UK students clash with police/ Prince Charles' car attacked

[JackRiddler]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/201 ... rles/print

Royal car attack: Cameron calls for 'full force of law'

• Student leaders claim protesters suffered police brutality
• PM condemns 'mob' who attacked Charles and Camilla's car

James Meikle, Vikram Dodd and agencies
guardian.co.uk, Friday 10 December 2010 17.28 GMT
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Prince Charles and his wife, Camilla, react as the royal car is attacked by protesters in London. Photograph: Matt Dunham/AP


David Cameron today promised the full force of the law would be used on the "mob" who attacked a car carrying Prince Charles and his wife, Camilla, and smashed property in central London last night, while student leaders hit back, claiming protesters had suffered police brutality.

Mark Bergfeld, of the Education Activist Network, claimed demonstrators had suffered "horrendous" conditions as they were kettled for up to 10 hours and said the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall were just in "the wrong place at the wrong time".

"There was police brutality," he said. "I saw 14-year-olds carry out their friends with cracked heads and things like that.

"I saw that people were being kettled until 1am on Westminster bridge. They were held there without toilet facilities, without water or food for 10 hours. We don't live in that kind of regime."

Cameron and the Metropolitan police commissioner, Sir Paul Stephenson, said more than a small number of people were involved in violence during and after a Commons vote paving the way for a trebling of university tuition fees.

The prime minister admitted concerns over royal security must be addressed, but said the responsibility for violence lay with the protesters.

"We want to learn the lessons from that but, above all, we want to make sure that the people who behaved in these appalling ways feel the full force of the law of the land."


Attacks on the Treasury, supreme court and other buildings in central London left the Met facing questions about again losing control of the streets during a demonstration. It also faced questions about some officers being heavy handed, and the kettling of peaceful protesters. A total of 33 arrests were made.

A difficult 24 hours for the police continued this morning with the announcement of an Independent Police Complaints Commission investigation into the case of a 20-year-old student who was apparently struck by a truncheon and left unconscious with bleeding on the brain.

Alfie Meadows, a philosophy student at Middlesex University, has undergone a three-hour operation. His mother said he was hit by police as he tried to leave the area outside Westminster Abbey and lost consciousness on the way to hospital.

Susan Meadows, 55, an English literature lecturer at Roehampton University, said: "He was hit on the head by a police truncheon … he's got tubes coming out of him everywhere. He will be in hospital for quite a while, it was a very major thing."

Speaking outside No 10, Cameron condemned the "completely unacceptable" behaviour of protesters. "It is no good saying this was a very small minority. It was not. There were quite a number of people who clearly were there wanting to pursue violence and to destroy property.

"I know that the Metropolitan police commissioner is going to be working hard to report on this. I also know, quite rightly, he will look into the regrettable incident where the Prince of Wales and his wife were nearly attacked by this mob. We want to learn the lessons from that."

The attack on the royal car was not the fault of the police, he said. "This was the fault of people who tried to smash up that car."

His remarks came after Stephenson said that armed officers protecting the royal couple showed enormous restraint and condemned the "thugs" involved in violence.

The commissioner said the attack on the royal car was a "hugely shocking incident and there will be a full criminal investigation" but added that "short of locking everything down" police had to try to find a balance between allowing protest and stopping violence.

He praised his officers and the royal protection officers for their actions in coping with a "very unpredictable demonstration … and very difficult night" and said they showed enormous restraint in the most difficult of circumstances.

"The route was thoroughly recced in advance, including up to several minutes beforehand when the route was still clear.

"The unpredictability of thugs and how they moved about the capital meant the protection officers were placed in a very difficult position."

He said kettling and other police tactics did not contribute to the violence. "It is an excuse people are hiding behind … People need to be responsible for their own behaviour," he said, adding that a significant number of protesters had behaved reprehensibly.

He denied the police operation had been "undercooked" and said it had involved nearly 3,000 officers.

Dozens of protesters and a number of officers were injured. The mayor of London, Boris Johnson, blamed a "large number of agitators who were determined to cause the maximum possible trouble and provocation and they succeeded".

He said a balance had to be struck between allowing protest and proportionate policing, saying the country could have a "different system", using watercannon and harsher police tactics that would have left "more broken heads this morning".

Charles and Camilla's car was surrounded by a mob as it drove down Regent Street on the way to a Royal Variety performance, with protesters kicking at the doors and shattering a rear window.

The protesters had spilled into the West End after an initially peaceful demonstration outside parliament deteriorated and spread.

Witnesses described how about 400 to 500 protesters were on Regent Street when the royal car was attacked. Charles and Camilla were visibly shaken but unharmed after demonstrators set upon the vehicle with fists, boots and bottles, chanting "Off with their heads" and "Tory scum".

Video footage posted on YouTube suggested the rear window was lowered as protestors surrounded the car but it was unclear whether Camilla, Charles or the driver was responsible.

Media reports that Camilla was prodded in the chest by a stick could not be confirmed. Today Charles and Camilla praised the efforts of police. A Clarence House spokesman said they understood the difficulties the police faced and were grateful for the job they did in "very challenging circumstances".

In other developments today, Charlie Gilmour, son of Pink Floyd guitarist David, apologised for climbing the Cenotaph during the protests, saying he "would like to express his deepest apologies for the terrible insult to the thousands of people who died bravely for our country".

The National Union of Students distanced itself from at least part of its London membership, pointing out that London University's student union had organised the demonstration in Parliament Square while the NUS held a rally on Victoria Embankment. The NUS president, Aaron Porter, said violent action was deplorable but it would continue to organise peaceful protest.

Clare Solomon, president of London University's student union, called the NUS leadership a disgrace. "They should have backed this demonstration. They are clearly out of touch," she said.

The NUS had paid thousands of pounds for "a glow-stick vigil", attracting 200 people, she said, when her union had spent hundreds on a protest that involved 35,000.

Solomon said it was hypocritical for people in the Tory party and others who voted for the war in Iraq to say that "this is violence when people are breaking windows as opposed to killing people".

The police should also take some responsibility, she said. "They were the ones beating us up and putting us in hospital when we were attempting to peacefully protest."
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2010

[Elvis]

"Off with their heads!"

Ah, the good ol' days. But we're better than that now, right, chaps? Cheerio

[semper occultus]

Withdrawing investment in human (‘variable’) capital is hardly a brilliant strategy for growth. It harks back, once again, to the Thatcher years...

oh I think you’ll find it harks back to the Blair years aswell, large scale increases in student numbers motivated by the wish to massage the unemployment numbers & because the smirking war-criminal reckoned he could preen himself as being modern & progressive without a proportional increase in funding to go with those extra students was effectively a reduction in investment . Presumably they are actually trying to increase investment by charging the students - the argument is about splitting the bill

The poor sods who fell for it are right to be pissed off – you just end up with a situation where for the average mid-rank of students you need a “degree” to get into a job that in the past was available to A level entrants
If you miss out on those opportunities you’re suddenly “over-qualified” for whatever else is going – to get genuine grad jobs you need a fucking post-grad degree – its not just paper-money that’s getting screwed but educational paper aswell

The root cause of this is 2-fold :
(1) There aren’t enough jobs – politicians pretending that “investing” in getting an average degree in an average subject at an average institute of learning suddenly magics up some whizzy professional level career is a pathetic scummy lie & fraud upon young people

(2) We need to totally re-design the whole concept of higher / further education.

There’s no point complaining that 40-50% of the entire population of 18-21 yr olds can’t spend 3 yrs on a fully-expenses paid degree courses like they did in the 60’s & 70’s when it was …the top 20% or whatever – its ain’t going to happen – the model that applies to an elitist university-sector can’t apply to what is simply becoming a tertiary level of mass semi-compulsory education

& please forgive me but I can’t get too carried away by middle-class kids being dropped off by Mummy in the Volvo round the corner to go on their demo – with all the aging 60’s trendies in the educational establishment cheering them trying to re-live their youth. They’re being allowed to let off steam &, per the script, attract the opprobrium of the Sun / Mail when someone pisses against a war memorial .
The storming of the Bastille it ain’t
In fact its not even close to the 1968 uprisings or even the 84 miners strike & what did they achieve ?

[AhabsOtherLeg]

.
Thank God for Clare Solomon - apparently, she's the only human being who is still allowed on Newsnight.

Listen to the rest of them in this clip - former Deputy Commissioner of the Met Brian Paddick regretfully admits that water-cannons "take far too long to fill up, and far too short a time to discharge," then goes on to recommend a policy of pre-emptively arresting the demonstration leaders - which would obviously include Clare Solomon, who's sitting next to him.

Better yet, he wants mass arrests and identifications done of anyone who keeps their face covered after being told to uncover it by the police - must be forgetting that there will be a few familiar faces (of his colleagues) among them.

Then they've got an "expert in gang culture" sitting there for no reason at all. He seems to have stopped off at the pub on his way in.

The presenter is ... just terrible. BBC.



Anyway, thank God for Clare Solomon. Once again she doesn't apologise for the "violence" of the "riot" (a riot is a specific thing, and that wasn't a riot) or denounce those who took part in it, which must be difficult with the pressure being put on her to join the Grown-Ups Club.

This account of the later parts of the day, when the protestors were more dispersed and vulnerable to intimidation, is interesting in it's possible implications. It's from The Guardian:

11.34am: A reader who wishes only to be identified as Gary sends this disturbing account that he wrote after returning home from the protests last night:

Live blog: email

I just got home after attending the embers of the protest at the end of Victoria Street. While there I got chatting to a 17year-old girl. A while later a group of people who I believe to be neo-Nazis turned up and started causing trouble. They were trying to start on an old man of about 60. A policeman calmed him down. They then started picking on this girl. They all started to scream "Cunt!" at her and she called them this back. The group (about 12-15) walked up to her in a very menacing way. We backed off towards the police and then one of the group pushed the girl violently in the head, causing her to fall down on her back. I pulled her away to the police and asked for help. Two of them smirked at each other and one said: "You wanted free speech." They then continued to watch as the neo-Nazis caused trouble. This occurred at around 7pm. http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/blo ... rmath-live

Mmmm...

BTW, David Gilmour's son has apologised for swinging on the Cenotaph, and said he didn't know what it was. He is reading History at Cambridge, and until yesterday he didn't know what the Cenotaph was.

[MacCruiskeen]

Good points, gnosticheresy and semper occultus. I'll try to reply to them later. (BTW, I posted that extract from the interview with Osborne last thing at night, mainly as a reminder to myself to read it in full. And he too makes some very good points.)

Ahab, by asking me to watch Newsnight you are challenging me to be very, very brave. Right now I am not up to that challenge. Maybe later. Here, in return, from last month after the student invasion of Tory Party HQ (I think I posted this already) is Clare Solomon versus the obnoxious Aaron Porter and the unspeakable Jeremy Paxman.

The following article sums up my own feelings about the students' "violence" pretty much exactly:

On violence against the police - The Commune

http://libcom.org/library/violence-agai ... ce-commune

A participant in the 9 December demonstrations against education cuts and fees in Parliament Square writes on the use of political violence, and condemnation of it in the media.



The condemnations are as predictable as they are boring. The public-school educated Sun hacks, who write like some coked up parodies of proletarian semi-literacy, refer to “louts” and “hooligans”. The Daily Mail complains about someone urinating against Churchill’s statue, and the Telegraph is dismayed that Prince Charles and the Duchess of Cornwall were “attacked”. Probably by a “baying mob”. Meanwhile, someone in a moustache on The Guardian talks about how, no doubt, this will provide a “distraction” from the “real issues”, whose repetition ad nauseam presumably has some intrinsic value for the solemn liberal contingent.

I can’t even be bothered to look up the precise terms of the condemnation this time. It’s always the same. A dash of the royal family, veneration for some long dead racist, shakes of the head from the banal but well intentioned. Is anyone still listening? Haven’t we read all this before?

The NUS and UCU are of course, for “peaceful protest”. What is the effective record of “peaceful protest”? How does social change happen? Is it always peaceful? Are kettles acceptable, and is it reasonable to try and break them? Such questions are politely neither asked nor answered: that would be politics – we’re just about protecting our reputations. Thanks.

One of the oddest, least remarked upon, features of contemporary capitalism is the way it systematically enlists all its main functionaries in talking nonsense on a day to day basis. The police don’t really believe that the “kettle” is a necessary response to violence.

It seemed more to be motivated by traditional aims of kettling that are rarely stated: to demoralise protesters so much that they are dissuaded from taking part again, and to exhaust them physically so that they go home quietly (not that there was any need for the latter by this stage of the night). While queueing to leave Parliament Square, a woman next to me jokingly told a police officer that if they let us go, she would promise that this would be her last demonstration. The officer replied, “That’s the point.” [Guardian]

OK. Now we know that. They know that. We know they know we know that. But, of course, they can’t say it, officially, in public. That’s against the rules. It’s like the “have you ever taken any illegal drugs” question on a job application form. No one expects you to answer truthfully: it’s a test, the real content of which is: “are you a fucking idiot?” No? Well go right ahead them. As long as you can play the game, it’s all ok.

Another recent example: Wikileaks cables shows that the US finds the obsequious grovelling of Conservative politicians “humorous”. But of course, Atlanticist politicians on both sides leap to say how important “the special relationship” really is to America. Of course they do. It’s the same rules we learned at school: deny everything, keep looking straight ahead and there’s nothing anyone can do.

We all have our own stories from last night, no doubt. A girl had a clump of her hair pulled out. A 20 year old is in hospital, having had to have life-saving brain surgery, amongst 43 hospitalised protestors. I’m sure it says somewhere that “there will be an investigation”. (Tomlinson, cough, Menezes, cough, etc. cough.) “My 19-year-old sister was forced to the floor by police when caught in a crowd and when attempting to get up was punched in the face by a male officer. She is sporting a black eye this morning” says one. Another: “a guy running away from police along Whitehall getting being unable to run further because of a stray barrier. Before he could jump over, two police charged into him with their shields and repeatedly hit him with their shields, against the barrier.”

Fair-minded people are against “disproportionate”, “provocative”, or “brutal” policing; and presumably in favour of a polite push and shove. This is an appealing message (and it may make sense to accentuate it to the cameras), but is more or less a fiction. Of course, there are incidents here and there where we can say that particular police could have been less brutal. But if the direct action we defend has any content at all, it must mean we supported, and support, concrete attempts to stop the law being passed, up to, including, and beyond the invasion of parliament – and we are in support of people trying as hard as possible to do that. And it is a fiction that the police could have tolerated that, or that preventing it could ever have been done gently. If it could have been, we wouldn’t have really been trying. If the police hadn’t been at parliament square last night, and if they hadn’t been prepared to act brutally, parliament would have been stormed, and legislation to triple top-up fees and abolish EMA would not have been passed. The brutality of the police is not incidental to the nature of the state, it is essential to it.

So you have to pick: the state, and horse charges against children who object to having their pockets robbed; or against the state (which means: against capitalism, for social revolution); and against the police too; brutal or otherwise. Polite fudges are polite – but more or less part of the continuous stream of liquid nonsense which constitutes the news media.

Next time, we should bring masks to give out. Just like on the Gaza demos in 2009, too many young people are going to get arrested because their faces appear on police footage – and in the photographs of the numerous “independent” photojournalists who sell images to the right-wing press, many of whom should arguably be looked on as police evidence gatherers.

Someone has to say it: mass violence against the police is necessary as part of any social struggle. We wish it wasn’t but it is. The reason is simple: the police defend the state unconditionally, the state defends capital unconditionally, and capital attacks us without remorse – or even a second thought. Reasonable liberals yearn for a compromise: but the state isn’t listening. Neither should protestors.

When Charles and Camilla were ambushed, or a fence was thrown at police, or a crowd broke the thin blue line: those were good things, and we support the people doing it. They are by no means sufficient, nor are they particularly helpful as isolated acts. What is important is that they establish the movement on new terrain. They represent the conscious willingness to defy and confront state authority, and state power. And that is the beginning of everything hopeful.


Dec 11 2010 01:03

http://libcom.org/library/violence-agai ... ce-commune

[MacCruiskeen]

OK, Ahab, I watched that Newsnight clip and nonetheless managed to keep my dinner down. Yeah, good for Clare Solomon, but she is still too evasive and apologetic. I can't say make the point any better than the anonymous demonstrator who wrote the article above:

Fair-minded people are against “disproportionate”, “provocative”, or “brutal” policing; and presumably in favour of a polite push and shove. This is an appealing message (and it may make sense to accentuate it to the cameras), but is more or less a fiction. Of course, there are incidents here and there where we can say that particular police could have been less brutal. But if the direct action we defend has any content at all, it must mean we supported, and support, concrete attempts to stop the law being passed, up to, including, and beyond the invasion of parliament – and we are in support of people trying as hard as possible to do that. And it is a fiction that the police could have tolerated that, or that preventing it could ever have been done gently. If it could have been, we wouldn’t have really been trying. If the police hadn’t been at parliament square last night, and if they hadn’t been prepared to act brutally, parliament would have been stormed, and legislation to triple top-up fees and abolish EMA would not have been passed. The brutality of the police is not incidental to the nature of the state, it is essential to it.

[Stephen Morgan]

Future debt-slaves are using a metal barrier as a battering-ram to smash in a door to the Treasury building. Numerous windows broken.

I'm lovin' it!™

I'm just reading an old book, "A Short History of England"; am I right that one of the things that made England great was its universal education system?

What made Great Britain great was it's predominate naval might.

What once made it a relatively pleasant place to live was a healthy welfare state.

As Mac says, free education has only been a legal right for all since the Butler Education Act of '44.

It and other subsequent reforms meant a free school education for all - including even girls! - and the opportunity for anyone who passed the exams to attend university for no fee whatsoever and with a more-than-adequate grant to support them if their family wasn't rich. (I am not making this up.)

That sounds nice.

It was also one of the things that fueled the political, artistic and social revolution of the Sixties, and we can't be having that kind of thing again, can we? By god no, sir. I say No! Nowadays, machines are much cleverer, more efficient and above all more obedient than mere educated human beings. What Britain needs today is a small sub-elite of pusillanimous debt-enslaved technocrats

I've always thought Tony Benn abandoning technocracy was one of the great turnings.

& managers existing resentfullly alongside a mass of impoverished and ill-educated McJobbers. If you don't believe me, ask David Cameron.

As George Osborne says, anyone scared out of University by a bit of debt doesn't deserve to be their in the first place.

BTW, David Gilmour's son has apologised for swinging on the Cenotaph, and said he didn't know what it was. He is reading History at Cambridge, and until yesterday he didn't know what the Cenotaph was.

I wonder if he knows what A cenotaph is.

[MacCruiskeen]

As George Osborne says, anyone scared out of University by a bit of debt doesn't deserve to be their in the first place.

You are joking, I hope. If so: Ha ha, yes, that was a good' un.

[semper occultus]

it must mean we supported, and support, concrete attempts to stop the law being passed, up to, including, and beyond the invasion of parliament...

if the Govt. had got a thumping majority would that still be your position ?

good grief Mac....what sort of precedent does that set ?

do you seriously want to live in a political system where the most violent mob who can rule the street decide what laws are & are not passed ?

Just where exactly do you think student activists rank in that hierarchy ?

The golden age of University education was largely a result of all the rest that went on lower down - the 11 plus & grammer schools filtering the rejects & giving a leg-up to the best & brightest - I presume you aren't advocating we go back to that ?

[MacCruiskeen]

it must mean we supported, and support, concrete attempts to stop the law being passed, up to, including, and beyond the invasion of parliament...

if the Govt. had got a thumping majority would that still be your position ?

If that thumping majority resulted in the further immiseration & exploitation of a huge proportion of the populace, then yes.

good grief Mac....what sort of precedent does that set ?

It sets several precedents. It means, for example, that pre-election pledges about matters of very serious import can no longer be broken with impunity. It means that smug, complacent liars and thieves have had the fear of god put into them, at long last. It means that people will no longer passively tolerate the ongoing transfer of wealth and power (created by the demos, the people) into the hands of ever-fewer plutocrats and warmongers. It measn that even schoolchildren below the voting-age can now understand what their "democratically-elected" government is intent on doing to them, their lives and their futures, so crassly obvious has it become.

do you seriously want to live in a political system where the most violent mob who can rule the street decide what laws are & are not passed ?

No. I want to live in a political system where "violent" "mobs" [sic] are not the only remaining means of achieving something even remotely resembling democracy. What you call "violent "mobs" have been at least partly responsible for nearly all of the positive changes in Britain and elsewhere over the last, say, 200 years at least. And they have always been condemned in exactly the same terms by the same class of greedy and brutal hypocrites.

Just where exactly do you think student activists rank in that hierarchy ?

In what hierarchy? In the hierarchy of "violent mobs"? Pretty low, compared to (say) the police. But pretty high compared to, say, the greedy and brutal hypocrites of the so-called Conservative Party, who need the police to protect them.

Look up "structural violence", by the way. That's one "Seventies" term that badly needs reviving.

The golden age of University education was largely a result of all the rest that went on lower down - the 11 plus & grammer schools filtering the rejects & giving a leg-up to the best & brightest - I presume you aren't advocating we go back to that ?

"filtering the rejects"? "best"? < Is there nothing violent about this mode of speech? I'm afraid we don't speak the same language, semper.

[slimmouse]

Fighting the education cuts is of course vital, but the problem had already been created a long time ago. Its just a pity that enough people couldnt see all this coming when the banks were "bailed out", and the subsequent legislation allowing the bail out was put before parliament. The smashing up of such institutions would have been infinitely better IMHO.

Im sure, over their evening Brandy and cigars, these c*nts will be indignantly be tutting at all these "disgusting scenes". And of course, these people continue to benefit ;

BAILED-OUT IRISH BANKERS GET £34M BONUS

FURY was mounting last night as it emerged that Irish bankers will pocket multi-million pound bonuses after being bailed out by British taxpayers.

The Allied Irish Bank will hand out £34million in bonuses for its executives this month, despite being on the brink of another rescue package.




Read more: http://www.express.co.uk/posts/view/216 ... z17pKDsZrw

Note, as with virtually everything reported by the ignorant fucking mainstream hacks today, the spin is that it is the "British taxpayer" who is bailing out the Irish. What fucking planet are these morons on ?

[semper occultus]

What you call "violent "mobs" have been at least partly responsible for nearly all of the positive changes in Britain and elsewhere over the last, say, 200 years at least.

...like universal suffrage - which we've now got & which you seem to be thinking we should now be rowing away from.

...whats your issue with the word "violent" - you are indirectly advocating violence - I think you're opening a pandora's box...

my use of the term mob was to refer to what I think would very possibly follow on from that course of action - the students are ofcourse a relativley benign & harmless bunch - apart from some arsehole dropping a fire extinguisher into a crowd of people.

filtering the rejects & giving a leg-up to the best & brightest

I had silent quote marks around that - surely clear from the context ?

[AhabsOtherLeg]

Yeah, good for Clare Solomon, but she is still too evasive and apologetic. I can't say make the point any better than the anonymous demonstrator who wrote the article above.

Unfortunately, if she could make the points made in that article, as clearly and unapologetically as the anonymous protestor made them, she wouldn't be asked on Newsnight in the first place. I'm not trying to say she's the greatest possible leader of the ULU, or any other student union, but she is a lot better than I've come to expect nowadays, in the age of Aaron Porters and Ed Millibands.

In fact its not even close to the 1968 uprisings or even the 84 miners strike & what did they achieve ?

Less than the Poll Tax Riots of 1990, I suppose, which achieved a great deal, if only temporarily (Council Tax being Poll Tax by another name, more or less).

There’s no point complaining that 40-50% of the entire population of 18-21 yr olds can’t spend 3 yrs on a fully-expenses paid degree courses like they did in the 60’s & 70’s when it was …the top 20% or whatever – its ain’t going to happen – the model that applies to an elitist university-sector can’t apply to what is simply becoming a tertiary level of mass semi-compulsory education.

It wasn't just the 60's and 70's, though. It was the 80's, 90's (when the deficit was at it's highest) and 00's as well. In the Nineties, the same number of people went to University as now - were encouraged and expected to go, like you say, almost regardless of ability - and it was free, with no tuition fees, and with grants to support poorer students, to cover their costs of living, etc. No one talked about it being too expensive for the country back then, because it wasn't, and it isn't now. That's what people are protesting against - not just the fees themselves, but the lies we are being told in order to sell us on (unjustified) cuts right across the public sector.

To say that the drastic reduction in university funding, and then the subsequent, hasty raising of tuition fees as a desperate measure to fill that funding gap, has anything to do with increasing investment in Universities is simply false.

The funding has been reduced, drastically, for ideological reasons, and the increased fees will never make up the difference. The Universities will then begin to fail for lack of revenue - and they will then be pointed out by the privateers, either in this current government or in the next one, as yet another example of public institutions failing because they are public. Like they love to do with the NHS. This will soften people up to the idea of privatized education - since the state version will be so shitty by then - and, further down the line, a privatized health service. Michael Gove even linked the two in his 2003 article, which I posted on page 1 of the thread.

Those of us who are net contributors to the State, graduates or not, are getting a terrible deal for our money. We could guarantee far superior healthcare and schooling for our families if only the Government gave us back the money which it confiscates from us in taxes and then spends on the schools and hospitals which it runs so badly...

He's Minister for Education now, and here he is laying out the paradox of "fiscal conservatism" - they always want to pay for everything twice: once in taxes, then again in fees or costs or whatever to some private entity. That's their idea of a good deal - paying twice.

After all, despite their reduction of state funding to the Universities (and secondary schools, in a way, with the abolition of the Educational Maintenance Allowance), they won't be lowering taxes (in fact, they're being raised, through VAT), and 0% of the money we've already paid to fund the education of this generation will ever be returned to us. The fees are a way of making sure our children will pay again for what we've already bought and paid for through taxation.

I wish I could express what I mean a bit better. I hope the gist of what I'm getting at is clear.

[MacCruiskeen]

filtering the rejects & giving a leg-up to the best & brightest

I had silent quote marks around that - surely clear from the context ?

Sorry, semper, I completely misread you. Mea culpa. And there is a big debate to be had about the whole idea of higher education, who needs it, who wants it, who can benefit from it, etc. Also about the whole restructuring of tertiary education over the last 30 years, the misuse of the word "vocational", and the general re-tooling of "education" to serve only corporate or commercial interests. But I am really pushed for time right now, so I can't start or join that debate properly at the moment.

What you call "violent "mobs" have been at least partly responsible for nearly all of the positive changes in Britain and elsewhere over the last, say, 200 years at least.

...like universal suffrage - which we've now got & which you seem to be thinking we should now be rowing away from.

The achievement of universal suffrage was progress in the right direction, i.e. towards democracy. It certainly wasn't democracy in and of itself, nor is it an end-point. (Just for instance: suffrage is by no means universal. And that's just for a start.) Nick Clegg promising one thing and then deciding the opposite once he'd secured the votes is not progress in the right direction, i.e. towards democracy. It is a joke, and not a funny one. It makes a mockery of universal suffrage, especially when those who will suffer most from it don't even yet have a vote.

...whats your issue with the word "violent" - you are indirectly advocating violence - I think you're opening a pandora's box...

Though the Beeb would have us believe otherwise, there is nothing violent per se about breaking an inanimate window or daubing a lifeless wall. There is, by contrast, something deeply violent about condemning an entire generation of voteless children to either penury or ignorance or both. (Structural violence against human beings.) There is also something deeply violent about lying your way into power and then using a gigantic team of heavily-armed & armoured thugs to prevent the people on whom you're inflicting that extreme structural violence from resisting it in the only way left open to them, i.e. through direct united action in self-defence (which includes the defence of their kid brothers and sisters, nephews, nieces, etc.)

[AhabsOtherLeg]

As George Osborne says, anyone scared out of University by a bit of debt doesn't deserve to be their in the first place.

You are joking, I hope.

I hope so too, 'cos it was Michael Gove that said it. Osborne's probably said it too, though.

Or Gideon Kray, as he should henceforth be known.


Ronnie Kray