POLITICAL STUDENTS ARE REVOLTING: An Interview with Viva MMU

Conducted: 02/03/09 by the PULP Online Team

Viva Representatives: Mark Harrison, Emma Davies, Nick Learoyd

On retiring from a hard day’s work one Thursday afternoon, PULP was confronted by a mob of seething students demanding an audience with the Union’s Executive. After identifying themselves as “Viva MMU” – Manchester Metropolitan’s very own band of student activists, and those behind the university’s recent political revival, we thought we’d offer them an interview.

“Tea and biscuits are an essential part of any occupation”

What exactly went wrong with the Geoffrey Manton occupation? Rumour has it the protest was cut short as a result of a biscuit shortage...
Nick: Tea and biscuits are an essential part of any occupation.

Mark: The only people who could get into the building were members of staff with an ID card. No food could get in. They switched off the water at one point. And the heating. Their idea was to starve us out.

Emma: It didn’t take very long.

Nick: It’s not their right to deny us our right to protest, to food, water, etc.

Emma: We were also threatened to be suspended from the university on more than one occasion during the occupation.

Demands of MMU students in occupation in solidarity with Gaza, as agreed on 22/01/09:

1) Issue a public statement condemning Israel’s attack on Palestinian educational institutions, including the bombing of the Islamic University of Gaza, and encourage your colleagues in the other Universities to issue a similar call.
2) Establish an emergency fund for Palestinians students from Gaza and waive their tuition fees to support their efforts to acquire an education.
3) Waive all application & tuition fees from students coming from Palestine and create scholarships specifically available for Palestinian students.
4) To build links with Palestinian universities.
5) Divest MMU funds from all firms contributing to the Israeli war effort.
6) To create a proper memorial to Tom Hurndall, a MMU student murdered by the Israeli Occupation forces in Gaza.
7) To sever all academic links with Israeli institutions that don’t oppose the continued occupation of Palestine.
8) That the Students’ Union should allow political posters to be displayed on its windows/noticeboards/walls.
9) That no military recruiters should be allowed on campus.
10) That the University should boycott Coca-Cola and stop the sale of it in all its outlets.
11) That there should be no repercussions for anyone involved in the occupation of MMU buildings.

Can you explain the motivations behind the last demand?
Nick: Basically it is saying that as long as we keep the protest peaceful, within the law then you have no reason to victimise any student who is involved in the protest because it is our right to hold such a protest.

Emma: It is just reasserting our right to hold the protest. We made John Brookes sign a part of a document to state that he wouldn’t take any action against any of the students involved in the occupation. That was the first thing we did when we negotiated out of the building. But generally the idea why we couldn’t sustain it is because we did not have enough people there active with us because it was during exam time, a lot of people didn’t know what was happening.

Mark: I’m sure if we could have got more people into the building we could have kept a presence up; kept renewing people, recycling the people in there. It was a really big blow to morale to not get food in, not get anything for the building, like we were isolated. So we couldn’t get out, or go round the university publicising what we were doing. We couldn’t have stayed over the weekend because we thought our food would get cut off.

Mark: Otherwise we probably could have carried on.

What were you hoping to achieve with the Geoffrey Manton occupation?
Emma: Mostly to create a political awareness on campus; to get students thinking about these ideas.

Do you think this has been successful?
Nick: It’s kick-started something.

Mark: We wouldn’t be standing for this election if we hadn’t started off with that action.

Emma: Since the occupation we’ve had a lot of people rallying around the group. We’ve set up Facebook pages.

Do you not think that your efforts would have made more of an impact had gotten the press involved?
Emma: I went down to the BBC on the second day and I gave them a list of our demands and told them to come down to check it out, cover it a little bit. Also I think we contacted the MEN on the first night. But it’s not something you want to publicise openly before.

Mark: We’re not very good at PR.

Emma: You’ve got to understand that this is the first time we’ve had a broad group of people coming together over a certain issue – and there are a lot of kinks to iron out in the way we organise, in the way we publicise. We’re not all hardened revolutionaries. Some of us are a bit soft.

How many of your demands do you reasonably expect the university to meet?
Emma: We don’t expect it to go through the university any more. What we did was once we negotiated our way out, we got the final demand which was the premise for leaving.

Was that the only one?
Emma: Basically we were trying to negotiate ourselves out by getting as much as we could. He [John Brookes] was very ‘hard balls’ with us. We got that one demand, the last demand but we’re still negotiating with him over Coca-Cola.

Could you please clarify your lobby against Coca-Cola and its relation to the crisis in Palestine?
Nick: Coca-Cola source water from within the 1968 boarders of Palestine – Palestinian land, which has been occupied by Israel. They source water from there in order to produce Coca-Cola products.

Mark: Coca-Cola do a lot of other bad things as well. They murder trade unionists in Columbia and stuff like that.

How many people are there in your group?
Nick: Well it’s a broad coalition so… but organising meetings we usually have 20 or so people. 20-30 people.

How do you plan to convince students that you are not just running to get a political point across?
Nick: We are running to put a political point across. We don’t want to de-politicise.

Do you see how it could look – that you started with the Manton occupation and have only become interested in the Union elections after being knocked back by the Vice Chancellor…?
Emma: No we were always planning in our own separate groups to run, not necessarily as a slate. What we felt was that behind this broad issue, with other broad issues that we think students actually feel quite passionate about, should run together in this way because we are all sort of broadly left-wing. We can help make an actual change in the SU. We’re not vicious, careerist politicians. We’re after making the Union more transparent and democratic, and I personally find the new constitution offensive on many levels.

Why?
Emma: For example, the new officer positions, the old sabbatical positions have been taken away and from the diagram that we were shown of the new system and how it’s going to work… first of all the VC has the final say on everything, and the board of governors, which is not separating the Union from the University, which is not making the Union autonomous. Which is wrong. And then each separate group, everyone has been lumped into different groups, like the “liberation group”, and the other group, and they’ve got to work together, but they actually have no official office.

With so many political agendas, how do intend to achieve anything within Viva MMU?
Emma: We all, within the group, have our own separate, specific interests and we all understand the relevance of the other ones’. I think the whole idea of having a broad coalition is that you take all these ideas together and you come up with something that is representative of the student body, because not everyone is going to feel strongly about ecological issues, not everyone’s going to feel strongly about war issues, but there will be something there that means something to them.

Do you not have anything in common, which unites all these different factions under the Viva MMU umbrella?
Nick: We have a core manifesto, which brings together the whole group, which everyone agrees with, well…isn’t totally resolved…but the core principals are: freedom for education, democracy for the union, which comes under freedom for education, no to fees, which comes under freedom to education. Second one is no to racism, to oppose any form of discrimination within the university. We oppose the BNP, all those Fascist, Nazi parties…

Emma: As well as against sexism, discrimination against people with disabilities, things like that.

Nick: Third is Stop the War, so we oppose the occupation of Palestine. We say bring the troops home from Iraq and Afghanistan. And, well, we support CND, Campaign for Neutral Disarmament. And the fourth one is campaigning on ecological issues, which relates to a humanist view as well.

Its seems you have taken a lot on board, approaching issues that world governments have failed to accomplish over the last twenty years…
Emma cuts in: They’ve not been doing it properly. I’m not being arrogant, but at SU level, we are not world level… I think to pass policy that opposes war and occupations, to pass policy that ensures no racism and no prejudice of any form on campus – and actively campaign against it…

Nick: What we are looking to do is to do it within the confines of our union and our university, so for example we oppose the army recruiting on campus because they bribe students.

They do that?
Nick: Freshers Fair.

Emma: They recruit outside, and I’ve looked at the amount of money MMU invests in Sugden Sports Hall – the uni doesn’t own Sugden but they put a nice chunk of money into it every year, as do Man Uni, down the road, so therefore they should have a say in who ‘sets up shop’ in the car park at Freshers Fair.

Do they [the university] have a say?
Emma: Yes. They should do, as a shareholder.

Nick: It’s their land.

They should do, or they do?
Nick: If it’s their land.

Emma: It’s difficult to find out.

If your slate becomes splintered by the elections, will those who weren’t elected into positions by the student body still exert an influence on the ones who were?
Emma: Of course, as in, we will all make decisions collectively.

Nick: We are an autonomous, non-hierarchal group.

Emma: Obviously we can’t make them answerable, i.e. the elected people, we can’t force them to be answerable, but as part of a group that wants to make the SU more campaigning, ideas that people feel strongly about within the group will be listened to and acknowledged.

Do you not see the fault with this?
Nick: what we are trying to say is that we want more transparency, and the Exec to be more answerable to the students.

Wouldn’t it be less answerable if half the Exec were answering to people who weren’t elected, i.e. who didn’t represent the student body?
Emma: Mmm, but they’re still students.

Nick: It’s up to the students within the university to lobby their Exec and to become active.

So you believe the majority of MMU students are politically enthused?
Nick: There’s something which everyone can agree with. If you’re talking about not paying fees and stuff then…

But isn’t that an irrelevant issue to the current generation of fee-paying students?
Emma: Not at all. I think students at MMU do not question the status quo because they do not know anything else. The whole nature of the SU doesn’t encourage challenging ideas. It encourages being passive. The whole dynamic of the Union and the uni, it’s like a factory. We get pumped in and pumped out. We’re not asked what our opinion is or anything, at any point. And I think that is a bit of a boundary for us, but at the same time we’ve found that through campaigning over Gaza that we’ve managed to engage – not a massive number – but a large number of students in student politics.

Nick: Also the thing about the fees is that four or three years ago when the whole debate about it was going on, it was a huge student movement that were opposed to it, and – no bones about it – it was a big defeat, and I think it’s starting to kick-start again. There was a demonstration in London last Wednesday, which Mark went to. There were 1, 500 people.

Mark: It was more like 600.

Nick: Don’t talk it down.

Would you admit there is a certain degree of apathy amidst the student population?
Emma: There is, within some students, but this is an apathy you have to overcome by actually asking students their opinion, and incorporating them and sort of challenging their idea that this is the way it is and that’s it. Because you’re never going to get anything by assuming that everyone is apathetic and nobody gives a shit, and that’s it. So by asking people and challenging them, from what we’ve seen so far this sort of creates a political culture amongst the students, to some extent over certain issues that you can build on from there. It’s about challenging hegemony really.

When talking about wanting an autonomous, student-led union, do you have any considerations for the business aspect of the organisation?
Nick: It should be the students who decide basically the policy of the union, not necessarily its business model.

But this is a part of your responsibilities as an elected student officer and trustee of the union.
Nick: …Do the Exec run the business strategy of the Union?

They are accountable for it, yes.
Emma: But this is entirely putting emphasis on the SU as a business. It doesn’t have to be.

But it is a business.
Nick: The point we’re coming from is not from the business point of view but from the actual policy, in terms of the way the union acts, campaigns, the way it looks after its students. Not the way it runs the bar. There is an element for having professional people looking after the business side of it, for example a shop and a bar, and events and stuff, but there should also be room for the students to dictate that this union shouldn’t sell Coca-Cola products etc, that we should be campaigning on these issues, that we should be having these events, having certain kinds of weeks for LGBT things.

Students have the platform to do that now. They just haven’t.
Emma: But they’re not actively encouraged. For example, for the GM, we get one a year and last year, when I went I found 2 posters advertising it within the SU.

Nick: It’s part of challenging the kind of culture within the university, which has become prevalent. We’re looking to re-energise students into becoming more active and start questioning things, as well as looking to provide answers.

Are you not concerned about ostracising the politically indifferent, by imposing your collective set of values on the student body?
Emma: I’ve never understood this, unless it is openly offensive, i.e. racist or homophobic, whatever, what is the real problem with having political posters in the SU? You look at them or you don’t look at them. You choose to live your life without being actively involved in politics – that is a personal decision. But advertising it out there and making people aware that it is possible. For example, I don’t like walking down the street and seeing advertising everywhere but it doesn’t affect my life in any way.

Back to the Geoffrey Manton occupation, do you not agree that you were imposing a personal set of beliefs upon the student body in an antagonistic, destructive fashion?
Nick: We respect the right to freedom of education for everybody. It was not our decision to impose those limits on the university. We said explicitly to the university that lectures can carry on within the occupied space. We would keep a symbolic presence at the back of the room. Quietly. Whether that be one or two people just sitting there whilst the lecture takes place…

Emma: …like that’s what’s been at Man Uni for the past month. That’s how it’s happened there.

Nick: We said to the university that we don’t want lectures to be cancelled. It was the university who cancelled lectures and put those restrictions in place.

Emma: We never at any point made any moves to prevent people from coming in and being educated, and learning. At every point we tried to maintain that this is an educational environment, and although we are trying to raise our point and make our voices heard, we were never trying to obstruct education. And I am really sorry that that didn’t come across from maybe the material that we put out.

Of course this was the biggest problem countering your campaign, that you did not effectively communicate your group’s efforts to the student population. To those about the campus, you were simply a disruption.
Emma: Well, like we said before, it was quite difficult to get the information out on what we were doing and why we were doing it when there were only a certain number of us and we had to old the room. And then we couldn’t leave.

Nick: What you got to do is, one of the crucial parts of an occupation is to send out information to the students, letting them know why you are doing it and what’s happening, and we had those barriers put in place, which meant we couldn’t do that. When the university said they were going to cancel lectures, we said it was infringing on people’s right to education, so what we’ll do is propose an alternative series of lectures within the space, so the people could still continue with education. So we invited speakers, trade unionists, lecturers, to come and speak about issues, which were related.

Mark: On the Friday, we had Geoff Brown from Manchester trade union council, the UCU rep from Man Met…

Any last comments, about the occupation, elections or otherwise?
Nick: We’re not bothered about winning, we just want to run as principal.

Emma: We’re mostly just running out of challenging it. It’s mostly just a challenge…

Nick: Challenging hegemony.

Emma: …to show that there is an alternative.