Yes, its true, I went to the student protests yesterday. Let me say that this is because I think the issue is serious: people have a right to have access to higher education, without being priced out of the running. So at 12, I went down to the UCL quad, listened to a speech, and then prepared to march. But.... they weren't marching. They were staging a sit in. Deciding immediately that this was LAME, I left, had a coffee and jumped on the bus home. While on the bus, the driver makes an announcement, saying that the roads aroundWestminster are closed, so you have to take the tube if you are travelling that way. Closed? Hmm, I thought. Sounds delicious. I promptly got off and jumped onto the tube to Westminster.
I got off, immediately noticed a police presence in the station, then walked upstairs. It was a little eerie next to Westminster Abbey, because they'd shut off all the traffic. There were a heap of confused tourists milling around, dozens of police, and over on a street leading up to Parliament Square, loads bangs, small explosions, and a wall of irritated looking police. I walked over to check it out. There were about thirty people standing there, looking over the wall of police to the protest. The police had set up a row of officers, then some vans, then another row, creating a kind of dead space in between. So I stood there for a while, occasionally chanting with the rest of them (I do love a good chant).
"No ifs, no buts, no education cuts!"
"Nick Clegg shame on you, shame on you for turning blue." And the like. A school girl had gotten a hold of a broken megaphone and was yelling this out to us, waving her signs. The best of which were:
"I cant afford a sign, how am I supposed to pay for university?" Written on an A4 piece of file paper.
"Dumbledore would not put up with this sh*t".
"Dobby did not die for this".
"FML".
The police told us that there were blocks on either end of the road, so no one could get in or out. How interesting, we thought. I started chatting to the lady next to me, who did her Masters in Law at the same place I am, when we noticed people walking through the blockade on the other side of the road. Oh, we thought, they must be turning everyone back the other way from parliament square. Well, lets go. We can march on to Trfalger Square and then head home. It's about three at this point.
So we walk into the cordoned off area. The police are pushing everyone back trying to reclaim their graffittied police van (which someone later told me was probably left there, in the middle of the protest, in the hopes it would get vandalised, so they could show everyone how violent we are). We walked through to the other side, only to be told that no, no one is getting out there. So we walk back where we came from, only to be told that no, no one's getting out there. What? we ask. Surely this is a violation of our civil liberties. Shrug, goes the constable.
The next three hours were vey very cold. It was getting later and darker, no one had eaten for hours, boys were peeing on the side of the road, girls were lying down crying, people started lighting fires to escape the cold, it was insane. And the police weren't budging. At about five they bought in port-a-loos and started shuffling people through. One girl told me that this was like the G20 protests, and they kept them there all night. But I was supposed to start work at 5! I told the police man. Shrug goes the constable.
At about six, I was standing at the front of the mosh, facing the police with my new friend, who was arguing in a very lawyerly fashion about how they need to let us leave. She gave him a business card, and said "you can track me down if you need to". Shrug goes the constable. But hen, by some miracle, he gets a nod from someone else, and says to the two of us "ok, off you go". Se we ran for freedom, out into parliament square, breathing in the fresh, fire free air. And then I went straight to work. I heard later they didn't let everyone go until midnight, because they were releasing people only in twos and threes and only every ten or fifteen minutes. And there were thousands of us.
Then I went to work, having had no food all day and being slightly freezing and traumatised, and being very tired. It was a great shift, of course.
The worst thing was when I got home, and the media had written it up as being a violent protest, contained by the police. Which is ridiculous. Towards the end all we were chanting was "LET US OUT". And sure there were people sitting on bus stops and climbing walls, but so what? As one girl said, "Its like a festival. But shit."
