Fifteen years ago, Britain’s streets were the scene of a mass youth revolt. Hundreds of thousands of students marched, blocked roads, and faced heavy police repression. Forty six campuses were occupied. Conservative Party headquarters was trashed. Until the autumn of 2010, the widespread trope among the commentariat was that young people were apathetic, the children of a post-political age.
In one sense, the movement was a direct response to the new Coalition government’s policy to triple tuition fees and scrap Education Maintenance Allowance payments to working-class school and college students – a direct betrayal of the Liberal Democrats’ promises. But as organisers, it quickly became clear to us that something much bigger was happening.
The 2010 student movement was the first phase of a much wider, global revolt – in many ways our generation’s 1968. Before long, millions of workers were on strike, the tent cities took root across Europe and America, and the Arab Spring swept through north Africa and the middle east. This was the first political moment in which social media played a central role. The Corbyn surge after 2015 was to a large extent a consequence of the social movements of the first half of the decade. Novara Media, too, can trace its origins directly to the occupations and street demonstrations of 2010.
With few exceptions – among them the Poll Tax movement of 1988-90 – extra-parliamentary revolts tend not to win immediately. None of the Chartists’ demands were met at the time, and the mass protests over Iraq failed to stop the war. Like 1968, the movements in the wake of the financial crash didn’t end in victory; neither the fee rise nor the wider austerity programme were reversed. But culturally and politically their effects were seismic.
On a bright morning on 10 November 2010, around 50,000 students joined what was supposed to be a run of the mill National Union of Students march to Westminster, rallying on the Millbank embankment. But the protest went off script. By mid-afternoon, the plate glass windows of Conservative Party headquarters at 30 Millbank had been smashed in and students were running riot through the building. The NUS had called the protest “Demo-lition”, a poor attempt at a pun on the destruction of the education system, and perhaps one which the crowd took more literally than its authors had intended.
The Liberal Democrats had come to power promising to scrap tuition fees entirely, scooping up millions of young voters in the process. Their abrupt U-turn became a flash-point for rage. The broken glass, the scuffles with police, and the fire extinguisher that was thrown from the roof were symptoms of a much deeper break, as a generation turned on their political elite at the beginning of austerity.
A New Labour-aligned NUS leadership quickly moved to distance itself from the emerging movement, condemning the very students it had mobilised. It was left to a fledgling grassroots group, the National Campaign Against Fees and Cuts (NCAFC) to name the dates for what came next. Walkouts on 24 and 30 November saw more than 100,000 students block roads across the country, marching through the sleet. Many protesters, including school students as young as ten, were “kettled” by police for hours in freezing conditions without access to food or toilets. A network of dozens of campus occupations provided a hub for coordination and a set of outposts which changed the atmosphere on university campuses. In London, mass weekly assemblies at the University of London Union sought to coordinate marches and overcome sectarian divisions.
It does not take more than a superficial look to trace the graduates of the revolt. We were organisers nationally and on our campuses (Simon Hannah at Westminster University, Michael Chessum at UCL). Ash Sarkar, Owen Jones, and Aaron Bastani were all participants at the UCL occupation. The first person to address the hundreds-strong crowd there was future shadow chancellor John McDonnell. Round the corner at the School of Oriental and African Studies, where McDonnell’s later advisor, James Meadway, was doing a PhD, it was rumoured that Jeremy Corbyn had to climb through the windows to address the occupation. In Birmingham, Zarah Sultana was taking part in school student protests while preparing for her A-Levels.
This was a moment of intense optimism about the digital world, and social media in particular. For the first time, Facebook events, tweets and viral online content were central to building demonstrations and sharing information. University occupations communicated by video link, holding meetings, dance-offs and seminars. Coders linked to the UCL occupation built an app that allowed people to crowdsource information and visualise where police lines were. Protesters across the world – from Madrid and Athens to Cairo and New York – were discovering how powerful this kind of horizontal communication could be. The novelty of the technology led many commentators to overstate its importance; the movements, in the end, were social and industrial, whatever tools they used.
On 9 December, when MPs voted on the fee rise, we were the two senior stewards of a march on parliament that saw some of the worst police violence in a generation. As kettled protesters broke into the Treasury, smashed windows and burned benches to keep warm, horses were charged into the trapped crowd, and police roamed the area beating students. Some protesters suffered life-changing injuries – lost fingers, broken bones, severe crushing. Alfie Meadows, who was rushed to hospital for emergency brain surgery, was maliciously prosecuted, and threatened with years in jail. William Horner could also have faced jail, if it wasn’t for his attacker, PC Andrew Ott, accidentally recording himself remarking: “He’s going to have to [have] done something because I just put his tooth out.” Ott was the one who served time, and both Meadows and Horner received compensation – but only many years later.
To a great extent, the story of how the student radicals became the Corbynites of the second half of the 2010s is the story of how a movement was flipped on its head. In another sense, it was an inevitable evolution. Street protests, without a political strategy, could only get you so far. Austerity politics – as Alexei Sayle put it, “the idea that the 2008 financial crash was caused by Wolverhampton having too many libraries” – was, and is, an aggressive political agenda dressed up as “common sense”. It was a remarkable PR coup, especially given the palpable desire of so many to fight for what remained of the welfare state.
The student revolt fired the starting gun on a much wider anti-austerity movement. By the following year, local community anti-cuts groups had sprung up in almost every town, Occupy’s tents were pitched, and the unions marched. The 2011 pensions dispute, which reached its climax on 30 November, was touted as one of the biggest single days of strike action since the general strike of 1926. But when UNISON and other big unions pulled the plug and moved to settle the dispute in very early 2012, the whole movement went into retreat and the government pressed ahead with its cuts.
The Coalition government succeeded in making working-class people pay for the crisis of a deregulated capitalist system. Foodbank use and anti-depressant prescriptions sky-rocketed; Britain suffered the worst drop in median wages in the developed world, second only to Greece; and disability benefits, youth services, sure start centres and local government were decimated.
On the left, the austerity agenda became hegemonic, eventually winning the Labour leadership. In January 2012, Ed Miliband and his shadow chancellor Ed Balls announced that, contrary to some of their earlier noises, they would back the Coalition government’s austerity programme, a move deeply unpopular with the party membership. Jeremy Corbyn’s election as leader in 2015 was the chickens coming home to roost. After the mass movements of the preceding years it should not have come as a shock to anyone that millions yearned for a more serious alternative to neoliberalism and austerity.
Now, the Starmer government is continuing with exactly the same fiscal hawkishness, with the addition of fervent anti-migrant politics, while Labour’s base despairs. First, Corbyn and now Polanski owe so much of their success to the Labour establishment’s inability to understand and adapt to what is happening across society.
All of the conditions which informed the anti-austerity revolt of the early 2010s remain today. The student movement was the first major outing for “generation left”, as Keir Milburn pithily named us. Age has become the most important demographic indicator for voting intention and political views – on economic policy, common ownership, immigration and trans rights – because generational politics has become a means of expressing class politics, rather than being an alternative to it. In 2010, our political class’s addiction to deregulation and austerity meant that young people faced a future with falling wages, high debt, endlessly inflated asset prices and rents, precarious employment prospects, and a higher education system in crisis. All of that is still true.
Today’s student radicals find themselves in a much more difficult situation, however. The student left is much weaker, and has no nationwide hub for coordination. The NUS did not lead the 2010 movement, but student unions did provide a basic level of activity. Today, the NUS is a shadow of its former self, having undergone a major financial crisis in the late 2010s, and no longer has large democratic conferences or even an elected national executive.
The marketisation of higher education has had a profound impact. When the price of education is so high, and institutions increasingly commercial, two thirds of students now have to work alongside studies, and the proportion inclined to dedicate themselves to activism is lower. This is not to say that nothing can happen. Recent student “encampments”, demanding divestment from Israel, show that many students are still active, even if the NUS is effectively shut down. The student movement was at a very low ebb prior to 2010, but things quickly exploded.
But aside from the lack of national coordination and the much harsher legal regime, the left’s attention is elsewhere. In 2010, the intense experience of state violence, and abrupt betrayal of the Liberal Democrats, produced a moment characterised by a deep mistrust of the political elite, and of formal politics in general. Now, however, despite the sometimes radical programmes of Polanski, Corbyn and Sultana, the logic of their political projects is decidedly conventional. Electoral parties can stand on picket lines all they want, but their success is measured in votes. Since the re-emergence of the left as a serious force in the 2010s, no one has managed to effectively straddle movement building and electioneering; Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party coincided with the British trade union movement’s nadir in terms of industrial militancy.
Neoliberalism’s failure means that the under-40s, at least in the US and UK, have swung decisively to the left and are itching for a political alternative; but neoliberalism’s success means that the left’s extra-parliamentary base has been demolished and is yet to be rebuilt. Polls show overwhelming support for public ownership of utilities, taxing the rich and rent control. Under the age of 50, Brits prefer socialism to capitalism, however nebulously defined those concepts are, by a ratio of almost two to one. But membership of trade unions remains stubbornly low. In 1979, more than half of Britain’s workers were in a union. By 1996, it was a third; in 2024, just over a fifth – or 6.4 million people.
Recent years have witnessed huge protests over Gaza and a strike wave over pay, but since the anti-austerity movement, which peaked over a decade ago, the level of social mobilisation over cuts, wages and the cost of living has been strikingly low. Even the climate movement, mobilising on the most existential issue of our time, is not yet bringing out large numbers in terms of protests or community organisation. In the early 2010s, social movements learned the limits of protest without politics. But if the left’s emerging projects now become pure electoralist parties, they will rob themselves of the movements that fuel them, and will be subject to the same institutional pressures as any other set of career politicians.
The crisis that began during the financial crash of 2008 is still unfolding. What began as a banking collapse was turned into a crisis of living standards and the democratic system. Popular support for privatisation and austerity collapsed long ago, but our political class continues to prioritise assets and profits above all else. Faced with historically speaking moderate social democratic alternatives, such as the 2017 Labour Party manifesto, they react like an immune system swarming to destroy a virus. The unsurprising result is that the far right is ascendent, and now within touching distance of power. It is using the same tool, social media, that seemed so liberatory 15 years ago, to fuel their agenda of hate and division.
On the bread and butter issues, on the climate crisis, and on the great moral test of our time – the Gaza genocide – Labour and Conservative governments have offered no meaningful solutions. Instead, they outbid each other on how long they can lock up those who complain. As organisers of the 2010 student movement, much of our time was spent calling for and justifying direct action – arguing that when the normal democratic system fails, other means become legitimate. Since then, the democratic system has done nothing but fail, but politics has become more authoritarian. If the student protests had taken place under the Starmer government, we would probably have ended up in prison, alongside Palestine Action and Just Stop Oil. If David Lammy gets his way, we might not even get a jury trial.
The need for a genuine alternative has never been more pressing, and by necessity it must be contiguous with the mass movements that have come before. The anti-austerity movement was heavily influenced by the anti-war movement of the early 2000s and the alter-globalisation movements of the 1990s. Those carried on into the anti austerity movement, Corbyn’s Labour, the climate movement, and now into the emergence of a new electoral left. That is why it is worth pausing and remembering the 2010 student movement. Whatever its limitations, its wild enthusiasm, disruptive fervour, and rampant disdain for the status quo was, and still is, is the antidote we need.
[Further reading: Is university worth the debt?]
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