Kat Craig of Christian Khan Solicitors represented UCL students Sarah Crane-Brewer and Frank Harris in possession proceedings brought by University College London (UCL) management at a hearing in the Central London County Court this afternoon.

In a judgment handed down by Her Honour Judge Faber this afternoon, UCL were granted a possession order for the Jeremy Bentham Room and part of the Slade School of Fine Art, which have been occupied by students since 24 November and 30 November respectively.
However, the students successfully defended a claim for possession over the entirety of UCL’s Gower Street campus. Whilst the students’ argument that the attempt to end the occupation interfered with their rights under Articles 10 and 11 of the European Convention on Human Rights which enshrine the right to freedom of expression and freedom of assembly and association, was not accepted by the Court, Her Honour Judge Faber granted leave to appeal on the issue. She held that, were the appeal to be successful, the order for the Slade School occupation may not have been justified.

Mr Harris, a 19 year old student studying Fine Art, said: “We are very pleased with our partial victory and that the Judge accepted our evidence that both occupations have been peaceful and  responsible, and did not disrupt academic activities.”
The Judge acknowledged the occupation’s aims of providing a safe space for UCL students to protest against the rise in tuition fees and the 80% cuts to the teaching budget, with Arts and Humanities courses facing the complete removal of government funding. Many students have been deeply  concerned that public protests are no longer safe as a result of police violence and pre-emptive kettling. The occupation also demanded that the London Living Wage is paid to all workers on campus.

Whilst the students consider today’s outcome a victory, they could now face legal costs for the University’s lawyers of almost £40,000. They have not yet been ordered to pay these costs, but the University has until 23 December to ask the Court to make such an order. Ms Crane-Brewer and Mr Harris are both funding their education by way of student loans. Ms Crane-Brewer, a 19 year old

Geography student, said: “We are deeply distressed at the prospect of having to pay this huge sum on top of the debts we already owe, just for trying to defend the right to free speech. This sum reflects the amount of debt many future students will face if fees are increased in line with government proposals. We would hate for others to face the same daunting prospect we now do.”

Ms Craig who, together with barrister Liz Davies, is acting pro bono for the students said: “These young students have been very brave in putting themselves forward to help the Court determine an important point of law. The Judge today paid tribute to both parties for their enlightening arguments and commended all parties for the sensible way in which they have conducted themselves.

In light of these comments we very much hope the University will decide not to enforce these costs against our clients.”

For more information contact Kat Craig on 07876 680 049 or katherinec@christiankhan.co.uk

Simon Hughes MP, seen by many as the totem of the Liberal Democrat left, and a champion of civil liberties, justice and the neccesity of public participation for a healthy democracy was not available for comment.

We feel that such events as chronicled in a Flickr photoset available here are indicative of arguably the most ILLIBERAL government response to direct action and genuine, grassroots political mobilization in the history of contemporary British democracy.

Students, schoolchildren and unionists are finding their rights to freedom of expression, association and protest being compromised on a daily basis. The Liberal Democrats, a party whose election manifesto and political posturing has been seen as broadly championing the causes of personal freedom, now constitute a sizeable part of a government that represent the biggest threat to the values of British democracy and the curtailing of liberty  in our lifetimes.

While we drank tea on a cold evening in Bermondsey, the police waited outside Hughes’ office (two on the door and a further six both in and in front of the police van) with what we recognized on their persons as CS gas. The champion of the Liberal left, the previously erudite and independent Hughes is now it seems an integral part of a government and policing establishment intent on systematically dismantling our constitutional rights , enshrined in both British and European law, to freedom of association and movement.

Within the Student movement we wish to pose the following questions to Simon Hughes MP, a figure who until recently commanded a great deal of respect as a member of the progressive left and frequent champion of personal liberty. Is this the sort of country you want us to become? Furthermore,is this the country you have sought to build since winning parliamentary office to Southwark in 1983?

We within the student movement feel or rather hope that the answers to both questions would be a resounding no, and that Hughes, who for much of his career has been a politican of immense integrity, feels trapped by the backroom politicking of this ramshackle and undemocratic coalition government.

Our message to Hughes then is this. While you stand in alliance with this government and retain faith in Nick Clegg as the leader of the Liberal Democrat party in the House of Commons, you are undermining the democratic fibres of our country and an 800 year old tradition of liberty that has been at the heart of our body-politic that preceeds conjtemporary party politics. You undermine something sacred and much older than either the Tory or Liberal parties.

While you stand in alliance with this government and retain faith in your party leader, you are not only legitimizing and contributing to the systematic dismantling of our country’s democratic traditions, but also it’s hard won and venerable public institutions including universities that have until recently offered higher education available to all on the principle of merit and not money.

Subsequently our message to Hughes is this. On looking at the pictures of teenagers and early-twenty-somethings drinking tea under the close scrutiny of the police do you really believe that this government is tenable for five years? Are you satisfied that it seems an empirically observable fact that the longer this undemocratic and haphazard government rules, the closer we seem to move towards becoming a police state?

This is not story by Kafka or Borges  – as surreal as employing surveillance over individuals drinking cups of tea might appear – this is the tragic and unfolding story of our country and what this government, of which are a member are doing to it.

This movement is intent on reversing this pattern and taking our country back, inch by inch if need be, and we implore you to do the same. If you are that same progressive politican of integrity that we remember before May 6th of this year we invite you and your fellow Liberal Democrat colleagues in the House of Commons to start on Thursday evening by joining us and representing the wishes of your own constituents in Southwark by voting against the propsed reforms to higher education and the EMA in England.

Simon Hughes MP, seen by many as the totem of the Liberal Democrat left, and a champion of civil liberties, justice and the neccesity of public participation for a healthy democracy was not available for comment.

We feel that such events as chronicled in a Flickr photoset available here are indicative of arguably the most ILLIBERAL government response to direct action and genuine, grassroots political mobilization in the history of contemporary British democracy.

Students, schoolchildren and unionists are finding their rights to freedom of expression, association and protest being compromised on a daily basis. The Liberal Democrats, a party whose election manifesto and political posturing has been seen as broadly championing the causes of personal freedom, now constitute a sizeable part of a government that represent the biggest threat to the values of British democracy and the curtailing of liberty  in our lifetimes.

While we drank tea on a cold evening in Bermondsey, the police waited outside Hughes’ office (two on the door and a further six both in and in front of the police van) with what we recognized on their persons as CS gas. The champion of the Liberal left, the previously erudite and independent Hughes is now it seems an integral part of a government and policing establishment intent on systematically dismantling our constitutional rights , enshrined in both British and European law, to freedom of association and movement.

Within the Student movement we wish to pose the following questions to Simon Hughes MP, a figure who until recently commanded a great deal of respect as a member of the progressive left and frequent champion of personal liberty. Is this the sort of country you want us to become? Furthermore,is this the country you have sought to build since winning parliamentary office to Southwark in 1983?

We within the student movement feel or rather hope that the answers to both questions would be a resounding no, and that Hughes, who for much of his career has been a politican of immense integrity, feels trapped by the backroom politicking of this ramshackle and undemocratic coalition government.

Our message to Hughes then is this. While you stand in alliance with this government and retain faith in Nick Clegg as the leader of the Liberal Democrat party in the House of Commons, you are undermining the democratic fibres of our country and an 800 year old tradition of liberty that has been at the heart of our body-politic that preceeds conjtemporary party politics. You undermine something sacred and much older than either the Tory or Liberal parties.

While you stand in alliance with this government and retain faith in your party leader, you are not only legitimizing and contributing to the systematic dismantling of our country’s democratic traditions, but also it’s hard won and venerable public institutions including universities that have until recently offered higher education available to all on the principle of merit and not money.

Subsequently our message to Hughes is this. On looking at the pictures of teenagers and early-twenty-somethings drinking tea under the close scrutiny of the police do you really believe that this government is tenable for five years? Are you satisfied that it seems an empirically observable fact that the longer this undemocratic and haphazard government rules, the closer we seem to move towards becoming a police state?

This is not story by Kafka or Borges  – as surreal as employing surveillance over individuals drinking cups of tea might appear – this is the tragic and unfolding story of our country and what this government, of which are a member are doing to it.

This movement is intent on reversing this pattern and taking our country back, inch by inch if need be, and we implore you to do the same. If you are that same progressive politican of integrity that we remember before May 6th of this year we invite you and your fellow Liberal Democrat colleagues in the House of Commons to start on Thursday evening by joining us and representing the wishes of your own constituents in Southwark by voting against the propsed reforms to higher education and the EMA in England.

“This is just to express my wholehearted support for your ongoing action… and just to help, you might enjoy the attached cartoon I knocked off this morning – yours to use in any way you want.”

The occupation began at a ‘What Next?’ meeting on the day of the second student march when a group of UCL students voted to take over the Jeremy Bentham Room (students at SOAS had gone into occupation two days before). A general meeting was then held to draft their demands. The most important, and most often repeated, is that UCL’s management issue a statement ‘condemning all cuts to higher education’. They also want things they might be able to get: for the university to pay UCL cleaners the London living wage, to bring outsourced support staff in-house and to change the composition of the university council to get rid of the majority of corporate, non-UCL members (they’d like a quarter each of management, students, tutors and support staff). Decisions are made by consensus – ‘better than democracy’ a first-year undergraduate explained – at two lengthy daily meetings. Students are divided into working groups according to their talents – IT, media, process (analysis of how the occupation itself is working) – but there’s no leader, everyone insisted. An email account, Facebook page, website and Twitter feed were set up overnight and messages of support started to come in from people like Tariq Ali, Noam Chomsky and Billy Bragg; comedians came to tell jokes, bands to play, novelists to read their books, tutors to give seminars. On 29 November, the day before the third march, they sent a delegation to protest outside the Oxford Circus Topshop about Philip Green’s alleged tax evasion. And on the day of the march itself, another delegation was sent to Trafalgar Square, while tweeters back at the occupation offered tea and biscuits to anyone running away from the police.

There are about 200 in all, graduate and undergraduate students: many more humanities students than medics or engineers – the arts teaching grant is the one that’s set to disappear. And there are union representatives and UCL support staff. I didn’t see anyone from the UCL Labour Club: judging from their Facebook page they’re more excited about the Christmas dinner planned for 14 December. The UCL student union has ‘no official position’. No one I spoke to had taken part in student politics before this; few of them had been on previous marches. I asked about the 2003 Stop the War march: ‘I was 11,’ they said: ‘I was 13 or 14.’ Everyone has plenty of reasons for being there: they want Malcolm Grant, the provost, to reverse his enthusiastic position on tuition fees, or to bring his £424,000 salary down in line with Oxford and Cambridge’s vice-chancellors; they want to speak up against the coalition; or to defend the English department from cuts; or to get the security guards the London living wage. There is depth of feeling and attention to detail, along with the inevitable earnestness; reasoned debates take place over coffee – they’d bought a machine since continual café runs had eaten into the kitty – and stale sandwiches donated from a staff meeting. They look cleanish though tired and cold – the heating got turned off on Sunday night and today is Wednesday – but they’ve learned to get round things: a shower and a night at home every few days, a few hours’ work on their essays before bed, a break for a lecture and to pass out flyers. It’s like a ‘really big sleepover’, one student tells me; another says that it’s almost become a way of life. They talk of the dance-off they’d had with the Oxford Radcliffe Camera occupation via Skype, of the ‘fun’ they’re having. They didn’t know each other before and now they’re a community.

There is paper everywhere: flyers on tables and in hands, the list of demands snaking up the wall, photos of the other occupations; marker-penned slogans, or doodles, or quotes from Goethe; a sinister ballpoint-pen portrait of David Cameron and cards written by solicitors Birnberg Peirce explaining that you don’t need to give your name if searched. The walls are a sort of slogan competition, in the manner of a JCR suggestion book or a library toilet wall: which ones will last? In the middle of the room there are chairs set out in the shape of a horseshoe where constant overlapping seminars take place: they pass a microphone round as they are asked if they are nostalgic about 1968, or what new media mean to their movement. I hear words like ‘alert’, ‘critique’, ‘offensive’ and even ‘Marxism’. At the edges of the room students sit around circular tables hunched over their laptops, as if they knew how much they look like the photogenic Harvard students of The Social Network.

The occupation is busiest online. The website, Ucloccupation.com, was created by Sam, an electronic engineering graduate who now works flexitime for a City firm (‘They don’t need to know I’m here’); he became involved after his girlfriend was trampled by a police horse on the second march. The website has a blog, a Twitter feed, a tag cloud, the latest photos from the occupation’s Flickr page, videos they’ve uploaded to YouTube and Vimeo and a Google calendar. (Wednesday night: SOAS ceilidh band. Thursday lunchtime: Raymond Geuss.) The thinking is get it all out there and edit later. This works because, according to Sam, the Met doesn’t know enough about the net to keep up with them: ‘We’re prescient on everything; we’re not worried.’ But I hear paranoia of one sort or another from everyone: the Tory Club are at the door, the police are watching my Twitter, the fire alarm has been going for an hour. They are able to share so much so quickly that when Territorial Support Group Officer 1202 punched a protester in the face on the third march, they soon had video from two angles up on YouTube, a still showing the number on his epaulette on their Flickr page and, by the next morning, the Facebook profile of the person who got punched.

They’re working almost like a news organisation, which is just as well because the mainstream media are no better than they might be. On the day of the third march, BBC rolling news showed snowy scenes instead of the student marchers being punched in the face. Newsnight’s Paul Mason visited the SOAS occupation the following day to accuse them of ‘polite outrage’ and of not being sufficiently like 68ers. Even to Newsnight it’s about fees or protest as a rite of passage: no one is talking about the fundamental reorganisation the proposed withdrawal of the £3.9 billion block grant will cause. The front page of the Evening Standard shouts ‘Vandals’. While it’s impossible to tell what images of the 2010 student protests will last, a frontrunner is the shot from the second march of a chain of girls in school uniform around a vandalised police van: sweet ineffectual schoolchildren and hardened activists. The sort of people occupying UCL – middle-class, articulate, pragmatic, calm – don’t figure.

To know in detail about what’s happening in the student movement, you have to go on Twitter. On the third march, students ran from police who looked as if they were trying to kettle them in the driving snow, and made the police chase them all over London. Laurie Penny, a New Statesman columnist and friend of the UCL occupation, can’t have been running as fast as she said she was, as her tweets came every five minutes or so: she was at the big Topshop, then running down Oxford Street singing ‘You can stick your Big Society up your arse’ to the tune of ‘She’ll be Comin’ Round the Mountain’, panting at the Royal Courts of Justice, cheering in Trafalgar Square as SOAS students brought tea, then finally home as her phone died and her feet got too cold. Jess, a second-year English student who usually tweets about fashion as @littlemisswilde (‘I don’t understand politics’) has become the UCL occupation’s ‘Twitter guru’. That day, she tweeted the police’s attempts to kettle the protest while keeping up with the rumours that Tom Ford would be the next high-fashion designer to do a diffusion line for H&M. For her, Twitter is a way of ‘expanding the room’: of including Erasmus students, older and disabled people and of keeping in touch with other student occupations; a way of knowing that there were not only 200 people occupying UCL but thousands behind them. (The downside was the number of people who asked her to tell them what shoes, underwear or dress she was wearing.) It’s also a way of targeting twittering politicians like Lynne Featherstone and Ed Miliband or celebrities like Johnny Marr, Armando Iannucci and Lily Allen for money and support.

Late on 30 November the @ucloccupation account seemed to have been hacked: no one liked talking about it but the theory was that the hacker was some sort of internal enemy, as the password had been freely given out. It wasn’t until early the next afternoon that they knew for sure the hacker had been shut out. The news that they were back up – given by a boy in a purple hoodie and Clark Kent glasses – got the loudest cheer from the room all day, louder than the cheer that greeted Bob Crow when he came to remind them that it was only when suffragettes broke windows that the world took notice.

The new media are also a way to become known to the old media: they delightedly tweeted BBC pieces about them and a Guardian video. No one flinched when I told them I was a journalist (apart from someone from the media group, who found me talking to students although I hadn’t made myself known to her). They knew how to make the best of being in London, close to the BBC and on the phone to the Guardian; one student told me it ‘was all quite cynical really’; another that ‘it’s a media war essentially’; another judged how they were doing by the fact that ‘the international media are listening to us intently.’

There are two ends in sight: the parliamentary vote on fees, which is scheduled for Thursday 9 December, and the end of the UCL term on Friday 17 December. Are they prepared to be here over Christmas? Some say they have train tickets booked; others say they’ll stay, get a Christmas tree, organise a Secret Santa. On 2 December the UCL management served the occupation with an injunction (you can see a picture of the actual serving of the papers on their Flickr feed) demanding that they leave; the students will have to defend themselves at London County Court on 7 December. The occupation reacted by organising a flashmob to target the Manchester offices of the legal firm that drew up the injunction, Eversheds LLP, and decided to hold a candlelight vigil for the death of education in the snowy quad, in front of the dome, pillars and banner. Perhaps it is also a vigil for the occupation, which may well be over by the time you read this.

By the entrance to the occupied Jeremy Bentham Room are the remains of an earlier vigil, all melted candles and wilting roses, Diana-like, with slogans among the tea lights: ‘Cedric Diggory Was Murdered,’ ‘Albus Dumbledore Was a GREAT MAN’ and ‘EDUCATION: The Fourth Deathly Hallow’. This is the generation who grew up reading about a turreted boarding school called Hogwarts, where Harry Potter, a suburban boy from Privet Drive, could be taught to defeat Voldemort; and likewise it seemed possible for any suburban girl in Blair’s Britain, if she kept her head down, did her Sats, her GCSEs, her ASs, her A2s, to go to university and so get a good job – or at any rate a job. They’d been told education is all there is, and now it’s been taken away. The UCL occupation has been visited by local schoolchildren, including a contingent of sixth formers from Camden School for Girls; when these nicely brought-up girls wrote to say thank you, they were rather breathless: ‘It was inspiring,’ they said. ‘I want to come to UCL.’

This was a bit of a bittersweet victory. Many people who came were unable to get in due to the limit of the room booked. A student-body wide referendum will be held within a week on whether to uphold the motion, as it should be, in order to gauge the feelings of the whole student body (or as many as will vote), but as it is… we’ve officially got UCLUnion support by a substantially large majority!

Last Thursday, one thousand Greek students, protesting government austerity plans, marched to the British embassy in Athens in solidarity with British students. On Moday we will gather outside the Greek embassy in a cheerful show of solidarity with them.

Map of the embassy here

Bring banners that show solidarity with the Greek students who were tear gassed – the more languages these banners are written in, the better – we will bring our own bearing Italian, English, Spanish, Portugese and Greek slogans.

As well as these banners we welcome your presence and a shared belief that this radical, new student movement is in the fight of it’s life, and it is a fight that we can all win!

This decisive week in London will itself begin with this act of solidarity at 1pm on Monday with our fellow Greek students who were tear gassed expressing solidarity with us.

We support all those fighting the cuts nationally and internationally!