ABSTRACT
The scale and intensity of the 2010 UK student protests and occupations against university tuition fees have prompted scrutiny of what the occupations tell us about the state of youth and student engagement in politics in modern Britain (Hensby, 2014; Ibrahim, 2011, 2014; Pickard, 2015; Rheingans and Hollands, 2013). The protests did indeed signify a particular intensity of feeling among the students involved against UK government proposals to increase annual undergraduate tuition fees to up to a maximum of £9,000. However, a little-explored dimension of that historical moment is the dynamic of the relationship between the student activists who have subsequently attracted critical attention and the organised student movement. The 2010 student protests represented the ascendancy of a particular form of student political action whose adherents actively constructed themselves as holding distinctive political values and adopting different campaigning tactics from the mainstream organised student movement, represented by the elected student leadership of the National Union of Students (NUS).1 This disavowal of NUS leadership is clearly visible in accounts of the 2010 protests by radical student activists, for example in the extract below:
The NUS leadership hoped for a pleasant stroll through central London to hear a parade of safely, implicitly pro-Labour speakers, before dispersing to letter-writing campaigns or, more likely, passivity. Activists on the ground realized something bigger might be in the offing.
