Tory–Whig coalition, one half of that bargain – the expansion of education that accompanied its part-privatization – has disappeared, and we’re now witnessing the fallout. So it’s worth keeping New Labour’s student architecture – desperately private, paranoid, gated, restricted, securitized – in mind when you consider the dozens of occupations of universities and public buildings that were such an important part of the student protests. Implicitly or explicitly, this is the kind of space they are reacting against. A protest against the coalition, to be sure; but it’s also a magnificent rejection of the fear, quietism and atomization that was the result of earlier policies. Their use of space is equally fearless.
The first major explosion around the programme of drastic education cuts – well before the trebling of fees was announced – was at the University of Middlesex in April 2010. The coalition’s aggressively philistine and class-driven rhetoric was amply foreshadowed here, in the closing of the college’s most successful programme: its Continental Philosophy department, a programme encouraging critical thinking which was clearly considered surplus to requirements at an ex-Polytechnic orienting itself towards Business, or lucrative overseas campuses in Dubai and Mauritius, spreading itself to the ‘emerging economies’ like any architectural firm. The interesting thing about Middlesex University is how totally decentralized and suburban it is, a series of disconnected outposts in several outer North London boroughs, and it’s just possible the various actions suggest what can, and possibly can’t, be done to politicize these places, so far from the metropolitan idea of protest as something which happens in highly symbolic central locations (Parliament Square, Whitehall, Millbank). The first occupation took place at Trent Park, the campus where the Philosophy Department was based, in one of those places where the ‘green belt’ instituted around London in the 1930s can be seen to not be entirely fictional. The advertisements for Middlesex courses at nearby tube stations are a literal facialization of the neoliberal student as a series of demands, alternately hedonistic and utilitarian, and always grimly conformist. Headed by ‘I want to be more employable’, it continues thus: ‘I want to be the best. I want to do my own thing. I want to excel. I want to go to the gym. I want to study business law. I want to see West End shows. I want business sponsorship.’ And with particular bathos: ‘I want to see what’s possible.’
For over a week, Trent Park became a ‘Transversal Space’, which is to say a Free University, with speeches and actions taking place inside the usual University spaces. The thing with Middlesex, and what made it so unlike occupations at SOAS or LSE, is that the place is already the model of the neoliberal university – totally dispersed, totally atomized, with no particular Traditions of Glorious Rebellion. If, as Mark Fisher argued in his book Capitalist Realism, the 2006 student protests over employment laws in France were easily presented as conservative attempts to retain privileges, Middlesex, and the protests of winter 2010, are the exact opposite – rather, they are what happens when an already neoliberalized student body tries to politicize itself. If, as Middlesex Occupation banners insisted, this particular University is a factory, like the factory it has learnt one of the principal lessons of the twentieth century – if you want to avoid conflict, decentralize, get out as far away from the (imagined) centres of power as possible, disappear from public view, and make the question of who actually holds power as opaque as possible.
The second part of the actions which I saw some of was a rally in Hendon, an area which is somewhat less exurban, and where you can actually walk to the campus, from Hendon Central tube. The University’s administrative offices sit opposite some particularly horrible developer-led student housing; the guilty party here is ‘Servite Homes’, who are just one letter away from accuracy. At Hendon, something seemingly familiar – a rally – was used as a convenient cover, a means of convincing authority that this was a situation they understood and could deal with easily, until it mutated into one they didn’t like one bit. In short, the event consisted of several speakers whose interventions were quickly followed by the instruction to ‘take the squares’, meaning the grass squares in front of the University, and set up a Tent Park, aka a ‘Camp for Displaced Academics’. The purpose of this seemed pretty opaque until students started erecting the tents on the space – several small ones to sleep in, and one large marquee, which was then draped with political banners, ranging from direct slogans, oblique pronouncements and at one point, some art-historical point-making, with banners adapting imagery from Paul McCarthy and others. The Middlesex protests ended in a partial victory, with the Philosophy Department and most of its students being taken on by (the equally suburban ex-Poly) Kingston University.
The tactics of surprise and spectacle used at Middlesex have a clear correspondence with those used by later Occupiers, albeit on a much larger scale. At the first major occupation, at the School of Oriental and African Studies, it was especially interesting to see the movement dealing with such a central location, right next to Russell Square, where it was much easier to reach a public of some sort than it was in Trent Park; the place has long had the feel of an activist enclave, and a large banner reading ‘THIS HAS JUST BEGUN’ flew for some time in front of the college. Somewhat larger, and for that and other reasons the focus of much of the publicity, was the Occupation of University College London, at the other end of Bloomsbury. As fans of Michel Foucault would appreciate, they picked the capacious Jeremy Bentham Room for their operational base (‘Jeremy Says No!’ read one poster, depicting the eighteenth-century thinker; adjacent was another poster reading ‘Jeremy Also Says Panopticon’). The Slade, just opposite, soon followed them into occupation, as did countless other universities up and down the country, and both SOAS and UCL had a board listing those which had come out.
The spatial politics of the occupations themselves are obviously worth considering. From what I could see at UCL, the ten days of hundreds of people sleeping together in one very large room had brought a certain intensity to the proceedings, and had shown how much this was becoming not just a campaign to bring down a singularly grotesque millionaires’ austerity government, but also to imagine a new kind of everyday life. I was invited to speak here about student housing and the awfulness thereof. Afterwards, one of the assembled students said something along the lines of ‘Yes, we know that’s awful, you don’t need to tell us – but we’re here creating something different, something positive, by ourselves. We’re living our ideas.’ It later transpired that the young man in question was a former Conservative who had worked for a while in the office of David Miliband, before getting radicalized. Let’s not forget that under New Labour, the front bench was largely occupied by Russell Group-educated student firebrands.
The student movement would have been of little interest if it were just confined to what is undeniably an elite university. What the UCL occupation were extremely adept at, however, was the use of both social media and the space itself to publicize their cause. Not only were they impressively media-savvy – in one corner of the room, a round table dotted with laptops, which bore the label ‘RESPONSE’, people were constantly sending out communiqués on Twitter and elsewhere – but they were also keen to use the space around to draw attention to their demands and those of the student movement in general. This was the rationale behind their involvement in UK Uncut pickets of Vodafone (who allegedly recently evaded £6 billion in tax) and of TopShop (whose boss Philip Green is both a prolific tax avoider and a coalition adviser, making a nonsense of the already outrageous slogan ‘We’re all in this together’). It was also the rationale behind one of their more inspired actions, a temporary occupation of Euston Station, where they also produced a parodic Evening Substandard, pre-empting the media’s hostility to them.
The student movement was astute in trying to avoid the tedium and predictability that marred the previous decade of protest in the UK, from the polite and for all its numbers easily ignored Stop the War protests in 2003, to the various sparsely attended ‘Carnivals against Capitalism’, usually easily ‘kettled’ and beaten by the police. On marches the students adopted tactics to avoid police kettles, leading to a chase through the streets of London on ‘Day X 2’, and many refused to follow the prescribed route into pre-prepared holding pens. By now, we know the response to this – the carnage
