Debunking the Daily Mail Myths

There is a ‘common sense’ view that currently prevails in the UK about university education.  I’m calling it the ‘Daily Mail’ view.  It consists of three myths:

1. Too many students go to university.

2. Too many people have degrees making it harder to find skilled jobs for everyone.  A degree is paradoxically essential and useless.

3. Most students waste their time at uni drinking, partying, getting STDs and not really doing much work – all at the taxpayers’ expense.

In conversations about the protests, I have encountered all of these arguments.  They are all myths.  Here, I want to provide you with the counter-arguments so that next time you come across one of these myths, you will know how to destroy it.

Myth 1 – Too many students go to university

Thinking that too many students go to university represents a particular view of education.  For proponents of this view, education has purely instrumental value.  The value of education is its ability to lead to a job and generate economic growth.  This logic is repeatedly asserted in the Browne Report.

The ability of a university degree to get a person a job and improve economic growth is only one of its values.  Education has further instrumental values.  People with higher levels of education are more likely to be healthy and to be satisfied with their work and leisure time.  Education creates citizens who are publicly engaged – the higher the level of education, the more likely a person is to vote and to volunteer (i.e. take part in Cameron’s ‘Big Society’).

Education makes society safer.  More than 50% of male offenders and 71% of female offenders in the UK have no qualifications.  Nearly half of prisoners have literacy skills below level 1 and 65% have numeracy skills below level 1.  Education improves a person’s chances in life and sense of self-worth, making it less likely they will turn to crime.  Also, education can generate a new start for those in prison: skills, training and knowledge can turn lives around.  As Victor Hugo put it, “He who opens a school door, closes a prison.”

However, education has more than mere instrumental value – it has intrinsic value.  It is a good in itself.  The value of education cannot be quantified.  Education does more than prepare a young person for a particular job, or provide a means to a safer society or a more engaged citizenry.  Lest we forget…

Universities are for education not job preparation.

Many people study for a degree out of interest or curiosity.  A degree in Art History or American Literature, for example, could be a way of exploring a life-long interest in the subject.  This is particularly true of mature student, who aren’t necessarily doing a degree for career advancement but out of interest.  With tuition fees rising to £9000 a year for undergraduate study, what mature students will burden themselves with that debt if they have a family to look after or a mortgage to pay?  A degree will become a luxury that only rich curious people can afford.

I want to point out that this is not an elitist argument; I am not saying that people with higher education are somehow better.  The point is, everyone should have the choice to partake in higher education.  People learn in different ways and university isn’t for everyone.  But universities are sites of learning from which nobody should be excluded, and they certainly shouldn’t be excluded because they can’t afford it.  Education benefits the individual and society: it should be encouraged and it should be accessible for everyone.

Myth 2 – Too many degrees distorts the jobs market

It does seem to be true that employers increasingly require candidates to have a degree, and yet lots of people with degrees can’t get jobs.  Any graduate scrambling around for whatever temp or bar work they can get will attest to this.  But there are two points here.

Firstly, we’re in a recession! Getting a job is hard for everybody.  Degree or no degree, it’s tough out there.  And unfortunately, this is only going to get worse.  With the government slashing public sector jobs, redundancies are going to be a big feature of 2011 – mainly redundancies for women as they make up the majority of public sector, part-time and temporary workers.  Not only that, but the drastic cuts are going to slow economic growth because there will be higher unemployment, therefore less people paying tax and spending money, making overall recovery slower.  If the government invested in job creation (Keynesian economics 101) we would get out of recession quicker.

Also, recent graduates are finding it hard to get work not because they have a degree, but because they don’t have enough work experience.  This is due to age, not educational attainment.  This is why the young get hit hard in a recession.  You could reply that young people should therefore spend less time in education and get into the job market quicker, but this leads to my second point…

My argument in the previous section was that education is about learning not job preparation.  Students get value from their degree that doesn’t necessarily translate into getting a job…

There is no such thing as too many degrees!

And anyway, if people stopped going to university and went into the job market quicker, the job market would still be saturated, just with less qualified people.

Myth 3 – University students are just out for a piss-up

Dismissing students as sponging layabouts in contrast to hard-working “tax-payers” is typical of late-capitalist society.  This devaluation of the role of ‘student’ finds parallels in the devaluation of other social groups.  For example, single mothers that live on state benefits are viewed as spongers depending on the welfare state, having increasing numbers of children just to exploit well-meaning tax-payer.  Not only that, but they’re probably committing benefit fraud, just to screw the middle-classes even further.

In late capitalist societies, where the market economy is valued above all else, any activity that is founded in a different value-system from “the bottom-line” is considered deviant, unwanted and unsuccessful.  Hence child-rearing (an obviously essential part of any society if it is to reproduce itself) is assigned a second-class status.  Similarly, studying (an activity based on intellectual or personal development) is deemed a parasite on society.  Learning?  Thinking critically?  Creativity?  Why would we want that?

This is unless, of course, education is re-conceptualised as a necessary evil that citizens endure before becoming profit-producing members of the formal economy.  If we re-conceive education in these terms it becomes useful to market capitalism.  And if going to university is extortionately expensive, only those members of society who are economically profitable can afford it; hence eliminating the unwanted elements from social advancement (economically unproductive reproducers, artists and thinkers).  This is exactly how the Browne Report perceives education.

The status war against certain groups is, therefore, unsurprising.  Undermining students supports the government’s argument for restructuring economic distribution – why would such a non-valuable group as students require state support?  If they are “successful” enough (i.e. earn enough money) they’ll be able to pay for their own education.

To fight this insidious tactic…

Students must reassert their value.

We have to find confidence in the work that we do and maintain both its intrinsic value and the value it has socially.  It is true that there are students who are just out for a good time.  But they get kicked out, or get terrible grades which bites-them-in-the-ass in the job market or if they want to study further.  I have worked extremely hard for my education.  And I defy anyone to study fulltime and work two jobs, and tell me that’s an easy life.

So, there you have it.  The Daily Mail myths are founded in an instrumental, economistic view of education (surprise, surprise!).  This short-sightedness is a product of our era.  But we must resist it.  Next time you have these myths beaten down your throat, you will know how to fight back!

Reply to Sunder Katwala

I drafted my post on NetrootsUK yesterday before I had read Sunder Katwala’s article for Liberal Conpiracy.   In this post, Sunder refers to my intervention in the opening plenary as follows:

The argument “we must have complete unity – and we will get there on the basis of everybody agreeing with me” will be futile, whether it is made by Alan Johnson, Brendan Barber, Caroline Lucas, Sunder Katwala, Laurie Penny or indeed SWP-style perspectives, perhaps captured by the passionately anti-Labour speaker from the floor, who lambasted Labour as a complete sell-out over Iraq and everything else, before saying “Of course, we want Left Unity but it will have to be about Labour coming to us”.

Now, a few clarifications:

1. I am not a member of the SWP.  I am not affiliated with any political party.  Nor do I think being a member of the SWP should be a put-down.

2. I have advocated the need to respect our differences in my post today, in my previous blog post, to anyone who has spoken to me throughout the duration of the movement, and I will continue to do so until the end.  This is because I believe in pluralism.

3. In the plenary, it seemed to me like everyone was singing from the same hymn-sheet, ‘join Labour.’  As Sunder has pointed out in his reply to Guy Aitchson, his approach was more nuanced than this (you can read his response here).

However, I wasn’t directly replying to Sunder’s comments.  I was replying to someone in the audience who stood up and said ‘we should all join the Labour party,’ after someone else in the audience had said we should join Labour.  I challenged this statement because I don’t agree that is the way forward.  I don’t want to go into the ins-and-outs of what I think about Labour here, as I will reflect more thoughtfully on that in another post.  The point I want to make here is that we should be given the space and support to hold different views.  I was perfectly entitled to stand up and question the assertion that we should join Labour.  The round of applause I got (the loudest in the plenary) suggested many others agreed with me.

Sunder’s argument is that he accepts difference and he writes, “disagreement with respect is going to work better where we can disagree on the basis of what people are actually arguing, rather than to caricature or misrepresent arguments.”  So why try to dismiss my views as incoherent, SWP-type rhetoric?  However, Sunder has admitted that characterising me as an SWP member was a mistake.  I’m glad he has recognised that it’s inconsistent to advocate pluralism whilst trying to dismiss my comments in this way.   He has argued instead that his issue is with the content of my comment.  So…

4. This is what I actually said (although I’m basing this on my poor memory so if there is video footage and someone can send me the link that would be great): “Why should we vote Labour?  All of us here marched against the war on Iraq and they completely ignored us.  And it’s not just Iraq and Afghanistan, but child detention and the 10p tax…  And where is Ed Miliband?  He’s shown no support for the student movement and he hasn’t provided any kind of opposition in Parliament.  Left unity is important.  But Labour doesn’t represent us.  We are representing ourselves.  We have our own campaign and if Labour want a piece of it, they can come to us.”

5. This is what I meant – On Iraq, I meant that Labour ignored popular opinion, so why should we trust them to listen to and represent protest movements now?  I brought in child detention and the 10p tax to highlight Labour’s anti-left-wing policies (I should have also mentioned tuition fees).  I questioned what Ed Miliband is doing because he hasn’t shown any support to the movement and hasn’t represented our views in Parliament at all.  I said that left unity is important because I believe that factionalisation could be the death of the movement, as I have stated elsewhere.  But unity doesn’t mean joining the Labour party.  If Labour wants that to be what unity means they have to show some interest in the protests, show that they care about what we’re saying and doing, recognise us, support us, and prove to us we can trust them to actually take our anti-cuts stance onboard rather than to co-opt and dilute it.  And I stand by all of this.

Sunder has pointed out that he wants to reject two types of view: ‘everyone must get behind Labour and Labour’s plan’ or ‘anybody who joins Labour is part of the problem, not the solution.’  I agree.  I’m not saying that anyone who joins Labour is part of the problem.  But in that meeting no-one was saying anything about Labour’s mistakes and short-comings.  It was part of the debate that needed to be brought to the group’s attention.  I’m not going to dismiss anyone out-of-hand that joins Labour, but equally they shouldn’t dismiss me for not wanting to join Labour.

One final point… Many people came up to me during the conference and thanked me for what I said because it was exactly what they were thinking, and they were glad I had the confidence to say it.  We talked in the session on gender equality about the intimidation women activists receive online just for daring to speak out.  I am not suggesting any of Sunder’s comments were intimidating, but I want to point out to everyone that if we are going to encourage more women, people from disadvantaged groups and people who are under-confident for whatever reason to get involved, singling individuals out for critique is not the way to do it.  I think we should all bear this in mind.

Lessons from NetrootsUK

Inspired by the success of the American movement Netroots Nation, UK blogs and organisations False Economy, Liberal Conspiracy, and the TUC, amongst others, decided to organise the first NetrootsUK conference.  The aim was to harness the power of the progressive left blogosphere and online anti-cuts activism.

The conference was a great opportunity for activists to share ideas and tips, and to network in person.  After discussing the day with other attendees, I would like to share some suggestions:

1. Scrap plenaries – the first session of the day was a plenary (the whole conference sits in the main hall and listens to speeches).  The speakers were Brendan Barber (TUC), Markos Moulitsas Zuniga (Daily Kos), Sunny Hundal (Liberal Conspiracy), Sunder Katwala (Fabian Society), Polly Toynbee (The Guardian), Nigel Stanley (TUC), and Clifford Singer (False Economy).  These sessions are designed to clarify the aims of the conference and inspire the participants for the day ahead.  However, it had exactly the opposite effect.

The anti-cuts and student movements have been exciting because they are the voice of the people.  For too long young people, pensioners, people with disabilities, those on benefits, have felt ignored and shut out from mainstream politics and from the public conversation.  Starting the day with a panel of big-name ‘experts’ rather than the people who are getting out there and making change happen was not inspiring, but disempowering.

2. Representativeness – There was a session in the afternoon called ‘Digital equality: how can women get engaged online.’  What was supposed to be a talk about getting women engaged in online activistism (which as Laurie Penny pointed out was pointless because women constitute the majority of bloggers and tweeters) turned into an extremely interesting discussion about tokenism.  One of the speakers pointed out that all of the sessions at the event included ‘one token woman’ on the panel and the only all-female panel was in this designated “women’s issues” forum.  Then two black women in the audience said they felt ignored because they hadn’t even had a token session or panel member.

Lisa Ansell, made the point that the cuts will disproportionately affect women, the disabled, black people and ethnic minorities, and people in the North, so rather than making these niche issues, they should be at the core of what the movement is doing.  There should be activists on gender, disability, race and from marginalized communities embedded throughout the panels in the next conference.  I realise this is hard to organise, but that doesn’t mean it should be avoided, it’s important.

3. Participation – The plenary sessions: a panel on the stage with audience members looking up to them with minimum participation, as I have said, is disempowering.  The workshop sessions varied on this.  Some were largely panel-led, others were more discussion-led.

Of course, there is a place for getting expert advice.  For example, there was a lunchtime event led by Chris Coltrane on internet security.  Having a discussion-based session on this would probably not be helpful, as the aim is to learn a skill from someone who knows it.

However, other workshops could have been more discussion-based.  Where this is possible I think it should be encouraged – it breeds inclusivity, empowerment and ownership by everyone of the event.  In discussion sessions the layout of the room could be addressed.  In UCL Occupation meetings we did this by setting the chairs out in a circle, so it wasn’t some people at the head of the room telling the rest what to do, but a group working together.  Also, other procedures could be considered, such as the consensus model, where the aim is to get as many people to participate as possible and all ideas are discussed openly.

4. Don’t become London-centric – It made sense to have the first conference in London, because that is where the organisers are based.  However, in order for this movement not to become London-centric and alienating, the next conference should be held elsewhere.

5. Accepting our differences, learning lessons, not creating divisions – In the opening plenary after hearing several audience comments that we should join the Labour Party, I got up and asked ‘why should we join the Labour Party?’  The aim was not to alienate myself from those who think getting Labour onside is the way to move forward, but to show that there are other views out there.  We all have different opinions and we should have the space and support to discuss them, especially at events like this.  As I have argued before, there will always be differences of opinion within a social movement.  It is better to discuss them and get them out in the open, than to let them fester and rot the movement from the inside.

And it is in this spirit that I am writing this blog post.  NetrootsUK was a great event.  I met some brilliant people, heard some inspiring talks, learnt a lot and we built in-person rather than online solidarity networks.  This is all really positive stuff.  But in every event there are lessons to be learned.  That is what I want to highlight here in making these suggestions.  We shouldn’t get too bogged down in criticising each other, but rather focus our anger and energy against our common enemy – the Coalition government’s neo-liberal agenda.  However, constructive criticism can help make the movement stronger and more effective.

Is the students’ conflict intergenerational?

In December, I took part in a Guardian podcast where I said that the students are furious at our parents. They’ve taken our jobs, our homes, our environment and now they’re trying to take away our right to an education. However, many members of the movement in occupations and in blogs have made forceful arguments against the idea of an intergenerational conflict. Here I want to think through the arguments for and against, and consider which approach I think we should adopt.

The Theory

UCLOccupation image

At the UCL Occupation the Daily Mail and Guardian journalist Suzanne Moore, gave a talk on how to present ourselves in the media. She said the best strategy is too push the idea of an intergenerational conflict. People of her generation feel extremely guilty, she said, and exploiting this guilt is the best way to get them on our side.

I believe the reason for the guilt complex currently engulfing the middle-aged middle-classes is due to the fact we live in a liberal society. The idea of intergenerational justice is built in to liberalism.

One of the earliest liberals, John Locke, argued that if people want to acquire property, they must leave “enough and as good for others”. The twentieth century liberal, John Rawls, includes an inter-generational proviso in A Theory of Justice called the “just savings principle”; whereby the current generation must save enough to maintain the fundamental institutions of society into the future. Since the environmental crisis has emerged, the liberal literature on intergenerational justice has gone ballistic. It is a matter of growing concern and enquiry within liberal political philosophy, and so it seems, in the practice of liberal democracies.

Many occupiers and bloggers have rejected this line of argument, however, because they are situated somewhere on the Left.  In far Left, Marxist, philosophy the idea of intergenerational justice doesn’t hold much currency.  The struggle belongs to the proletariat; it is based on class. The proletariat takes no account of age or generational membership; it consists of anyone who is exploited by the capitalist class.  The detractors from the idea of intergenerational conflict are concerned with unity.  What we want, according to this line of argument, is to foster ties with the working class, the unions and public sector workers.  Talking about intergenerational conflict obstructs unity and creates divisions where there should be none.

I want to propose an intermediary position, based on the insights of Critical Theory.  Critical theorists are influenced by Marxism, but instead of accepting the Marxist thesis of historical materialism, they assess actual social movements and theorise their claims in order to advance their normative, emancipatory arguments.

One of the insights of Critical Theory and other continental philosophical traditions, such as postmodernism and poststructuralism, has been to highlight that class constitutes only one kind of social division.  Society is also stratified along the lines of sex, race, ethnicity and status.  Our movement seems to be highlighting another division – the division between generations.

The calls for Left unity are obviously extremely important.  The Left historically has had a tendency to factionalise and fracture, destroying itself from within.  This is a trend the student movement rightly wants to avoid.  However, there is some truth in the intergenerational argument.  On the early demonstrations the vast majority of protesters were young, under the age of about 26; the presence of lecturers and workers was minimal.  The student movement is a youth movement.  Moreover, the cuts we are facing now are a direct result of economic policies and ideologies that have been handed down from the previous generation.

Some of baby boomers have had an amazing time. They’ve presided over an unprecedented era of economic, intellectual and technological growth. But with this has come unprecedented environmental damage, a growing inequality gap between the world’s rich and poor, neo-colonial war and the current economic recession, caused by the voracious appetite for property.  The inequality gap has meant that many people of that generation actually lost-out on a phenomenal scale – witness the decline of England’s industrial North.

The baby boomers that did hugely benefit (or the governments’ they have elected) acted with an astonishing degree of irresponsibility.  They ignored intergenerational responsibilities and responsibilities to the poor (hence the corresponding sense of guilt).  This irresponsibility derives from the wholesale adoption of neoliberal economics.

The Practice

We as a movement can and should (I think) be stressing this point. As the youth wing of a larger struggle, we can come together with other groups, like the unions, whilst highlighting our frustration with decisions taken in the past. We can say that the generation before us acted irresponsibly and failed to take our interests into account by adopting neoliberal policies.

UCLOccupation image

The advantage of this approach is that by highlighting the need for intergenerational justice, we are not just fighting for ourselves, but also for future generations.  By focusing on the irresponsibility of the previous generation and how this is now undermining our life chances, we are saying that this mustn’t happen again; future generations must be taken into account.

Another advantage is that by rejecting the politics of the past twenty years, we are asserting that we want something new.  We want things to change, we want to live in a different world, and if the politicians aren’t going to do this we will do it for ourselves.  Our youth and our desire for a break with the past is a strength: it is exciting, challenging and invigorating.

This standpoint can also foster unity.  Everyone on the Left is anti-neoliberalism. We can unite around this common enemy while also maintaining our particular position. Rather than causing division, it highlights the fact that those of the older generations who campaigned and fought against the policies were right all along. We can come together in renewed struggle to stop another generation making the same mistakes.  We can unite cross-generationally in a rejection of the Right and a desire to reinvigorate the Left.

This unification, however, does not require us to give up our rightful place of finger-pointing at the generation that preceded us, critiquing their unabashed irresponsibility, telling them to pay for it rather than lumping it all on us and future generations, and insisting that we want change.  Now.  We don’t want unmitigated economic growth; we want a new left politics based on equality and responsibility, environmental protection and solidarity.  We want a different world to the one we have inherited.

One final point… Unity is vital to any social movement.  However, within any movement there are different groups, differences of opinion and different reasons for being involved.  We have to acknowledge and respect this.  A blind adoption of “unity” does the Left no favours.  Repressing dissent and subsuming all groups under one common front is what leads to rupture.  We have to accept difference while focusing on our common goals.

In sum, we can call this an intergenerational struggle by drawing out the reason behind it. By making neoliberalism the target, we can assert our unique position, as those bearing the brunt of its mistakes, while uniting with other groups who also oppose it.

Will the Browne Report improve the quality of higher education?

“Rather than create a bureaucratic and imperfect measure for quality, our proposals rely on student choice to drive up the quality of higher education.”

The Browne Report claims to improve the quality of higher education, which may be why some MPs were persuaded by it.  According to the report, universities in the UK are in serious need of reform.  They need to improve on quality to keep up with their international competitors.  Quality ought to be measured by ‘student choice.’

Here are four quick reasons why Browne’s proposals will almost certainly undermine the quality of higher education:

1. Pressure on lecturers – Academics already face immense pressure to ‘publish or perish.’  Getting a job, staying in a job and having any influence within universities depends on having a high level of publications in the right journals.  Combined with teaching commitments, academia is becoming an increasingly stressful workplace.  Now, academics will be under constant pressure to ‘improve quality.’

This might not necessarily be a bad thing (we’ve all had bad lecturers), but who is the judge of quality…

2. ‘Student Choice’ – What eighteen-year-old knows the ins-and-outs of university life: the most important subjects for a solid grounding in an academic discipline, how a degree should be structured, what they actually want to study long-term, what makes a good or bad essay?  I didn’t set out to study Political Theory, I discovered it during my undergraduate degree in politics.  In terms of deciding what I should have studied as an undergraduate theorist, I really don’t think I was the best judge.  The most important political theorist of the twentieth century is John Rawls – someone I hadn’t heard of before my degree, who is bloody boring to study and I would have avoided like the plague if possible.  But I would be a much poorer political theorist for it.  Will universities now teach ‘crowd-pleasing’ courses to appease ‘student choice’ rather than intellectually valuable or rigorous subjects?  Whatever happened to peer review?

If we’re basing university assessment on student choice, we have to know what students really want…

3. What students want – Students want high grades, especially if degrees are exclusively seen as a stepping-stone to a job rather than a good in themselves.  Will there be pressure to inflate students’ grades?  If a student is paying £9000 per year, they’re not going to settle for a 2:2 are they?  What if a student relies on getting certain grades to maintain their subsidy?  Will lecturers feel undue pressure to add a mark or two?

Students also want more contact time with staff…

4. Mass redundancies – If there are mass redundancies, there will be less staff to go round.  This undermines students’ wishes to have more contact time with staff; they will actually have less support.  It also means higher class sizes.  Staff will have more marking to do, more students to see, more responsibilities in general and less time to research, therefore undermining what students want and ‘student choice’, increasing pressure on lecturers and reducing the quality of research.

If we want to improve the quality of higher education, marketisation is not the answer; it creates a whole new set of problems.  Browne thinks his recommendations will improve the quality of higher education because, like any other market fundamentalist, he believes in the power of market forces to sort the wheat from the chaff in every possible sector – as the Report puts it, ‘Competition generally raises quality.’ Rationalising turning higher education into a marketplace by claiming it will improve quality is a clever smokescreen and clearly it has fooled some MPs, but it hasn’t fooled anyone with an understanding of the government’s Thatcherite agenda.

Why I am protesting

David Cameron recently wrote in the Evening Standard, ‘Before protesting, students need to get the facts straight.’  There is an establishment theory that the student protests are a knee-jerk reaction to reform.  They claim that the student actions are ‘hysterical’ and ‘ill-informed’: basically, we don’t know what we’re talking about.  Students just want an excuse for a ruckus, the theory goes; we are bored of daytime TV and binge drinking, so we’ll try rioting for an adrenalin-filled change.

Another myth is that the students are entirely self-interested.  They don’t want to pay more fees, the critics argue, but why should the taxpayer foot the bill for their superfluous education?  However, I personally am a PhD student.  I have guaranteed (well, so they say) government funding for the next three years.  The rise in tuition fees will not affect me at all.

This dismissal of our concerns is hardly surprising, but it is time to reflect on what we are doing and make explicit our reasons for protesting.  At the protests and occupations, I have encountered students from all walks of life, demonstrating a range of political views and identities.  We all have our reasons for being there.

So what are my reasons for protesting?  Why do I care?

1. The principle – Much of the public debate regarding The Browne Report has centred on tuition fees.  Under the new government plans, students will pay up to £9,000 per year in fees for an undergraduate degree when they earn £21,000 per year; currently students pay £3,000 per year and start paying back when they earn £15,000.  The government claims this is fairer than the current system, because students pay back when they earn more money.  Critics claim it is unfair; firstly, as the fees will be so much higher they believe it will be off-putting to students from poor backgrounds, and secondly, while students start paying the fees back later they will be paying back three times more than they currently do.

This pragmatic debate about the consequences of the plans is obviously important.  However, it masks a much deeper problem.  The fees are going up because the government is almost completely removing the ‘block grant’ to universities, which underwrites their teaching.  Its removal means that universities must find their funding elsewhere.  This is why the rise in tuition fees is so steep; students are plugging the gap left by the cutting of government funding.

This is not just a problem of finances, however, it is a question of how this country views and values higher education; it is a question of principle.  University education is a public good (it benefits the whole of society and is funded by public money).  Removing state funding from universities and creating a market in higher education changes its status from public good to private commodity.  It means universities are no longer considered as centres of education, learning, cultural and intellectual advancement, acting as a forum for public critique and exchange.  They become supermarkets for school-leavers, where they acquire skills that will get them a job (preferably in science, medicine or engineering as these are the subjects that will ‘drive economic transformation.’)  This logic is deeply flawed.  The Browne Report constitutes a sea change in how we think of higher education – from public to private, state to market.

2. Police brutality – –

The police tactics at the student protests have been deplorable.  I have experienced ‘kettling’ – the police block all the exits to a small area trapping protestors for as long as they want, without access to food, water or toilets.  The aim of a ‘kettle’ is to increase the pressure among the protestors, to incite violence.  Then the police can point the finger at us for our violent behaviour.

The police have also used horse charges, where they line up dozens of mounted police and charge into the crowd.  This tactic is extremely dangerous, and it is only a matter of time before someone is badly hurt, if not killed.  At the protest on 30 November, protesters retaliated by throwing sticks and stones at the mounted police: a desperate attempt at self-defence in the face of a disproportionate attack.

The police have also hit protesters with batons.  One student, Alfie Meadows, is still in hospital suffering from life threatening brain injuries.  A disabled protester, Jody McIntyre, was dragged from his wheelchair in what he believes to be a tactic to incite retaliation from protesters.

It would be wrong to claim that every student protester has behaved like a saint, but we have to ask where the violence is coming from.  The real ‘violence’ is hemming people into an enclosed space for hours on end in the freezing cold, baiting them to retaliate, charging them with horses and beating them with batons.  The state is using excessive and disproportionate violence on people who are protesting because the politicians won’t listen to our views any other way.  The police are doing a wonderful job of radicalising a generation.

3. The bigger (feminist) picture – Students have striven to locate their concerns in the wider context of public sector cuts.  I want to set aside the question of the pros and cons of the welfare state for another day, and instead I want to highlight an under-rated effect of the cuts – the disproportionate effects on women.  As a woman and a feminist theorist, I am concerned for the future of gender equality in the UK.

In terms of higher education, the hike in fees could be off-putting to young women thinking about university.  Women earn 16.5% less than men in the same jobs, so it will take women a lot longer to pay back £27,000 worth of tuition fees.   The Women’s Budget Group is working to highlight the impact of the other cuts on women.  They have found that cuts in benefits will disproportionately affect women because women claim almost 100% of child benefit, and 53% of housing benefit.  Lone parents and pensioners, most of whom are women, will suffer the greatest loss in public services.  65% of public sector jobs are held by women.

Broadly speaking, when the state cuts back, women fill in the gap; be it in education, health, social services or care-giving.  This has been demonstrated time and again in countries where Structural Adjustment Policies (SAPs) were implemented by the IMF.  There is no reason to think the effects will be different in developed countries.  Theorizing gender should be central to this movement’s aims.

4. The Alternatives – Finally, there are alternatives.  The government claims that the cuts are essential in order to deal with the deficit and to get the UK economy fighting-fit.  They have not aired or discussed the fact that there are other ways of doing this.

The UKuncut movement has highlighted that tax avoidance is a multi-billion pound enterprise.  Philip Green (government advisor on the cuts) dodged £285million pounds of tax in 2005 alone, which could send 9000 students to university, or pay the salary of 20,000 NHS nurses.  Vodafone owes the government £6billion in tax, which the courts were going to enforce until George Osbourne stepped in and allowed them to get away with £1.2bn.

False Economy has gathered evidence from Nobel prize winning economists as to why the cuts are actually detrimental to the economy, rather than to its benefit.  They argue that the cuts will slow the economy down because there will be higher unemployment, less spending, and a lower tax intake, retarding economic growth.

I am not an economist, so cannot detail a concrete alternative budget proposal.  What I object to, as a political theorist, is the lockdown on discussion of alternatives, the flagrant support of big business over the poor, and the lack of government discussion with the public.  The government is dictating from above, they have shut us out.  The government is acting in an elitist, dictatorial fashion, which is not acceptable in a liberal democracy where a plurality of ideas should be allowed to be expressed.  The alternatives ought to be discussed.

What we can see from each of my motivations – protecting education as a public good, reacting to police brutality, fighting for gender equality and trying to highlight the alternatives – is that they all stem from a common cause.  The real motivation for the government cuts in education and the public sector is ideological.  The Conservatives (and lame-duck Lib Dems) are carrying-out a backlash against the sprawling state.  Austerity has become a byword for neoliberalism.  The restructuring of education as a market, the violent state reaction to dissent, the lack of concern for equality and the lack of public debate all represent the mantra of neoliberalism – maximising the market, minimising the state.

One could argue that now Browne’s proposals have passed in government that my main reason for protesting – protecting education – has gone.  However, we must remember that the poll tax also passed in Parliament, and through public dissent and disorder it was never enforced.  It is important for the student movement to learn the lessons of the past.  It is also essential to think reflectively about why we are fighting.  We mustn’t be scared of raising the issue of ideology.  The Conservatives have an ideology and they are imposing it on us.  It is up to us to critique it, deconstruct it, and provide the alternatives.