Police kettles were smashed, corporate tax dodgers forced to close their doors and Wetherspoons even packed away all their tables in a riot prevention measure yesterday, as militant anti-cuts protests hit Glasgow city centre.

Hundreds of people took to the streets in the city, embracing a diversity of tactics in the latest show of opposition to cuts in local services and education. This comes ahead of Glasgow City Council’s cuts budget, to be set within the next fortnight, and following the announcement, buried just before Christmas, that all of Scotland’s colleges will face cuts this year of 10 percent, meaning direct cuts to student places and courses, and making compulsory redundancies likely.

Beginning with a static rally in George Square organised by trade union umbrella group ‘Defend Glasgow’s Services’, which heard from a number of different speakers, around 200 protesters then took the police by surprise and broke off for a march through the city centre. Billed as “guided tour of cuts and cutters”, the roving demo was organised by new group Glasgow Against Education Cuts, with a list of potential ‘targets’ drawn up in the days before the march, taking inspiration from the UKUncut style of direct action.

After leaving the square to chants of ‘Cameron lose your smile, let’s do this Egyptian style!’, the demo then headed down the city’s central shopping precinct, Buchanan Street. First stop on the tour was phone company Vodafone, where a speaker went into the details of their nefarious tax-dodging activities. Attention was also drawn to the complicit role Vodafone have played in propping up the regime of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, cutting off their signal in recent days in order to stifle communication between protesters.

Having initially been taken by surprise, at this point large number of police began to pile in, with riot vans attempting to follow the demo along pedestrianised streets. Heavy police presence in tow, the tour then headed down to Topshop on Argyle Street, where chants rose up of ‘Shoplift! Topshop!’, before a rapid u-turn from which the tour headed towards offices run by ATOS, the company paid millions in public money to kick people off benefits. However, the police then made an attempt to kettle the demo near Central Station, entrapping around 70 protesters within police lines.

With no one particularly wanting to spend the rest of the afternoon packed into a police kettle on the pavement of a fairly quiet street, a push and shove rapidly ensued with the police, with protesters managing to force their way through the lines. There’s several reports of injuries sustained from police violence at this point, including one young woman who was grabbed around the neck and a school student who was shoved to the ground.

The demo began to break-up at this point, with groups charging up the street away from the police, with a cop helicopter now attempting to keep track of the demo from the skies.

Managing to regroup again on Buchanan Street, most people went back to George Sq. At this stage it was decided to disperse, rather than face the risk of being stuck in a police kettle for the rest of the afternoon, as happened during the tuition fees protests on 9 December and which allowed the police to pick off certain activists for arrest.

However, just as people were beginning to leave, news reached us that, while walking home, 19 year old student Dominic O’Hara had been snatched by the police and bundled into a van, with the police refusing to tell onlookers why. Around 40 people were still present in George Sq, so a decision was made to march to the police station in which Dominic was being held. Ridiculously, the police saw fit to follow the procession with an escort of both on-foot officers and two vans all the way to the station. For over an hour a picket was held outside, with a senior officer eventually telling us that Dominic is being charged with breach of the peace and assaulting a police officer. These are the same charges he is already facing in relation to December’s fees protests; this was clearly a deliberate, targeted arrest of a member of a group who have been facing continual harassment since last summer. Dom is being held over the weekend and will be appearing in court tomorrow.

Saturday’s demonstration showed that we can and will take to the streets whenever we want, where we want and at the time we want. Over the past year, the council have made it virtually impossible for legal demonstrations to be given permission in the city centre, apparently due to its importance to ‘Glasgow’s economic prosperity’. As such, unless we want to march around a park in the west end or hold a static rally in the middle of square, there’s little option beyond taking to the streets without official permission. Strathclyde Police and Glasgow City Council – you brought this upon yourselves!

The anti-cuts movement must continue to grow, in both size and militancy, over the next year, and can’t be allowed to go down the same dead-end route of A-B marches that the anti-war movement was ultimately reduced to. We need to keep our tactics fresh and exciting, continuing to push for direct action and for outmanoeuvring the police. The demo yesterday was highly successful in this regard, bringing a significant number of trade unionists, students, unemployed people and pensioners together, and adding a radical edge to the morning’s trade union rally.

BONUS: video from the day here

Ed Miliband is the leader of the Labour party, the official parliamentary opposition to the Coalition government. Ed was elected on the back of trade union votes to this position, and relies on the subs paid by ordinary trade union members to keep his party going.

So with the Coalition – remember, the ones that Ed’s official job is to oppose – embarking on the biggest offensive against the welfare state since its inception, surely the natural place to find him would be at the forefront of resistance to their austerity measures of cutbacks, job losses, wage freezes and VAT rises?

Alas, no. In fact, probably the only time you’ve seen Ed anywhere near the headlines since his election has been over a cabinet reshuffle last week, and his earth shattering decision last year to not attend any of the student protests. Not even the nice NUS candlelit vigils.

Last week, Ed came out and said that he opposed co-ordinated strike action to defeat the cuts. This is no great surprise, but a blunt display of how markedly to the right the Labour party are from even the mainstream union leadership, who at least are employing the rhetoric of industrial action, if not the action itself. As we reported last week, Miliband has also been pandering to the right-wing press over the mythical ‘Royal Wedding Strikes’, saying that he finds the idea “appalling” and “totally condemns it”.

On top of this, not-very-red Ed has “strongly implied” that, nevermind backing strike action, he isn’t even willing to march against the cuts. And we’re not talking about some semi-legal student kettle frenzy, the march in question is about official as demonstrations go: the one organised by the Trades Union Congress for Saturday 26 March in central London – the demo that the TUC leadership have eventually called about a year after everyone wanted them to. Instead, all Ed can say is this: “What we are not going to do under my leadership is go back to the heroic failures of the 1980s which set the party back… Industrial action is not the way you change governments. You do it through the ballot box.”

Well that’s us told. Sit tight for the next four years and then on 7 May 2015 we’ll elect a Labour government and everything will be fine. Or not, as the case may be. RMT leader Bob Crow is right when he says that we “don’t have the luxury of waiting for the next general election… Con-Dem attacks on jobs, services and standards of living are hitting us now”.

26 March will be a key date for the movement to beat the cuts and the coalition. Hundreds of thousands – maybe more – will march in London. Unions are mobilising members from across the country – a number of trains have already been booked to run from Scotland, and dozens of coaches will also be heading down.

Let’s be clear, marching in itself will not be enough to defeat the ConDem’s agenda. But it can be a springboard for the sort of action that can. The student movement which exploded off the back of November’s NUS demo is a good example of what a big demo can achieve, managing to spark action across the country and bringing the coalition to the verge of their first defeat, thinning their majority dramatically.

Regardless of the attitude that the officials and bureaucrats within the trade union movement, the NUS or, for that matter, Ed Miliband , think, a huge militant demo has the potential to give a confidence boost to millions of workers across the country, and kickstart momentum for industrial action.

Autonomous groups have already started building for mass resistance on the 26th. A mysterious website, purporting to be from the ‘armed wing of the Trades Union Congress’ have initiated a call-out for decentralised mass action in London on the day. They’ve also got a wee bit ahead of themselves and started calling for all power to the soviets, but we share the general sentiment. Last weekend’s ‘Network X’ conference, of anti-cuts activists from across the country, also supported the call-out for direct action on 26 March that goes beyond simply being herded from one park to another to listen to speeches by a few TU leaders.

The Labour party have had 10 months now in which to show which side they’re on. The party’s leadership have no interest in fighting the cuts, being careerists of the worst kind, who’d rather sit back quietly for the next few years and hope they get elected sometime in the future. The time to fightback is now, and hopefully March 26 can prove to be the beginning of the end for this government’s austerity programme.

A two hour occupation of Royal Bank of Scotland offices in central Glasgow took place earlier today, in protest at fatcat bankers taking billions in bonuses while the rest of us suffer the cuts and austerity of the economic crisis they caused.

Around twenty people – including climate change activists, students, 80 year old pensioners, anarchists and SSY members – gathered in the city centre at 11am, before walking to the building on Cadogan Street and quietly entering it. Once inside, banners and placards were unfurled, while a megaphone was passed round with most people there getting the chance to speak and explain why they’d come to occupy RBS.

The police arrived within 20 minutes of the occupation starting, but they made little attempt to remove us, saying that they were merely there to ‘facilitate’ the protests, not to take sides. While that was very nice of them to do so today, it’s a shame that the same can’t be said about previous protests which have targeted the bank, like Climate Camp and the G20 demonstrations in London.

Today’s protest was organised under the banner of ‘Citizens United’, a group who’ve organised a number of similar actions over the past few months, managing to get themselves – and the anti-cuts message – a fair amount of media coverage in the process. The demo this morning mostly focused on bankers’ bonuses, a particularly contentious issue at the moment, with Barclay’s chief Bob Diamond recently telling MPs that the “time for remorse” for bankers was over, ahead of next month’s bonus bonanza which will see the banks, including those under public ownership, start paying out an expected £7 billion in perks.

RBS falls among these state-owned banks – with the multibillion bail-outs it received in 2008/9 making it 84 percent owned by the government. However, rather than fully nationalising – or indeed, reigning them in at all – RBS has been allowed to continue with the kind of reckless behaviour that caused the crisis in the first place. On top of this, they’re one of the main sources of capital behind the Alberta Tar Sands, perhaps the most environmentally destructive project on the planet – and among the reasons why last year’s Climate Camp targeted the bank.

Today’s protest is an important part of keeping up the pressure on the bank, with similar action to take place in Edinburgh tomorrow. Our occupation ended under our own volition after about two hours, during which time loads of journalists, film crews and photographers had dropped by. As the bank’s workers filed out for lunch, we made it clear that we had no issue with them – and that we wanted to speak a senior manager. Indeed, while RBS will hand their top bosses multi-million bonuses, they’ve recently laid off more than 20,000 of their own staff in the UK. So it probably shouldn’t come as a great surprise that no one in the building was willing to come down and defend the obscene bonus culture, the bailouts or the forced austerity we’re now undergoing.

Paris yesterday - in solidarity with the Tunisian revolution

Few could have predicted how rapidly events would unfold in Tunisia over the past few days. A repressive dictatorship, with any public display of dissent rare and fear of the police widespread, the country has been rocked by mass protests over the past month, as we reported last week.

Initially an uprising of urban youth over rising food prices and high unemployment, sparked by the suicide attempt of a young graduate,  it quickly developed into a broad front against the regime of Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali, in power for 23 years. As the official organs of civil society entered negotiations with the government – in some cases winning significant concessions – the masses continued to take to the streets, against the threat of bullets, tear gas and imprisonment, raising the chant of “no, no, no dialogue, Ben Alí must go!”

In a desperate bid to cling onto power, on Thursday Ben Ali made a televised address to the nation, in which he pledged not to stand for re-election in 2014 (elections he would have won: in 2009 he took 90% of the vote amid tight media and candidacy restrictions), to introduce sweeping social reforms, and to investigate the police killings of protesters during recent demonstrations.

It wasn’t enough. On Friday, the protests continued. Trade unions called a two hour general strike, and thousands rallied outside the Interior Ministry. A state of emergency was put in place; Ben Ali fired his own government and called fresh elections within six months. On the streets, the police continued to fire live ammunition and tear gas at the now illegal protests. Yet only hours later, reports began to emerge that Ben Ali himself had fled the country – now sheltering as a guest of the Saudi royal family.

But the same political elite are still in power, at least for now. The Speaker of the country’s Parliament has taken the role of interim president, while the army maintain a strong presence on the streets. The new president has promised to abide by the constitution, which states that a new presidential election must be held within 60 days – whether it will prove to more open and democratic than previous elections remains to be seen. Across the country, the army are visibly removing portraits of Ben Ali and other overt signs of his regime. But these changes are superficial, little more than an attempt by the same ruling class to pretend that something has changed, to appease the masses and send them home.

Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali

Ben Ali ascended to the presidency in 1987, when his predecessor was forced out amid a political and economic crisis. What was meant to be an interim measure became permanent, with Ben Ali refusing to cede power. The Tunisian masses are only too aware of this, and will not be duped similarly this time. The events of the past few days have shown that it is the workers, the students and the unemployed of Tunisia who hold the real power – and the future direction of the country is now for them to determine.

The ruling classes are in a state of panic – earlier today the  Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi came out and condemned the Tunisian revolt, blaming it on Wikileaks cables deliberately created by US diplomats “in order to create chaos”. The irony couldn’t be greater – President Ben Ali was a firm ally of the United States, a proponent of neo-liberal reform and willing participant in the ‘war on terror’. Gaddafi is terrified because the uprising is already beginning to have an impact throughout the region – in Algeria last week, in Jordan and even in Libya itself. The lessons for the whole of North Africa and the Arab world, and its collection of despotic rulers, couldn’t be clearer.

Tunisia is at a crossroads – one dictator has been forced out, but the revolution has just begun. Socialists in the country now have a key role to play in arguing that the Tunisian people must go beyond simply demanding base reforms to be instituted by another government from the same elite elected through a sham democracy, but that the masses must take power into their own hands. And only this, a democratic system under workers’ control, free from interference by western imperialism, can provide a long-term solution to the day-to-day problems suffered by the people of Tunisia.

An explosion of popular protest has broken out in North Africa over the past few weeks, with anti-government demonstrations and riots continuing in both Tunisia and Algeria.

Localised unrest first began in Tunisia in mid-December, sparked by the attempted suicide of 26-year old graduate Mohamed Bouazizi, who set himself alight outside a government building in protest at the police seizure of his fruit and vegetable stall, reportedly for selling without a permit.

Protests in Tunisia – a repressive, western-backed de-facto dictatorship – are rare, but Bouazizi’s action brought issues which have been simmering for years to a head and proved to be the catalyst for nationwide demonstrations. While he has since died in hospital, the rioting and protests have continued.

A number of factors lie behind the unrest – high graduate and youth unemployment, endemic corruption among the elites and government officials, and rampant inequality. On top of this, global food prices are at crisis point, reaching a record high last month.

What started as a rebellion of urban youth has now developed into a much broader front against the repressive government of Ben Ali, who’s been president for 23 years. Thousands of lawyers have been on strike and in the streets, demanding an end to the brutal repression of the protests, of which the death toll is continuing to mount. Trade unions have held mass rallies against unemployment, which have also been attacked by security forces. However, clear reports of what’s happening on the ground are hard to come by – foreign journalists are banned from the country, meaning almost all reports abroad are relying on agency copy. Inside Tunisia, journalists are being banned from towns in which protests are going on, and the government have come down heavy on social media and internet reportage.

Indeed, it’s interesting to compare the media coverage the Tunisian uprising has had with the much-feted, not dissimilar, protests in Iran in 2009/10, in that case over a disputed election result. While the ‘Green Revolution’ dominated headlines for weeks, the Tunisian protests have hardly merited a passing mention on mainstream news broadcasts, and the angle taken has been noticeably different. Whereas with Iran, media outlets played up the pro-democracy, pro-human rights youthful activists WITH TWITTER vs. repressive government aspect of it, this has been virtually absent from what little has been said about Tunisia. As one commentator over at Al Jazeera has asked, could the reason be that the Tunisian government – ranked alongside North Korea in terms of its internet censorship – is an ally of the west, and thus doesn’t fit the familiar, easy to understand narrative of nasty baddie Arab regime vs. secular, democratic western opposition? Indeed, while the US and other governments regularly condemn the Iranian government for their crackdowns on dissent, we’ve yet to see any similar pronouncements regarding Ben Ali’s regime in Tunisia. Apart from in secret, that is, with one leaked US embassy cable describing the country as a “police-state”, and laying bare the reality of the regime. Maybe it’s something to do with the fact that Tunisia uses American technology to enforce its strict internet censorship policy, and recieves millions of dollars of US military aid every year as an ally in the ‘war on terror’. Hmm.

In neighbouring Algeria, protests broke out last week, sparked by rapidly rising food prices, with the cost of some commodities up 20-30 percent in recent days, coupled with massive youth unemployment. Like in Tunisia, rioting and demonstrations have spread rapidly across the country. The Algerian Socialist Workers Party (no relation lol) have said in a statement that I’ve badly interpreted from Google Translate:

For several months the discontent has been bubbling. In fighting for the elusive bag of milk, in search of a bakery open, the rage at those billions stolen in front of them: princely gifts made to the Gulf emirs, the lords, or the Algerian kings of Europe, all exempt of tax.

The origin of the explosion, increasing the price of sugar, oil and groceries. The sight of the legitimate revolt of young people of Tunisia, of course, inspired the protests. The distribution of social housing has rekindled the hatred of corruption. We are asked to wait, but we see the fortunes ride without waiting.

Wage increases achieved in the public sector after years of struggle, strikes, repression, are ridiculous for working classes, that is to say for the majority. And these increases are not yet implemented everywhere, and are already eaten by higher prices.

The final outcome of the revolts in both countries remains to be seen, but what’s become clear from the protests is the huge level of discontent at high unemployment, lack of opportunity and the rising cost of living, which is continuing to mount. Mass arrests, repression, censorship and state murders have so far failed to quell protests in either country: while Algeria is accustomed to demonstrations of this kind, Tunisia is not, raising the possibility that they could spread throughout the region.

Pour les libertés d’expression, d’organisation, de manifestation et de grève !

The Coalition Government’s austerity programme gets into full-swing today with an approx. 15 percent rise in VAT in possibly the most brazen and direct attack on living standards yet put into practice. One of the headline announcements of last June’s emergency budget, it will see the cost of nearly all goods rise by 2.5 percentage points from this morning, to 20 percent.

Inevitably, this will hit the pockets of the poorest hardest. VAT is among the most regressive of all taxes that doesn’t take into account any disparity in income – children spending their pocket money pay the same flat rate of 20 percent as millionaires purchasing luxury yachts. Indeed, the richest tenth of the population look set to lose around 1 percent of their after-tax income from the rise; the poorest tenth will lose 2.25 percent. This may seem negligible but to people already struggling on the breadline, the impact will be substantial.

So with prices set to rise across the board, on top of already high inflation, unemployment that’s set to hit 2.5 million and forecasts of hundreds of thousands of job losses across the public and private sector, it’s good to know our Chancellor, Gideon ‘George’ Osborne, is living by his mantra of ‘all being in it together’.

Or not, as it seems. For the Mad Vatter himself has been absent of these shores of late – instead choosing to bring in the new year in top toff getaway Klosters, an exclusive ski resort  in the Swiss Alps. Osborne spent nearly a week with his family in the resort, reputedly “the world’s most expensive”, where chalets can cost up to £11,000 a night. Attempting to deflect any enquiries about the trip, Osborne’s office have hilariously refused to comment any further than saying he’s spent the past week in Davos, a nearby town which hosts the World Economic Forum each year – as if to suggest he’s spent the visit on important diplomatic affairs rather than a luxury ski holiday, in the same week that his VAT rise will leave millions out of pocket.

The truth is, of course, that we’re not all in together, and that Osborne is just another Eton-educated millionaire in a cabinet full of them, making a fine job of representing the interests of the rich and powerful. Likewise, the VAT increase is not about bringing down the deficit, but a calculated attempt to transfer societal wealth from the poorest to the richest, and the burden of taxation in the other direction.

Taking the piste

fascism with a feathery face

Times are hard for the English Defence League. As they drift ever further into obscurity and irrelevance – continuing to insist to anyone who’ll listen that the single greatest threat to the British working class right now is the impending arrival of islamofascism – their tactics are becoming increasingly desperate.

Britain’s inevitable transformation to an Islamic Republic could, according to the dogma to which the EDL subscribe, come from anywhere. So while the minds of the population have been concentrated on slightly greater issues – namely the path of total destruction of the welfare state that the Tories are currently taking us down with glee – the EDL have spent the past few months running around in chicken suits outside fast food restaurants, in a bid to halt the encroach of halal chicken across Britain. Sharia law is surely only a step away.

And just last week, it was reported that dozens of EDL members have submitted compensation claims after they were involved in a “horrifying” (read: minor paint damage) coach crash en route to a demonstration in Preston in November. With 78 claims submitted, it soon transpired that there was only about 25 EDL supporters on the coach. Although maybe they’re keen to recoup some cash from all the lucrative merchandise money they’ve been losing out on after their transactions list was leaked recently. Understandably, the coach company aren’t amused.

However, while laughing at the English Defence League has become a new national sport, it would be foolish to write the organisation off. The growing sense of political polarisation, which will intensify as the cuts begin to be felt, is not lost on the EDL. Earlier this month, leadership figure “Tommy Robinson” (real name Steven Yaxley-Lennon) gave a flavour of the direction the EDL are moving in. Responding to the student demonstrations which shook the country in November and early December, Robinson told an assembled mob in Peterborough that the EDL are “disgusted with the behaviour of the so called fuckin’ students in London… we support British police, we are their allies…. we never want to see the British police attacked by people of this country”, with no sense of irony.

What followed was a confused mess of misdirected class anger, casual racism and out-and-out jingoism. There’s the references to ‘our boys’ and Britain’s imperial wars abroad,  much more adoration of ‘British police’, the usual digs at ‘the Muzzies’ and then a lot of OUTRAGE at the people who ‘desecrated’ the statue of Churchill in Westminster, a man who represents “every single thing this country is about” and is a “fuckin’ prophet”. He even tells the mob that ”every EDL member should shake the hand of a British policeman”. It’s unclear whether the eleven arrests that took place later in the day were actually just the police overreacting to friendly handshakes.

But beyond this fawning patriotism, his greatest vitriol is reserved for ‘the students’, who “do not understand what it is to be a working class member of this community” and “never ever lived a normal day in their life”. Pretty remarkable given that that the demonstrations have been precisely about access to uni for working class students, battling a government determined to raise fees to a level that will burden all but the richest graduates for life.

Tommy Robinson (far left) at a BNP meeting in 2007 - he's consistently denied any connection to the party

But it’s an identical narrative to the one that the tabloids have been ramming down our throats over the past two months. Within hours of the Millbank demo, journalists were pouring through the facebook pages and backgrounds of so-called ‘ringleaders’, attempting to smear them, and by implication all, students as upper class, undeserving and spoilt. Similar tactics have since been used against UKuncut. The agenda here is clear – to make their predominantly working class readership feel distance from the student and anti-cuts struggles, by painting all those within them as either reckless militants (Bob Crow, Len McLuskey) or upper class kids living out their teenage rebellion. The idea that normal people are out on the streets terrifies the media – which is why they’ll do everything to convince their readers otherwise, and place that distance between them.

The EDL are not a traditional party of the far-right, but the consequence of years of tabloid lies about Muslims, immigrants and asylum seekers – their politics more  The Sun than Der Sturmer. But the EDL are adapting to the times and it’s little surprise that they’re now concentrating as much of their ire on ’students’ and ‘reds’ as ‘the Muzzies’. It also neatly fits in with their bullshit notions of ‘old Albion’ and bizarre view of British history, with the students, allegedly, seeking to destroy everything that makes Britain great – statues of racist Prime Ministers, for instance, while the EDL frame themselves as the valiant last defence against Islamo-Bolshevik takeover.

In a time of crisis, the English Defence League are reverting to fascist type. They claim to be the true voice of the English working class – but it’s clear on which side they really stand. They idolise the Queen and Winston Churchill, who was an admirer of Italian fascism, ordered troops to march on workers during the 1926 General Strike and held a racist and anti-semitic worldview. For all that they claim Britain is a “two tier” system, they crucially fail to see the real dividing line – not their fantasy of a system that favours Muslims above all others, but of the class divide.

Currently, the EDL are content with running around after Anjem Choudary’s equally deranged Jihad4Anglia warriors and scrubbing graffiti off of Churchill’s statue. But is it beyond the realms of possibility that, over the coming twelve months and as class conflict intensifies, the EDL will be turning up at pickets to intimidate striking workers, beating up students protesters or, as in Greece, providing back-up militia to riot police? History tells us it is not – underlining the crucial importance of class-oriented anti-fascist work in the period we’re now in.

It’s that time of year again: a moment where we pause for sombre reflection, overblown self-congratulation and making stupid lists in a bid to fill up space as no one can be arsed writing anything proper anymore. While the last of these couldn’t be further from the truth here at SSY (trust me, there’s some epic blogging coming your way prettty soon), the opportunity to stick a list together of funny pictures is not one we’re ever gonna overlook. So here we are, with SSY’s annual round-up (following last year’s ground breaking inaugural countdown) of the best placards, signs and protest banners of the last twelve months! Totally impartial and 100% authoritative , as you’d expect.

Read the rest of this entry »

Screwing English, Welsh & Northern Irish students, screwing Scottish students (but after they graduate!), turning over education to big business, slashing spending, or relying on charitable donations – that’s the spectacularly shit choices for the future of  our universities and colleges outlined in today’s long-awaited Scottish Government review on higher education funding.

It’s the first steps in undoing what’s gradually become accepted in Scotland over the past decade – that education should be free. In 1999, it was, ironically enough, the Lib Dems who oversaw the abolishing of fees, and then in 2007, it was the SNP who got rid of the graduate endowment, a one-off sum paid after completing studies. It’s put Scotland miles ahead of the rest of the UK in providing access to education for all, and is one of the best achievements of the devolved administration. Today’s announcement now sets the ground for its gradual reverse.

There’s little in the way of surprise in the proposals, coming just one week after the House of Commons vote which will see tuition fees at English universities rocket to between £6-9000 a year from 2012, largely to substitute a dramatic fall in state funding. Given the knock-on impact that the changes in England will have on Scottish funding via the Barnett Formula, the argument being put forward by the Scottish Government, and Scottish unis themselves, is that something is going to have to give.

However, what’s put forward in today’s report is only tentative at this stage, with the SNP to line up their concrete policy in the coming months, prior to May’s Holyrood election. As such, the paper is more a list of possibilities rather than any definite policy proposals, but nonetheless it does point in a direction which has worrying implications for future Scottish students.

While much is being made of the fact it rules out “up-front” tuition fees, this is a virtually meaningless phrase – no one, in England or elsewhere, pays  up-front tuition fees. Almost everyone gets a student loan to cover their fees, which is then paid back (with interest) in the decades following graduation. This is why it’s a total myth that a “graduate contribution” is somehow a progressive alternative to fees – they’re the same thing. Yet a graduate tax is exactly what the Scottish review lays out.

In all, there’s six different proposals in the review, in order to “stimulate a debate” over the coming months on the best solution for the future of Higher Education. In reality though, most of them are complementary and in all likelihood we’ll see a mixture of them being implemented in 2012, to coincide with the changes in England. To summarise, the main policy ideas in the paper are:

• for the state to keep its role as the main source of education funding
• for the state to remain as a funder of education, but alongside a graduate contribution
• increasing fees for English, Welsh & Northern Irish students, who currently pay just under £2000 a year, to £6,000
• increasing income from donations & charity
• increase investment from businesses
• “efficiency savings” – a.k.a. cuts

We need to be clear that all of these – with the exception of the first (ie. the status quo) – are regressive measures that seek to bring individual contributions into the fray, negate state funding and add to the overall marketisation of education. The idea that business contributions can replace state funding is particularly dangerous; while there’ll be plenty of money from the likes of BAE Systems for cutting-edge bomb making and Glaxo for profit-oriented medical research, what about every other subject that isn’t worthy of corporate investment? Only last week, staff at Glasgow Uni had to come together to vote down management proposals to allow business members onto the university court.

The SNP will argue that they’re only implementing these measures through necessity, and that unlike the Tories  in Westminster, they’re not hellbent on privatising education. But this doesn’t change what they’re trying to enact – we need ‘Scotland’s Champions’ to stand up to the Coalition, not cower and implement the cuts, fees or backdoor privatisation on their behalf. As for making students from the other parts of the UK pay more – in a bid to quell overblown fears about thousands of “fees refugees” pouring over the border seeking cheaper education – it’s divisive and unfair.

We’ve already seen thousands of students on the streets and university, college and school campuses across Scotland – while our ‘representatives’ in NUS Scotland might be happy to settle for a graduate tax, let’s make it clear that we won’t. A huge fight to defend the principle of free education is on our hands, but we’re entering it in good stead, with even today’s announcement made in virtual secrecy – its date made public only yesterday due to the fear of student protests at its unveiling. Ahead of the Scottish election, maximum pressure must be placed on every party to not go down the road of a graduate tax or fees – and after their election, to stick to their fucking promises.

by Squeak

Ever since the news began creeping out -- on rolling news coverage and, for a lot of us, jubilant facebook status updates -- about the VICIOUS ATTACK on the car carrying HRH The Prince Charles Philip Arthur George, Prince of Wales, Knight of the Garter, Knight of the Thistle, Knight Grand Cross of the Order of Bath, Member of the Order of Merit, Knight of the Order of Australia, Companion of the Queen’s Service Order, Privy Counsellor, Aide-de-Camp, Earl of Chester, Duke of Cornwall, Duke of Rothesay, Earl of Carrick, Baron of Renfrew, Lord of the Isles and Prince and Great Steward of Scotland (to give him his full title, respectfully) and his wife Camilla, the reaction from the press, police and now the government has been nothing less than hysterical,  terrifying and downright fuckin’ hilarious in equal measure.

In fairness, it has been a good few centuries since an heir to the throne in Britain has had to contend with a a baying mob brandishing sticks and chanting “off with their heads”. Mad rioting outside Parliament on Thursday was,  to some degree, expected; indeed, BBC journalists felt the need to remind us every five minutes that “anarchists from the Whitechapel Anarchist Group and the Wombles” were there with the intention of causing trouble. Nevermind that the Wombles disbanded in 2006 and that WAG are, with all due respect, probably about ten men and a dog, the media nonetheless needed some sort of “label” to attach to any disorder, unable to comprehend that maybe, just maybe, ‘normal’ students are pretty angry and like smashing shit up as well.

What definitely wasn’t expected on Thursday was the window of a toff-carrying Rolls Royce getting punted in on its way to a concert in honour of those sitting in its back seat. Three days later, the story continues to dominate the headlines. It’s led to an outpouring of right-wing vitriol about violent hooligans attacking “our royal family”, desecrating a statue of “anti-fascist hero” Winston Churchill and “attacking” the police. Apparently the future Queen may have even been hit with a stick -- or as the Daily Star put it ‘CAMILLA POKED BY RIOT THUGS’. I mean, honestly, haven’t you guys heard of Gandhi?

The tabloid’s moral faux-outrage was all too predictable. More worrying, however, has been the response from the establishment -- it’s added fuel to the fire for reactionary demands that policing isn’t tough enough and needs to be “stepped up” at future demonstrations. Today, it’s revealed that Theresa May, the Home Secretary, is looking at introducing water-cannons for public order policing.

The irony couldn’t be greater when we look at what happened on Thursday, when the tooled-up riot cops successively kettled, horse-charged and brutally attacked demonstrations widely reported in the media as good-natured and peaceful. It’s left one 20 year old student, Alfie Meadows, requiring brain surgery after being bludgeoned by a police baton. And now we’re being told that this wasn’t enough, and that protesters should be getting a “good soaking” as well.

In Glasgow, fortunately, no one required hospital treatment as a result of the police actions on Thursday. However, the treatment of peaceful demonstrators still (as the video below shows) verged well into the territory of brutal assaults on protesters, the pushing around of school children, and flagrant political policing. In a continuation of the harassment and intimidation of political activists that has been ongoing over the past few months, two demonstrators were picked out from a crowd of hundreds and arrested on trumped up charges. These include assaulting and obstructing police officers and attempting to rescue or assist the escape of a person in custody; both are bailed (one with the now customary city-centre banning order) and will appear in court in January.  Their full statement, and call for witnesses, can be read here.

What’s becoming clear is that as the radicalisation of broad sections of society and opposition to austerity and cutbacks grow, the police are stepping up the victimisation of activists and attempting to limit protest though whatever means possible. We need to be prepared to resist this and stand up for the rights of everyone to resist the Coalition’s attacks on the working class -- which, far removed from two aristocrats facing the minor distress of encountering a few of their subjects -- are set to rip apart communities and the lives of millions of people.