Cambridge city centre saw four separate protests yesterday, on a day designated by national groups as an occasion to protest against government cuts. 

The day began with Cambridge Defend Education’s (CDE) protest against the privatization of student debt, which began outside St. Mary’s church at 11:30am. 

CDE is a campaign group of students and academics. Founded in 2010, they “campaign against fees, debt and privatisation in education; against cuts and austerity in the UK and beyond; and for a free and radical academic space of critique and creativity”.

About 11 members of CDE cordoned off the pavement immediately in front of the church using red cardboard boxes with the word ‘debt’ written on them. Some members flyered passers-by whilst the remaining protesters, some dressed as bankers, played a game of ‘stuck in the mud’, renamed ‘stuck in the debt’. 

CDE member Daisy Hughes, a second year student at King’s College, hoped that the display would raise awareness surrounding the student debt issue by drawing members of the public in.

"The poor impoverished students are being chased by the bankers who are getting them ‘stuck in the debt’’’, she explained. “Hopefully members of the public will come along and help our protestors who are stuck in the debt”. 

Passers by took flyers and some stopped to talk but none were persuaded to join in.

A similar-sized crowd was gathered at the New Museums site on Downing Street protesting against vivisection. Members of the group Animal Rights Cambridge shouted slogans through a megaphone and banged a drum. They were positioned directly in front of the Geology department. 

“I know they’ve got primates in there though”, said Sue, 70, who has been a member of Cambridge Animal Rights since 1990.

Four policemen were present at the scene. 

"They don’t want us to storm the gates. They don’t want us to get in”, Sue explained. I asked her what the group would do if they did manage to gain entry to the site.

“We would leaflet the people in there”, she answered.

The group organizes some kind of protest activity every year on the 5th November to mark the anniversary of the death of activist Barry Horne, who died in 2001 after a 68-day hunger strike, in an attempt to persuade the government to hold a public enquiry into vivisection.

Horne undertook the hunger strike during an 18-year prison sentence, which he was given for setting off incendiary bombs in shops selling fur and leather. He was known as an ‘urban terrorist’. 

The Cambridge Branch of the People’s Assembly, a national protest group opposed to government cuts, also held their display of ‘creative disobedience’ yesterday

One of the group’s founding members, MML lecturer and Homerton Fellow Olivier Tonneau, led a procession of roughly 20 protestors, attached to him with chains, on a march through Cambridge. Some of the protestors were dressed as ‘victims of the cuts’; surgeons, school students, a postman strumming a guitar. Tonneau was dressed as Prime Minister David Cameron. 

Speaking as Cameron, Tonneau expressed a desire to “get the most” out of his “workers” and stressed to passers by “what they could do for their country”.

The group had written their own lyrics to famous protest songs which they sang as they marched through the city.

Also in the Market Square the Cambridge Students for Life Society were standing in a line holding tea lights and signs depicting fetuses and pregnant bellies.

The society campaigns for the right to life from “the moment of conception to the moment of natural death”.

A spokesperson for the society said to Varsity: “We didn’t know it was the national day of disobedience. We just thought it would be really nice on bonfire night to light candles and create a witness in memory of all the children that have died from the tragedy of abortion”.