British students protest planned tuition hike

Tens of thousands of students waving placards and chanting anti-government slogans marched through central London on Wednesday to protest plans to triple university costs as part of Britain’s radical deficit-reduction program.

Organizers said about 50,000 students marched through the streets and around the Houses of Parliament, including small breakaway groups that vandalized a government building, to show their outrage at plans to raise the cost of studying at a public university to about $14,000 a year.

Some chanted “Tories out!” and engaged in a rowdy standoff with police at Conservative Party headquarters in the Millbank Tower skyscraper along the River Thames, where they smashed windows, started a fire in the inner courtyard and climbed on the roof. Office workers were briefly evacuated from the building in the early afternoon as a fire alarm went off, but were able to return. Officials said there were a few arrests and minor injuries.

Student protester Benjamin Weiss told the BBC that the demonstration called for more than simply marching with placards.

“People say, ‘Why aren’t the students doing more? In my day the students were so great,’” Weiss said. “Well, now the students are doing something.”

But Aaron Porter, leader of the National Union of Students, which organized the protest, called the violence the “despicable” actions of a few participants.

“I’m utterly disgusted and appalled,” Porter told reporters. “That was not part of our plan.... It’s despicable that they used this opportunity to hijack a peaceful protest.... Unfortunately, a small minority sought to undermine us.”

Britain’s ruling Conservatives say the program to scale back the size of government and eliminate $128 billion in public services during the next four years is needed to ease public debt and cut a budget deficit that is equal to nearly 12% of annual gross domestic product.

The protest Wednesday was the largest street demonstration against the budget cuts since the coalition government, led by the Conservatives with the Liberal Democrats as junior partner, announced the plan last month.

The marchers also demonstrated outside the Liberal Democrats’ party offices. Students are particularly bitter in their criticism of the Liberal Democrats, who had promised to abolish university tuition fees in their election campaign.

University students received free education until former Prime Minister Tony Blair’s Labor government controversially imposed fees for the first time, soon after taking power in 1997; he later increased them to a cap of about $4,800 a year.

An independent inquiry into higher education initiated by former Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s Labor government, which lost power in May, presented its results a few months ago to the new Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition, recommending increased and open-ended higher education fees.

But in Parliament on Wednesday, Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, leader of the Liberal Democrats, faced fiery opposition to the tuition hike from Labor deputy leader Harriet Harman, who accused the coalition government of “pulling the plug on public funding and dumping the cost on students.”

Clegg said the new measures were necessary and preferable to previous Labor Party practices.

“It is a fair and progressive solution to a very difficult problem,” he said.

Stobart is a staff writer in The Times’ London Bureau.