Many of you will be aware of the unannounced police raid at Royal Holloway students union last weekend, where police officers targeted black students at a freshers event, using stop-and-search tactics to (apparently) search for drugs. This report is from Workers’ Liberty, which myself and Daniel Cooper (who was arrested) are members of:
On the night of Friday 27 September, at least fifteen police officers turned up at Royal Holloway Students’ Union in Surrey, and set about the profiling and searching of students attending a freshers’ week SU night.
This included both uniformed cops with tasers and sniffer dogs and, even more bizarrely, undercover police disguised as students.
The police had been invited into the student union by a commercial manager; no student or elected student representative authorised their presence or was consulted. The police were particularly targeting black students: an all-too familiar reminder of the police’s systematic racism.
When a group of students attempted to challenge the police action, one of them – former Royal Holloway SU President and current University of London Union Vice President, Workers’ Liberty member Daniel Cooper – was manhandled to the ground by seven officers and arrested. He was held until Saturday afternoon.
There are numerous issues here: the routine presence of police on university campuses; students’ right to congregate, associate and organise freely; police racism; arrest of a student representative; and democratic control and accountability in student unions.
Far from creating a safe environment, such police presence creates an unsafe and intimidating situation. We should demand that the police are allowed on campus only in exceptional circumstances.
Royal Holloway students are launching a campaign on these issues, but all this is relevant much more widely. We need a campaign across the student movement. Cops off our campuses!
Since then, students at Royal Holloway held a demo on campus this Wednesday opposing the use of police to intimidate students, and for SU control over police presence on site. If you are a student at Royal Holloway, or wish to show support, you can contact them here.
This raises much wider questions about what role university and SU management have in our student unions, and who has ultimate control over the physical spaces of our SU buildings. It’s easy to forget this in the current situation where both NUS (through NUS Services/NUSSL), and most Student Unions, operate as businesses, running fancy dress nights and discount drinks offers, unions have in the past been student-controlled political spaces. At times, students unions were fought for by groups of students, who saw them as spaces which should be run by students, and for students, no more was this clearer than in the late 1960s and early 1970s when broader political campaigning around issues such as the Vietnam war politicised students in general, and politicised student union spaces. These days, with the advent of NUSSL and Student Union commercial services becoming more and more prominent throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the control over Student Union spaces has moved more and more away from the democratic bodies which should govern it, and towards student union, or university management. We need a broader discussion about what our student unions are becoming – some of them are indistinguishable now from any other events venue in the area around campus. Many political groups are blocked from doing any organising on campus because of bureaucratic or prohibitively expensive room booking systems, or bans on leafleting on campus except for companies who have paid the Student Union or university for the privilege. And now, university manage are sending undercover cops into freshers’ events . For those of us who see student unions as a place we have ownership over, this was a terrible abuse of power (aside from the racism within the act itself) – but is it so set apart from the pervading culture of university management’s increasing control and influence over student unions? Perhaps not. Only recently, University of London management saw fit to enter the University of London Union – again with no discussion with those people who should run that space (the students and elected officers), and arrested students on the premises. These incidents show the real dangers of student union and university partnership in the control of student union spaces, and we should not pretend there is no conflict of interest. If we want to control our union spaces, and ensure the safety of its members, we will have to fight for it through campaigns like the one starting at Royal Holloway – it’s time we took back our student unions.
Rosie Huzzard 