Our students' reawakened spirit of protest has been greeted with joy in many quarters—but it is votes, not demonstrations, that really bring about change. Photo: Phil Whitehouse
The recent rounds of student protests have made for striking news coverage. Aerial photographs of throngs of youngsters hemmed in by police, smoke wafting over crowds, buildings with smashed glass—all are excellent grist for the mill of assumed student radicalism. And, whatever our personal views on the policies under protest, there is widespread feeling that students ought to protest; that marching and shouting is, at root, what students are for.
Yet students’ political energy is definitively fickle. The columnist Johann Hari thinks that Nick Clegg could now be on course to losing his seat at the next election. This seems, at best, unlikely. Even if there were enough students in Clegg’s Sheffield Hallam constituency to swing it one way or another (there
jim evans
What would any one of them vote for?
The world is run by a dictatorship of global moneylenders and currency speculators and by the leaders of countries like the USA and China and Saudi Arabia and Russia.
Go on…here`s a challenge…make a case for voting in British elections!
I voted what I hoped was socialist or social democratic for decades….how daft was that?
All I got was “Labour” governments that competed with the Tories over which “side” would most effectively run Britain as an undemocratic satellite of Washington and Wall Street!
Emily_Marsh
this will show you why students are angry, then please tell me who we should have voted for instead.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTLR8R9JXz4