Category Archives: Political

Writing about politics and current affairs.

David Laws and benefit fraud

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A little over two years ago, Treasury Minister David Laws was discovered to have claimed more than £40,000 in parliamentary expenses and paid it to his long-term partner, against parliamentary rules. He resigned and was later ruled to be guilty of breaking six rules. Today he became a junior minister in the Department for Education.

In 2010, a man from Coventry was given six months in prison after being convicted of a £41,000 benefit fraud. A couple of months earlier, a woman in Stoke-on-Trent was jailed for 16 weeks for a similar offence, after she failed to disclose she was living with her partner. Another woman was spared jail but received a suspended sentence of 18 weeks for failing to disclose she was living with her partner “as man and wife”. A pensioner with learning difficulties was given a seven month suspended sentence and 100 hours unpaid work for claiming £40,000 in benefits while he had £90,000 in savings, much of it in cash.

Last month, a man who fraudulently claimed £40,000 in benefits to fund his mortgage was given a month to repay the money or face jail. The month before, a woman who claimed more than £40,000 in council tax and housing benefits over 14 years was given a six month suspended sentence and electronically tagged to enforce a curfew. The same month, a freelance TV presenter who helped to unmask unscrupulous businesses was jailed for 12 weeks for fraudulent benefits claims totalling £24,000.

Britain: this is for everyone

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Last night’s Olympic opening ceremony was stunning. A glorious jumble of references and spectacles, mixing globally-popular elements with winking in-jokes for the British viewers. It spoke in enormous mile-high symbols of our history and life – not just in the bombast and belligerence of Bond and the Queen arriving by parachute, but also in the careful choice of the Brookside lesbian kiss and the Tardis noise materialising during Bohemian Rhapsody. These are huge chunks of culture, full of their own meaning and carrying their own symbolism; forging them into an event that had its own identity and was not overwhelmed by its parts is an incredible achievement. Danny Boyle should be proud.

Some critics have complained that last night’s ceremony was too political, too much like propaganda – missing the fact that by its nature every Olympic opening ceremony is political, is propaganda. The real complaint is that it was not propaganda they agreed with – and that is fine. An event as enormous as this, as powerfully charged with anticipation and with significance, couldn’t ever hope to please everyone.

But the symbols chosen for celebration were for everyone. The NHS is for everyone. The Queen, James Bond, Mr Bean, the internet, technology, suffrage, kissing, Mary Poppins, Kes, Dizzee Rascal. The opening, pastoral and construction scenes showed clear class delineations; the joyous riot of music and popular culture that grew from it showed disparate, distinct but equal individuals. There’s a vision of utopia there, and it is neither homogenous nor segregated.

It’s easy to throw around words like “vibrant” and “young” and waffle about the British sense of humour and post-Empire faded greatness. That doesn’t come close to the heart of what happened last night. It ought to be impossible to articulate a national identity so full of contradictions. But in four words, there’s a valiant attempt: this is for everyone. Inclusive, open, supportive but not prescriptive, with humility and quiet confidence, and without the belief that everyone’s necessarily going to want it. Everyone gets a turn. Oh, and with permission to be as eccentric, cynical and sarcastic as you like so long as you’re not being mean.

In the end, Danny Boyle’s opening ceremony did what politicians and sponsors couldn’t do (not even with Mitt Romney’s help). It united much of the country, even those bits of it that couldn’t care less about the sport and remain deeply cynical about the money, the sponsorship and the eventual outcome. It made people proud. It gave the Olympics a different meaning. This is why culture matters, and why storytelling is important: it makes meaning. Without it, we’re just a collection of people. With it, we get to be British.

The Hitman: Absolution trailer is a symptom of a huge problem with games

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Late, but I wanted to get a couple of thoughts out on the Hitman trailer. A whole host of articulate people have already tackled it – Keza MacDonald, Helen Lewis, Sarah Ditum, Brendan Keogh and Grant Howitt being my picks for good reads on the topic. I don’t want to go over old ground, but I do have a couple of things to add.

Firstly: these are not “powerful women”, whatever IO says. These are women whose sole purpose for existing is to be titillating for the viewer, and then to be destroyed. If being entirely defined by your utility to men is how these people think female power works, then they are wrong and even dafter than I’d previously given them credit for.

Second, a lot of the problem here is ubiquity. If the trailer existed in isolation – if it was one egregious thing in a world where most things weren’t egregious – it would probably stand out more but it’d also be a less problematic incident. Stuff like this is not just normal – it’s actually hard to think of one game franchise that includes women that doesn’t pull sexist shit some of the time. Wouldn’t it be awesome to tell stories about strong female characters that didn’t assume a viewer wanted wank fodder? Why does almost every woman in mainstream games have to deal with sexualised violence? The Hitman trailer exists in a cultural context where – within the mainstream at least – the narratives are extremely limited. The writing is almost universally bad and almost universally discriminatory. If women are in a game, we’re on show, or we’re weak and pathetic and need rescuing. (The treatment of non-white people, disabled people, same-sex relationships and disability is a whole different rant, but has the same basic features.) The male gaze is ubiquitous in mainstream games. This is just the latest stupid example. A lot of people (myself included) aren’t just pissed off at IO, we’re pissed off at the routine disregard and objectification in games and games marketing.

Finally – look, gaming while feminist is basically an exercise in ignoring infuriating things all the time. In extremis – say while playing Heavy Rain, Arkham City, Bayonetta, DOA, and so on – it’s like trying to read while someone’s shouting SEX BOOBS LADYBITS SEXY SEXY BUM in your ear. You can SEX read the sentences GIRLS if you BOOBS try CROTCH SHOT but it’s much ASS harder than it SEXY should be. Most of the time the sex is completely irrelevant to the game. For the love of god, game designers and marketers, please just stop.

Pasties, horses and duck houses: the power of symbolic objects

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The world famous GreggsWhen is a pasty not just a pasty? When it’s a metaphor for class divide, of course.

In literature, symbolic objects transcend their physical limits to embody themes or carry metaphors. Pandora’s Box, to take a very obvious one, is not only a functional, fundamental element of the story but also a powerful metaphor for the confusion and chaos released by curiosity. It’s an integral element of the myth but it also carries meaning beyond its origin story.

As news stories run and run, twisting and turning often in far more fanciful ways than any fiction, sometimes these sorts of symbolic objects turn up. My favourite for a long time now has been the duck house, made famous during the MPs’ expenses scandal. More so than any of the other ludicrous things paid for by MPS out of their expenses, the duck house came to symbolise the lavishness, the detachment from reality and the sheer unadulterated silliness of the whole affair. It’s hard to sum up all of that with a news story, or even with a pithy quote, but a symbolic object can do the heavy lifting that no amount of text can quite manage. The duck house even manages to subtly imply a bunch of waddling, quacking MPs into the bargain. It’s a gift that keeps on giving.

Then a couple of weeks ago we had the horse. Phone hacking as a news story has gotten so convoluted and complex that it’s impossible for anyone but the most dedicated news junkie to follow in full. There’s a (necessarily) slow-moving inquiry that hasn’t yet brought politicians into the picture, and there’s an ongoing feeling that the cosy relationships between principle actors in the drama are not going to be publicly revealed.

Hence, the horse: a wonderful symbolic proxy for power, passed back and forth between the police, the Brooks family and Cameron himself. Horsegate played out in microcosm the larger drama, with denials, memory lapses and an eventual, half-hearted confession after which precisely nothing changed. It was a gift for cartoonists, too, especially in its connotations of servility – and a physical reminder of the closeness of Cameron in class and in pastimes to the Chipping Norton set, and the vast chasm between that and most of the rest of the country.

So today, to the pasty. It’s not a sausage roll tax or a hot food tax; it’s a pasty tax. A regional delicacy beloved of workers and students, both of whom have been walloped pretty hard since the coalition came to power. It’s a working lunch, a travelling lunch, a cheap, hot lunch eaten on the go by busy, normal people. It’s sustenance for hard days. In its Cornish origins it has subtle echoes of resistance, of regional pride; it’s determinedly non-London, as is Greggs, which has its origins in Newcastle. Greggs is on every high street; it’s well loved for what it does; and it’s almost impossible to imagine Cameron or Osborne there.

It is no coincidence that these symbolic objects are all about class. British national discourse is fairly bad at talking about class, thinking about class, examining unspoken opinions or getting a good sense of the realities of social stratification. The definition of “middle” class has vastly expanded and encompasses everyone not wearing a tiara or a hoody. But the duck house is so far out of everyday experience that it can’t be packaged as anything other than a symbol of wealth. Horse riding is a pricy pastime that carries Victorian, upper-class connotations. And the humble pasty is something an awful lot of people have eaten in the last few years – the sort of people who’ve been hit badly by the economics of austerity. The sort of people who aren’t Cameron.

These things surface an undercurrent, a class divide that doesn’t often get publicly debated outside of riots-based moralising. That we latch onto these symbols shows how hard it is to talk about class, equality and social mobility in the UK without resorting to stereotype or self-delusion, especially at present, when the optimistic view is that we are all headed for difficulty. Almost everyone is braced for the worst, counting pennies, fearing redundancy or more price rises. We are all so terribly nervous about what happens next. We have to have a pasty to focus on instead.

On silence

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This week, Helen Lewis-Hasteley posted at the New Statesman the words of seven women speaking about the abuse they’ve received online. That’s spawned a huge conversation, a #feministwishlist hashtag and a lot of other posts, much of which Helen’s rounded up here.

I think I was 12 years old the first time someone on IRC told me explicitly what they’d like to do to me, sexually, then swore at me when I told them I wasn’t interested. I learned, fast, that if I wanted to be taken seriously or heard at all – if I wanted to ensure that random, entirely unsolicited, often threatening sexual advances wouldn’t happen – I’d best pick a male name, online. Or at least be gender neutral. Being female meant I was fair game. It sometimes seems that in 15 years not all that much has changed.

I have maybe half a dozen online pseudonyms I’ve used at various times. There’s one in particular I’ve been writing, commenting, talking under since I was 12. Nowadays I don’t use it much, now I speak under my own name here and on Twitter, but when I’m not pseudonymous I speak about different things. I’m mindful of what I’m saying, not just for what it is but also for the reaction it might provoke. If someone wanted to track me down, it would no longer be particularly hard, with this open identity.

I am lucky, and often thankful, that the pseudonyms I use have never – as far as I know – been linked to me. I won’t repeat the abuse I’ve gotten under those other names, because I barely had the spoons to deal with it the first time round and I’m damned if it matters what the exact words were, anyway, and because it could open floodgates or let people link those identities to this one.

And in deciding that, I know in my bones that I’m setting myself up to be dismissed, to have my experiences belittled because I choose not to share them explicitly, to be called a liar or worse; that’s the kicker, you see, that eventually you know in your bones what could be coming, so you self-censor.

Some women speak and continue speaking, whether they are abused for it or not. For some women, who speak and are abused, the price for speaking is too high and silence is the only choice that lets them protect and care for themselves. For others, the existence and the experiences of those women is enough for them to decide, consciously or otherwise, that the risks of speaking will always outweigh the rewards.

And for some, like me, a partial silence descends.

I weigh words. What’s safe, given how easy I would be to find in real life, and given what I can cope with on a given day. How much of myself to reveal while pseudonymous, which details to fake and which to hide. It is laughable to suggest that identity online is uncomplicated in such circumstances. Either I can be myself, or I can speak without fear. I am uncomfortably constrained in both skins.

This is how bullying works. It’s how hate speech works. The abuse doesn’t even have to be directed at you personally – just so long as people are being torn apart for having a characteristic that you share, you may welll be worried about being torn apart for the same reason. Not just women, either – the mental health blogging community is 99.9% pseudonymous, for instance, with very good reason.

I’ve seen people argue that women should be stronger, should just suck it up and deal with it, as though silence about abuse is not a form of partial silence. I’ve seen people say women aren’t being silenced, because of all these women who are not silent, as though all women speak about the same things and measure risk and reward the same way, and as though there’s no gradient between silent and outspoken. I’ve seen suggestions that women should only write on moderated sites – presumably sites they don’t moderate themselves – as though restricting the venues of our speech doesn’t amount to silencing. And I’ve seen people say pseudonymous environments are bad for women because of harassment, when some of us find them the only places we can speak without worry.

All these arguments are bollocks. And I’m bored of hearing them. And maybe saying so will put me in danger, maybe it’ll mean a threat or a few abusive tweets or maybe just an argument I’d rather not have to have. But I’m fed up of being told how we ought to moderate our behaviour. All these options just end up with us being a different sort of silent. I’d like us to be free to speak.

Maybe it’s just me. But somehow, after this week, I doubt it.

Zombie rights

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On Friday, shortly after the royal wedding, five people dressed as zombies went for a coffee together in Starbucks. They’d intended to go to a flash mob in Soho Square, but left after only a few people turned up. They were asked to leave Starbucks by police, searched under section 60 powers, and then arrested for potential breach of the peace. My friend Hannah Eiseman-Renyard has written a thorough account of what happened.

A few thoughts for the Metropolitan Police:

Firstly, people dressed up as zombies do not normally pose a threat to the general public. They are not, in fact, the living dead. Although they may shuffle past you moaning about brains, and may even fake eating each other for a bit of a giggle, the chances of them causing harm to real people are not above average. They are more likely to break into Thriller-style dances than they are to break out into a riot.

Secondly, fancy dress parties in general are, surprisingly, not illegal – even when they happen in public spaces. I know it must be tempting sometimes, especially when you see a really bad Harry Potter costume or a genuinely horrid PVC nurse outfit, but you are not supposed to act as the fashion police. Dressing up is not a crime.

Thirdly, zombies may not be fast, but they can generally shuffle under their own power. Police vans are admittedly much quicker, but arrests are not meant to be used as a way of moving peaceful people out of areas where you don’t want them to be. They’re also not meant to be used to keep London pretty and acceptable while the world’s TV cameras are pointed in our direction. Edit: Nor on people filming arrests and then talking to journalists.

Fourthly, while I understand you can keep better tabs on the living dead when you have them under lock and key, zombies have the same rights as your standard flag-waving patriot. No matter what day it is. We did not turn the law off on Friday. We did not become a dictatorship for 24 hours for the sake of a wedding. Arresting people for acting in ways that are not sanctioned by the establishment is generally not considered to be one of the hallmarks of democracy.

Fifthly, although none of the zombies were charged with any offence, the effect of arrests is to stifle dissent and to scare people into behaving themselves – much like the earlier arrests the night before. There was no violence on Friday and no aggression by this group of zombies towards either the police or the public. No potential weapons or intoxicating substances were found in their bags or on their persons. At best their arrests were disproportionate. At worst they were deliberate intimidation as a consequence of doing something that wasn’t on the official script for the day.

Finally, if sitting in a coffee shop while dressed as a zombie is an offence, I am guilty many times over. And I’ll do it again in future. I will fight for our right to look like idiots while drinking caffeinated beverages, because some things are important.

March 26: the peaceful majority

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By the time I arrived at the Embankment, the police had already started turning people back from the front section of the march. Crowds of union members in matching T-shirts – purple UNISON, orange GMB, easy to distinguish at a distance – had formed in the middle of the road, flanked by people passing out placards and vuvuzelas from cardboard boxes and copies of various socialist papers off trestle tables.

I passed a young couple holding hands, arguing about their protest gear: “I don’t want a general strike one, but everyone’s got the No Cuts ones.”

That’s about right. The march wasn’t just staffed by the usual suspects, the hard-left unionists and the white-collar politically-engaged types – it spilled over with people of all sorts of political persuasions, including plenty of Lib Dem voters feeling a combination of betrayal and guilt.

For some it was a march to stop their jobs being lost and their workplaces closed down; for others it was a polite expression of a sad desire to take their vote back, to do it again, and not make the same mistake this time.

It was a grand day out. It was a long way round to get to Hyde Park for a picnic, walking slowly via Whitehall and passing the armed policemen outside 10 Downing Street, where little children jumped up and down and shouted “out, out, out” but couldn’t possibly have understood why.

Handing out vuvuzelas was a nice touch; they made it possible for a group of people who weren’t all there for the same reasons to communicate their displeasure with a wordless horn blow rather than having to set aside individual issues to form a single chant (though “no ifs, no buts, no public sector cuts” was a recurring shout).

The horns gave the children something to do. Even the pre-teens had placards, often ones they’d made themselves. One, in multi-coloured felt tip: “My educayshun got cut so now I can’t smell.”

Not one person I met or spoke to mentioned tax dodging. I saw a few “eat the rich” banners but for the most part those holding them were marching with other cuts-focussed friends – “homelessness is not a crime”, “end back door privatisation”, “this placard is rubbish because my TA was fired”.

The protesters who occupied Fortnum & Mason seem, from the reports I’ve seen, a long way away from the people I spoke to, the teenagers and parents and grandparents, ambulance workers and fireman, midwives and teachers who gave up their Saturdays to march. Whole workplaces came out to say the cuts should stop, generations of family marched together against cuts that will hit all of them – among them a group of midwives whose first thought on hearing of the Oxford Street trouble was “I hope the shop workers are OK”.

And many of those people, who’ve never heard of such a thing as the Black Bloc, will feel betrayed by what happened on Oxford Street yesterday afternoon. They came to march and to register their opposition, not to smash the state or fuck the police. (Another good point for the vuvuzelas – fewer sweary chants when children were present.)

When a few people were building Trojan horses, these people were packing picnics. And while the photogenic youth movement smashes windows and throws paint, the quieter, gentler, older one has the attention of the leader of the opposition – and is booing him when he says he supports some of the cuts.

A few of the pictures I took during the first part of the day found their way to the Guardian live blog of the event. They show, and I saw, good humour, biting sarcasm, bitter sadness, vast diversity, politeness, responsibility – and anger. These were people who had already tried talking to their elected representatives and working to make the best of things, and who had decided that wasn’t good enough.

And it must be rare, very rare, to see so many of those people from so many occupations and walks of life, all mobilised against something. As Paul Mason pointed out yesterday:

This passive but fairly angry mass are the people that pose the biggest political problem both for the government and the opposition; because when you can mobilise more or less your entire workplace – be it a special school, a speech therapy centre, a refuse depot, an engineering shop or a fire station – to go on a march, then “something is up”.

Yes. Something is up. And the media whose adherence to news values and desire to shock and titillate makes it easy to reduce this protest to its most violent events – on both the right and the left - needs to remember and bear witness to that.

Otherwise we will have an estimated 400,000 people who not only feel betrayed by their government, but also by betrayed their media.

 

 

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Edit to add: Ryan Watts, a photographer who was at the march, pointed out on Twitter that the good work of the police is also overshadowed by the violence – the peaceful majority saw policemen being helpful, friendly, chatty, directing them gently, passing out useful information, and even expressing a wish to be on the march themselves. I don’t imagine those policemen see much of their experience reflected in today’s headlines either.

“Why did you come to the March For The Alternative today?”

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Tories: no transport cuts to lunch clubs for the very elderly in Islington

A few answers, from today’s TUC-organised march in London, where hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets to protest against the coalition government’s austerity measures. These words come from people who marched from Victoria Embankment to Hyde Park as part of the main march, and spoke to me in the park shortly after Ed Miliband’s speech.

Ambulance worker from Manchester, who travelled with a group from his union:

Some of what the government is doing will directly affect us – we’re going to stop being a foundation trust but we don’t know enough about what will happen yet. But I’m here because I’m against the whole thing – pensions, pay, everything.

Tim Lewis, who travelled from Cambridge alone:

I’m here for a couple of reasons. I think the Chancellor is absolutely full of shit, for a start, and what the government is doing is insane. I’m also here partly out of guilt because I accidentally voted for a Lib Dem candidate thinking it would help keep the Tories out of power and we all know how well that turned out.

Adam Green, a history student with a placard reading “Unite against apathy”:

It’s not just about the tuition fees – I mean I oppose the tuition fees but there’s lots more going on. Like, what’s happening to the NHS, I don’t think that’s a good thing, and I don’t want to just sit there and say I’m only going to fight for the things that affect me and my friends. You’ve got to stand up for everyone. And the government can afford to cut business tax but it can’t afford to help out people who are homeless and that just doesn’t make sense to me.

An NHS worker in her 50s who came with her branch of UNISON:

I’ve been in the NHS all my working life and I’ve never seen anything so wrong-headed as what they’re planning to do. GPs are rubbish as it is and asking them to decide how to spend money as well as look after sick people is just daft. My children and my grandchildren think I’m crazy for coming.

Sylvia Dunhurst, who has severe mobility issues:

When I had my accident I was off work for nearly a year, and when I tried to look for jobs afterwards there weren’t any that I could do that could cope with my wheelchair. So I do what I can to keep myself active but it’s incredibly hard to scrape by at the moment. The coalition seems to want to take away the things that make it possible for me to live my life with any sort of autonomy and dignity.

A teacher at an inner-city primary school in the Midlands:

Some of the children I work with are very deprived. A lot of them don’t speak English as a first language, some of them are children of asylum seekers and refugees, and their parents are desperately poor. The cuts are taking away funding for teaching assistants and they’re pushing more good teachers away from doing these hard jobs because the workload is going up and the pay and pensions are going down.

Geoffrey, a 72-year-old pensioner:

Because if we don’t march against this then they will say we agree with it. I don’t agree with it. They are taking away things that people need. My friends who are in homes need help to get around and that’s being taken away. They can’t be here because they can’t get around, but I can be here, so I am.

Sally, 8, who came with her mum, dad and 11-year-old sister:

Um, because I like going to the library to get books and I like my teachers.

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More thoughts on reporting the march tomorrow, when I’m done celebrating being another year older.

Who can work for free?

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Since Arianna Huffington sold the Post to AOL, there have been lots of posts on all sides of the debate about whether bloggers working for free is a good thing, a bad thing or simply an unavoidable thing.

It’s true that many HuffPo bloggers arecelebrities or working people or other types who pure and simple don’t need pay, who do it for the platform. But more are unpaid, community bloggers who write for love, for dedication, and in some cases in the hope that their work for free is a gateway, a way to build their profile and to end up with a paid writing gig. No one’s forcing them to write for free. But to me this issue seems to fit neatly into a continuum with a free guest post on one end and months-long unpaid media internships on the other. Media and writing careers are desirable; people want a way in; editors want a portfolio of cuttings; the only way to get one is, often, to work for free. Online or off.

And that means that media diversity shrinks. There are thousands of aspiring, talented writers who can’t afford to work for nothing but expenses paid; hundreds of students who have to earn money during their summer breaks and can’t take time out to go do unpaid work experience. Very few people can afford to be a journalism entrepreneur or start up a hyperlocal blog, and genuinely spend the time and the money and the energy involved in covering their community well, when there’s rent and utilities and bills to pay.

Further down the line, what about those who can’t afford to drift from freelance paycheck to freelance paycheck, with no sick pay or holiday or job security, in the hope of getting something more permanent? Do they capitulate, go over to much-derided “content farms” like Demand Media or Suite 101 just to get some writing credits and try to earn money at the same time? Or do we lose those voices from the conversation because of the economic barriers to entering a media career?

I’m not saying that the HuffPo can or should solve those problems. But I do think they’re problems that need thinking about when we think about paying writers – because if media businesses don’t pay people with no experience, we’re guaranteeing that the people with experience will be a certain type of people. And that, in the long run, means a poorer public dialogue and a skewed view on the world.

Education, education, education: the political

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This is one of a pair of posts. This one looks at the unanswered questions after the tuition fees vote. The other one declares and explains my personal biases.

18 is a magical age. Drinking, voting, leaving home, and exams that have the power to change the direction of your entire life – and the end of free education.

It’s peculiar, how education changes in the August of the year you pass your A-levels. Suddenly education is a privilege, not a right. Suddenly you must justify your choices harder than ever before, make sacrifices, shop around, evaluate the potential quality of your teaching in a way you have never had the chance or obligation to do before. Suddenly education is a marketplace, not a common good.

And it’s about to become more so, thanks to the trebling of tuition fees and slashing of university funding. As part of the cuts to humanities, funding for languages at university has been decimated – even as the coalition tries to push more teenagers to take them on at GCSE. Education is not a life-long concern – and education for its own sake is utterly devalued by a government that persists in painting certain subjects as more worthy than others.

When we talk about the cuts to education, adults tend to forget that many teenagers don’t go to university because of the career options at the end – they go because they care passionately about their areas of expertise and because they love to learn. For the same reasons that 17-year-olds do A levels and 6-year-olds love art lessons. Because of the joy of learning.

At the protest, everyone I spoke to shared a similar sentiment. The protests were about the cuts. The anger is about the lies, the broken promises, the injustices. The coalition’s last-minute attempt to persuade furious protesters that in reality they just haven’t quite understood the implications has done little, if anything, to help – in fact, its list of myths certainly doesn’t cover the main objections I have (though at least it’s provided some great parody ammunition).

Many of the big questions remain, at least to my knowledge (please correct me if I’m wrong) unanswered:

  • How much is this going to cost the country?
  • Why are we borrowing more when the coalition’s stated aim is to reduce, not increase, the deficit?
  • Why the uneven nature of the cuts, aimed at humanities more than science?
  • Where’s the evidence that humanities graduates don’t contribute to the economy to the same extent as science ones?
  • Where’s the study that shows what impact the fees and cuts might have on poor students, minorities, students from poorer schools?
  • What’s going to be done to make the Student Loans Company fit for purpose, if it’s going to be overseeing so much more money?
  • What is the sale of this debt into the banking system going to do to the economy, in the short and long term?
  • We’ve seen analysis of EMA and participation – but where’s the analysis of the impact of stopping the EMA on attainment, aspiration, attendance, self-esteem?
  • Why is debt you have no hope of paying back fine for students but bad for countries?
  • Whose voices are going to be missing from the wider conversations and absent from our universities in ten years’ time, because of fees, because they’re critical thinkers but not great mathematicians, because they can’t afford college, because they’ve been told their chosen field is worth less than others, because they don’t believe their education is worthwhile any more?
  • Why are universities covered by the Department for Business and not the Department for Education, anyway?

And the anger is going to get bigger as the injustices are perceived to mount up – the post-Christmas VAT rise coupled with this year’s round of bank bonuses is going to add fuel to the #ukuncut fires – and some of the anger will stop being directed at Nick Clegg and his merry band of pledge-skippers and start to be aimed at others in power. Dumbledore’s Army are already marching, and for all the pearl-clutching about yobs poking Camilla with sticks and the discourse about falling support for students, the narrative has escaped the cosy confines of the right-wing press. Groups of kids are using decentralised technology to organise protests in real time – and making jokes about Godzilla at the same time. They don’t need the support of the Daily Mail. They’ve got their networks, and the Mail doesn’t matter any more.

And bear in mind, while everyone on every medium is talking about peaceful protest, that this is a group of young people who have never seen peaceful protest work. This is a generation of politicians who have never listened to peaceful protesters, no matter how reasonable. Would there have been resignations if there hadn’t been a pitched battle going on outside?