We Went to a Student Masterclass About the Best Way to Hold a Rent Strike

Students from around the UK met in south London this weekend to plan a national rent strike. They all came with similar stories: terrible student halls and private rented accommodation which universities and landlords are charging way too much for.

NUS President Malia Bouattia, who spoke at the event on Saturday night, summed up the mood pretty well: "The student housing situation is at crisis point. In London, the cost of student accommodation has doubled in the last decade, but this is also happening across the UK." According to the NUS, the shortfall between the cost of rent and the money students now get from loans is £8,000.

The sad state of student living was mostly taken as a given by those attending the meeting, but they didn't dwell on that; they'd come to take action. Activists at the meeting from Aberdeen, Glasgow, Sussex, Bristol, Belfast and London were beyond the stage of trying to negotiate with university managers. The general feeling was that there's no time for pissing about – that action is the only way to get things done.

"Facing the wholesale sell off of education and ever-rising fees," Bouattia told the crowd, "it's time for us to turn the tide and take on greedy landlords and markets and vice chancellors. It's time to unleash the power of the student movement on a local and national level."

With this emphasis on action in mind, one of the first events of the weekend was a step-by-step training session, given by UCL students who recently won nearly £1 millionmillion in compensation from their university, on exactly how to start a rent strike that will make a difference.

The way to win, UCL student Iida Kayhko told the group, is to know your enemy (i.e. the university management), and to go on the offensive. You have the upper hand here: you can easily know what they are going to do – they work slowly and you can predict it – but they don't know what you are going to do because you can act a lot more quickly. Essentially, she said, you've got to take every opportunity to attack the managers and make the university look bad as you can. "One time when we were meeting, a UCL manager slipped up and said something like, 'We don't consider low income students when setting the rent.' We were recording it and sent it to the press and it was published all over the place."

Beyond this, she said, you've got to appeal to as many students as possible. "You have to think: 'How do you make the rent strike fun?' It's shit to say, but so much activism is dull. We were successful because we had sick demos, we took over parts of the university and let off smoke flares. We burnt effigies."

During a break, VICE caught up with Richard, a student from Bristol who is planning to start a rent strike in the city. "Bristol University has announced rent prices will go up by five percent this coming year. It's a massive rise and it's expensive to begin with," he said. "There are about a dozen of us and we're launching the campaign in the next few weeks at the university's freshers week. The idea is not to make it too political to begin with. We're gonna have a party, keep it fun and get people involved that way."

Asked why they don't try negotiating with Bristol University managers before going on rent strike, Richard was critical: "There's only so far that lobbying will get you. I thoroughly believe in direct action and making life difficult for the people who are, basically, your enemy."

Back in the training session, the group were told to sketch out a battle plan to create chaos for the university, while UCL rent strikers circled the room to offer advice. They discussed various scenarios, such as what would happen if the university threatens to expel students who aren't paying their rent. The answer, according to Iida: "You call a massive national demo and get coach-loads of students from other unis in for a really aggressive protest… and you do it quickly."

Radical Housing Network activist and former UCL student Ben Beach continued: "Constant escalation is the key," he said. "If management threaten to expel people, go to their offices with drums; if they threaten to bring in bailiffs, burn effigies of them." The key, Ben said, is to disrupt the working life of the university managers: "You'll need to think about occupations and blockades. Are there key points at the university that you can physically block?"

Jenny Killin is a student from Aberdeen and an officer in the student union there. "We've had successes in Scotland already," she said. "Housing co-ops in Edinburgh, for example, which have been around for a while, are a radical response to the housing crisis. At Aberdeen University, the rent has been frozen for the past two years, but that's just lapsed. We're going to campaign for another freeze. But the university are very reluctant."

Jenny is also part of the Living Rent campaign, a new group that aims to broaden the student struggle to the broader private rented sector in Aberdeen and Scotland more generally. "Everyone has a problem with landlords, and they're the same problems: bad conditions, high rent. We thought we needed to launch something broader."

A factor that will act in the favour of future rent strikes is the newly left-wing NUS leadership. Bouattia told the meeting that rent strikes would now be directly supported by the NUS – which will act as a "resource providing machine for local actions", she said. "The NUS is this year putting affordable housing at the front of its campaigns and we have passed policy to support rent strikes up and down the UK to encourage the growth and spread of rent strike actions."

If activists take the weekend's training and advice to heart, and the NUS follow through on their promises to support rent strikers, a national rent strike could well be a possibility.

@owebb

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