Admission: Impossible – Two days to go!!! (Day 14)

Nottingham Trent and Nottingham for the final countdown…

It’s fair to say that with just two days to go until the demo we were pretty hysterical. Uncontrollable fits of laughter at the most simple jokes. irrepressable urges to stop at regular intervals for junk food and sugar. It was two days to go until the National Demo and it was all coming together nicely.

We drove up from Leicester to Nottingham, after having to drive back because Gemma had left her ‘demo coat’ back at the cheap hotel we’d stayed in the night before.

So off we drove, uninterrupted with the exception of a quick stop on a side street so that Wes could do an interview with a radio station about Sunday’s demo.

We arrived in Nottingham for lunch with Bav, the President at Trent and Mark Grayling, the General Manager, Chair of AMSU and a good, critical friend to NUS. We listened to some of the difficulties that sabbs had found in motivating people to come on the demo and had a good discussion about the long-term fight against fees and other ways in which they could try and get students involved in the campaign.

We then drove over to Nottingham University where Education Officer Benedict Bringle had been running a really active campaign to build for the demo, signing up over 200 people!!! Be had also been part of a delegation of officers who’d met Boris Johnson that morning. It seems that Boris gave them the impression that he isn’t a fan of the cap and would like to see fees increase, so we’ll be clarifying his position after the demo. With all the spaces filled on Nottingham’s coaches, Be hadn’t left much room for us to do anything more, so after catching up with the sabbs about the wider campaigning work of NUS, we did some interviews with a roving reporter from the radio station, caught up on our work on the Charities Bill and then went to the sports bar for a quick Diet Coke before the journey home.

And so we left, the final leg of our Roadshow complete. Two days until the National Demo. It’s been a long month for us, we’ve had to drop things from our schedule to be able to do it and some days went better than others, but we felt that – having clocked up more than 2,000 miles and spoken in total to around 3,000 students – that we’d done our bit to support unions and build for the demo.

Students’ unions have worked incredibly hard for the demo. Whether they brought 20 people or 200 people didn’t really matter to us. All that mattered was that they’d been out there, talking to students and raising the issues. We’ve seen students’ unions with little campaigning culture mobilise more people for the demo than before and that success is just as important as any other.

So as we drove back, stuck stationary in the traffic back to London, it was with some sense of trepidation about what would happen on Sunday, but a feeling of satisfaction knowing that this campaign has truly kick started an active campaign to defend our education.

Wes and Gemma

PS – Thanks to all of you who invited us onto your campus. We’re sorry to the unions we didn’t visit, so please get in touch if you’d like us to come and support any of your other campaign activities!

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