Heading down Oxford Street london u.k. and manchester u.k. demo students.

Shoppers on Oxford Street were today surprised when a march of about 700 protesters, many of whom masked up, suddenly appeared on Oxford Street. Traffic was blocked and a few plastic bins thrown into the road. The speedz march, supported by a mobile sound system pumping out tunes, turned up Tottenham Court Road. Somewhere on the way about half the crowd must have taken a different way, as there were only about 300 left when walking down Euston Road and turning right into Woburn Place, heading in the general direction of Piccadilly Circus.
They are still out there, haunting the city...

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Hundreds of students chase Porter through Manchester u.k.

: manchester

National Union of Students President Aaron Porter was unable to speak at the rally of today’s NUS/UCU demonstration in Manchester, after hundreds of angry students chased him off the streets.
As protesters gathered at the starting point on Oxford Road, about thirty activists from Hull Students Against Fees and Cuts and Leeds University Against Cuts accosted Porter and demanded that he justify his record. Instead of engaging with us, Porter turned and hurried off – only to find himself followed by growing numbers of demonstrators from across the North. Within a couple of minutes he was literally being chased through the streets of Manchester by about half those who had gathered at that point – certainly more than five hundred people – with chants including “Students, workers, hear us shout, Aaron Porter sold us out” and “Porter – out”. Eventually he took refuge in Manchester Metropolitan Students’ Union, protected by a heavy cordon of riot police. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Porter did not turn up to speak at closing rally. Instead, NUS was represented by his deputy, Vice-President Further Education Shane Chowan – who was unable to finish his speech after he was drowned out by hostile chanting and pelted with eggs. The rally was deathly dull, with trade union bureaucrat after trade union bureaucrat telling us what we already knew (with the partial exception of Matt Wrack from the FBU, who gave a fairly militant performance). The atmosphere among the protesters – overwhelmingly students – was very different. Most of the speakers were heckled repeatedly, and chants about student-worker unity, the need for strike action and the revolts in Tunisia and Egypt were very popular. After the end of the rally, about a thousand students marched independently into town, led by the student left (NCAFC, SWP, Workers’ Liberty, Revolution, anarchists). We were met by a huge and violent police presence, and at the time of writing many of us are still kettled on Deansgate in central Manchester – though having comrades sing the Internationale with us from across the road helped keep up our spirits. After the chasing off of Aaron Porter, one other bit of good news. Pat Murphy, a comrade who sits on the National Union of Teachers executive, told us today that the committee had, on his initiative, voted to delete a proposal to invite Porter to speak at NUT conference in April. Hated and hunted by his own members, Porter is starting to be shunned by many trade unionists too.

Video: Short Clips From #Demo2011 / Van Blocking london.

A few clips from today's take over of London Streets, with several thousand marching against fees and cuts to parliament, then off and away past Millbank, to show solidarity with those in Egypt fighting a repressive regime, and then off again, streets reclaimed, Boots, Topshop, Vodaphone and Banks protested, different groups marching miles around the city, blocking whitehall, splitting off, coming back together.
The video clips don't really show that, but a bit of it at any rate. It does show groups of people up for blocking police vans, and I saw a whole lot of #solidarity out on the streets today. Good effort. Solidarity to everyone out protesting in Manchester too.
Localise the protests, then come back stronger on March 29th - see you there!

On January the 29nth, in London a group of protesters who were participating in the “Defend Education, Fight Every Cut” demonstration headed towards the Egyptian embassy to show solidarity with the streets in Cairo