Michael Chessum: Student Protests: Today is Our 1968 Moment
[Michael Chessum is education and campaigns officer at UCL Union and an organiser for the national campaign against fees and cuts.]
Less than a month after the first national student demonstration, the coalition has given up on real argument. The line now being pushed by Nick Clegg and David Cameron is that students – the full-time readers, the doctoral researchers – simply haven't read the government's proposals, or don't understand them....
The student movement is no longer picking at the seams of a rise in fees; as in France in May 1968, the injustice of the vote may awaken a broader crisis. But while in 1968 protesters fought for a new society and a new history, today we contest the supposed end of history – the idea that human progress is now and for ever linked to free markets and corporate interests. It is a paradigm that continues to form the backbone of mainstream political discourse.
The government at the heart of this crisis has nothing to offer us but palliatives: meagre electoral reform, the odd quid for bursaries, the hollow slogans of the "big society". The popular unrest over education reforms is threatening to bypass the rhetoric, and to spread to millions of ordinary working people after Christmas. Lib Dem MPs must now stick to their pledge. If they don't, and the vote passes, they will regret it.
Read entire article at Guardian (UK)
Less than a month after the first national student demonstration, the coalition has given up on real argument. The line now being pushed by Nick Clegg and David Cameron is that students – the full-time readers, the doctoral researchers – simply haven't read the government's proposals, or don't understand them....
The student movement is no longer picking at the seams of a rise in fees; as in France in May 1968, the injustice of the vote may awaken a broader crisis. But while in 1968 protesters fought for a new society and a new history, today we contest the supposed end of history – the idea that human progress is now and for ever linked to free markets and corporate interests. It is a paradigm that continues to form the backbone of mainstream political discourse.
The government at the heart of this crisis has nothing to offer us but palliatives: meagre electoral reform, the odd quid for bursaries, the hollow slogans of the "big society". The popular unrest over education reforms is threatening to bypass the rhetoric, and to spread to millions of ordinary working people after Christmas. Lib Dem MPs must now stick to their pledge. If they don't, and the vote passes, they will regret it.