How the police and senior management are trampling on student dissent

nus.org.uk

The news that Michael Chessum, president of the University of London Union (ULU) was arrested earlier this week under section 11 of the Public Order Act 1989 is the latest event in a series of efforts to quell dissent on UK university campuses. It further illustrates a worrying trend in the future of student politics as well as the fate of public universities themselves.

Under S.11, the police had every right to arrest Chessum on the grounds that he had failed to give prior notice of the demonstration, held to counter management's continuing plan of dismantling the largest students' union in Europe, opting instead to outsource services and dilute both accessibility and public accountability for its students.

Yet the claim rests on shaky grounds, for several reasons. First, as reported by the London Review of Books,  Chessum was arrested almost immediately after his meeting with a member of senior management, who had previously written to him advising: ‘review your personal and institutional responsibilities and liabilities in leading protesters into physical danger and unlawful action'. While the University of London claim they have nothing to do with the protest, complains from union staffers suggest that the correspondence might amount to a clear threat taken in this context.

There's a bigger issue at hand, however; an ongoing trend in which authorities have actively clamped down on student dissidence in campuses across the country- and have gotten away with it.

Consider that even after the 2010 student protests in London, the metropolitan police continue to taunt students with letters 'reminding' them not to engage in 'disruptive, anti-social behaviour as Farah-Al-Nahda reports.  The crackdown hasn't just been limited to mass protests either. Just a few months ago, another student at the University of London was arrested for a 'chalk protest' highlighting the University's aims at altering levels of pay to outsourced low-wage cleaners.

That isn't all, of course. On the same day that Chessum was arrested, secret footage published by The Guardian showed that the police were attempting to bribe students at Cambridge University into spying on activists on the campus. According to the tapes, the police weren't just searching for activists who may pose a risk to national security, but rather 'union-stuff', as "the things they discuss can have an impact on community issues."

While Chessum has now been released from Holborn police station, he, as have the rest of union members, has been banned from staging any more protests on any of the London campuses until further notice. Meanwhile, the University of London will continue the plans to disband ULU, only this time with little threat of resistance.

Finally- it's worth reading this piece on OpenDemocracy.net. It's an interesting article on the uses and abuses of security services in our universities, and the ways in which other forms of protests- including those against arms manufacturers, are also being trodden on.

What this says about how universities are changing is debatable, though the way I see it, arbitrary arrests, gagging orders and the increased erosion of transparency make it clear that public institutions are becoming more corporate, less accountable to their student bodies and disturbingly, more welcome on campuses.

Some thoughts on Journalism

It’s been a while since I last went on a school trip- especially one that didn’t involve asking middle-aged mums from Kent about parking in their dreary town centers.

As part of the NCTJ course (an accredited journalism training programme) that I’m taking at Lambeth College, I had the opportunity to attend the Society of Editor’s conference, an annual meeting of the industry’s top editorial staff, freedom of information campaigners and veteran journalists, to discuss the most pressing issues that currently faces journalists working in the print medium. The day consisted of panel debates relating to reforms in press regulations, the relationships between journalists and the police as well as the conduct of ‘responsible journalism’- and how to address the balance between reporting and national security.

There’s a collection of really good blogs (most by fellow Lambeth students) here

While I won’t go through each of the debates with a fine comb (the blogs do have more details regarding them anyway)  I thought it might be worth highlighting the key points from the conference, which may help those working in the industry, or others wanting to join it.

 ‘Journalism is changing’
A point that almost everyone knows in theory, but not so much in practice.

Journalism is going through a transition stage at the moment. While the UK still has a very healthy amount of newspapers and magazines in circulation, the medium of mass printing is dying; in other words, people are less likely to spend a large % of their daily income on newspapers.

As the Press Gazette reports here most national printed papers have seen a rapid decline in their readership in less than a decade- in part because of steep increases in price, but more because news is more accessible- and free- online.

Home Secretary Theresa May’s keynote address made this quite clear, stating that the biggest challenges facing the press were that of advertising revenues and monetizing content. At the same time, she said that the challenge of the local press came from larger institutions like the BBC, who could lift local content and broadcast it to a much wider audience. 

In this case, the ‘media’ face a number of problems at once;

(a) To reassert its relevance to local and national democracy.
(b) To build better brands, particularly on digital platforms
(c) To compete against bigger agencies and broadcasters with larger audiences
(d) To find the funding needed to continue journalistic practice.

Proposed regulations aren't ideal- but it might be better than the alternatives

 I’ve blogged previously on why the Royal Charter would dilute the roles and responsibilities of the press- something I still believe. But the conference did hold a terrific debate on how journalists might work under the new system.

The panel discussion- which featured  the Director of Liberty Shami Chakrabarti and Freedom of Information campaigner Heather Brooke, highlighted the difficulty for British journalists in acquiring information. One example given related to the difficulty she had in getting information relating to MPs expenses- which the Telegraph eventually broke thanks to a whistleblower. Brooke said: “Information that should be in the public domain t is suppressed and it creates a sort of black market”

Chakrabarti said she had no desire for ‘absolute transparency’, acknowledging that secrecy was essential for a state to protect its national interests, but also argued that there was a need for oversight and public accountability, saying that in our current state, security services “wanted no secrecy for us, and no accountability for them.”

The question is, under a new regulatory model, how free are journalists to do investigative work?

As editor of the Press Gazette Dominic Ponsford argues, the Press Complaints Commission’s new incarnation, the Indepdendent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO) may be the ‘best worst solution’ on the table. The stick behind the PCC’s replacement is coercion to the newspapers, which comes from harsh pay-outs by newspapers in libel cases. However, as many of the oversight bodies will only really change in name, and publishers will still oversee the conduct of journalism, there are some who argue that this is far more desirable than a Royal Charter.

That said, the Media Standards Trust aren’t too happy, as Gordon Ramsay, researcher at the LSE media project shows.

 Monetising media is still uncharted territory

Paywalls, re-branding, going digital etc. Lots of ideas on how to make journalism pay (important for budding reporters), no real agreements on how to do it. A panel debate featuring the Sun’s new editor David Dinsmore and Peter Barron, former editor of  BBC Newsnight, argued their methods of making journalism pay.

I won’t go into this as it’s quite long winded, but my personal opinion would be that paywalls are likely to become the default setting of most media outlets. The debate will then shift from one of ‘how to pay journalists’ to a more diverse one on the balance between monetizing content and easing access to information for the public.

The Royal Charter has killed the Fourth Estate

It is said that in 1787, the polemicist and prominent Whig Edmund Burke first made reference to the "illustrious nativity of the Fourth Estate" in a speech to the House of Commons. Though in context to our debates surrounding the place of journalism in British society, it is perhaps best to turn to Burke's contemporary Thomas Macaulay, who in reviewing Hallam's Constitutional History first made the case for the press as a system of accountability, stating: "The gallery in which the reporters sit has become a fourth estate of the realm."

Fast forward to 2013, and we have seen the most remarkable of transformations, as an institution whose modus operandi rests on independence becomes further compromised by the power of politics. As the Privy Council grants its royal charter on press regulation, accompanied by the Queen's seal of approval, the press will now have to face new obstacles when going about reporting.

The Sun's political columnist Trevor Kavanaugh has said of the new regulatory system: "If you put lipstick on a pig, it's still a pig", illustrating quite voraciously the difference in narrative between politicians and newspaper journalists. The former describe the Royal Charter as the 'best possible outcome' in abiding by Lord Leveson's recommendations which followed the Leveson Inquiry. The latter see it as sneaking statute, designed to give the political class more influence over the press, as Toby Young blogs on the Telegraph.

Both claims are exaggerated, but there still exists a potent danger. Indeed, the new system of regulation remains voluntary, but the fangs of the new regulatory model lie in the detail- in particular, the methods in which media organisations would be coerced into signing up to the Charter. In particular, this relates to the Crime and Courts act 2013 , which stipulates different treatments of media outlets depending on an 'approved regulator'. The snippet can be found in section 42, but I've posted the relevant segment here:

(3)For the purposes of subsection (2), a body is “recognised” as a regulator of relevant publishers if it is so recognised by any body established by Royal Charter (whether established before or after the coming into force of this section) with the purpose of carrying on activities relating to the recognition of independent regulators of relevant publishers.

(4)“Relevant claim” means a civil claim made in respect of any of the following—
(a)libel;
(b)slander;
(c)breach of confidence;
(d)misuse of private information;
(e)malicious falsehood;
(f)harassment.

The press have also suggested the charter is coercive on the basis that those who do not wish to join, such as Private Eye magazine, risk higher legal costs and exemplary pay-outs to claimants in the event that they are taken to court.

At the same time, the creeping authority of the charter is embedded in more discreet ways. Consider section 17 of schedule 3 under the stipulations of the charter:

17. The Board should not have the power to prevent publication of any material, by anyone, at any time although (in its discretion) it should be able to offer a service of advice to editors of subscribing publications relating to code compliance.

And when we consider in recent days that a number of high profile politicians, including the Prime Minister in which he posed a thinly vieled threat to The Guardian over it's NSA surveillance reporting, there is definitely a legitimate fear that politicians- and their interested affiliates, will be able to steer journalism at their own will.

A first reading of the charter illustrates not only the diminishing of the 'fourth estate' in its present state, but also the re-definition of journalism itself. What started as a legitimate inquiry into phone hacking and unethical practice- as well as legitimate debates regarding the strength of the Editor's code has instead become a battleground in which journalism is defined by the most powerful in society. Whether the press play by these new rules, or abstain completely is something we'll see in the coming few months, but I fear if they that satirical cover of Private Eye may instead become a haunting reality.

ULU were right to ban officials from remembrance day ceremonies

stephen_gunby via flickr.com

There's one image that remains prevalent from the now 'infamous' student riots of 2011.  
Charlie Gilmour, a Cambridge history undergraduate was snapped swinging from the Cenotaph-an act deemed of such disrespect that he was given a jail sentence of 16 months. Yet the message that the photograph conveyed was not simply a student's disregard for 'the glorious dead', but rather the underlining irreverence that student unions supposedly harbour toward Britain's military history.
 
The news that University of London Union (ULU) senate have voted to ban any staff attending remembrance day in their 'official capacity' has brought this sentiment up once more. Already, members of the Twitterati have resurrected Mcarthyist claims of universities controlled by Marxists. Even London MP Stella Creasy has got involved in the issue, tweeting: “As a former student, this decision by ULU to ban officers from participating in Remembrance Sunday makes me ashamed.”

Firstly, its important to note that the tweet significantly misrepresents the actuality of the situation; Officers of the ULU are allowed to attend ceremonies as individuals, but not in their official roles. Certainly, this is far from a blanket ban, never mind an exertion of hostility toward the armed forces. With that in mind, we should really be focusing on actual issue- whether it was right for ULU to ban any official representation. 

By and large, I feel that ULU got it right. 

As one of the largest unions in the country representing over 120,000 students, ULU has a unique pressure to reflect the vicarious diversity of its organisation. With that remit comes responsibilities, especially in decisions that assume collective representation. For the most part, such actions are implemented when the welfare or rights of students are under direct threat, a principle that forms the framework of the controversial 'No Platform' policy, as well as other initiatives designed to represent minority groups such as LGBT networks. In such situations, unions like ULU are justified in taking stances, particularly as they are bound to them by constitutional mandates and democratic accountability.

The obligation of collective representation cannot be said about events like remembrance day, especially if we are to accept ULU's duty as a democratically elected body. After all, considering the diversity of opinion surrounding war, the armed forces and memorialising across the country, should ULU be taking a stance in ample disregard of important- albeit smaller- clusters of student opinion? And if this is a valid precedent, then would we similarly support ULU if it claimed to represent its entire student body on national issues relating to Royal ceremonies, or the death of former Prime Ministers?
 
Here lies the real dilemma: While it's all well and good for self-aggrandised 'patriots' tacitly telling students that they should be forced to participate, collective representation actually dilutes the value of commemoration itself. Whether one chooses to commemorate in an official ceremony, a secular gathering or to abstain, acknowledging history should be left as an individual enterprise, instead of a predetermined action. If ULU president Michael Chessum wants to commemorate this weekend by “fighting for peace and challenging the policies of governments” he has every right to do so, in the same way that others can attend a memorial service, observe a two minute silence or not do anything at all.

Why ULU's decision- which strikes me as refreshingly democratic, has come under such intense scrutiny is quite confusing. Far from all the sensationalism and rhetoric, the vote conveys enacts the principle that no union staff member has the right to represent London's entire student body on issues where there are clear divides of opinion across the spectrum. In that case we should see ULU's decision not as deliberate way to antagonise, but rather a positive step forward in allowing students to choose how they remember the nation's darkest moments.