Those pesky students have been at it again! Stamping their feet and marching on the capital to complain about the piddly little increase in tuition fees. The figures suggested that there were around 50,000 people attending the demonstration, which probably means there were double that.
Some of it got out of hand. Some people resorted to violence and thuggery, intent on making the news for all the wrong reasons, smashing windows and dropping dangerous articles from the roof of the Millbank building.
It’s strange really because when all of this happens is France and violence erupts, people tend to empathise and congratulate the students for their passion and ardour. When it happens here it is condemned as petulant and unnecessary.
Personally, I wouldn’t advocate any form of violence. It frightens me, alarms me, however much I might empathise, however much I love people expressing their passion, even if it is isn’t a passion I share.
Watching the students marching through London though, did bring back a load of memories from a past world; a world that seems detached and distant for all its resonance.
I had the fortune and misfortune to attend university/polytechnic in the middle of the Thatcher Era which gave us plenty of fuel for frustration. Ma T would be delighted with the likes of Clegg and Cameron with this increase in the tuition fees.
As for us, we were marching against the end of the grant system. It seemed that a lack of grants would mean no students from deprived areas or working class families would attend higher education courses. It seemed that university was doomed to be the place for those who could afford it, further polarising an already unequal society.
But then, to some extent, hasn’t it always been the case, and won’t it always be the case?
I didn’t attend a university. I chose to attend a polytechnic in a large British city. It wasn’t a popular place. There wasn’t anything particular about this institution. It was basically a bog standard place that I chose because of its proximity to my home.
I can remember meeting people during the ubiquitous Fresher’s Week and being fascinated and a little shocked at how many of my fellow new-folk had attended either private or grammar schools. It was alarming, and as I progressed through the first few months of college and met new people, the number of people educated in a selective institution seemed to grow. If this was the ratio at a small, incidental polytechnic in the heart of England, what was it like at the Russell group universities? Full of toffs?
In the 1980s, the student marches were restricted. We were allowed to march through the main part of the capital but only on a Saturday. If we wanted to demonstrate in the middle of the week, we were diverted “Sarf of the river!”
One such demonstration led us from goodness knows where to goodness knows where else, via the Elephant and Castle and down Kennington Lane. We ended up walking through some tennis courts in the park opposite the Oval; hardly the most prolific place, and certainly not the background for a rally that one would have hoped for, like the big demonstrations that you saw culminating in a festival spirit in Trafalgar Square.
I remember another march where we were so incensed at something that we decided to have a mass sit-down demonstration in the middle of Piccadilly. For the love of reason, I cannot remember what that particular fight was about but I can remember being frightened and intimidated by the police who were trying to move us on, but equally scared of the adrenalin rush that clouded my perspective and thrust me into doing something that was against my instinct.
Mass hysteria is a dangerous thing.
But then masses of people coming together for a cause of such magnitude is empowering. It is spiritually uplifting, and to go along with the masses in such instances feels the right thing to do.
Sometimes, being a hopeless idealist is a lonely place to be. Sometimes, when you fundamentally believe in something, you cannot understand why others do not see your point of view. Incredulity creeps in. Rationality often dissipates.
So when you find yourself amongst like-minded folk who resolutely agree with your standpoint, there is an incredible sense of togetherness and love for your fellow human beings, and sometimes that can force you into doing things that you may not have considered doing.
My first anti-apartheid rally was the most memorable.
Mandela was obviously still in prison. The shops at the polytechnic were devoid of Rowntree products and Barclay’s Bank was well and truly boycotted for their trading links with South Africa.
Loads of free coaches were laid on by the university and polytechnic and we travelled en masse to London where we congregated in Hyde Park. It was a crisp Autumn Saturday and the wealth of passion overwhelmed me.
Here were people from all over the country, giving up their Christmas shopping days to stand up and be counted, declaring their voice in a world that didn’t seem able to listen.
Over 150,000 people were gathered, according to police figures. Streams of people wandered around in every direction. I wish to goodness I had some photographs from that time as a reminder of what collective passion looks like and feels like.
The march ended in Trafalgar Square where we listened to the great speakers of the time as they shouted their condemnation across to the closed windows of the South African Embassy where hundreds of police were standing guard.
Would we make a difference? Would anyone ever listen to the injustice, the disgrace, the appalling lack of liberty that we could not even begin to imagine?
I suppose, as I stood there in 1985, I wasn’t sure that we were going to make any difference at all. The Soweto Riots continued. Stephen Biko had been dead for nearly ten years and if anything, South African extremism had got worse since his murder. Mandela was still rotting away in prison for all we knew. Our government at the time resolutely refused to participate in any sort of boycotting. The situation seemed hopeless.
And yet, a mere four years and three months after that rally, Nelson Mandela was released from Robben Island along with his compatriots, declaring a new future for South Africa that we, as people taking to the streets in that cold November, could never have envisaged.
So will the students who demonstrated on Wednesday make a difference? Will the decisions on tuition fees be altered? Will the demography of our higher education institutions dramatically change as an outcome of this inflationary action?
Nobody knows the answer but to sit still and do nothing seems an inappropriate course of action.
Mass demonstration has a purpose. It has a very significant purpose of telling the world and indeed yourself that there are people who care, that altruism is not dead.
I’ve never been to South Africa. I have no personal links with the place but I felt an urgent need to have my say about the injustice that I could clearly see there.
I went through college with a grant, albeit a pittance of one. My demonstration against those cuts was not for me but those who were coming after me. Why should they be saddled with enormous debts when I had had the right to a free education, something that I still believe should be the human right for all? Learning opens doors, creates life and purpose. That should be available to every person should they decide that this is what they want. And more investment in real education so that children can make informed decisions and want to learn so that they can ultimately make those decisions is equally required as a matter of urgency.
But then it has always been so; always been urgent and we are still living in an age where the lack of quality education restricts and inequality prevails.
Perhaps I should have been more proactive this week and joined the students in their hour of need.
It would certainly have been and interesting sort of regression therapy as I tried to recapture the feelings and emotions that I know I felt in those long distant decades ago.
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