As previously reported by Live!, this year has seen Imperial College Union joining the NUS national demonstration against tuition fees for the first time since 1999. Turn-out from Imperial was less than spectacular, though significantly higher than many other London colleges, with estimates ranging between 30-50 Imperial students taking part. The Union has attracted criticism for half-heated promotion of the demonstration with much of a £2,000 budget designed to secure a turn-out of 300 students remaining unspent – at one point it appeared that student protesters were going to be outnumbered by members of the student media covering the event.
Students from Imperial joined the protest in dribs and drabs, some meeting in Beit Quad and others meeting near the ULU building at the start of the protest. The Imperial group was rather diverse, with members of the Union Executive mixed with more than a few people brandishing “Socialist Worker” banners and a few students from the Wye campus thrown into the mix.
The march itself took several hours, setting off past Senate House, the home of the University of London, down to the Strand and then along Embankment back to Westminster before finally ending up at Trafalgar Square. The rally at the end of the march was addressed by a number of figures including Labour MP Frank Dobson and AUT leader Sally Hunt, however by this point many students had begun to drift away.
The freezing cold can’t have helped turn-out, although most students seemed well prepared to wear their ULU-standard-issue “Fee Fighter” t-shirts over the top of slightly warmer clothing. Generally the participants were good natured, with the NUS claiming that 20,000-30,000 students took part, while the police estimated the numbers at closer to 10,000. This is a far cry from the potentially 100,000 being talked about in the run-up to the march, comparable with last year’s total and pales into insignificance next to the turn-out on other protests in the capital recently. ICU President Mustafa Arif agreed that the protest was not “as effective as it could have been” and described it as a “missed opportunity”.
Several of those present suggested that students waving placards with simplistic slogans such as “F**k Fees” and chanting “Tony, Tony, Tony, out, out, out” aren’t exactly doing justice to the complexities of the issues in Higher Education funding – though the entire area is so opaque anyway it’s unlikely anything less than a small book would have sufficed. While everyone present could agree to being opposed to top-up fees, there were probably as many different opinions on what solution would be preferable as there were student unions represented. For example, eyebrows were raised from some members of the Imperial contingent when one of the speakers at the rally proclaimed that additional funding was needed for universities and that it should be directed at the “former polytechnics”.
While ICU can certainly be accused of failing to put its full weight behind the demonstration, it has been suggested retrospectively that this was not a great loss if these resources could potentially now be directed at lobbying MPs and the government directly, arguably a more effective tactic. Tuition fees may be an extremely unpopular policy and eventually one that the government is forced to drop but today’s protest seems unlikely to be the deciding factor in their decision making, or even the proverbial straw that breaks the camel’s back.
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