Some thoughts on the student protests

A few mildly unconnected thoughts I've had lately on Wednesday's anti-fees rally, or more accurately on the way it's been reported and discussed:

1) It's annoying that people keep on implying that this is a self-interested protest. Yes, of course it reflects an entirely human preoccupation with your own situation and with people like you who will face that situation, rather than with the state of the world in general. But most of the students protesting will categorically not be affected by these reforms. That's not why they're on the streets. They're there on behalf of the thousands of people who will be affected, and who they know will find it harder to get a degree than they have. This seems blindingly obvious to me, but apparently not to Every Pundit Ever. Besides, as Mark has pointed out: they may not be organising protests against the cuts as a whole, but then neither is Polly Toynbee. Like her, I'm sure a lot of them would turn out for those protests as well. But it's unfair to criticise the National Union of Students for failing to organise them - the clue's sort of in the name...

2) Yes, I have noticed that a couple of days after I whinged at anti-fees campaigners for letting the Tories off the hook, anti-fees campaigners stormed Tory HQ. Ahem. Don't I look silly. Except that again, some pundits appear to have internalised the anti-Lib-Dem focus, citing the target of the invasion as an indication of random destructiveness: I swear one actually said, 'Their whole campaign has been aimed at the Lib Dems, and then they go and invade Tory HQ!' Yeah, what on earth have the Tories got to do with any of this? It's not like Cameron is Prime Minister or anything. Crazy students.

3) Left this till last, but really my deepest unease about this whole thing. Admittedly, this may just be the Evening Standard, as I haven't had a chance to read the other papers yet - but if their coverage is anything to go by, all that was achieved after the G20 protests seems to be crumbling before our eyes. The number of police injured in the 'riots' seems to have magically multipled from 7 to 40 some time between Thursday's paper and Friday's. Phrases like 'eruption of violence' are being bandied around left right and centre (often to imply that people or organisations are condoning violence when in fact they have endorsed non-violent direct action - again, the clue's in the name...) And most worryingly, the finger is directly being pointed at the namby-pamby liberal intelligentsia who 'tied the police's hands' after G20, preventing them from responding effectively to events.

Now, to be clear - I wasn't there on Wednesday, so I don't know what happened or how violent it was. But the way it's been reported is something I've seen many times before to describe protests with no violent intent, where the only injuries caused were a result of scuffles caused by over-zealous policing. To reiterate, I don't know if that's the case this time - but I'm certainly taking the press reports with a generous pinch of salt.

Anyway, regardless of the truth of the reports, I'd still be concerned if this risked undoing the limited progress that was made after last year's G20 protests. The way peaceful protests are policed in this country is utterly unacceptable. I have seen peaceful protesters intimidated, traumatised, attacked without provocation and arrested without due cause. This is not the action of a few bad apples, it's completely endemic. For Christ's sake, have we forgotten that a man died not so long ago? But it seems like at least some people are in danger of forgetting it, and going back to giving the police carte blanche to beat up hippies, all because of a few smashed windows and an idiot with a fire extinguisher. And that really scares me.

What's that? you're angry about housing benefit? I'll just transfer you to my colleague Steve...

Just a quick observation as I'm rather tired, but... I noticed with some surprise the other day that Steve Webb, the Minister for Pensions, seems to have been allocated the unenviable responsibility of putting his name to parliamentary answers on housing benefit. What, I ask myself, does housing benefit have to do with pensions? It certainly doesn't feature in his list of ministerial responsibilities, unless you class it under 'pensions and related benefits', which seems like a bit of a stretch. Given the government's rhetoric pitting housing benefit claimants against 'average working families', you'd think it might fit better under 'employment and related benefits', which is Chris Grayling's area.

However, Steve Webb does have one distinguishing feature that Chris Grayling lacks: he's a Lib Dem. Perhaps I'm just being overly cynical, but I can't help wondering if it is quite deliberate that one of the government's most widely-criticised attacks on the welfare state is being fronted by the DWP's only Lib Dem minister. Steve Webb was the party's work and pensions spokesperson before the election, and I'm fairly confident he would have been speaking out against the current changes as strongly as anyone had he still been in opposition. Instead, he's forced to defend them. It does make me wonder whether the widely-noted tactic of pushing Danny Alexander in front of the cameras to announce unpopular things whilst hiding George Osborne in a box extends to other departments as well. I can well imagine the existence of a concerted Tory strategy to make Lib Dems the fall guys as far as possible - with Lib Dem ministers happy to take nominal responsibility for controversial areas in the heady anticipation of having influence.

I can equally well imagine that I'm barking up completely the wrong tree here. But either way, I can't help feeling that the Tories are playing a far cleverer game than the Lib Dems in terms of coalition politics.

UPDATE: Ironic that the day after I wrote this, Nick Clegg is left carrying the can at PMQs on the day of the student fees march, resulting in a predictable 30-minute mauling. Obviously, Cameron has a pretty good alibi, being in China and all. But I can't imagine the Tories being too upset about this. Tuition fees is another area where campaigners and the media seem to have done the Tories' job for them by aiming their fire so exclusively at the Lib Dems. I know it's easy and it's rational, because of the narrative of betrayal, but it's unfortunate that it's led to those who are actually the leading party of government - who never opposed raising fees in the first place and would clearly have done this anyway with or without the Lib Dems - getting off scot free.