Reflections on the Student Protests

I was filled with a desperate sadness as I attended the protests in London on Wednesday. As a politics and philosophy student, I regularly encounter rolling (or glazing) eyes when I drive discussions towards areas of my own personal interest, and I am deeply aware of the apathy and lethargy that many people of my age feel with regard to politics.

But, as much as the cynicism of it pained me at the time, Nick Clegg and the Liberal Democrats’ wooing of students before the last election was genuinely impressive, and could have been an incredibly positive thing. Clegg shined, particularly in the televised leadership debates, and communicated with students in a way which some of us found smug, limp and patronising, but which seemed to strike a chord with many of my peers.

There was something reassuring about the fact that there was no significant groundswell of support for David Cameron, who had marketed himself exhaustively to young voters, and of course I can sympathise with those students who wouldn’t countenance voting for Labour. The fact is, the Liberal Democrats were an attractive option for many first-time voters, not least because of their famous pledge to vote against any rise in tuition fees.

But I was deeply saddened when, whilst marching through Whitehall, past Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament, I observed the number of ordinary, not greatly radical or politicised students, holding banners such as “I agreed with Nick,” or “Clegg on my face.” Light-hearted slogans such as these belie the extraordinary wretchedness of a situation where many people voted, filled with optimism and hope, only to find themselves abandoned months later.

Generally speaking, I don’t feel the same sense of vitriol for the Liberal Democrats as some on the left-wing do, because I didn’t see them as a genuinely attractive alternative before the election, and would never have expected genuinely positive, radical government from them. Admittedly, I did expect them to be a far more moderating influence on the nastiest excesses of the Tories, but, in reality, I know that they’ll probably pay for their decisions at the next election. It is unforgiveable, though, that they have let down so many young people who voted for them in good faith.

The whole issue of the Millbank protests has served primarily as a distraction so far, so I don’t wish to dwell on it too much. What I have found more worrying, though, is the level of condemnation that the protesters have encountered. For people who have voted and protested and written to their MPs but still feel a profound and overwhelming sense of anger and hopelessness, I can feel nothing but sympathy.

This whole argument is essentially about whether the government ought to retreat from its role as the primary funder of higher education. I don’t think it’s idealistic, or that I’m speaking from some liberal, middle-class student bubble, to assume that the majority of people in this country favour the current system over the Browne proposals, which seek to substantially shift the burden of payment to individuals.

The Conservatives (along with the traditional Tory press, and their new Liberal Democrat allies) have done a sterling job of setting a cuts agenda, and lowering public expectations of what the government can realistically do. In such a context, it’s true, and probably reasonable, that many people probably reluctantly accept the reasoning behind charging students more.

Accordingly, I think it’s extremely important that the fees issue is incorporated into a broader anti-cuts agenda. We cannot expect people to sympathise with students over and above other sections of society who are set to be seriously adversely affected. Crucially, we cannot accept the logic of cuts, but expect public support for our own protest against student fees.

And, as such, it is extremely important to include more people in the struggle. If we allow our political opponents to cast students as an isolated vested interest (as the Conservatives have had so much success in doing to their opponents in the past – see the miners’ strikes), then we will have no success. We need to appeal to the millions of people who agree that cuts in higher and further education are extremely damaging, not just for the poorest young people who might see as fees as a psychological and/or economic barrier to improving themselves, or the ordinary graduates who will be setting out into the world of work with all the stress, anxiety and desperation that comes with significant personal debt. We need to stress the argument that a properly funded education system benefits all of society, and that a good education is one of the most benign influences on human life. But we need to remember that if we expect support from other sectors of the population, we have to offer our solidarity and support to other battles being fought against cuts by all other members of the working class.

One of the starkest conclusions that can be drawn from this whole episode is that to cast ‘students’ as one, cohesive and united body is fallacy. This is an issue as much about left versus right as any I can imagine, and although I have been shocked by the amount of negativity and cynicism that Wednesday’s protests attracted from some of my peers, I am also encouraged that this deeply malign, socially damaging cuts agenda is finally being aggressively challenged.

Is Democracy Middle Class?

Muesli, wholemeal bread, broadsheet newspapers, balsamic vinegar, humous, BBC 2, Amy Winehouse, vegetarianism, recycling, farmers’ markets, music festivals, cycling, goats’ cheese, Ian McEwan, Skiing holidays, poetry, preferring to take the train, grammatical pedantry, environmental hypocrisy, Bob Dylan, poking fun at others, thinking of dropping out of university, communism, The Clash, football, wha… woah, surely not!?

How about democracy? How bourgeois is the political system which should ensure government by and for the people? Well, consider that utopian paradigm: ancient Athenian democracy. Only about 10-20% of the population would have been eligible for participation in government, and these would all have been adult male citizens, themselves the sons of citizens, who had completed their military service. Although this might seem like a thoroughly aristocratic way of running a democracy, unlike other popular assembly-based city-state governments of the time (such as those in Sparta and Corinth), citizenship was not conditional on meeting certain property qualifications, such that it could not be termed an elite, aristocratic mode of government. Indeed, for many contemporary historians, the demos in democracy refers to the ‘people’ as distinct from the elite, rather than the more common modern understanding – that ‘the people’ means ‘everyone.’ It is also worth noting that the ‘working-class’ citizens – i.e., those waged labourers or rural workers who would not have found it so easy to attend the ekklesia regularly – voted and participated far less, meaning that it was the moderately wealthy middle class who tended to dominate legislative proceedings.

Consider, too, our own parliamentary democracy. The Representation of the People Act of 1832 extended the vote to the middle class (males), expanding the franchise by over 50%. The move had long been campaigned for by the Whigs, (who would later become the Liberal Party, and subsequently the Liberal Democrats) and perennially resisted by the Tories, (the traditional party of the upper class landed aristocracy). Curiously, this reform which enfranchised still less than one in six adult males is often mooted as the beginning of democracy in the UK. Nick Clegg recently declared that his planned constitutional reforms would be the “biggest shakeup of our democracy since 1832” – an elected House of Lords, a referendum on the AV voting system, and tougher regulation of CCTV and DNA evidence presumably means more to him than universal and female suffrage, secret ballots, the outlawing of bribery and, more recently, devolution for Scotland and Wales.

What of our newly-formed Con-Dem government? It has been widely publicised that David Cameron’s first cabinet is comprised primarily of private school and Oxbridge graduates from rich families, but this is slightly misleading. Apart from the likes of George Osborne, Nick Clegg and a few others, the new cabinet do not come from exceptionally privileged or elite backgrounds, most having excelled at comprehensive or grammar schools, the children of moderately wealthy parents. Notably, many of the apparently ‘salt of the earth’ exceptions to the upper-crust hegemony, such as William Hague and Vince Cable, are from solid middle-class families. The only members of cabinet that could truly be described as having working class roots are Eric Pickles, who attended Leeds Metropolitan University and whose parents were Labour supporters in a small working class town in Yorkshire; Chief Whip Patrick McLoughlin, who is from a coal-mining family; and Sayeeda Warsi, who talks candidly about her ‘extremely humble’ roots as ‘the daughter of an immigrant mill worker in a mill town in Yorkshire.’ (Baroness Warsi’s father now runs a profitable bed manufacturing company.) It is also interesting, if not entirely pertinent, that the traditional party of the middle class (and of democracy – the clue’s in the, um, name), the Liberal Democrats, have an entirely Caucasian parliamentary party.

Beyond the hopefully (but probably not actually) irrelevant persiflage of government ministers’ upbringings and demography, the democratic system by which we are governed does seem to act in a notably middle-class way. The increasingly unpopular first-past-the-post electoral system tends towards moderation, as extreme and marginal parties are underrepresented in favour of stable government. It is interesting that this majoritarian system is only just in serious danger of reform now that all three of the major parties claim to represent the interests of the moderate, middle-class, centre ground. The main battleground in elections is this fabled illusion of ‘middle England.’

How useful is it to examine democracy on an international scale? Well, by employing fuzzy logic and crude national stereotypes, plus the help of The Economist’s Democracy Index, we might be able to make some interesting generalisations. Aristocratic, landed-gentry-fallen-on-hard-times nations such as our own score moderately well; the UK gets a rating of 8.15 (10 being the most democratic). Other ageing superpowers such as Russia and the USA score similarly. Nouveau richeChina gets a paltry 3.04. The ‘global poor’ score the worst – besides South Africa and Botswana, most African countries are categorised as having authoritarian or ‘hybrid’ governments. Meanwhile, the highest scorers are the moderately wealthy Northern European and Scandinavian countries, along with Australia, New Zealand and Canada (Sweden is the most democratic country with a rating of 9.88).

Of course, one of the questions that relationships like this pose is whether democracy somehow begets moderate wealth and ‘middle-classness,’ or whether a middle-class society will naturally tend towards democracy. A 2004 UNDP survey found that 54.7% of Latin Americans would accept an authoritarian government if it could solve their economic problems. It should come as no great surprise that people will tend to think less warmly of liberal democracy if it cannot ensure stable jobs and good working conditions – almost half of the population of Latin America were living in poverty in the same period.

Of course before seeking to define democracy as ‘middle-class,’ a whole series of distinctions need to be made: between workers government and parliamentary government (see Jonny Keyworth’s article); between direct participatory democracy and representative democracy; a soviet-style ‘the government doing what the people should want’ democracy versus a liberal democracy with certain institutional checks and balances. It is clear that ‘democracy’ is not inherently middle-class; our representative parliamentary democracy may well be, however. It goes without saying that it should depend on the demographic make-up of a society – democratic nations with a large middle-class will probably have middle-class government. Perhaps the fact that middle class people have more time on their hands, and are likely to be educated to a relatively high level, means that they are more enthusiastic in their democratic participation. Perhaps, too, they are better placed to enjoy the benefits of a stable parliamentary democracy.

Election 2010

Please don’t vote for the Conservatives. Labour are still very much the party of sustained investment in public services, the Liberal Democrats have some good plans for constitutional reform, but the Conservatives remain surprisingly and seriously right-wing. This party align themselves in the EU with anti-Semites, homophobes and climate change-deniers. They plan to squeeze the public sector with a pay freeze and “savage cuts” to tackle an economic problem caused largely by banks and big business. Historically, they have raised unfair taxes such as VAT, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they do so again as part of plans to reduce the deficit quickly (at the same time raising the threshold for inheritance tax – a move which would be the ultimate “fuck you” to the idea of equality of opportunity).

Gordon Brown’s repeated warning that George Osborne’s policies endanger the economic recovery, risking a “double-dip recession” is not hollow – the private sector that the Conservatives still strongly represent the interests of is not yet growing fast enough to fill the gap left by a huge reduction in government spending that the Tories propose. A return to recession under the Tories would hit the poorest so much harder. That levels of unemployment, poverty, house-repossessions etc have stayed low up to now (in comparison with the recessions of the 1990s) is a victory of the Labour government’s active interventionism – a philosophy so opposed by David Cameron who thinks that now is the time to cut back on what the state offers to the people in the most need.

This is a really important moment in British political history. If Labour or the Liberal Democrats – or most realistically, perhaps, a Lib-Lab coalition – wins power then we can expect to be eased compassionately out of recession, for our antiquated voting system to be reformed to genuinely reflect the democratic judgements of the people, and for levels of investment in the NHS and the education system to be maintained. If however, the anti-progressive minority in Britain vote in high enough numbers for David Cameron, George Osborne, Theresa May, Liam Fox et al to form a government, aside from the aforementioned economic and social disasters, we could see a great deal of permanent damage inflicted onto our society.

Most worryingly, they might be able to engineer it so that they stay in power for a long time. Cameron’s plan to reduce the number of MPs by 10% is presented as a cost-cutting exercise, but will actually see him redrawing the boundaries of hundreds of constituencies in what some commentators have suggested would be “one of the grossest acts of gerrymandering in British political history.” They will also, obviously, resist electoral reform, including in the House of Lords which they could fill with as many of their business friends as possible. This will mean that, like in the 1980s and 1990s, the British population will be stuck with a powerful Conservative party, with a mandate from the quiet minority of the population (it will probably always remain at less than a third of the electorate) who are opposed to progress, fairness, equality and compassion. A Lib-Lab coalition, however, would ensure that the views of the decent, progressive majority in British society would always be represented by a majority in government, reducing the Conservatives to the fringe party that I obviously want them to be, but that they also reasonably should be.

I will be voting Labour. Despite the obvious and depressingly numerous failures (see foreign policy, civil liberties etc), they have introduced the minimum wage, cut crime, increased levels of literacy and numeracy, increased child benefit and introduced Sure Start to help the poorest families, introduced civil partnerships, reformed the House of Lords, scrapped entrance fees for national museums, massively increased international development spending, introduced paternity leave and extended the state pension for women. David Cameron’s most compelling argument is “vote for me if you don’t want Brown.”