleton – literary critic
• Alison Lord – UCU branch chair from the victorious campaign to stop cuts at Tower Hamlets college
• Michael Rosen – poet and education campaigner
• Jeremy Corbyn MP – member of Parliament for Islington North
• Nikos Lountos – activist from Greece
• Alex Callinicos – author of Education in a Neoliberal World and professor at Kings College London
• Daf Adley & James Haywood – NUS Executive
• Juan Carlos Piedra – Justice for Cleaners
• Stathis Kouvelakis – Lecturer and author
• Lesley McGorrigan – Officer at Leeds University UCU who are striking against cuts
• Mike Gonzalez – 1968 activist and author
• Patrick Ainley – author of Education Make You Fick Innit
• Sarah Young – student from Sussex University occupation
• Gargi Bhattacharyya – author and professor of sociology
• Assed Baig & Tara Hewitt – students union officers
• Jim Wolfreys – president King’s College London UCU

Croatian occupation-Money for Education not for the army

Cross posted from infinite thØught blog. Thanks for the great report.

Invited to give a paper at the occupied Philosophy faculty, we arrived on day 31 of the protest. The first striking thing about the occupation, to protest against the introduction of tuition fees, is its sheer size. Unlike Philosophy departments in the UK, often small addenda to larger Humanities or Social Science schools, here Philosophy is truly the Queen of the Sciences. As such, Philosophy at Zagreb includes all humanities and most social science subjects, and the faculty is made up of somewhere between 6000-7000 students. The occupation is not only huge in terms of the size of the buildings, but also in terms of the number of students still there, even after a month. The protests started after the government proposal was discussed and an occupation was proposed by a Capital reading group (although there is some dispute as to whether this is where the original idea came from - no matter, it happened). The occupation has received widespread media coverage.

Read more HERE

Record of protests as part of the international day of action so far

http://www.emancipating-education-for-all.org/content/record-protests-part-international-day-action-so-far

Report back from Another Education is Possible conference

Over 170 delegates participated throughout the day in the various workshops and debates. The overwhelming feeling of delegates was that we need an urgent response to the crisis in our education system. The NUS is not going to act to mobilise students so we need to fill that gap and start to rebuild the student movement from below. In this spirit the conference passed the founding statement and three amendments focused on action. Below are the initiatives called by the conference and the results of the committee elections.

Emergency Demonstration - 3pm on Friday the 14^th of November

Assemble outside Westminster Cathedral, Victoria Street (5 minutes from Victoria station)

Tax the rich to fund…

• FREE EDUCATION & LIVING GRANTS FOR ALL
• £200 million “missing” from the governments budget for higher education but Billions in bail outs for the bankers

We have seen year-on-year attacks on our right for an education. The latest are cuts to thousands of student grants after a £200 million short-fall from the Department of Innovation, Universities and Skills. This comes only a few weeks after the government promised to bail out bankers with billions of tax payer’s money.

(Publicity will be out in the next few days)

For a National Student Demonstration (25^th of Feburary)

The existing calls for a national demonstration are positive and need to be turned into real activity on the ground. The conference agreed to call the demonstration for Wednesday the 25^th of February assembling at ULU. The demonstration will then be in run up to the government announcing its new budget.

The conference also committed itself to organising an open meeting to discuss the demonstration and take the organisation of it to the next level. The steering committee will meet soon to put together an event where we can both launch the demonstration and draw together as many activists as possible to organise mobilising for it.

A National Tour

The conference noted that many high profile figures support our call to build a student movement for free education. The steering committee will organise contact speakers to organise meetings across the country to discuss what is happening to our education and organise action to defend it.

Election Results:

The following committee was elected:

Chair: Damiani Sourmaidou

Secretary: Yousuf Joondan

Convener: Dominic Kavakeb

Treasurer: Jenny Jones

Communications: Rob Owen

Block of ten:

Tom Wills (Sussex)

Bonolo Woracker (Coventry)

Zakeera Suffee (Essex)

Mpegwa Mwakang'ata (SOAS)

James Norrie (Oxford)

Alison Smith (Plymouth)

Siobhan Brown (Manchester)

James Foley (Glasgow)

Ben Sellers (SOAS)

Matt Vicary (Sheffield Hallam)

Irish students protest over uni reforms

Irish students protest over uni reforms, originally uploaded by solomonsmfield.

Photograph: Dara Mac Dónaill

STUDENTS MARCH: STUDENT protesters brought traffic to a standstill in Dublin city centre yesterday afternoon as an estimated 15,000 young people took to the streets to voice concern about the potential reintroduction of third-level fees.

Students gathered in Parnell Square at lunchtime ahead of the march, which culmintated with a rally outside Leinster House where the protesters were addressed by student leaders and opposition politicians.

The students cited budgetary cutbacks in the education sector, a €600 increase to the annual student registration charge announced in the Budget and recent comments by Education Minister Batt O'Keeffe on the possible reintroduction of third-level fees as the fuel for their protest.

The protest was organised by the Union of Students in Ireland (USI), the representative body of some 250,000 third-level attendees in the State.

USI president Shane Kelly said he was delighted with the response of students, which he said was one of the largest student protests in years.

Read more here.

Another Education is Possible conference-sign up now

Sign up HERE

Conference Agenda 1st November

11 – 11.30 am Registration:
Registration desk will be inside the foyer of the main SOAS Building. If you have not yet paid you will be asked for a £5 fee to receive your ticket

11.30 – 12.30 pm Opening Session: Education in a Neoliberal World:
Room G2 (on left handside of SOAS reception desk)

• Paul Mackney, former joint General Secretary of University and College Union
• Italian Student, activist from the occupation of Rome University. Witness to the wave of occupations and protests sweeping Italy.
• Alex Callinicos, Author of “Education in a neoliberal world”
• Stalin Vermudez, victimised cleaners leader and SOAS Unison branch chair

12.30 – 1pm Lunch break: Home made Ugandan food will be served for a suggested price of £4. All proceeds will gotowards the cost of educating refugee children.

1 – 2.30 pm Workshops:

Fighting Racism and Fascism (Room G2)

• Brian Richardson, ‘Tell it like it is’ campaign on racism in education.
• MC’s Lo Key and Bashy, leading UK grime artists involved in Love Music Hate Racism
• Assed Baig, Staffordshire Student Union Exective

Stopping Climate Chaos (Room G50)

• Phil Thornhill, Campaign against Climate Change
• Alison Smith, VP Education and Welfare Plymouth SU

Anti war, Troops Out Now (Room G51)

• Andrew Murray, Stop the War coalition
• George Solomou, Former Soldier involved in Military Families against the War
• Noreen Fatima, Student at London Met University

Recession and Resistance (Room G52)

• Ben Sellers, SOAS Justice for Cleaners and Co President SOAS SU
• Sean Vernell, UCU Left activist and member of UCU National Executive (pc)
• PCS branch secretary on how we can support the PCS strikes

2.45 – 4.15 The future of the student movement - What sort of NUS do we need?
Room G2
Wes Streeting, NUS National President Vs Rob Owen, NUS National Executive

4.30 – 5.30: Closing Session: Building a democratic, campaigning student movement
Room G2, Chair: Ben Sellers

Italian students protest Uni reforms

Italian students protest Uni reforms

Written by Kasia Mychajlowycz

Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi threatened to call in the police to break up the week-long student demonstrations and protests that have been taking place across Italy in opposition to his conservative government’s planned reforms of primary and university-level education in the country. According to the Associated Press, “thousands” of students - up to thirty thousand, by one estimate - conducted sit-ins, demonstrations and marches throughout last week. Since the beginning of term, political unrest amongst university students has disrupted classes, with some students skipping class for weeks in protest. Even some teachers have joined the students and begun conducting lectures in the streets and squares, reported AP. Primary school staff plan a general strike next Thursday, while higher education faculty are to strike on November 14. The main march on Thursday saw secondary school and university students marching from Sapienza University in Rome to the Senate, where members of the government were voting on the reforms. If passed, universities and secondary schools will see drastic budget and job cuts to conform to the national budget set in August, which called for a €7.8 billion cut in state-run schools over the next four years. In the lower schools, elementary students will have the same teacher over five years, and could fail a grade for poor conduct. Both the Italian Carabinieri and Rome’s police force had a heavy presence during the demonstration. On Friday morning, PM Berlusconi threatened to order police to break up the sit-ins and demonstrations, stating that he “will not tolerate schools and universities being occupied”. Organizers of the protests, in particular Italy’s student union (Unione degli Universitari), said that they have no plans to cease the demonstrations until the reforms are voted down by the Senate, stating defiantly in one press release “The mobilisation not only continues, it is growing”.

Another Education is Possible conference-sign up now

Italian Students have led a wave of occupations and protests against the neoliberal cuts in the face of the economic crisis. Students and lecturers have united with such force that the government is debating sending in the state to break up the occupations. Student strike waves are shaking Greece and Ireland as we write this. Governments are reshaping our universities to fit the needs of capital and we need to be part of the fight back; we need to start to pull together the nucleus of a movement at home that can replicate the same sort of action at home.

The crisis of capitalism is ripping through all areas of the welfare state and working class life. We need to fight on every front in solidarity with workers while remembering the main fight is where we are.

Our starting point is rally our forces nationally at the Another Education is Possible Conference on Saturday 1st.

Unprecedented debt and no jobs for the class of 2008

Found this in the Times Online. Wish I had time to write something on this myself like " der, what do you expect?"-maybe tomorrow...

The class of 2008 faces unprecedented levels of debt and is struggling to find jobs as the credit crunch takes hold.

Students who graduated from university this summer have apparently never have had it so bad. Many borrowed tens of thousands of pounds in student loans on the assumption that they would walk into well-paid employment.

But graduate recruitment has been suspended or reduced by some companies as they struggle to stay afloat. Rather than taking their first step on to the career ladder, graduates are instead moving back in with their parents and accruing interest on debts as they look for work.

One graduate from the London School of Economics said: “I thought after I got a masters degree from a world-renowned school that I would have an easier time finding a job. I was wrong....

Read more here