UEL OCCUPATION

Today was a quiet day on campus, due mainly to the snow and the consequent lecture cancellations. Putting all of this aside, the response from those students who were on campus was largely positive. People do seem genuinely angry about the cuts and fee rises.

Tom Mangan gave a hilarous theatre workshop, featuring many ‘Whose Line Is It Anyway?’ copy-cat scenes. Later, Pete Pitfield gave an important workshop entitled, ‘Hands Off: Street Defence’ which featured many tactics for avoiding police brutality and taught us the importance of sticking with an affinity group.

At 5pm, we had the Friends of Palestine launch meeting. Jody McIntyre gave us a short speech on his time in Palestine and the relationship between the struggle he saw there and the struggle we are currently facing here.

Our day began with putting up posters, lecture shout-outs and flyering. Just after 12pm, a media representative from King’s College London came to talk to us about the occupation there and a UEL representative gave a short message of support (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vCElf0avxxI&feature=player_embedded).

At 3pm, Chris Knight gave an impressive anthropology lecture on the ideas of a dialectical society and the human revolution. Just as the lecture finished, a few members of the occupation talked with a journalist from ‘The Wharf’ Later, at 5pm, David Graeber gave a talk on the importance of Millbank and the direct action that ensued.

An Emergency General Meeting has been announced of the UEL Student Union to talk about both our reaction to the cuts and the ineptitude and misrepresentation of the SU. We are proposing to turn the EGM into a General Assembly for all students and lecturers to attend.

Day 7

Today was an important day for the UEL Occupation. Many of our students went on the student demo. Although no-one got to Parliament Square where the bill was being debated, many of our students reached Trafalgar Square. Some of their stories will be on this blog later.

We got a massive amount of flyer’s out even though so few people came in to uni today, after all the snow and problems on the DLR. We then had a great meeting with students in the evening which led to a discussion on what people thought and how we can go forward.

Day 8

Lecturers invited UEL Occupation delegates to a meeting of the local branch of the University College Union and allowed us to talk about the nature of the occupation and what we want out of it. The reaction was very positive and we discussed the problems that we may face.

Delegates also went to to London Metropolitan University to discuss activism amongst the student populace of London. The discussion was colourful and many new ideas came back to the UEL occupation.

Richard Seymour, a writer and Socialist political activist, came to the Occupation to give a rousing speech on the history of the Conservatives and talked with us, and some new faces, about the current political climate.

This evening, we greeted two lecturers who gave an inspirational talk on ‘Occupation and Resistance, UEL’s radical history,’ in which the past of the NELP’s and PEL’s activism was laid out.

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Day 5:

Students of the UEL occupation got up early on Sunday to decorate our room, make new banners, organise our meeting and build for the 30/11/10 demo. We felt it necessary to decorate the room to give it a more homely feel, showing our desire to stay here indefinitely. We hung up a great new banner right in the middle of the university square with “FxxK FEES” emblazoned across it. We received some donations from students in the library and decided the actions for the week.

Day 6:

At 6am a delegation of UEL students went to support the tube strikers at Mile End chanting: workers and students unite and fight. Students and worker discussed how to bring our movements closer together.

Another delegation was dispatched to Tower Hamlets college to talk about UEL’s occupation and it’s role in the wider university network, the proposed rise in education fees and cut sin education spending and EMA and the national demo on 30/11/10. We also organised for the student strike and demo on the 30th and flyered the vast span of the Docklands campus.

For all of the amazing messages of support that are flooding into our gmail account!

We will soon be printing out some of these to add to our ‘Solidarity wall’ in the room. 

Brighton:

http://brightonresistance.wordpress.com/

UWE:

http://act-at-uwe.blogspot.com/

UCL:

http://ucloccupation.tumblr.com/

More to come..

It’s encouraging that we’re seeing good numbers in room 101 every night, last night was the third of the occupation and there were approximately 13 people staying. It’s also encouraging that not every night sees the same group, with more and more students coming to take part. This signifies not only a success in terms of our common purpose (opposing fee hikes and HE cuts) but also in terms of engaging more and more UEL students with issues that affect them, and building a more diverse and aware political community on campus.

Going beyond room 101, we are managing to uphold a magnificent dialogue via email between ourselves and many universities across the country that are also under occupation. Some of our occupants visited SOAS and UCL occupations earlier this week.