In the wake of the economic crisis, autumn 2010 saw an unprecedented wave of UK mobilisations against the Coalition’s plans for a hike in tuition fees and spending cuts in education. On November 10, a first national demonstration against fees and cuts was called by the National Union of Students (NUS) and University and Colleges Union (UCU). This demonstration attracted over 50,000 participants (making it the largest UK protest since Stop the War in 2003) and culminated in the infamous Millbank ‘riots’. Following a perceived lack of leadership on the part of the NUS, the more radical National Campaign Against Fees and Cuts (NCA£C) and Education Activist Network called two days of action and a second national demonstration for December 9 (on the day of the vote in Parliament) attracting over 20,000. In this paper, we analyse data collected from surveys distributed at both national demonstrations as part of the UK case of the Europe-wide ECRP project Caught in the Act of Protest: Contextualising Contestation (Klandermans et al.). We focus on the question of how did the first national demonstration against fees and cuts (and ‘the riots’ focussed on by the press) affect what types of people got involved in the second national demonstration? Were young people, demonstrating for the first time, put off by ‘the Millbank riots’? Or did similar groups of people attend both demonstrations? What types of people were drawn to this cause and attended the second national demonstration that had not attended the first national demonstration? And what distinguishes those activists that attended both national demonstrations from the rest? This paper also investigates whether the crisis drew young people to engage with politics for the first time. Did the recent UK mobilisations against fees and cuts provide a new avenue for young people’s political engagement?
