Rebel, Rebel...

Finally we are protesting against the government's plan to raise tuition fees! After seeing and reading about the thousands of French students that demonstrated up and down France in protest of the current proposal to raise the pension age (among other austerity measures in France), I was wondering when action was going to be taken here against the government's harsh proposals to cut, cut, cut! 


I was proud to see my fellow students take to the streets of London peacefully but then it turned into a riot as a few activists began to shatter the windows of the home to the Tory headquarters and others entered reaching the roof top throwing missiles and in one case a fire extinguisher. The violent actions of a small minority has completely undermined the message everyone was trying to get across. Now the focus will not be on the amount of people that came out against the rise in tuition fees, it will be on the damage caused, the people hurt (in particular police officers) and the violence that took place. Young people get enough negative coverage from the media as it is; at the start of today we could have been seen to have a political conscience but now as the newspaper with the highest readership, The Sun puts it, we're "yobs." The public are just going to feel sorry for those that were evacuated from their workplace and the police officers that were left injured.


As much as I'm opposed to the Conservative proposals and as a party in general, storming their HQ and throwing fire extinguishers is not the way to go about preventing the rise in tuition fees. Violence may bring about change in some cases or at least history suggests it does, it's not going to stop this coalition government at least I don't think the majority will change their position on this. Hopefully some Lib Dem MPs will still want to speak up for students but what politician is really going to want to be affiliated with people that create this sort of violence? No-one wants to send out the message "creating violence brings about change." If the proposals had any chance of being prevented then this protest needed to get public opinion on the side of the protesters and their cause, now I'm not sure there's a chance of that happening.


I always used to think a bit of anarchy never did any harm, I was all for it but really its only harm is to the cause itself...or at least I think that at the moment, my opinions seem to be rather fluid at the moment hence the bewildered title. I wish I could have been at the demonstration alongside my fellow students today but unfortunately and ironically I did not have enough money to get myself to London town! Hopefully next time...