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 of ‘Day X 4’, where a police force clearly out for revenge and a spectacularly servile media preferred to cover the mild harassment of two royals over, say, the police’s near-fatal attack on twenty-year-old student Alfie Meadows, or the dragging of Jody McIntyre, a student with cerebral palsy, out of his wheelchair and across the pavement. Yet throughout, this enormously unexpected and unpredictable movement showed it was willing to use the streets as it liked, a fine riposte to the grim, circumscribed, privatized urbanism of the last thirty years.
From this moment came, most obviously, the Occupy protests across British cities in autumn–winter 2011. There’s another moment which grew from it, to some degree, though it is often disavowed. It arguably came from the protests against Education Maintenance Allowance, the grant which kept poor young people in post-16 education, who made the Day X marches a rather surprising affair for those expecting the usual, usually middle-class suspects. In Hackney in August 2011, a chant went up of ‘Whose streets? Our streets!’, a slogan long-used by the anti-capitalist left on their symbolic marches. The results were very different.
Agency (3), The City and the City
One of the most succinct and intelligent descriptions of ‘urban regeneration’ was a documentary film by Jonathan Meades called On the Brandwagon. It begins with riots in Liverpool in 1981, a city whose population had halved, whose docks had disappeared; then moves through the attempts to put a sticking plaster over the wound. First, ineptly, via the Garden Festivals bestowed to Liverpool or Ebbw Vale, alongside the first, ‘enterprise zone’ version of Regeneration – then more dramatically through New Labour’s abortive attempt to turn our chaotic, suburban-urban cities into places more akin to, say, Paris, that riot-free model of social peace. Meades looks at the middle-class return to the cities, adaptive re-use, luxury apartment blocks, Mitterandian Lottery-funded grands projets and loft conversions in the factories whose closure was the problem in the first place. The film ends in Salford Quays, its gleaming titanium a ram-raid’s distance from some of the poorest places in Western Europe. The likely result? ‘There will be no riots within the ring-road.’
We’ve long congratulated ourselves, in London, on the fact that we have no banlieue. We felt especially smug about it when zoned, segregated Paris rioted a few years ago. It’s not like it’s untrue – irrespective of the existence of a Thamesmead or a Chelmlsey Wood, our poverty is not solely concentrated in peripheral housing estates, at least not yet. Oxford might try not to think about Blackbird Leys, but London, Manchester/Salford, Liverpool, Birmingham, Bristol, Nottingham – the cities that erupted in August 2011 – these places by and large have the rich next to the poor, £1,000,000 Georgian terraces next to estates with some of the deepest poverty in the EU. We’re so pleased with this that we’ve even extended the principle to how we plan the trickle-down dribble of social housing built over the last two decades, those Housing Association schemes where the deserving poor are ‘pepper-potted’ with stockbrokers.