First they came for the students. This week, 12 vanloads of police arrived at Sussex University, in collaboration with management, to evict students who had been occupying a room on campus for eight weeks. They had been taking a stand against privatisation of services at their university, creating a militant "pop-up union" and attracting support from all over the country: they had to be got rid of. Photographs from the day show police in antiseptic yellow uniforms swarming in as if to disinfect a wound in the body politic where the rage was bleeding through.

The suppression of student protest by the British state has been savage and efficient over the past three years. The students of Sussex were brave even to make the attempt. They knew all too well that they were risking arrest, serious criminal charges and physical violence from police and hired security, and that is what happened. It's what always happens when a government uses force to suppress radicalism.

Right now, as millions of people stare down the barrel of job losses, benefits sanctions, destitution and desperation and the rich are given tax cuts, I hear a lot of people asking why there isn't more resistance going on. Well, here's why. There was resistance, and it was brutally and systematically put down. The students, the street-organising anti-cuts campaigners, the Occupy movement. When people speak about the Occupy camps and anti-austerity protests of 2010-12, it is with a tone of regret, as if somehow those grassroots movements just fizzled out because those involved didn't know what they were doing. On the contrary: they were cleared out, arrested and beaten back by police, just like the students at Sussex.