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.