Ten years ago today, the plate glass windows of Conservative Party headquarters at 30 Millbank were kicked in by an angry mob who stormed through the building, graffiting the walls and hurling documents (and a fire extinguisher) off the roof. The riot took place at the end of a fifty thousand-strong march organised by the National Union of Students (NUS) in opposition to the Coalition government’s plans to triple tuition fees, and it shocked everyone – from the NUS leadership which described it as “despicable”, to the media who put it on every news bulletin, to those of us who were in the crowd ourselves. It was one of those moments when an event, a spectacle, outstrips all expectations, and throws open possibilities which were inconceivable a few days prior.
Millbank was the start of an explosive moment of protest, which gripped the country for a solid month. On 24th November, something like 130,000 students took to the streets across the country, tens of thousands more on 30th November, and forty thousand marched on parliament for the vote on December 9th. In the absence of the NUS, which actively opposed the protests, the task of coordinating fell to forty-odd university occupations that were scattered across the country and to the new Left networks, chief among them the National Campaign Against Fees and Cuts (NCAFC), which had been set up in February that year and whose logo spread like a virus across campuses off the back of misappropriated printer credit.
The movement triggered by the Millbank riot was disruptive and wild. Those who took to the streets, walked out of school and occupied their universities viewed direct action and mass mobilisation as their biggest weapons in their fight against the elite. After the student movement, and to a great extent accelerated by it, would come the anti-austerity movement of 2011, with its massive public sector strikes and marches, alongside Occupy, UKUncut, and a million local anti-cuts struggles.
