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.