Two Years of Arms Off Campus Action

Over the last two academic years, we have launched a full frontal assault on the University of Sheffield and Sheffield Hallam's links to the arms trade. But before we go into our actions and resistance to this we must first give some context.

The University of Sheffield has the highest funding from arms manufacturers of any UK university, having received £72 million from arms companies since 2012 according to recent freedom of information requests. With Rolls Royce, Boeing, BAE Systems, GKN, Caterpillar, Airbus, General Electric Aviation, and QinetiQ, alongside grants from the United States Military and the UK Ministry of Defence, the University of Sheffield is in bed with war criminals. The Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre (AMRC), part funded by Boeing, is located just outside Sheffield, and is the crown jewel of the University’s complicity in the arms trade. Sheffield Hallam is not much better, having industrial partnerships with JCB, Caterpillar, Volvo, Rolls Royce, and BAE Systems amongst others.

BAE Systems have supplied weapons and logistical support to Saudi Arabia before, during, and after their widely condemned bombing campaign in Yemen that has seen 400,000 people killed so far and a further 17 million forced into starvation. A military campaign condemned for war crimes, enabled by British bombs, plans, and logistics. Meanwhile, BAE Systems is considered by both universities in Sheffield as a close research partner. We cannot sit back and say nothing.

It doesn't stop at BAE Systems. Rolls Royce is another example, holding various contracts with Turkey, a country that has been consistently using targeted airstrikes on Kurdish communities in Rojava (North-Eastern Syrian Autonomous region) and in Turkish-occupied Kurdistan. Even more directly, both universities work with the US and UK military apparatus, which provides grants in return for research into more efficient war machines.

Our universities are continuing to enable Western colonialism around the world with little consideration for the harm they are causing. This harm is historical - since the establishment of the British Empire, universities have provided the empire with civil servants, military officers and regional administrators essential in the operation of the empire. And this complicity has never stopped; the current funding from arms companies is just the continuation of the colonial education project. For all the talk of progressive and woke universities, our institutions are fundamentally propping up global inequality and imperialism.

During our campaign, in October 2023, Israeli Occupation Forces launched a new intensification of the genocide of the Palestinian peoples. The British state and British universities work deeply with Israel, and are directly complicit in occupation and genocide - arming the IOF, quashing protest and remaining silent on the root causes of the violence. In light of this, our campaigns since have paid special attention to companies facilitating this genocide, and we have strengthened our ties with other groups fighting for Palestinian Liberation.

Action #1 - March 2022 Sheffield Military Education Committee

We infiltrated the ‘Sheffield Military Education Committee Leader's Talk’ and got their event cancelled. The event itself was a lecture, panel discussion and networking event between the Military, Business, and Higher Education sectors including the Vice-chancellors of both Sheffield universities signing the military covenant. Not shady at all then...

But what is this Military Education Committee behind the talk? The MEC is a cross-university body that works to recruit students into the military and to establish institutional support within our education for the military and its industrial complex. Upon hearing of this event, we decided to take action and seal the fate of the MEC event; especially as their talks were also crossing the UCU picket lines!

So a small team of activists occupied the lecture theatre where the event was due to take place and unfurled a banner. After just a few minutes of chanting the event was cancelled... how sad!

Action #2 - Oct 2022 Diamond Occupation

At this point we seriously started to piss off the University of Sheffield, with a week-long occupation of the University of Sheffield‘s £81m engineering building, The Diamond. This resulted in its closure, making waves and catching the attention of news outlets locally and internationally, with articles in Jacobin as well as The Tab, a host of local publications, Squat.net, the front page of Forge Press - the university newspaper read by students, staff and researchers alike - and a column by us published in local news outlet Now Then. The occupation was only called off after the university went to court and brought in High Court Enforcement Officers (bailiffs) to evict us.

This was a highly successful action that caused massive disruption to the university, forcing it to have many difficult conversations around its close ties to the military-industrial complex and war criminals.

Action #3 - November 2022 Occupation of Hicks

Continuing our demilitarise campaign alongside and in solidarity with the UCU (University and College Union) who were on strike, we began a short occupation of the Uni of Sheffield’s Hicks Building to maintain pressure and demonstrate student support for the strikes. It became tense following security placing chains on the doors, locking us in an enclosed area and illegally removing our ability to leave in an emergency situation.

In one confusing moment a staff member crossed our picket wearing a CND (Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament) pin, as they didn't support the strike. We would like to remind all fellow peace and anti-arms trade activists that the struggle against the profit-driven military-industrial complex and the struggle against marketised education are inseparable. A fact that can never change in a for-profit system of education!

Action #4 - Nov 2022 Careers fair disrupted

Hot on the back of our occupation of Hicks we shut down one of the university's careers fairs. University of Sheffield’s Careers Service is responsible for pushing students into jobs in the military and its industrial complex alongside jobs in the fossil fuel sector. We see this relationship as morally irreconcilable with our university’s commitment to be “responsible – for our people and the wider world” as one of its 5 key values.

We went in with our ‘Get military out of education’ and ‘#OneOfUsAllOfUs’ (a UCU solidarity slogan) banners and took the stage and the mic. We also took the opportunity at this point to highlight the university's relationship with Thales, an arms that has provided UoS with £1.1 million in research funding. Thales in the UK builds the Watchkeeper drone, produced through a joint venture with Israeli arms company Elbit Systems. Thales’ products have also been used by the Russian military in Ukraine.

Action #5 - Nov 2022 Cantor occupation

Our campaign continued to roll, with our comrades at Sheffield Hallam launching an occupation of the Cantor Building, reminding Hallam that they are not outside of our field of view. The university also maintains a close relationship with various arms companies.

Since this occupation we have heard Hallam has been engaged in developing technology to automate the EU border... seems like an escalation at Hallam might be needed!

Action #6 - Feb 2023 Operation Octopussy

Thursday 9th and Friday 10th of February 2023 were University and College Union (UCU) strike days. They also happened to be the days that the University of Sheffield was hosting HESPA - the Higher Education Strategic Planners Association, a part of the training and replication of Higher Education’s middle management who are responsible for a large part of the running of the sector and contain many of its future leaders. The conference was due to be held in the Octagon, behind a UCU picket line - and Vice-Chancellor Koen Lamberts was billed to be giving the opening address on Thursday morning at 10:30am.

Just before 09:00 on Thursday, a dozen Sheffield Action Groupers (SHAGers, if you will) walked through the front entrance of the Octagon, all dressed in sexy white overalls. The University’s Security Operations Manager (and ex-cop), Simon Verrall, was on the doors. He took offence to our presence and began assaulting activists by grabbing and pushing us, with at least one person falling to the ground, in a violent but vain attempt to prevent our entry.

All this as the 20 UCU members who formed the special picket called to protest the event looked on in horror. After his own underling pointed out that he really shouldn’t be assaulting students and that he should instead “leave it to security”, former firearms commander and Superintendent Verrall of the South Yorkshire Police responded angrily with the admittedly quite funny line, “I AM security”, and finally relented. Twelve of us spread across and occupied the building, taking entrances and deploying banners to block conference attendees from entering.

The organisers were taken completely by surprise and, lacking a contingency plan (who could have possibly predicted they would face disruption for bare-facedly crossing a picket line in Sheffield!), the event was cancelled several hours later. Koen unfortunately never showed up, cowardly cancelling his appearance as soon as the occupation started. Our group goal of megaphoning the slimy bastard will have to wait for another day. Still, at least we ruined Simon’s week. Must be getting embarrassing for him, having to keep explaining to his bosses why he can’t do his job. We left the occupation at 13:00 and had a lovely photoshoot with some flares and banners in front of a buoyant crowd of striking staff. Up the UCU!

Action #7 - Sept 2023 Crashing Freshers Fair

We know the army preys on the working class, but they also prey on students - recruiting us to be cannon fodder in service of imperialism. They had a stand at a freshers fair, attempting to sign up students before their university education had even begun. With how they’d positioned themselves, it was all too easy to get a banner in place above them and leaflet the crowd below, which they certainly weren’t happy about!

Action #8 - Sept 2023 Operation B.A.E. (Before All Else)
To kick off the academic year we occupied the Arts Tower (the tallest university building in England!) for three days over the University of Sheffield’s ties with the arms trade, and their attacks on striking workers. With a team of seventeen people inside (plus more outside support) we forced the university to hire expensive private security to monitor our movements 24/7 in an attempt to intimidate us, but we still succeeded in shutting the building’s normal operations. They stole our banners, shut off electricity and stopped outside food deliveries (although they failed to realise we could lift food up through the windows). On the final day, they discovered we were in the boardroom (where we’d been since the beginning) and the security operations manager, Simon Verrall, laughably concluded we must have crawled through a non-existent roof space.

Action #9 - Nov 2023 the wave

As a result of the Israeli State’s escalation of its genocidal project in Palestine following the events of the 7th October 2023, there was a renewed appetite for action on campus.

The University of Sheffield was holding an opening ceremony for its latest vanity project, a new £99m building. ‘The Wave’ is supposedly net-zero, but had to be knocked down once due to it literally sinking into the ground. The ceremony had planned speeches from the Deputy Vice-Chancellor, Gill Valentine, as well as champagne and a big cake in the shape of the building.

Unfortunately about 70 students somehow managed to get inside with banners reading ‘CUT TIES WITH APARTHEID’, ‘SOLIDARITY’, and ‘STOP ARMING ISRAEL’. Some of them had megaphones, and started calling out the University’s ties to the arms trade and complicity in the Israeli genocide of Palestinians. For some reason the organisers of the event didn’t appreciate the noise, and had to cancel the event.

Action #10 - December 2023 Divorcing Husbands

In the context of the following two pages as well as complicity in the ongoing Palestinian genocide, we decided Chris Husbands, Vice-Chancellor of Sheffield Hallam University did not deserve a leaving party. Hallam has received numerous investments from dodgy companies who support the killing of refugees and the expansion of the carceral state. Under the leadership of Chris Husbands, this has increased.

The day began at 12pm with a demonstration outside Sheffield Hallam University’s Owen Building in solidarity with the ongoing genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. We thought it impolite to not pay Chris Husbands a visit at his leaving ceremony being held inside - all students and staff were invited after all, and that includes us. The university was already spooked, with a horde of Security thugs stood guarding the doors to welcome us into the building. A short walk later round the back of the building, and we quickly found the atrium where the event would be held. Our hosts didn’t seem to be expecting us, so we announced our presence with a megaphone, yelling chants in solidarity with Palestine. Curious students began to appear at the balconies, looking down at the ensuing chaos of security. After a couple of minutes, they realised we weren’t leaving, and began packing away their champagne glasses and canapés onto trollies. We’d successfully disrupted the leaving drinks, yay!!

However, we knew we couldn’t stop at disruption - we needed to completely prevent the event from taking place. After a short game of cat and mouse, it didn’t take long before SHAGers had blocked both entrances into the new venue at Hallam Hall with a banner. Security clearly didn’t know how to handle us, they called for reinforcements from our old friend Simon Verrall, Security Operations Manager at the University of Sheffield. Sadly, Verrell seemed shy and didn’t say hi. We even had a visit from pigs in uniform, who came to stare and point at us, but realised they couldn’t do much to stop our legitimate protest against genocide. Five hours after we’d first gathered outside the Owen Building, we clocked off and went to the pub for a pint and chips!