2010: Year of Protest.

 It all started with a carnival atmosphere, as tens of thousands of students and six formers took to the streets to protest about the state of higher education and inequality in society.  Students carried placards with witty and sometimes obscure slogans such as “Be realistic, ask the impossible” and “Under the paving stones, the beach”.  But it all turned violent as groups of anarchists seized buildings and confronted the police. Pretty soon, there was an atmosphere of revolution.  

     No, that wasn’t a report from the student demonstrations in London but Paris, May 1968, when students seized the city in the spirit of the Paris Commune.  The ‘68 students fought running battles with the police, threw cobble stones, wrecked cars.   Their actions struck a chord with the trades unions, and within days ten million French workers went out on strike.  “Les evenements” nearly toppled the French government and Charles De Gaulle, the President, put the military on alert for a violent revolution and then scurried off to Germany.  His government was forced to concede an early general election. 

   

    The current student intifada in Britain against tuition fees may not be quite in the same revolutionary league, there’s no sign yet of any general strike following the Battle of Westminster.  But it is important nevertheless, if only because of the timing. As in 1968, 2010 has been a year of protest throughout Europe.  We saw general strikes in Spain and France, riots in Greece, mass demonstrations in Ireland  as EU governments sought to deal with the financial crisis by driving down living standards and cutting public services. Students have invariably been in the thick of the action. There has been an increase also in less orthodox, internet based protest, too, such as the wiki hackers of “Anonymous” who’ve attacked firms like Amazon and Paypal in defence of the Wikileaks leader, Julian Assange. Protest has gone digital.

     But in Britain, despite widespread discontent at the prospect of swingeing spending cuts and the return of banker bonuses, the streets had remained eerily calm - as if people didn’t quite know what to do, were waiting for something to happen.  Then, on November 10th, out of a clear blue sky, fifty thousand students took to the streets in London and provided the first serious challenge to the political and financial establishment since the financial crisis broke in 2007. The impact was all the greater for the fact that no one had predicted it, not even the National Union of Students who had organised the protest.  The response was immediate; it was as if a dam had broken.   Within ten days 34 universities had been occupied and students launched a rolling campaign of nationwide strikes and demonstrations. It culminated last Thursday in a pitched battle in Parliament Square as angry protesters smashed their way into the Treasury itself after learning that the parliamentary bill to triple tuition fees in England had passed by 21 votes.  Unfortunately, the Prince of Wales and Camilla got caught in the melee. 

  As Rector of Edinburgh University I’ve spend many long hours with students in recent weeks, not least on overnight bus trips to and from London, and I’ve been astonished by how rapidly these idealistic  but largely apolitical young people have been radicalised by their experience. They see their rebellion as less about fees, and more about how society should be organised.  They reject mindless thuggery, but they are outraged at the rewards given to bankers who caused the financial crisis, and yet have escaped any penalty.  They are contemptuous of politicians who’ve made ordinary people and students pay the cost of bailing out the banks.  Above all, they loathe the Liberal Democrats who have come to symbolise all that is wrong in a political culture where politicians say one thing to get elected and do the reverse when they get into office.  Direct action has become cool again, for the first time since the poll tax marches 20 years ago.   Students have been heavily involved in the UK Uncut flash mob demonstrations against tax avoidance by directors of Primark, Topshop and Vodafone.  Last Monday, students from the University College London occupation descended on Topshop in Oxford Street, to accuse Sir Philip Green’s alleged “tax dodging”.  Their slogan:”You marketise our education, and we’ll educate your market”.  

  In four short weeks, the students have changed the weather in British politics, almost as much as has the snow.   They have thrown down a  gauntlet to parents, politicians, trades unions and voluntary organisations to call a halt to what the anti-cuts movement calls the “scorched earth” policies of the Coalition.   Whether anyone picks up this gauntlet of protest  remains to be seen.    The student intifada has divided the commentariat.   Old school radicals, like the writer, Tariq Ali, who was a leading  figure in the student revolts of the 1960s, believe that the student uprising is a game changer - that this is the spark that will ignite wider public discontent at banker capitalism and  “a new cycle of protest across Europe”.    Others, like the Guardian columnist Deborah Orr have taken a less sanguine view.  She dismissed it all as infantile posturing and ultimately futile. “Protesting against the cuts”,she wrote in a column that aroused fury among many Guardian readers, “is like protesting against water’s habit of flowing upwards”,  .Steve Richards in the Independent scoffed that protests “rarely achieve their objectives”.  Certainly, despite the protests, the bill to triple fees in England passed into law in Westminster on Thursday, though the government majority was slashed. The main damage was done to the Liberal Democrats who have been deeply split over the fees issue.

   

    So, does street protest achieve anything apart from broken windows and a few headlines? Well, it’s easy to dismiss demonstrations as futile, especially peaceful ones.   Back in 2003, over a million people marched against the Iraq invasion in the biggest popular demonstration London had ever witnessed.  It didn’t stop Tony Blair launching an illegal war on the basis of weapons of mass destruction that weren’t there.   In 2005, a quarter of a million people dressed entirely in white encircled Edinburgh in a largely peaceful attempt to Make Poverty History.  It didn’t.  Hundreds of thousands marched peacefully in Scotland against the poll tax in 1988/9, but it wasn’t until March 1990, and the riots in Trafalgar Square, that the poll tax’s fate was sealed.  It’s easy to conclude that protest is only really of interest to the protesters themselves - that it makes them feel good.  

    But this curmudgeonly view is I think wrong. Protest does have an impact, though sometimes it isn’t obvious.   The campaign against the Criminal Justice Bill in 1994 did not “kill the bill” but it did moderate it.   The anti war marchers who said “Not In My Name” in 2003 made clear to history that the war was illegitimate in the eyes of many millions of ordinary people, and destroyed Tony Blair’s credibility.  The poll tax demonstrations really did succeed in getting the community charge scrapped, though it took a couple of years and the removal of its architect, Margaret Thatcher.  She was forced from office a matter of months after the poll tax riots in London by Tory ministers who realised that she had become a vote loser.   In Scotland, the poll tax protests fuelled demands for a Scottish parliament as the only certain means of protecting Scotland from future Tory legislation. The  urban race riots in 1981 in areas like Toxteth, Southall and Brixton led to the Scarman Report, police reform and multicultural policies in local government  

     It’s also true that the student demos are not May 1968 in Paris. But the truth that 1968 wasn’t either. Europe’s greatest popular uprising since World War 2 was a political failure.   The student unrest and the strikes evaporated almost as quickly as they had emerged,  and in the subsequent general election, the right wing Gaullists were returned with an increased majority.    But les evenements, while a failure electorally, were immensely significant culturally, and historians agree that 1968 was a watershed year in Europe and the world.   The  rebellion wasn’t really a revolution in the traditional sense and was led as much by hedonism as Marxism.  The revolt captured the imaginations of young people all over Europe, and marked end of the old authoritarian, sexually repressed and socially conservative post war era.  Feminism, environmentalism, gay liberation all trace their origins to the “Spirit of ‘68”.   Even Gordon Brown took to the streets at  Edinburgh University.   I half expected to see him on last week’s march to the Scottish parliament against fees.   Had he not been responsible for introducing student fees as Chancellor in the Labour government, I suspect he probably would have been there.   The irony is that it is the children of 1968, who benefited from free tuition, who are now pulling up the ladder behind them.  And they are despised for that.

     Students have always been in the vanguard of popular protest.  They tend to be a weathervane for social and political change.  After all, they  don’t have mortgages, families, debts and responsibilities.  Haven’t been worn down by the relentless pressures of bureaucratic life, their brains fixed in an orthodox pattern.  They are more open to new ideas and more willing to demand action.  

   But they aren’t always on the side of the angels, as we saw last week.  Remember the Maoist cultural revolution in China, where students waving Little Red books persecuted and assaulted teachers and lecturers, and anyone else who got in their way.  Street protest is essentially an emotional experience, not dissimilar to a music festival or a football match.  Being in close contact with tens of thousands of like-minded individuals unleashes a kind of euphoria, a sense of power.  The noise itself is energising - the roars that run up and down the march like an aural mexican waves.  I felt it for the first time in thirty five years  when I was on the march in London.  It was impressive, and, I have to say, rather uncomfortable.  As was having to shout dumb slogans like “Students and Workers Unite and Fight!”.  The only workers around were the hard hats on the Whitehall building sites, and they looked down with bemused indifference.

    Last week’s violence in Parliament Square  underlines an inconvenient truth about street protest: People get caught up in the excitement, the disinformation, the chaos, the ecstasy of violence.  It ends with broken windows in the Treasury and fire-extinguishers thrown from the roof of Millbank Tower. Thirty four students hospitalised and twelve police.    Protests, even peaceful ones,  are a kind of surrogate warfare  -  a physical show of strength on the streets, and that is why they are so powerful.   You can have any number of Facebook campaigns and twitter flash mobs, but they just don’t have the impact of actually getting out there and putting boots on the street.  

     Indeed, social media, far from replacing street protest, has become another tool for those engaged in it.  Twitter was used by the breakaway groups of students to wrong foot the police. Facebook has turned into an alternative media for many young people, who are more inclined to believe what they read there than what the see on the conventional media. Social media can also replace old-style political organisation.  But digitally or physically, mass protest involves a challenge to the state.  Direct action, even non-violent civil disobedience, is a threat to the public order, and the threat is generally met by a show of force.   Kettling is, after all, a form of summary punishment  where the police form a kind of impromptu prison to contain the demonstrators on the street for anything up to seven hours.  It’s an unpleasant experience, and intended to be.  The equivalent of being taken down to the nick and thrown in the cells for a few hours.  Not surprisingly, many are frightened off demonstrations altogether after being kettled.  But almost as many are radicalised on the spot, realising for the first time in their sheltered lives, the reality of the power.  

    But the question remains: were this year’s student demonstrations a flash in the pan or the start of a new cycle of popular protest?  Will we talk of the spirit of 2010?   Well, history isn’t written in advance , but my hunch is that this isn’t going to go away any time soon.  Len McLusky  the new militant leader of the Unite trades union has called for an “alliance of resistance”, to spending cuts uniting public sector workers and students.  And with inflation rocketing in the New Year - food prices are already rising at an annual rate of nearly 10% - and wages frozen, even many who initially supported government cuts will start to wonder why they,  and not the bankers,  are paying the price of the financial crisis. 

      There’s no sign, however. of any general strike.  Most people are still in work and clinging on to their homes thanks to zero interest rates.  Public sector unions have wisely been keeping their heads down aware that - as a relatively privileged group of workers who still have jobs, increments and pensions - they may find it hard to win much public support from private sector workers who are really feeling the pinch.    The big challenge for public sector unions in the New Year will be to demonstrate to the 70% of employees who don’t work for the state that they can still support those who do.

     But the students have given a lead - a very powerful one.  Apathy is passé. Commitment is back.  And now the fight against fees will move from Westminster, to Holyrood as students try to defend free higher education in Scotland. A generation is being radicalised, just as many of their parents were by les evenements in 1968,  when the Rolling Stones celebrated Street Fighting Man.