History of the Present

As a PhD student of un certain age it’s sometimes easy to feel that history is passing you by. Then there are days when the present comes vividly alive. I am too young to have been a soixante-huitard and was in Paris for the poll tax riots in 1990, but there was definitely a whiff of revolution in the air today as I rounded the corner of Malet Street on my way to a seminar at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and found my path blocked by a phalanx of police in Day-Glo jackets. It was midday and a little further up the road, a boisterous crowd had already been kettled outside Senate House. By the late afternoon, as darkness fell on Parliament Square, the TV news would be full of images of bonfires and swinging batons, but in Malet Street five hours earlier there had been something of a carnival spirit, a desire to burst the ConDem balloon with barbs not bombs.

‘Vince Cable can’t decide whether to get into bed with Cameron or cower under the duvet,’ mocked one speaker. ‘Pinocchio Clegg didn’t pay to go to university so why should we?’ demanded another.

Amidst the predictable mass-produced Cameron Pig signs reminiscent of the Class War placards of the early 80’s there were also stabs at homemade humour. My favourite read: ‘If I have learned anything from these protests it’s that spellcheck doesn’t work on cardboard.’ I’m pleased to report the sign was correctly spelt, so obviously a university degree still has some uses.

So now the government has got its majority, will the student demonstrations fizzle out or morph into a genuine mass protest movement? To listen to some of the speakers gathered in Malet Street it already has: ‘You’ve already shown your solidarity with the Greek protestors and forged links with the unions. Whatever happens today, this isn’t over until you kick the bankers and their stooges out of office.’

Certainly, this generation of students has already shown impressive organisational skills, but the hotheads are rapidly giving the movement a bad name and it is hard to see the centre holding during what promises to be a long ConDem winter. I have no doubt the anger on the streets is genuine, but I fear it has less to do with the scale of the fee hikes than the sense of betrayal at the Liberals’ broken promises. After all, it is not the 20-year-olds on the streets of London today who are going to be saddled with upwards of £30,000 of debt, but the 16-year-olds coming up behind them. They face a stark choice: to accept the tuition fees as a fait accompli and knuckle down to the task of scaling the corporate ladder so that one day they may have the means to repay them, or to take up where previous generations left off. The 68’ers weren’t just fighting for themselves but for a different kind of society and a different model of historical progress, one in which capital and free markets were not the only measure of value. During the neo-conservative boom years that followed the collapse of communism we heard a lot about the ‘end of history.’ Perhaps December 9, 2010 was the day that ‘history’ finally spluttered back to life.