Student protests: the view from a reformed protester

It’s no secret that I was sent down from University for my involvement in a student protest. So today inevitably conjures a whiff of nostalgia, even tear gas.

The late 1960s, early 1970s, were heady times. We were on full local authority grants. We worked in the holidays to amass spending money and the world beyond was changing rapidly about us. America was losing the war in Vietnam; the apartheid government in South Africa was killing to stay in power; and we were the liberated post “pill” generation. Clapton, the stones, the Animals, and the Who, were all regulars on a Saturday evening at the union.

Our problem was authority – we hated the lot of them.

In truth when we marched across the University Campus to occupy the Senate Block (the administrative hub of the University) for what was to be six weeks, we had so many causes that we sent the university no fewer than ten demands. We were rebels in search of a cause. We found that cause in everything from the University’s investments in South Africa to the keeping of “secret files” on students.

We tracked everything back to capitalism. Although I was only a “pink liberal” with no party allegiance of any description, we were quick to spot the sugar company in town with direct links to the South African economy.

Demos, and baiting the cops, was enormous sport. Sitting in was intellectually surprisingly stimulating. But above all we wanted to change the world. Not our world, their world – the world of the poor, the oppressed, the imprisoned. I am sure we could have drummed up something on student fees but it would have been down the list from the above.

We weren’t above a bit of aggro. I was charged with assaulting a policemen at a demo in Manchester. To my shame, with my confident posh accent, I managed to prove he’d assaulted ME and I got off. We were incredibly motivated – happy to go at it for days. We had very little co-ordinating power – no internet, no phones…well nothing beyond the half smashed phone box at the street end.

And protest now? Well, yes, motivated in part by self interest for sure…but I think we’d have tracked it back to the banks and asked why we students should be shelling out for what we would have called the “thievery, crookedness, cack-handedness, downright subterfuge, stupidity and greed of the bankers”. Maybe last weekend’s little number at top Shop in Oxford Street marks a beginning of that. Maybe cyber protest too. Interesting times.