Anti-Cuts Protests in the UK: Are We Really All in This Together?

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Introduction

A high number and wide variety of protests have been organized in the UK since the implementation of austerity measures following.ashgate.com w the 2008 financial crisis. The UK government’s response to protests wagainstww austerity has been to suggest that “we are all in this together.” This sentiment has been widely publicly ridiculed because of the polarity of cutting welfare benefits whilst preserving tax havens. Anti-austerity protesters have picked up on this tide of public ridicule and emphasized the sharp contrast between .atheshgat eminority.com rich and the majority of British citizens whose conditions have dramaticallyw worsened as a consequence of austerity measures. This master frame is best exemplified by the slogan of the Occupy protests: “We are the 99 percent.” Whilst no-one would ever suggest that a protest, or set of protests, is able to unite 100 percent of the population, we expect anti-austerity protests to share the ability to mobilize broadly given that they have similar broadly conceived goals. .ashgate.com ww

While the cross-class and wwcross-issuew dimensions of anti-austerity protest have been well documented in the Global South, much less has been written about the constituencies of anti-austerity protests in the richer Global North. A systematic exploration of different street demonstration responses to austerity would shed some light .aonshga tthee.com possible reasons for and dynamics of separate yet likely overlapping actions. This chapter aims to tackle this issue by focusing on similarities and differences across three major austerity protests in London: the student demonstration Fund Our Future (FoF); Occupy London; and the Trade Union Congress (TUC) March for the Alternative. In particular, the chapter asks: To what extent, and why, do the constituencies of demonstrations mobilized through similarly.ashgate .cframedom www anti-austerity calls for action differ? This comparison also facilitates assessment of the potential of anti-austerity coalitions as synergetic www and inclusive collective action. Thus the purpose of this chapter is two-fold. First, we seek to assess the heterogeneity of anti-austerity protests thus demonstrating the coalitions’ potential to mobilize cross-class and cross-issue coalitions. Second, we explore similarities .ashgate.com and differences especially in terms of embeddedness and individual factors such www © Copyrighted Material

(protester) level analysis. Coalition building and challenging interlockingm systems o of inequality across classes, races, ethnicities and genders are well.c documented te a as serious challenges for social movements, which often fail to takeg advantage of h s connections across issues (Ferree and Roth 1998; Rose 1999; .aBystydzienski and w Schacht 2001; Van Dyke and McCammon 2010). Whilst we wcannot be certain of w cause and effect, our analysis also helps to shed some light on how the features m o of organizing committees and the framing of their calls.c for action interact to te determine the extent of inclusivity of protest participants.a Although we expect g h all three protest events to be inclusive, we anticipates that they may be inclusive .a in different ways. Thus, our research is importantw for helping movements and w associated protests develop a broader reach and wa louder voice. It is especially

m important given that anti-austerity movements aspireo to represent the 99 percent. .c The chapter proceeds as follows. In a firstte step, we discuss the potential of a g anti-austerity coalitions to bridge different movementsh and organizations, drawing s on previous studies of anti-austerity movements..a Secondly, we introduce the w concept of coalition, discuss the challengesw of coalition formation, and seek to w contextualize coalition formation in relation to similarities and differences across m o anti-austerity coalitions. In a third step,.c we introduce our research design and te data and briefly describe the three ademonstrations we examine: Occupy, FoF and g h TUC. For each demonstration we sexamine a) the framing of calls for action; b) the .a nature of the organizing committee;w and c) their mobilized constituencies. We find w w some similarities across both a and b and then turn to assess why it is that there m are differences in terms of embeddednesso and political attitudes of participants in .c the three demonstrations. teAfter analysis of results, we return to discuss the key a g questions and examine h the opportunities for anti-austerity protests to mobilize s diverse and heterogeneous.a protest constituencies. w w w

m o Anti-austerity Protest.c as “Bridging” Events te a g h Research to dates has found a clear link between the incidence of protest and .a budgetary cuts.w As Ponticelli and Voth (2011: 3) find in relation to panel data w w collected across Europe from 1919 to 2008: m o .c whente expenditure is increasing, the average country-year unit of observation in a g hour data registers less than 1.4 events. When expenditure cuts reach 1% or more s .a of GDP, this grows to 1.8 events, a relative increase by almost a third compared w w w to the periods of budget expansion. © Copyrighted Material

Pontincelli and Voth (2011) note that the frequency of demonstrations, as a specific form of protest, rises fast once expenditure exceeds the 3 percent threshold. Consequently, it should come as little surprise that anti-austerity protests proliferated across most of Europe in response to cuts in public spending..ashgate. ww But what are the characteristics of such protests? And what is their potential for developing inclusive heterogeneous constituencies? Inclusive framing such as that deployed by anti-austerity protest organizers has been shown to assist the development of “unlikely coalitions” (Mayer et al. 2010).

This requires “establishing a common interpretation of an ideology.ashg aorte.c operspectivem w that unites movement members in a shared identity and purpose”ww (Mayer et al. 2010: 751). Moreover Corrigall-Brown and Meyer (2010) argue that it is not only the actions of actors that matter, but also the political context. They suggest that “coalitions are not de novo formations but instead are created out of existing relationships in conducive political contexts” (Corrigall-Brown and Meyer 2010: 16). This therefore stresses the importance of examining.ashgate.co m the w political context of austerity. www Anti-austerity protests in low(er) income countries where structural adjustment programs had the effect of depressing the incomes and living standards of significant sectors of the population are well documented. Walton and Ragin (1990) pointed out how anti-austerity protest took place.ashgate.c oinm 26 of the 80 debtor countries between 1979 and early 1985, resulting inw 85 protests, peaking in 1983–1985. Although the predominant participants in such protests were the urban poor (from street vendors through to shantytown residents), these were often joined by members of higher income groups, including teachers, students, shopkeepers and professionals (Seddon 1986). This is confirmed by Auvinen’s (1996) research, which used regression analysis of.ash ga70te.co mdeveloping ww country cases from 1981 to

1989 and found that adjustmentwww programs generated “political protest where there are high levels of urbanization and economic development, as well as in the presence of a democratic political regime” (Auvinen 1996: 395), uniting different groups affected by austerity measures. As he puts it: “The basic political problem is that the usually diverse.ashga teinterests.com of these groups may become amalgamated in anti-austerity protest” (Auvinen 1996: 377). Similarly, in his study of anti- austerity protest in Northwestern Costa Rica, Edelman (1990) found that large producers and small agriculturalists—usually juxtaposed as having divergent class interests—were united in their opposition to anti-austerity measures. However, Bassel and Akwugo (2014) warn that austerity measures such as budget cuts in the third sector might.ashgate .hampercom www solidarity and “the ability to mobilize at the intersections of different social justice agendas is undermined” (p. 134). www Whilst the cross-class and cross-issue dimensions of anti-austerity protest have been well documented in studies of anti-austerity protest in the Global South, much less has been written about the constituencies of anti-austerity protests in the Global North. Rüdig and Karyotis (2013) focused their attention on Greek .ashgate.com anti-austerity protests, trying to understand the nature of participants and their recruitmentwww pathways. They found that almost one third of the Greek population © Copyrighted Material

Work on the Spanish 15M movement—considered an importantm precursor o to Occupy—has illustrated how the genealogy of the protest was.c important in te a shaping an inclusive constituency. In Madrid, on May 15 2011, 25,000g protesters h s took part in an act of mass civil disobedience to protest against. athe brutal eviction w of a peaceful camp united under the slogan “we are not productsw in the hands w of politicians and bankers.” Even prior to the act of disobedience, participants m o developed emotional bonds that had evolved through prior.c actions in an informal te network of youth, a democracy organization and other aestablished organizations g h working on finance, employment, development and humanitarians issues (Romanos .a 2013). According to Romanos, in addition to wthe geneology, deliberative w democracy, imagination and mobilization messagesw with broad appeal were also

m behind the mobilization success of 15M. Calvo’so (2013) primary and secondary .c survey research of participants in local 15M Occupyte camps found participants to a g be young, well-educated, left-wing and politicallyh dissatisfied. Many had previous s affiliations in political organizations. Thus. a Occupiers seem to embody a particular w approach to anti-austerity protest, led by wyoung and well-educated people, highly w dissatisfied with political institutions. Their previous involvement in organizations m o suggests experience and learnt skills. cas well as a critical distance from these. Is te the nature of the organizations Occupiersa used to be involved in differentiating g h Occupy from other types of anti-austeritys protests? Or does Occupiers’ distance .a from formal organizations representw preference for an alternative logic of w w aggregation (Juris 2012)? m Brown et al. argue that recento social movements in the UK are better understood .c “as responses to a crisis ofte care than simple anti-austerity protests” (2013: 79). a g Comparing protests betweenh 2010 and 2011, they argue that these movements s approach the crisis of care.a in different ways. On the one hand the student movement w and the TUC “Marchw for the Alternative” criticized a lack of care: a lack of care w regarding educationm and the future of young people and of those providing and in o need of social services..c On the other hand Occupy (and UK Uncut) seek to show te a how social relationsg based on attentiveness and care are possible and can be an h alternative. Ins particular, the prefigurative politics of Occupy focused very much .a on the creationw of mutual care in a free and safe space and its reproduction on a w w bigger scale (Roth et al. 2014). Thus an interesting question arises: to what extent m do differento motivations appear across protests opposing austerity in the UK? And, .c what arete the implications of these differences in terms of forming inclusive, broad a g and hheterogeneous constituencies? s .a w w w © Copyrighted Material

Lessons from the Coalition and Cross-class Alliance Building Literature

Coalition building in social movements has, despite its importance, received relatively little scholarly attention until recently (but see Rose 1999; Bystydzienski.ashgate. ww and Schacht 2001; Van Dyke and McCammon 2010; Ferree and Roth 1998). Treating social movements as homogenous social entities is a pragmatic approach to simplify the complexity of the reality of social movements. As Della Porta and Rucht (1995: 213) so aptly put it:

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It is already a difficult task just to empirically describe w wthe variety of actor constellations and interactions that typically characterize a social movement’s interactions with its reference groups. If however, we want to move from description to explanation, then the difficulties and complexities tend to become overwhelming. It is not by accident that hitherto most explanatory research in the area of social movements is restricted to case studies..ashga teEven.com w then, the focus

is rarely on a broad movement and all its relevant referencewww groups but rather on one or just a small selection of movement issues and the main interactions that evolve around these issues.

Whilst we can learn a lot from the study .aofshg atparticulare.com case studies, and from analyzing different specific social movementw issues separately, it has long been recognized that there are links across and between different social movement organizations and social movement sectors. Although coalitions have been understudied, their importance has, for a long while, been indirectly recognized. Dating back to the 1970s, for example, Curtis and Zurcher (1973) discussed.ashgat e.socialcom ww movements in the context of multi- organizational fields. For them,www “social movements are rarely solitary entities.” Instead, they are

organized collectivity with more or less distinct parts that are not inherently bound together … they entertain more or less friendly, supportive or competitive .ashgate.com relations or keep distant from each other. (Curtis and Zurcher 1973: 202)

Movements that share principles or goals, or which have the same opponents, will inevitably overlap. But not only do movements unconsciously overlap; at least during some periods and in some places, these overlaps and collaborations are deliberate.a sandhgate.c ogivem www rise to alliances. At the micro level, such alliances will result in heterogeneous constituencies. Historical and contemporary social www movements alike have exhibited numerous alliance structures: liberal and socialist movements occasionally unite to fight authoritarian regimes; the free trade and antislavery movement cooperated; socialist, liberal, and feminist groups allied to promote women’s suffrage, and together with pacifist groups, they tried to prevent .ashgate.com World War I, albeit unsuccessfully. In a similar vein, the so-called new social movementswww of the 1970s and 1980s often united in specific campaigns (Della Porta © Copyrighted Material

© 2015 From Marco Giugni and Maria T. Grasso (eds), Austerity and Protest: Popular Contention in Times of Economic Crisis, published by Ashgate Publishing. See: http://www.ashgate.com/isbn/9781472439185 176 Austerity and Protest © Copyrighted Material and Rucht 1995). Even back then, “one could already doubt the existence of a m distinct environmental, feminist or peace movement when looking at the [alleged]o .c te differences within these movements” (Della Porta and Rucht 1995: 207). a g At the level of mobilized protesters or constituencies, these overlaps hcan be s .a conceived as a form of social embeddedness. Research has shown that protestersw w with memberships in multiple social organizations are more likely to bew mobilized to a variety of protests/demonstrations (McAdam 1982, Klandermansm 1997). o Yet according to Saunders et al. (2012), even at the micro-level, protesters.c have te a frequently been treated as a homogenous category, overlooking ghow individuals h s vary in their extent of participation. What has been particularly.a ignored is how w different groups of individuals may be mobilized at demonstrationsw even when w the issue/framing of the demonstration is very similar. It has also not yet been m o understood how and why similar individuals may attend.c very different types of te protests/demonstrations, nor why very similar protests maya attract different types g h of protesters. s .a As part of a recent relational shift in the study ofw social movements, network w analysis has been applied to the study of socialw movements to address the

m collaborative tension between different movemento organizations within and .c across movements (Diani and Bison 2004). Thiste is well illustrated by work on the a g global justice movement, which has highlightedh how different types of movement s organizations were able to coalesce around.a the master frame of “justice” (Van w Dyke 2003; Della Porta 2007; Saundersw 2013). The new wave of anti-austerity w protests—Occupy in particular—are thought to have led to new wide-ranging m o alliances and mobilization (Juris 2012;.c Shihade et al. 2012). The formation of te organizational coalitions is considereda an important factor in the successful g h mobilization of diverse (cross-class,s cross-race/ethnic, cross-gender, etc.) .a movement constituencies—a nearw universal objective of protest organizers. It also w w provides a way to understand the relationship between organizing coalitions and m the empirical focus of our chapter—mobilizedo constituencies. Coalitions comprise .c “two or more movement organizationste [which] are working together on a common a g task, single project or long-lastingh alliance” (Van Dyke and McCammon 2010: s xiv). There are two types.a of coalitions: coalitions within a particular movement w (drawing especially onw the example of the women’s movement), that is to say w within movement coalitionsm ; and coalitions across different movements (illustrated o with reference to.c links between labor and women’s organizations), or what we te a might term cross-movementg coalitions. h By lookings at both types of coalitions, we can learn which factors can favor .a or constrainw effective collaborations and so foster diverse constituencies, within w w different contexts. These factors include “divergent identity based and ideological m motivations,”o “differing organizational characteristics,” the “competition for .c scarcet e resources” and “potentially divisive issues of race, class and culture” a g (Beamishh and Luebbers 2009: 648). But within movement and cross movement s .a coalitionsw are thought to be differentially affected by some of these factors. w Monetaryw resources, for example, appear more important for intra-movement © Copyrighted Material

Copyright material: You are not permitted to transmit this file in any format or media; it may not be resold or reused without prior agreement with Ashgate Publishing and may not be placed on any publicly accessible or commercial servers. Anti-Cuts Protests in the UK 177 © Copyrighted Material coalitions than cross-movement ones (Van Dyke 2003: 244). In our analysis, we compare the relatively resource-rich Trade Union Congress (TUC) to the relatively resource-poor National Union of Students and the even less well-off Occupy movement; allowing us to assess whether money has allowed TUC.ashgate . to ww attract a broader constituency. Within-movement coalition dynamics have been particularly important for women’s movements which are diverse, including a broad range of organizations and individuals from a range of backgrounds (for a review see Ferree and McClurg

Mueller 2007). Diverse constituencies can be encouraged by including.ashgate.com w minority issues on the agenda of majority organizations (Agustin and Rothww 2011), forming minority caucuses (S. Roth 2008) or “organizing one’s own” (B. Roth 2004; 2010). Despite a considerable overlap with white women’s liberation, black feminism and Chicana feminist second wave- women’s movements were “characterized by multi-issue political platforms calling for radical economic change and for the radical overhaul of male/female relationships” (B. Roth.ash g2010:ate.com w 100).

Although Benita Roth’s work on coalition buildingwww has suggested that broad framing is useful for helping build broad constituencies, frame-alignment processes and personal ties have primarily been studied in order to understand how individuals get involved in social movements. Framing has rarely been applied to an examination of the diversity of constituents.ashga teattending.com a protest. Framing also plays a significant role in successful mobilizationw by cross-movement coalitions (Gerhards and Rucht 1992; Ferree and Roth 1998; Mayer et al. 2010). Master frames—such as reference to the broad concept of “justice”—have been shown to effectively bring campaigners together across traditional movement divides (Snow et al. 1986). Cross-movement coalitions involve collaboration of social movements and social movement.ash gaorganizationste.com ww representing different causes and interests, and have been foundwww to result in diverse constituencies, although not without tensions. For example, labor and women’s movements together represent the interests of women workers (Balser 1987; Fonow 2003; S. Roth 2003). Coalitions between labor unions and community organizations are vital for union revitalization .aandshgate .chaveom resulted in social movement unionism (Brecher and Costello 1990; Heery et al. 2012; Mustchin 2012). But cross-movement coalitions do not take shape without effort. They are particularly challenging for organizations with narrow goals, small memberships and tight ideologies. Broad framing is important in helping the formation of “unlikely coalitions” (Mayer et al. 2010) and an unlikely coalition is likely to result in a broad constituency. This requires .a“establishingshgate.com www a common interpretation of an ideology or perspective that unites movement members in a shared identity and purpose” (Mayer et al. www 2010: 751). Cornfield and McCammon (2010) argue that ideological alignment between groups is crucial for establishing partnerships, whereas differences in organizational cultures can undermine solidarity despite common interests when “exclusionary solidarity limits crosscutting ties in favor of a “primary” loyalty; .ashgate.com inclusive solidarity, by contrast builds on such intersections to foster coalitions” (Ferreewww and Roth 1998: 644). The literature on NIMBY (not-in-my-back-yard) © Copyrighted Material

© 2015 From Marco Giugni and Maria T. Grasso (eds), Austerity and Protest: Popular Contention in Times of Economic Crisis, published by Ashgate Publishing. See: http://www.ashgate.com/isbn/9781472439185 178 Austerity and Protest © Copyrighted Material organizations corroborates this: NIMBY organizations, which are self-interested, m tend to foster fewer interorganizational ties than organizations fighting foro the .c te greater good (Saunders 2013). We thus anticipate the most inclusive ofa our g three constituencies of anti-austerity demonstrations in the UK will haveh fewer s .a participants motivated by self-interest than by solidarity or moral obligation.w w Through their comparison of two G20 protest events in London in 2009,w Bennett and Segerberg (2011) came to similar conclusions. The personalizedm and non- o ideology oriented approach of the Put People First coalition enabled.c it to maintain te a a stronger network, retain organizational control, bolster rather thang damage the h s reputation of participating organizations and maintain a coalition.a website. Along w each of these dimensions, the radical, ideologically-drivenw and direct action w oriented Meltdown network provides a stark contrast. At the same time, van Troost m o and Olcese (2013) have illustrated that individuals can be.c successfully mobilized te even when some degree of dissonance (especiallya emotional dissonance) g h exists between their motivations to attend the demonstrations and the frame by .a the coalition/organizers. w w Building upon this research, our analysis, firstly,w focuses on the nature of the

m coalitions and the frames they deployed. We theno look at the extent of inclusivity .c in the three types of anti-austerity protests. Next,te we compare the three protests a g with respect to their organizational alliances/socialh embeddedness as well as s individual/ideological factors to explain .a overlaps and divisions. We examine w these sets of factors at the coalitions’ levelw (organizations) and constituents’ level w (individual participants). m o .c te a g h Research Design s .a w w w We assess the importance of organizational affiliation/social embeddedness and m other factors such as motivations—ino explaining similarities and differences among .c three major anti-austerity tprotestse in the UK (Students’ Fund Our Future, TUC’s a g March for the Alternative,h and Occupy) and therefore their potential in terms of s cooperation. We firstly.a assess the similarities of their calls for action (framing w analysis), which we expectw to lead to quite inclusive and heterogeneous protests. w

As well as frames, mour analysis also takes into account the nature of coalitions, in o terms of organizational.c alliances. The assessment of inclusiveness is our second te a analytical step.g Thirdly, we compare and contrast the constituencies of the three h protests in termss of social embeddedness and individual factors. In particular, we .a deploy bivariatew quantitative analysis—comparing across demonstrations—using w w the following variables: m In ordero to assess the three protests’ inclusivity we explore socio- .c demographics:te age, education, gender and subjective class. Whilst we expect all a g threeh demonstrations to be inclusive, we anticipate a higher proportion of younger s .a peoplew on the student protest. w w © Copyrighted Material

In order to assess social embeddedness of participants—and so explore coalitional dynamics at the individual level (rather than the organizational level as is commonly done)—we investigate organizational membership profiles: we look at protest participants’ membership (active or passive) in a variety.ashgate . of ww organizational types. Although we expect overlaps with a range of people with similar organizational experience, we anticipate that the unions will be most prominent for the TUC demonstration while we expect that organizational affiliations in general are less prominent among Occupy protesters.

We assess the following individual/ideological factors: political.ashgate. coattitudesm w by self-placement on the left-right scale; libertarian values (derivedww by measuring attitudes to income re-distribution, abeyance of authority, privatization and migration); and trust in political institutions (government, parliament and political parties). We anticipate that all three demonstrations are dominated by left-wing participants, although we already know that young students tend to be more conservative amongst protest constituents (Olcese and. aSaundersshgate.com w 2014).

We also look at motivations for participation: in particularwww we focus on whether individuals decided to participate for reasons of self-interest, to express solidarity or as a moral obligation. We might anticipate more self-interest among students and unionists than Occupy protesters, who are known to engage in prefigurative politics (Roth et al. 2014). Holding framing. acallsshgate.co mconstant, we therefore consider that Occupy is likely to be able to attract a broaderw constituency than the other two protest events. We present cross-tabulations of the data, and compare the distribution of answers using Chi2 where the data are nominal (e.g. gender) and non-parametric Kruskall Wallis tests for our scale and ordinal variables, as the data are not normally distributed. .ashgate.com ww

The data analyzed in this chapterwww is derived from the UK case of the pan- European Caught in the Act of Protest project. The response rates for the three surveys included in this sample range from 14 percent (for Occupy and Fund Our Future) to 21 percent for the TUC demonstration. This makes it essential for us to report on the representativity.ashgate.com of our data. A comparison of those who respond to the face-to-face survey only and those who respond to the face-to-face survey in conjunction with the mail back survey reveals very few significant differences across the two subsamples. This suggests that the data is fairly representative of the approximately random sample of protesters selected as respondents. There are no significant differences between respondents in these two subsamples regarding the following.a svariables:hgate.com www when protesters made a firm decision to participate in the protest, their extent of political interest, their degree of satisfaction with www democracy and their past participation in demonstrations (measured by Kendall’s tau-b). A T-Test result comparing the age of protesters in the two samples is insignificant, with the mean ages only 4 months different. The only significant difference is in gender: men who complete the face-to-face interview are more .ashgate.com likely to additionally send back the survey than women who complete the face- to-facewww interview. 48 percent of those respondents who completed just the face- © Copyrighted Material

m o Fund our Future .c te a g h s The FoF march took place in central London on 10 November 2010.a and involved a w march from Horse Guards Avenue to Milbank. It attracted overw 50,000 participants w and has become renowned for the violent property damage caused by a minority of m o participants to the Conservative Party Campaign Headquarters..c It was organized te by the NUS (National Union of Students) and UCUa (University and College g h Union). The key slogan was to “fund our future” and thes call for action stated that: .a w w Staff and students in further and higher education ware coming together to build

m an unprecedented coalition to fight against the cutso that have been imposed upon .c our communities, as well as to resist the prospectte of higher fees and increasing a privatization in education. [emphasis added]g h s .a w The proposed increases in tuition fees (theyw have now been trebled to £9,000) w and cuts in spending in higher education were considered to be outrageous. The m o demonstration was targeted at the government,.c and education was regarded as key te to improving the economy. As a leafleta collected at the demonstration states: g h s .a The demo is part of our strategyw to influence the Coalition Government. NUS and w w UCU firmly believe that education changes the lives of individuals, families and m communities. Education ando skills will also be key to our economic recovery. .c te a g With respect to the organizingh committee, both the NUS and UCU are formal s organizations associated.a with the unions and the labor and student movements, w and are very establishedw within the educational and political fields. While UCU w has been campaigningm steadily, the students’ union had been out of the public o eye for a while .untilc the recent wave of student protests. The National Union te a of Students (NUS)g was established in 1922 and is a voluntary membership h organization, sa confederation of 600 students’ unions, representing more than 95 .a percent of allw higher and further education unions in the UK. Through member w w students’ unions, NUS represents the interests of more than seven million m students.o NUS assists with many student unions’ elections—making sure that .c proceedingste are fair and democratic, conducting its own research on students a g and hrunning national campaigns to ensure students’ voice is heard in relation to s .a nationalw policy concerning students. NUS is not affiliated to the TUC. However, w inw August 2013, Toni Pearce, NUS National President and Frances O’Grady, TUC © Copyrighted Material

General Secretary signed an agreement which outlines the development of a new partnership between the NUS and the TUC. UCU (The University & College Lecturers’ Union) was born in June 2006 from the merging of two historical unions—the Association of University Teachers.ashgate. ww (AUT), and the National Association of Teachers in Further and Higher Education (NATFHE). The expansion in membership of both unions continued steadily throughout the past century and at the beginning of this century. Their combined membership is around 120,000. UCU is affiliated to the TUC, as its predecessor has been for a long time. .ashgate.com w

ww TUC’s March for the Alternative

The TUC (Trade Union Congress) March for the Alternative took place on 26 March 2011, starting at Victoria Embankment and finishing at Hyde Park for a rally, which was addressed, amongst others by the.a shthengate.co mLabour w Party leader

Ed Miliband. The march was attended by at leastw ww250,000 people, with some commentators estimating up to half a million (Sotirakopoulos and Rootes 2014). The demonstration was organized in opposition to the UK government’s austerity program of spending cuts. “Government spending cuts will damage public services and put more than a million out of work. They.ashgate .willcom hit the vulnerable, damaged communities and undermine much of whatw holds us together as a society.”1 The organizing platform clearly blamed the UK government for the issue, for two main reasons: a) “eliminating the deficit in just four years is a savage timetable that does not give economic growth the opportunity to raise the nation’s tax take. Indeed the deep cuts promised will depress the economy making deeper cuts necessary to meet this timetable.” Moreover,.a s(b)hgate .“raisingcom ww four pounds through cuts for every pound raised through tax—andw wdoingw most of this through a rise in VAT that hits the poor and those on middle income the most—is deeply unfair. The recession was made in the finance sector, yet banks and those now enjoying gigantic bonuses once again, are not being asked to make a fair contribution.”2

The “alternative” proposed.ashgate.com by the organizers was to adopt a deficit reduction program based on fair tax and time for growth to raise tax.3 Furthermore, the coalition expressed support for the aims and objectives of the student march:

People round the country are already campaigning against these deep, rapid cuts. Students have shown their opposition to cuts, the end of EMAs [Educational Maintenance.ashga te. Allowances—financialcom www support for low income pre-graduate students] and increases in fees. Parents and teachers have opposed cuts in school www

.a1sh NUSgate.com statement (same statement in the UCU website). 2 NUS statement (same statement in the UCU website). www 3 NUS statement (same statement in the UCU website). © Copyrighted Material

building. School sport, libraries and public woodlands all now have strong 4 m defenders. Few towns now don’t have their own campaign group. o .c te a g The demonstration was organized by a very well established confederatedh formal s .a organization, which has played a key role in the UK labor/union movement.w w The TUC is constituted by 54 affiliated unions representing 6.2 millionw working people. Since the nineteenth century it has worked to improve workingm hours and o conditions of employment, and was responsible for the foundations.c of a welfare te a state and the first Labour government. Today the officialg detachment from the h s Labour Party seems to mark the beginning of a less institutionalized.a role in w national politics but it is still very influential in protecting wworkers’ rights and in w defending public services such as higher education as the agreement with the NUS m o seems to testify: .c te a g h This agreement represents recognition by both the TUCs and NUS of a shared .a belief in social justice, collective organization andw democratic participation w on campuses, in workplaces, and within the widerw community. Both the trade

m union movement and the student movement o are committed to developing .c a new generation of activists who are engagedte in the political process, a participants in their local communities and campaignersg to create a fairer, more h 5 s prosperous society. .a w w w Occupy London m o .c te Occupy London is a more spontaneousa protest action than the former two. It began g h in October 2011 with an attempt bys about 300 protesters to occupy London Stock .a Exchange (LSX) in Paternosterw Square, taking action under the slogan “we are w w the 99 percent.” Thwarted by the police, protesters proceeded to set up a protest m camp in the vicinity of St Paul’so cathedral. In mid-October there were over 100 .c tents present at St Paul’s, tein addition to a neighboring camp at Finsbury Square a g Gardens, and, later, a squattedh ex-UBS bank building, renamed the Bank of Ideas s (Roth et al 2014). Instead.a of being an event organized by formal organizations, w Occupy was establishedw by individuals associated with UK Uncut and the Camp w for Climate Action,m but also people who were not associated with any protest o groups. Members.c of Anonymous were also present in the protest camps for the te a whole durationg of the occupation. h Occupy dids not profess to have answers to the problems it identified, but .a recognized thatw discussion of the issues—by a broad range of people—was a way w w to begin to institute a more desirable and democratic financial system. As with m the TUC,o Occupy expressed solidarity with student demonstrators. The initial .c statementte of Occupy London which we present in full, below, was collectively a g h s .a w 4 NUS statement (same statement in the UCU website). w w 5 Full text available at http://www.nus.org.uk/en/news/nus-and-tuc-agreement/. © Copyrighted Material

the current economic system is unsustainable and Occupy is the place to begin .atosh gate. ww redress it; 2) Occupy London represents a diverse range of people across class, race, gender and sexuality; 3) the public should not have to pay for the banking crisis; 4) cuts to public sector spending are not inevitable but justice is needed, instead; 5) independent regulators are needed to check the financial sector; 6)

Occupy London supports strikes and other actions to defend welfare,.ashg aeducation,te.com w

health services and employment; 7) structural change is requiredww to make it possible to care for people and the planet; 8) the current system is jeopardizing the environment; 9) Occupy London stands in solidarity with oppressed people across the globe and; 10) Occupy is democracy in action and everyone is welcome to join. (paraphrased from the Occupy London web pages)6 .ashgate.com w

Inclusivity www

All three marches can be said to have mobilized a diverse range of participants, but with some interesting differences. TUC participants’ ages ranged from 14 to 75 years; FoF’s from 16–75 years; and Occupy’s.ashg a15–79te.com years. There are significant differences in the mean age ranges: TUC marchersw were, on average, considerably older (mean age=50) compared to Occupy (44) and FoF (30) participants. As with anti-austerity demonstrations in Spain, participants in the UK anti-austerity protests were highly educated, with no significant differences across the three demonstrations (Table 8.1). .ashgate.com ww

www Table 8.1 Highest education qualification obtained, or, for students, the level at which they are studying

None.ashgatePrimary.com GCSE A’Level BA MA PhD TUC (n=195) 2% 0% 9% 14% 32% 36% 8% FoF (n=146) 1% 0% 3% 13% 52% 18% 14% Occupy (n=132) 1% 1% 8% 13% 39% 28% 11%

Independent samples Kruskall-Wallis test significant at 0.000, rejecting the null hypothesis that the distribution.ashgate .cofom agewww is the same across categories of demonstrations.

www

For all three marches, the proportion of people either with a university qualification or studying for one was over three-quarters, and this was, perhaps unsurprisingly,

.ashgate.com 6 Available at http://occupylondon.org.uk/about/about-occupy-london-2, last accessed 03/05/12.www © Copyrighted Material

© 2015 From Marco Giugni and Maria T. Grasso (eds), Austerity and Protest: Popular Contention in Times of Economic Crisis, published by Ashgate Publishing. See: http://www.ashgate.com/isbn/9781472439185 184 Austerity and Protest © Copyrighted Material slightly higher for the student demonstration (84 percent). Both the TUC and m student demonstrations attracted almost equal proportions of men and women,o .c te but the proportion of men (61 percent) was significantly greater than womena (39 g percent) for Occupy, even though women were prominent amongst thoseh more s 7 .a active (Roth et al. 2014). There are no significant differences in the distributionw of w protesters subjective social class across the three demonstrations. Overall,w hardly any of the protesters considered themselves to be members of the mupper class. o Around one-fifth placed themselves as upper middle class,.c two-fifths as lower te a middle class and just shy of one-third considered themselves to beg working class. h s The lower class, like the upper class, was also poorly represented..a The remaining w demonstrators were unable to identify with any social class (Tablew 8.2). For more w on social class and anti-austerity protesters, see Hylmö and Wennerhag (Chapter m o 5, this volume). .c te a g h Social Embeddedness s .a w w Across all three demonstrations, many participantsw were active in more than one

m type of social movement organization, with a meano of 1.1 for TUC and FoF, but .c of 1.2 for Occupy. Passive membership (i.e. donating)te was slightly higher for FoF a g (1.4) and Occupy (1.5), but overall, the differencesh between the three marches s are insignificant. Despite participants . ina all three demonstrations being drawn w from a diverse range of organizational types,w there are some important differences w in organizational membership profiles of the participants in the three marches m o (Table 8.3). .c te a g h s .a Table 8.2 Subjective socialw class of demonstrators w w

m Upper o Upper Lower Working Lower None .c class te middle middle class class a g class class h s TUC (n=199) 0%.a 15% 36% 35% 0% 15% w w FoF (n=142) w 1% 20% 39% 27% 3% 10%

Occupy (n=134) m 2% 18% 43% 22% 2% 13% o .c te a g h Not surprisingly,s the proportion of trade union members is highest for the .a TUC marchw (60 percent). However, 40 percent of the participants were not union w w members but supported the protest against public sector cuts indicating an alliance m of serviceo providers and service users as well as those who support the welfare .c state aste conscience constituents. Furthermore, one third of the participants of the a g h s .a w 7 Pearson’s Chi Square nominal measure Cramer’s V for 3x2 contingency table w (genderw against demonstration participated in) is 0.12*. © Copyrighted Material

Table 8.3 Membership of organizations

TUC Fund Our Occupy Cramer’s (n=211) Future (n=144) .aVshgate. (n=147) ww % participants with either active or passive membership Church / religious organization 11 16 18 n.s

Union or professional organization 60 36 29.ashgate.com w0.28***

Political party 30 30 w19w n.s Women’s organization 6 8 10 n.s Sport / cultural organization 14 22 15 n.s Environmental organization 21 16 34 0.17** LGBT organization 2 9 13 0.18*** Community / neighborhood 15 11 .ashgate.com w19 n.s organization www Charity / welfare organization 36 29 35 n.s Third world/ global justice / peace 23 18 30 0.11* organization Anti-racist / migrant organization 9 15 14 n.s .ashgate.com Human or civil rights organization 19 w 16 28 n.s

Notes: *p=0.05 **p=0.01 ***p=0.00. student demonstration (36 percent) and well over a quarter of Occupy participants (29 percent) belonged to unions. .aThisshgate.c oreflectsm ww on the one hand the unionization rate of lecturers and the supportw wofw UCU for the student march. On the other hand, it shows that Occupy was supported by members of trade unions. Among the participants in the student protest more belong to sports and cultural organizations, probably students groups, while fewer belong to charity and welfare, and human and civil rights organizations.ashgate.co mcompared to those participating in the TUC march and Occupy. These differences reflect age and (political) generational differences. In contrast to TUC and the student demonstration, more participants in Occupy belong to the Church and religious, third world/global justice and environmental organizations. On the other hand, party membership is lowest among Occupy participants (Roth et al. 2014). Fewer participants in the TUC march belonged to women’s and. aanti-racistshgate.com www or migrant organizations. These patterns reflect to some extent the different orientations towards www care that were identified above. In particular, party membership patterns might indicate that the state is a target of the protests seeking policy change. This is reflected in the responses to open ended questions asking who is to blame for the demonstrations issue. The vast majority of the participants of “Fund our Future” .ashgate.com blamed the coalition government, though some felt that the Labour government andwww bankers/capitalism and neo-liberalism were responsible for the rise in student © Copyrighted Material

© 2015 From Marco Giugni and Maria T. Grasso (eds), Austerity and Protest: Popular Contention in Times of Economic Crisis, published by Ashgate Publishing. See: http://www.ashgate.com/isbn/9781472439185 186 Austerity and Protest © Copyrighted Material fees. Similarly, the participants of the TUC march blamed primarily the coalition m government. In comparison, students were more inclined to state that the capitalisto .c te system was responsible and fewer blamed Labour. This contrasts with participantsa g in Occupy, who were much more likely to blame “greed,” “unregulated capitalism,”h s .a “flaws in capitalism” or “our system of money as debt.” While Occupyw and TUC w protesters both share suspicion of the capitalist system, this critique appearsw to be more radical among the Occupy supporters who call for a differentlym organized o society creating cooperatives. Participants in the TUC march, in. c contrast, call te a for fairer taxation and smaller budget cuts. The participants in theg student march h s and the TUC march more frequently proffer solutions that can.a be accomplished w within the current economic system while Occupy supportersw seek to transcend w capitalism and party politics. m o .c te Political Attitudes a g h s .a The distribution of self-placement on the left-rightw political spectrum is w significantly different across the three demonstrations.w In the survey, the self-

m placement score ranges from 1 for “left” to 11o for “right.” The mean score for .c both TUC and Occupy demonstrators is 2.4, butte is considerably (and statistically 8 a g significantly) higher for FoF. h s Across the three protest events, participants.a are more likely to express w libertarian rather than authoritarian views:w i.e. they believe in the redistribution w of wealth from the richest to the poorest, they generally consider that children m o should not be taught to obey authority.c (presumably, instead, to obey a moral te code) and they do not believe that privatea enterprise will improve public services. g h However, there are important differencess within this general picture. Agreement .a with the statement that “governmentw should redistribute income from the better off w w to those who are less well off,” is higher for TUC participants (90 percent) than m FoF (82 percent) and Occupyo (83 percent) participants (Table 8.4). TUC marchers c . 9 are more likely to considerte that children should obey authority (50 percent); and a g student demonstrators (althoughh only a tiny minority) are slightly more inclined to s agree that privatization. acan help improve public services (3 percent agree with this w 10 compared to 2 percentw or lower for demonstrators in the other two protest events). w

Student demonstratorsm have a higher tendency to agree that people should be o allowed to migrate.c if they want to (57 percent) compared to TUC marchers (37 te a 11 percent) and Occupiersg (41 percent). h Generally,s the protesters in the sample exhibit high levels of distrust for political .a institutions; w however, there are significant differences. While “only” a third of w w TUC marchers (32 percent) claim to have “none at all” or “very little” trust for m o .c te 8 Kruskalla Wallis score is significant at the 0.00 level. g h 9s Kruskall Wallis score is significant at the 0.00 level. .a w 10 Kruskall Wallis score is significant at the 0.00 level. w w 11 Kruskall Wallis score is significant at the 0.04 level. © Copyrighted Material

Table 8.4 The government should re-distribute wealth from the richest to poorest

.ashgate. Strongly Disagree Neither Agree Strongly Kruskall ww disagree agree Wallis sig TUC (n=211) 1 3 7 26 64 FoF (n=147) 2 5 10 35 47 0.01

Occupy (n=144) 4 4 9 25 .58ashgate.com w

ww %s are row percentages. political parties, almost two thirds (61 percent) of FoF participants and 81 percent of Occupiers express this sentiment.12 This indicates that trade union members have more trust in political parties than students and Occupiers..ashga teDistrust.com w for government is high across all three samples, without significant differences,www although more TUC (72 percent) and Occupy (72 percent) participants are not at all or not very trustful compared to FoF participants (59 percent). Around two-thirds of all participants are not trustful of parliament, regardless of the demonstration they attended (Table

8.5). For a more in-depth look at trust in anti-austerity.ashgate.com demonstrations in different countries, see Andretta et al. (Chapter 6, thisw volume).

Table 8.5 Trust in political institutions

Trust in … Not at all Not very.ashgate.coSomewhatm ww Quite Very much Kruskall

www Wallis sig Government TUC (n=207) 27% 45% 22% 6% 0% FoF (n=145) 29% 30% 27% 14% 1% n.s Occupy (n=141) 37%.ashgate.com 35% 20% 9% 0% Parliament TUC (n=205) 18% 39% 33% 10% 0% FoF (n=146) 14% 38% 31% 15% 1% n.s Occupy (n=139) 29% 35% 22% 12% 1% Political parties.ashgate.com www

TUC (n=204) www 15% 48% 33% 4% 1% FoF (n=145) 17% 44% 29% 10% 0% 0.00 Occupy (n=140) 22% 46% 27% 6% 0%

Motivations for Participation m o .c te What does this mean for the motivation to participate? How are these orientationsa g related to solidarity and inclusiveness? It is important to address this questionh in s .a the context of our examination of broad constituencies, because protests wattracting w high proportions of the self-interested could be said to have failed wto attract a broad constituency (for an example, see Klandermans et al.’s contributionm to this o volume). They show that self-interested beneficiaries are less involved.c in multiple te a movements than conscience constituents who protest for reasonsg of morality of h s solidarity. Are the protesters pursuing their own interests or are.a they taking to the w street on behalf of others? Twice as many participants in the studentw protest and in w the TUC march (72 percent) participated in order to defend their interests in contrast m o to 47 percent of Occupy participants. However, as Rheingans.c and Hollands (2012) te point out, it would be problematic to interpret the studenta movement in the UK g h in 2010 as characterized by self-interest. Although it wass not a typical class based .a movement, it addressed affordability, inequality and concernsw about a fairer society. w Furthermore, the participating students did take risksw and did not gain personally

m from the participation in the student occupationo (Rheingans and Hollands, 2012: .c 551). Overall, the vast majority of the participantste in all three protest events took a g part to express solidarity, however, fewer h student protesters (75 percent) than s participants in the TUC march (96 percent).a and Occupy (92 percent) participated w to express solidarity. FoF participants werew also less inclined to participate out of w moral obligation (52 percent, compared to 81 percent of TUC participants and 59 m o percent of Occupiers). Motivations differ.c statistically significantly across the three te demonstrations (Table 8.6). For a morea in-depth assessment of motivations to protest g h across a range of demonstrations ins cross-national perspective, see Klandermans et .a al. (Chapter 7, this volume). w w w

m o .c Discussion and Conclusionste a g h s All three of the demonstrations.a attracted people from across a range of social w classes, and drew inw participants with a broad array of active and passive w memberships. Thism suggests that they were all very successful at building diverse o constituencies. In.c the case of the student and TUC demonstrations, we might argue te a that this is a resultg of the broad framing of the issues, the large memberships held h by the organizationss on the organizing committee and the similar organizational .a cultures of thew TUC, NUS and UCU. In the case of Occupy, we might argue that w w it was able to attract across classes—and to successfully attract minorities (note m its participants’o disproportionate membership in LGBT organizations)—as a result .c of its teability to be inclusive in deliberative discussions (Romanos 2013), and a g becauseh it allowed autonomy and self-representation (B. Roth 2004; Agustin and s .a Rothw 2011). Although the platform of Occupy was more ideological than the other w w © Copyrighted Material

.ashgate.

ww Table 8.6 Motivations to participate in protest

Strongly Disagree Neither Agree Strongly Kruskal disagree agree Wallis

.ashgate.com w sig. Defend interests ww TUC (n-195) 4% 10% 14% 37% 35% FoF (n=140) 6% 8% 14% 39% 33% 0.00 Occupy (n=129) 13% 12% 27% 28% 20%

Moral obligation .ashgate.com w

TUC (n=200) 3% 7% 10% www 26% 55% FoF (n=141) 6% 9% 15% 33% 37% 0.03 Occupy (n=130) 6% 6% 15% 29% 43% Express solidarity

.ashgate.com TUC (n=202) 0% 1% w 3% 16% 80% FoF (n=141) 1% 3% 21% 23% 53% 0.00 Occupy (n=132) 1% 1% 60% 25% 67%

Yet there are some notable differences.ashgate.com ww across the three sub-samples that are worthy of further discussion. Firstly,www the student demonstration tended to attract younger people,13 those (who at least believed they were) seeking to defend their interests and a higher proportion of people with or studying for a university qualification. This may be a result of the demonstration being targeted specifically at students and staff in HE.ashg aandte.com FE institutions. A broader sense of “we” might have been developed in the organizers’ call to action to enable the protest to attract those without university qualifications, and to help students to better understand the moral and solidary incentives for participation in anti-austerity demonstrations. Relatedly, participants in global justice organizations—actually quite tightly related to the theme of the demonstration—were low. Perhaps a coalition beyond the NUS and UCU.ashgate.c omightm www have been mobilized, had the demonstration been framed more broadly. www With regards to the TUC march, this did not mobilize younger constituents well and disproportionately drew members of trade unions in comparison to the other marches. This is hardly surprising given that the TUC called the action

.ashgate.com 13 However, the average age is 30, thus much higher than the average undergraduate student,www which indicates that former students and teaching staff participated in the event. © Copyrighted Material

© 2015 From Marco Giugni and Maria T. Grasso (eds), Austerity and Protest: Popular Contention in Times of Economic Crisis, published by Ashgate Publishing. See: http://www.ashgate.com/isbn/9781472439185 190 Austerity and Protest © Copyrighted Material and advertised it via its member unions. Few young people were attracted to the m demonstration, despite the new partnership between the NUS and TUC. Botho .c te the prevalence of authoritarianism, represented by the high tendency ofa TUC g participants to agree that children should obey authority, and the lack of mobilizationh s .a via social media may well both be a function of the age of participants.w The w demonstration platform’s call for assisting damaged and vulnerable communitiesw may have contributed to TUC demonstrators’ sense of solidarity. m o Occupy, although considerably smaller, might be said to have .beenc the most te a successful at bringing together a diverse range of participants. Theg age range was h s the broadest, and the mean age of participants sits in between.a the two extreme w of FoF (youngest) and TUC (oldest). A broader range of organizationalw sectors w was represented among participants and there was a good deal of solidarity. One m o interesting difference is the lack of gender balance: more. cof the participants were te male (even though more of the active were female). aThis may be because the g h demonstration was considered higher risk and therefores that biographic availability .a factors were more likely to matter. Occupy was perhapsw not the place, for example, w for women with young children. This is not to suggestw that this is a function of

m gendered parenting, but perhaps a reaction to Occupy’so “Macho” atmosphere and .c drug-taking. Occupy’s overt emphasis on diversityte and inclusion may have made a g it more welcoming for those sectors of societyh who did not consider themselves at s risk from engaging in high cost activism. .a w Our analysis of three cross-movementw protest events indicates that framing w and bridgework play a significant role for the mobilization of heterogeneous m o constituencies and that self-interest .c and solidarity are not mutually exclusive. te Protest organizers need to pay attentiona to generational differences with respect to g h organizational affiliation, affinitys to social media and political culture in order to .a reach out to a broad range of protesters.w The mobilization of heterogeneous protest w w events is not only a success in itself but can also lay the groundwork for further m collaboration. Our research ocontributes to the emerging scholarship on coalition .c formation. It supplementste existing studies that employ qualitative studies, but a g introduces a comparativeh perspective on cross-movement alliances. s Perhaps what is unique.a about demonstrations in contemporary Britain is that w they are taking placew in an era of austerity: one which, according to protesters, w affects a host of protestm issues, whether specifically / directly related to austerity or o not. Inclusiveness.c and solidarity appear common across all of the demonstrations te a we surveyed wheng it comes to class representation, multiple organizational h memberships sand motivations for participation. For future research, we suggest .a to comparew demonstrations taking place at different periods of time to test w w whether it is the anti-austerity economic climate that appears to be fostering broad m constituencieso in contemporary protest. Indeed, we may find significant differences .c betweente demonstrations taking place in comfortable versus uncomfortable a g economich eras. Such a comparative approach would have the value of allowing s .a scholarsw to tease out the context (of anti-austerity) from the issue (anti-austerity w versusw other demonstrations). © Copyrighted Material