No Shock Doctine petition launched – Anti-cuts students disciplined
We’ve now launched the website and a petition for our campaign against a “shock doctrine” for Britain – that is, the use of the recession to force through right wing policies which would otherwise be politically impossible to secure.
On the same week, it looks ever more likely that students at Sussex University will be severely punished for the ‘crime’ of protesting against cuts to the funding of their education – this discipline could cost these students degrees they have worked three years towards.
One of the reasons that we called the campaign “No Shock Doctrine for Britain” was to highlight that those in power, if motivated to do so, often use crises to push through a number of right wing economic or socially authoritarian policies – not just the cuts we are currently seeing. Just as the Government is pushing through an ’emergency budget’, so Sussex University hired a Vice-Chancellor to break it’s staff unions and culture of student activism (or so I’m told). While this is not the same scale, it is a good example of what we may well begin to see at various levels across the country in the coming years.
What has been happening at Sussex Uni is indeed a warning of what is likely to come, but also encouragement for that struggle. Graduating last year from Sussex, I saw the creeping, but systematic transfer of power away from the staff and students towards a very distant management. This is not the first time that the management has tried to intimidate its students out of protesting and activism- a sit-in in the Library a few years ago resulted in a legal struggle between the protestors and the management. Last year the management moved towards solidifying its power by switching the role of the cabinet and council, so that student and staff representatives were no longer part of the democratic process in the management of their University. So this year, when student and staff representatives raised objections to the drafting-in of cut-throat managers to ‘streamline’ the courses and faculty- they were told that they did not have the authority to object- their role was only to ‘observe’. Well Sussex students don’t just ‘observe’- Sussex has a long tradition of activism and the management would do well to realise this. This year in particular, the students have given the management a real fight- they have continuously throughout the year, stood up and said very loudly ‘NO’. The management have retaliated with more and more draconian measures. This is what we can expect- the harder we fight the Tory-LD cuts, the harsher their reactions will become. But Sussex students have shown that we must not be intimidated- they will not give up and they refuse to go down without a fight.