• 1 Benford, R. D., and D. A. Snow, 2000, p. 614.

4Framing is a sociological concept developed by scholars analysing social movements. According to the American sociologists Robert Benford and David Snow, collective action frames are “action-oriented sets of beliefs and meanings that inspire and legitimate the activities and campaign of a social movement organisation”1. In other words, they are like filter lenses, presenting an interpretation of reality aimed at mobilising support for a cause.

• 2 “Grants fight”, The Beaver, 2 February 1973, p. 7.
• 3 <http://anticuts.com/2010/10/29/the-case-for-free-education-an-ncafc-briefing/>, last accessed on 1 (...)
• 4 These changes mainly took place under Thatcher and Blair’s premierships. Student grants were replac (...)

5During the 1950s and early 1960s, students saw their grants as a privilege enabling them to access higher education – especially those who would not have been able to afford it otherwise – hence the surge in the number of students entering university during those years. By the late 1960s and early 1970s, their perception had changed. They felt it was a right as a British citizen to receive a grant as a form of payment for their training, similar to a worker’s wage. Therefore, in the manner of an industrial union, it fell onto the National Union of Students (NUS) to protect the interests of its members. The NUS argued that maintenance grants should keep up with inflation and allow the students to live decently : “The value of student grants is less than what it was in 1968. The standard of living of students has been systematically eroded by inflation. The National Union of Students cannot allow its members’ standard of living to decline any further”2. Similarly, in 2010, the National Campaign Against Fees and Cuts (NCAFC) – the umbrella organisation leading the movement – claimed that student grants should enable their beneficiaries to cover their living expenses : “every student should be provided with a grant that is enough to live on”3. But by that time, only the poorest were provided with maintenance grants, while the rest of the students received loans that had to be repaid4. On the top of that, they also had to pay off the loans covering their tuition fees. So the NCAFC wanted to go back to a time when education was a public service free for all.

• 5 “Thames Poly”, The Beaver, 14 March 1973, p. 6.
• 6 <http://anticuts.com/2010/10/29/the-case-for-free-education-an-ncafc-briefing/>, last accessed on 1 (...)
• 7 <http://anticuts.com/ncafc-constitution/>, last accessed on 13 January 2018.
• 8 “LSE students could face fee cap abolition”, The Beaver, 12 October 2010, p. 1. “To freeze or not t (...)
• 9 <http://www.educationengland.org.uk/documents/robbins/robbins1963.html>, last accessed on 13 Januar (...)
• 10 Red Mole was created in March 1970 after a split in the editorial board of Black Dwarf, founded in (...)
• 11 “Education on the cheap”, Red Mole, 17 February 1973, p. 2.

6Both the 1972-3 and the 2010-11 campaigns were organised against what the students perceived as concessions from the government to the capitalist system. In the 1970s they complained that “The Government’s policy of providing British capitalism with an increasing supply of skilled labour at the cheapest possible cost has been at the expense of students’ living standards, especially those from working class backgrounds”5. In other words, they resented the fact that capitalist interests were given precedence over their own – a theme that was taken up again and developed at length in the 2010s. In the eyes of the students, their opponents were the government and the economic elite they served, as the following expressions demonstrate : “a government of the rich, for the rich” and “the lies told by the bosses and their government”6. They rejected the recommendations of the Browne Review which they considered as a “neoliberal assault”finalising the drift towards the marketisation of further and higher education7. But given the circumstances of the 2010 general elections, the Liberal-Democrats in the Coalition government were portrayed as “liars” having broken their electoral promise of opposing any increase in tuition fees. Thus they were framed as being “immensely hypocritical”, “seek[ing] to betray the students”, accused of “deception”, of “ratting on their promise”.8 Interestingly, the students in 1973 had also accused the government of going back on its word because Thatcher’s proposals were reversing the principle at the heart of the Robbins Report of 1963 : making universities “available to all who are qualified by ability and attainment”9. Hence, from the Conservative government of Harold Macmillan in the early 1960s to that of Edward Heath in the early 1970s, the policy on higher education had changed course, marking the transition from a growing budget to spending cuts. The socialist newspaper Red Mole10 – very popular among students – voiced the contrast between the Robbins and Thatcher proposals in these terms : “Gone are the ‘Green and Pleasant Land’ vistas of Robbins a decade previously. […] Today those same forces demand a deterioration in all provisions and a ruthless cut-back on unit costs”11.

• 12 The Debré law, named after the Defence Minister Michel Debré, abolished the temporary exemption fro (...)
• 13 “On the picket-lines”, The Beaver, 17 February 1972, p. 5. “Hot spring in Paris”, Red Mole, April 1 (...)
• 14 “Thatcher throws sop to students”, Red Weekly, 19 May 1973, p. 2.
• 15 <http://www.thecrimson.com/article/1974/4/27/we-knew-we-were-right-pto/>, last accessed on 14 Janua (...)
• 16 <http://anticuts.com/2010/10/19/france-an-inspiration-for-tomorrow/>, last accessed on 13 January 2 (...)
• 17 <http://anticuts.com/2010/10/29/the-case-for-free-education-an-ncafc-briefing/>, last accessed on 1 (...)
• 18 <https://www.theguardian.com/education/gallery/2010/nov/25/student-protest-placard-slogans>, last a (...)

7As for the motivational frames used by the activists spearheading both campaigns, they chose to refer to the events occurring in France to inspire their troops. After May 1968, France had become the epitome of protest in the eyes of British activists. When secondary school and university students started demonstrating against the Debré law12 and the reform of the first two years of higher education, British activists observed them closely. They compared this new wave of unrest to the movement of 1968 and praised them for being instances of what they saw as a French invention : joint student-worker actions13. They tried to forge links between industrial struggles and the student movement and framed them both as part of the same fight against a common enemy : “our allies in the fight against the Tories’ attack on student living standards are those struggling against them”14. A similar phenomenon was at work in the United States, were a declining student movement was torn between two rival factions. The main organisation, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), split in 1969. The minority wing took a revolutionary stance inspired from the national liberation struggles while the majority group adopted “a pro-working class approach” and tried to forge alliances with workers involved in industrial disputes.15 In the same vein, the students in 2010 also looked across the Channel to the massive demonstrations against pension reform. On the NCAFC blog, numerous articles can be found depicting the events going on in France in order to motivate students to take action : “France – an inspiration for tomorrow”, “We turned Oxford into Paris”, or “French workers and students fight back !”16. For that reason they reframed the issue at stake as a matter of social justice, proposing to tax the rich to finance public services instead of imposing cuts. “If we had a government which really wanted to solve the crisis in a way that was ‘fair’,” read an NCFAC pamphlet, “it would – at the very least – increase taxes on the wealth of the rich, big business and the banks. […] It comes down to which you think are important : profits and the wealth of the rich, or the services and jobs the rest of us need”17. This particular opposition to public and education spending cuts drove them to make references to Margaret Thatcher’s record both as Prime Minister and as Education Secretary, as such slogans as “David Thatcher Education Snatcher” or “I can’t believe it’s not Thatcher” showed.18 Thatcher was famous for “rolling back” the frontiers of the state and for her education cuts in the early 1970s, which removed free school milk for children over seven years of age thereby earning the infamous nickname “milk snatcher”. Thus the students perceived those cuts and the ones they were facing as part of the same continuous process, which could explain why they made use of some the tactics employed by their predecessors.

• 19 “400,000 Students Back Strike”, The Glasgow Herald, 15 March 1973, p. 1. “Student rent strikes face (...)
• 20 <https://www.theguardian.com/education/2010/nov/24/student-protests-school-children-streets>, last (...)
• 21 “Thames Poly”, The Beaver, 14 March 1973, p. 6. <http://anticuts.com/2010/12/04/students-and-london (...)

8Students involved in both campaigns resorted to a vast array of tactics. Moderates employed conventional strategies, ranging from writing letters to MPs to taking parts in massive demonstrations with the biggest national actions gathering about 40,000 in central London both in 1973 and in 2010. More radical techniques involved sit-ins lasting several hours, numerous university occupations and pickets, guerrilla theatre, teach-ins or alternative free universities, rent strikes and canteen boycotts to name but a few. Both movements involved an outstanding amount of students and affected colleges and universities across the nation. By March 1973, it was estimated that approximately 400,000 students had been taking part at some point in the NUS campaign, while over 40 universities and colleges answered the call for rent strikes19. Forty years later, students also embarked on a massive show of force with 32 universities simultaneously occupied at the end of November 2010 and about 130,000 students walking out to demonstrate in the major cities on 24 November across the nation20. Students from both generations sought to forge links with the workers by using old working class tactics like the rent strike or pickets blockading their universities, inviting trade union members to come to speak during university occupations or to lend a hand on picket lines. Students and workers also signed statements of mutual solidarity and encouraged their members to take part in their respective or common actions to draw parallels between both struggles21.

• 22 “Grants”, Glasgow University Guardian, 1 March 1973, p. 1. “Official NUS Pamphlet: Frozen Grants”, (...)

9But if the tactics used for both campaigns were similar, the way they were relayed through the new technologies caused substantial differences. Facebook groups, Twitter accounts, blogs and the like ensured a better coordination of actions, accelerated information dissemination and provided a forum to counter the dominant media disparaging representation of the protests. For example, Youtube videos were used to promote actions and mobilise support, as can be shown through several creative examples. The King’s College London Students’ Union chose to make a parody trailer of a zombie movie which exposed the recommendations of the Browne Review as the next evil about to befall British students and announcing the national demonstration of 10 November 2010 (Figure 1). Along completely different lines, the University of the Arts London Students’ Union concocted a parody cover of MC Hammer’s song ‘U Can’t Touch This’ entitled ‘Can’t Cut This’ attacking the cuts on Arts education and also urging students to protest on 10 November (Figure 2). Thanks to YouTube, the students were able to reach a very wide audience since the videos were viewed by several thousands of people. During the 1973 campaign, this function was fulfilled by sober notices and ads in student newspapers, with inserts in bold capital letters such as “Grants/ SRC and NUS both back big demo/ join the protest for/ higher grants/ leaves Union – March 14” or the printing of the official NUS pamphlet urging the students to support the movement in the local periodical of Warwick University (Figures 3 and 4)22. Since the newspapers’ circulation was only about a few thousand copies, these ads were bound to have a much more limited audience than the YouTube videos or other material posted on the Internet. Yet, the numbers of participants in the actions in 1973 and in 2010 were similar, which is why the impact of the new technologies on the 2010 protests should not be overestimated.

• 23 “Edinburgh grants survey sheds light”, The Glasgow University Guardian, 15 November 1973, p. 1.
• 24 <https://www.theguardian.com/education/2010/nov/10/student-protest-fees-violent>, last accessed on (...)

10Significantly, the main media in Britain portrayed both movements in very unfavourable lights, siding most of the time with the government and the police. To discredit student demands for higher grants in 1973, mainstream newspapers claimed that students squandered their money on alcohol : “a high proportion of student grants are spent on alcoholic liquor”23. Since the days of the large anti-Vietnam demonstrations of 1968, the media have been describing student activists in the same stereotypical ways, relaying such clichés as the foreign agitator, the anarchist, the hooligan or more recently the ‘hoodie’, who has come to embody some kind of urban threat. From the very first demonstration, the press focused on violent incidents rather than on the issues at stake. Even The Guardian chose to spotlight the disturbances in the article entitled “Student protest over fees turns violent”, mainly quoting members of the government and only briefly the NUS president Aaron Porter to mention his condemnation of the troublemakers. No student demonstrator was interviewed. Worse, they were pictured as a mindless and aggressive mob : “an estimated 50,000 turning out to vent their anger” and further on “a crowd hurling placard sticks, eggs and bottles”24. This depiction depoliticised the protest and presented the activists as a threat to society hereby legitimising police repression.

• 25 “Occupation”, The Beaver, 14 March 1973, p. 8.
• 26 “Student rent strikes face legal threats”, Red Weekly, 12 May 1973, p. 2. “Newcastle: no hall place (...)
• 27 “The Stirling picket of March 3rd”, The Glasgow University Guardian, 19 April 1973, p. 5.
• 28 <http://anticuts.com/2011/09/20/protestor-jailed-for-banner-drop-defend-the-right-to-campaign/>, la (...)
• 29 “IMG arrests”, The Warwick Boar, 11 October 1973, p. 3. Coventry IMG, 1973, MSS.164/2/4/5.
• 30 “Police call on School to monitor student activists”, The Beaver, 25 January 2011, p. 1.
• 31 “LSE students ‘kettled in’ at education cuts rally”, The Beaver, 30 November 2010, p. 4. “The polic (...)

11During both campaigns, students felt they were being treated harshly and unfairly by the authorities. In 1973, university officials adopted a hard line in order to deter the students from carrying on with the rent strike. Their tough stance amounted to “threats of victimisation and intimidation” in the eyes of the young activists25. For instance, university administrations warned them that they could be facing legal action, that their grants would be withheld, or that they would be barred from the halls the following term26. Some students who took on leading roles in the campaign were also suspended, which often led to renewed escalation in the protests to oppose those disciplinary measures27. Likewise, in 2011 Edward Bauer, an active member of the NCAFC and Vice-President of Education at the University of Birmingham, was kept in custody for ten days, suspended from his elected position and from his status as a student. These sanctions occurred after Bauer unfurled a banner on a bridge reading “Traitors not welcome – Hate Clegg, love NCAFC” on the day of the opening of the Liberal Democrat conference in Birmingham. The students were convinced that the police, the court and the university administration were acting in concert in order to intimidate them and muzzle the protests28. To account for their heavy-handed tactics, the police conjured up the threat of terrorism. In the early 1970s, the Angry Brigade, a left-wing revolutionary group, blew up a series of symbolic targets which never led to any serious injury but did trigger a crackdown on the student movement and left-wing protest groups in general. The Irish Republican Army had also started a much more lethal bombing campaign on mainland Britain in retaliation for the shooting of unarmed demonstrators by British paratroopers which became known as Bloody Sunday. Amid these growing tensions, the students regularly complained of “police harassment”, as when the Special Branch used an anti-IRA operation as an excuse to raid the office of the International Marxist Group in Coventry29. In 2010, the students railed against the government’s Contest Counter Terrorism Strategy because they felt it was being used as an excuse to keep them in check and stifle their campaign. Ashok Kumar, Education Officer at the LSE Students’ Union, lambasted the attempts of the police to monitor their political activities : “It is truly scary that the Metropolitan police believe it is their role to police our peaceful and non-violent occupations. This is about protecting the status-quo and has absolutely nothing to do with keeping the peace or the laughable ‘counter-terrorism’”30. The controversial police tactic of “kettling” crowds during demonstrations was also in the students’ crosshairs. On 24 November 2010, about 5,000 protesters were penned in by a police cordon for up to eight hours which was interpreted as yet another way of deterring the students from “exercising their democratic right to voice dissent”31.

• 32 “Grants Action Call”, The Glasgow University Guardian, 14 February 1975, p. 1.
• 33 < https://www.tcs.cam.ac.uk/interviews/0010155-nus-president-aaron-porter-talks-about-placards-prot (...)
• 34 Ibid.
• 35 For more details on the funding of higher education in Britain see the chronology entitled “Grants, (...)

12Although both movements faced relatively comparable treatments from the media and the forces of law and order, only the 1973 campaign managed to favourably influence government policy. Despite its promises to let the “lame duck” industries fail and to curb trade union power at a time of outstanding militancy, the Heath administration was forced to back down and perform a famous U-turn on economic policy. This could also account for Margaret Thatcher’s small concessions to the students in May 1973, while Wilson’s return to power the following year brought them an almost complete victory – delaying for a few years the break with the post-war consensus on education. They obtained a substantial increase in the standard grant, an annual review of grants to keep up with inflation and an end to the discrimination against married women students who previously received 40 % less than their male counterparts32. The 2010-11 campaign suffered an entirely different fate and did not result in any direct change of policy. The government won the vote in the House of Commons on 9 December 2010 approving the recommendations of the Browne Review and thereby allowing universities to raise tuition fees up to £ 9,000 a year. On that very day, the split in the student movement became apparent when some 20,000 demonstrators answered the call of the NCAFC and the University of London Union to walk through the capital, while a mere 300 gathered at the NUS rally33. In the following months, its President, Aaron Porter, came under harsh criticism for refusing to support the national marches orchestrated by the more radical organisations. According to him, the role of the NUS was to act as a pressure group swaying government decisions, rather than as a trade union spurring collective action34. Those divisions were not the only factor explaining the failure of the campaign. In the post-Thatcher and Blair eras, trade union power had been curtailed, the markets deregulated and the frontiers of the Welfare State “rolled back”. After Thatcher’s victory in 1979, the free-market approach that characterised her premiership was applied to higher education. University budgets were drastically reduced as part of an overall plan to cut public spending while student maintenance grants were turned into loans (except for those from low-income homes). Tony Blair’s administration furthered that trend by introducing and then increasing tuition fees for British undergraduates35. Therefore the unsuccessful outcome of the ‘Freeze the Fees’ campaign could be explained by what seemed to be a neoliberal consensus on the funding of higher education forged by the main parties.