Loughborough Students Union have provided its students with a bus to London tomorrow from the Fountain for anyone who is interested in taking part in the demonstration.
Tomorrow will see thousands of students, including those from Loughborough, marching through the streets of London to stand up for their educational future. The national demonstration, organised by the NUS, has been labelled ‘#demo2012: Educate, Employ, Empower’.
The demonstration comes as NUS members have decided to take action after the National Conference in April, when delegates voted to hold a national demonstration in the first term of 2012 over the governmental decisions that have led to current students being weighed down with debt, having difficulty finding jobs, getting onto the property ladder and state pensions being phased out.
It has been stated that the demonstration has three main priorities: Education, Employment and Empowerment. It has been suggested that by the government’s moves to get rid of EMA, reducing the undergraduate teaching funding and postgraduate funding, increasing tuition fees and introducing restrictions on international students, the government is in fact taking away education’s ability to create opportunity. The NUS, therefore, demands that the government put in place an education system which is accessible to all so that anyone can study if they want to.
The NUS are also concerned with the considerable increase in unemployment in youths, which has now reached over one million in the UK and it is therefore demanding fair work and fair pay, which lead to sustainable jobs and thus a better economic society.
The NUS believes that it is essential students work together with teachers, families, friends and communities to form alliances against those that have let students down in the past; such as the politicians that lied about how they would vote on tuition fees. However, the NUS have stated that students cannot simply wait for the next election to stand their ground; they must act now if they want change.
As a result, thousands of students are going to stand up for the democracy, equality and collectivism that The Students Movement was built on and march together through the streets of central London tomorrow.
On attending the demonstration tomorrow, the Loughborough University Student President, Ellie Read, stated that: “as an Exec we came to the conclusion that it’s important that each individual Loughborough student makes their own decision about whether they support the demo and want to be involved or not. Therefore, we didn’t actively push the event to students, but we made sure we facilitated those that made the decision that they did want to go, by putting on a bus to the demo which students could pay to travel on if they wished to attend.”
