(no subject)
Student protests? Occupying the Conservative party's HQ? Fuck yeah!
I was there for the last round of tuition fees protests in 2003, which were perfectly well behaved and achieved sod all, and I kind of wish I'd been there today because it sounds like it was magnificent. As ever, the media coverage sounds absolutely nothing like the reports I've heard from people who were there - at least partly because the media are incapable of distinguishing between damage to property and actual violence towards humans - despite all the hype about the number of people who were hurt (thanks Sky News!), the official reports show that ten people have been treated for minor injuries, and seven of them were students.
Jeremy Paxman is losing his touch a little bit. I just caught the beginning of Newsnight, where he was shuttling between the President of the NUS, who has given the usual line about "small minority ruining it for everyone else", and the President of an individual university's student union who supports civil disobedience, asking a question about either protest tactics or the issue of university funding, then following it up by accusing them of refusing to talk about the issue they hadn't just been asked about. The BBC have actually been giving the students a really hard time about this; earlier a reporter tried to tell the guy from the NUS that the peaceful protesters should have stopped the building occupation - which is a bit harsh considering that the Metropolitan Police couldn't stop it. Then it emerged that the NUS use a private company to run their demonstrations, and in all honesty, that has to be one of the most sickening things I've heard today. We've reached such a state of apathy that you can now pay people to run a protest for you. I usually hate the way that words like "broken" have been thrown around in political discourse in the past year, but it truly is a sign of the capitalist apocalypse when an organisation can out-source something like that.
The rather interesting foil to the NUS's establishment lackeys (anyone who's been even halfway round the student-political block knows that it's a de facto apprenticeship programme for Labour politicians) was Clare Solomon, the Present of the University of London Union. It seems their union has joined forces with radical groups planning to unleash a wave of protest across the country, and "this is just the beginning". Given that this year the government have tried to suggest that protest organisations should be billed for the cost of policing any action they organise, it's about time they got a good, firm, reminder that money isn't the only thing capable of talking.
Remember: illegal protest never achieved anything except universal suffrage, the end of the poll tax, the end of the original poll tax in the 14th century, the downfall of the French monarchy, the start of the American Revolution... Today's protest could just be the next item on a very long list.
I was there for the last round of tuition fees protests in 2003, which were perfectly well behaved and achieved sod all, and I kind of wish I'd been there today because it sounds like it was magnificent. As ever, the media coverage sounds absolutely nothing like the reports I've heard from people who were there - at least partly because the media are incapable of distinguishing between damage to property and actual violence towards humans - despite all the hype about the number of people who were hurt (thanks Sky News!), the official reports show that ten people have been treated for minor injuries, and seven of them were students.
Jeremy Paxman is losing his touch a little bit. I just caught the beginning of Newsnight, where he was shuttling between the President of the NUS, who has given the usual line about "small minority ruining it for everyone else", and the President of an individual university's student union who supports civil disobedience, asking a question about either protest tactics or the issue of university funding, then following it up by accusing them of refusing to talk about the issue they hadn't just been asked about. The BBC have actually been giving the students a really hard time about this; earlier a reporter tried to tell the guy from the NUS that the peaceful protesters should have stopped the building occupation - which is a bit harsh considering that the Metropolitan Police couldn't stop it. Then it emerged that the NUS use a private company to run their demonstrations, and in all honesty, that has to be one of the most sickening things I've heard today. We've reached such a state of apathy that you can now pay people to run a protest for you. I usually hate the way that words like "broken" have been thrown around in political discourse in the past year, but it truly is a sign of the capitalist apocalypse when an organisation can out-source something like that.
The rather interesting foil to the NUS's establishment lackeys (anyone who's been even halfway round the student-political block knows that it's a de facto apprenticeship programme for Labour politicians) was Clare Solomon, the Present of the University of London Union. It seems their union has joined forces with radical groups planning to unleash a wave of protest across the country, and "this is just the beginning". Given that this year the government have tried to suggest that protest organisations should be billed for the cost of policing any action they organise, it's about time they got a good, firm, reminder that money isn't the only thing capable of talking.
Remember: illegal protest never achieved anything except universal suffrage, the end of the poll tax, the end of the original poll tax in the 14th century, the downfall of the French monarchy, the start of the American Revolution... Today's protest could just be the next item on a very long list.