Down at Thirty Millbank beside the grey and misty Thames, they’re still cleaning up the glass and metal, sprayed all around by last week’s demonstration against tuition fees. The protest drew about fifty thousand to Conservative Party HQ, most of whom were peaceful or piss weak, depending on your politics. There were about a dozen hardcore anarchists, and another forty or so who came along for the ride — through the front doors and up the stairs to the roof, indeed.
There they cheered and taunted the police from above — and filmed each other on cameras and phones, which were then confiscated as they came down stairs, making it easier for the police to pin charges that would stick. That they may not have been the straight-A types was further confirmed by the fact that Thirty Millbank isn’t Tory party HQ at all. It’s the near-vacated Conservative Campaign HQ from the election. The advance guard had apparently been steered away from the actual HQ by the genius ruse of someone saying “no, it’s uh down the road.”
Despite the black-bloc argy-bargy, the students gained a great deal more sympathy from the general public, as it always does where middle-class welfare is concerned — in this case, the proposed escalation of tuition fees, from their current level of around £3,000 a year maximum, to up to around £9,000, with universities having a greater flexibility to set their own rates.
The police meanwhile got no respect at all, principally because they had under policed the demonstration so egregiously, with the blue line so thin that the marauding students had no more than half a dozen officers to break through to get into the building. Police shook their heads and said there were lessons to be learned — the chief one being that you shouldn’t talk about across-the-board cuts and fail to exempt police services, weeks before a season of demonstrations kicks off.
Two years ago, the police had effortlessly ‘kettled’ — ie. constrained in small groups — the G20 demonstration in the centre of London (causing the death of one bypasser), and there is no question that they would have been able to police this one properly — not least because half the attendees were signed up via social network sites. No, they undoubtedly let this one through to the keeper.
The student demo has been seen as the kick-off to a concerted season of protests, as the Lib-Con alliance start to roll out the specific cuts they have been talking about for months — although how aggressive these will be is yet to be seen. A key part of this will be the forthcoming election for the head of UNITE, the UK’s largest super-union, covering a vast range of service, transport and process work — which is being run-off between moderate Len Bayliss, and his rival ‘Red’ Len McCluskey, a former footsoldier with the ‘Militant’ faction of Labour. McCluskey favours a campaign of rolling strikes; Bayliss favours nothing much at all.
The people at the centre of the gunsights are not the Tories, but the Lib-Dems who campaigned heavily on holding down tuition fees, and even signed a pre-election pledge to that effect. Lib-Dem Simon Hughes, asked whether he would vote to put the fee increases through, on a news broadcast, said he was keeping an open mind — a position undercut by a placard behind him showing his signed copy of the ‘no-fees’ pledge.
Students are now targeting key Lib-Dem seats, such as leader Nick Clegg’s student-heavy Sheffield Hallam constituency, in a ‘decapitation’ strategy, aimed at punishing the leadership for their betrayal — which betrayal, it has subsequently been revealed, was something they had planned to do since before the election. Should that fail to work, they’ll probably return to the fire extinguisher strategy.
The reality of the situation is that the community has been living beyond its means and the UK for some time and piss weak governments of the Labour persuasion have allowed this rot to continue to the point where the British economy is in tatters. Responsible public finance requires a long-term balance between government expenditure and taxation, and excessive government spending without the appropriate taxation levels eventually leads to a breakdown when the capacity to borrow is affected by the community’s unwillingness to pay the interest costs.
Governments in the UK, United States and the PIGS have all been doing it, and the day of reckoning has now arrived with the GFC providing a trigger for the necessary correction.
And the reason we are not currentlyfacing a similar problem is the mining boom which is allowing Australians to live beyond their customary means by selling massive quantities of coal, gas and iron ore to overseas buyers.
Labour’s giant spending spree on uneconomic social infrastructuresuch as school buildings and home insulation is likely to drag us further down the path of ruin and if we don’t increase taxes or reduce government outlays to repay the accumulated debt used to finance this porkbarrelling exercise we may be facing similar protests in the not too distant future.
The reason politicians get away with these processes for so long is the abysmal ignorance of the community at large in relation to public finance. Politicians are very good at selling the benefits but not the cost of their programs, and the proposed expenditure of $43 billion on the NBN is a classic example of what happens when politicians get to play with expenditure decisions without commensurate accountability.
I would have more respect the anarchists if they had unacceptable strategy for correcting the structural deficits are concerned, other than robbing those who have managed to accumulate some wealth by deferring consumption expenditure.
I think it is important to distinguish between a country’s economy and its government’s finances.
The poor state of the UK’s economy surely originated with the US sub prime mortgage scam which spread to the UK because of its lax regulation of banks, not because of the government’s spending on social infrastructure.
However, since the UK government’s budget is in serious deficit something must be done. But the UK Conservatives and Liberal coalition has sought to bring the government’s budget into balance only by cutting expenditure. The coalition government should raise and extend taxes.
I agree with Rundle that increasing university tuition fees is reducing middle class welfare and is therefore good policy. However, the Government is simply crass in cutting its support of teaching in the humanities to nothing while maintaining at current levels its support for teaching and research in the sciences.