Yesterday’s student protests were painted as mindless, thuggish behaviour that should be condemned by any sensible Democrat. Only too happy were the Baby-Boom pundits to twist the knife into an already painful wound that is the raising of tuition fees to a smooth £40,000 worth of graduate debt. Quick were yesterday’s beneficiaries of free higher education to condemn, in person and in print, the actions of a “thuggish majority” who clearly should have sat down, shut up, lit a few candles and swallowed the economic medicine.

And so the headlines rolled in. “Protesting students vandalise Nelson’s Column,” “David Cameron condemns violent fee protests in London,” “Police hunt fees demo ‘criminals‘.”

Little mention was made of the more than 40 people who were hospitalised at the hands of police during the demonstrations. But in true British spirit, the papers were awash with police injury figures (injury, not hospitalisation – the distinction should be made) and gleefully intoxicating themselves with photographs of Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall being “hit with a stick through car window.”

The bewildering scenario that was Prince Charles and Camilla heading back for a champers after going to see NDubz at the theatre, taking a detour in their Rolls Royce through a highly anticipated crowd of thousands of student fee demonstrations must have seemed like something of a scene from The Pink Panther.


Can you actually picture the scene? “Oh my Camilla! Look at all these beastly, young ruffians! By gum they’ve cracked a window!” What was the driver thinking? Why weren’t the police aware of the royal route? Why, if indeed they had been aware, did the police ‘kettle‘ protesters within the area if they had been expecting a motorcade?

And to that kettling business! If police force a huge amount of people into a tight area, with no amenities, food, water, or basic toiletry facilities, things are inevitably going to get heated. Added to this, if those you are intent on keeping cooked up are to be held confined by force of truncheon, I think those protesters have a valid argument for self-defence. You only need to watch the footage below to see how slap happy a copper can be under pressure.

This is not to say that I advocate the appalling practice of hurling parts of breeze blocks at policemen and women, as was the case in a small minority. But the fact that I have to verbally disassociate myself with this kind of behaviour (as the President of the NUS did on a BBC News interview yesterday, when he was asked, was he “proud of all the violence today?“) It’s a telling end in itself.

This indiscriminate tarring of young people as thugs is nothing new. Our generation has been a microcosmic guinea pig for all sorts of behavioural control, as anyone who remembers the ‘mosquito‘ will know. But the worst of it is that our anger and discontent is entirely justified, and not by any means a typical spike in a long line of generational rebellions.

The Baby Boomers had the Welfare State, cheap mortgages, were the first to access easy credit, received free education, benefited from the Thatcherite sell-for-all of social housing and sat in an age of economic prosperity unknown at any other time in British history since the Industrial Revolution.

What does our generation have to show for this increase in living standards?

We have the world’s largest recession. A recession of entirely preventable means, which was caused by the insatiable greed of the Baby Boom generation, and the lack of regulation of business and banks owned by their Baby Boom peers. This means we will be paying a government deficit (a tab left by gen BB in my view) for the rest of our lives.

We have some of the most expensive housing in a developed nation, and hardly any of it at that. The Baby Boomers cashed in their low-cost mortgages, failed to replace the social housing they dropped like a hot-pocket, and hiked up all the rents and house prices to fill the gap (ten guesses who benefits from that.) Indeed, a shit lot of good it has done for us. Our options, in stark contrast to getting on the property ladder in our early twenties, is high-cost rent at a divided bedsit.

We now have one of the world’s most expensive education systems. A system that our parents and politicians benefited from at a time when it was available for free. And what do we get for our money? Over-subscribed courses, a vastly unfair tier system that lets thousands of paying students down, and a job market that has no jobs. Oh, and yes. That was them too.

We are the untrustables. We are the irresponsibles. We are the anti-socials. We can’t be trusted to drive a car without paying seven times it’s worth in insurance. We can’t be trusted to wear a hood in public without getting shifty looks of suspicion when we walk past an old woman carrying a handbag. We can’t get an ounce of credit, a tutorial free from debt, a house we don’t have to share, a foot in the property ladder, and now it appears, a single voice within one of the biggest debates of our time.

Today The Times ran with an article on the front page asking for it’s readers (sorry, subscribers, no free lunch here kiddies) to identify ‘rouges’ at the protest by observing a pre-organised picture gallery and emailing the publication with details of any people recognised. Needless to say The Times didn’t compile a ‘police brutality gallery,’ or an ensemble of the various Lib Dems who broke their pledge to vote against a rise in tuition fees. But unsurprisingly, the response was populist, calling for the “full force of the law.”

The narrative is clear. We should put up and shut up. David Cameron said we are all in this together. But it seems some of us are more in this than others. Our parents would do well to remember the privileges afforded to them that we must now pay for, and remember as well that just as we are burdened with the debt of their mistakes, so too do they expect our generation to bear the burden of their ever waning pension deficit.

Our generation should not take this lying down. We should not be hoodwinked into paying the tab twice; three times over, and we should not repeat the same mistakes when it comes to the generation we will raise in our place.

We are the creators. We are the innovators. The future prosperity of society is in our hands, and we have a chance to shape a world where it is not business as usual, but where radical ideas can flourish for the good of everyone, not just those with the ability to pay.

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