Two hours ago, I was passed this email via a trusted source. It suggests that police plan to kettle demonstrators along the route of today’s education march, and that plans are in place to use potentially lethal water cannon “if need be”. The memo appears to come from Business Monitor International (BMI, a security risk company. The police have denied the suggestion.)
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Right now, I’m standing at Malet Street with several thousand students, unionists and allies waiting for the march to leave Bloomsbury and head to the City of London.
The stated aims of the march, which was called by the National Campaign Against Fees and Cuts, are to “support the 30 November Strikers” and to “stop the HE White Paper” which is set to open up British universities to further privatisation after last year’s vote to triple tuition fees.
Demonstrators are calling for a tax on the rich to fund free higher education in the UK, and the selection of the City of London as a target makes a clear statement that protesters see corporate greed and public sector cuts as inextricably connected.
One year ago tomorrow, students took over the Conservative Party’s headquarters at Millbank. After a year of arrests, kettling and brutal crackdowns, the shift to targeting banks rather than Parliament is perhaps indicative of a growing awareness of where and by whom power is truly wielded in Britain today.
A spokesman for BMI declined to comment on the specifics of the memo, but added that the company was often given information “which we pass on internally”.
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