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Saturday, December 6, 2014

Students' uprising in Warwick... for now, soon in other parts of the UK?


And, I predict this sort of thing  will be soon happening all over in the countries that  have a wide disparity between the fat cats and the young unemployed, disenfranchised citizens.    
In the article below, the writer opines that police crackdown on the protesting students will embolden them further, and he is absolutely right.  First and above all, the youth are angry with the establishment for not only the high tuition fees but also the dire unemployment (in spite of the govt. massaging the job numbers to show them on an upward trend) the students know it's not true, otherwise they would be employed. 

Owen Jones writing at GuardianUK:
Students are rising again, and police crackdowns will only embolden them
Once again student protest – this time at Warwick – has been met by police repression. The pre-election battle lines are drawn.

Young people are often patronised and dismissed as an apathetic blob, too dazzled by mass consumerism to give a toss about politics. But when powerful figures go through the motions of encouraging youth engagement, it is clear they mean little more than casting a vote every few years. Angry protest – let alone peaceful civil disobedience – is a definite no-no. If Britain’s young mount protests that are in any way appropriate to the scale of the government-directed attack on them, the state will make its disapproval firmly known.

Many of the students protesting at Warwick University will have had little experience in protest. Perhaps – for some of them – Wednesday’s day of action, which was called by the National Campaign Against Fees and Cuts, was one of their first tastes of political activism. It will have proved a salutary experience. After the students staged a sit-in in support of free education, police officers stormed in, began manhandling students, sprayed students with CS gas and had Tasers at the ready.

This experience will be all too familiar to veterans of the many student protests that followed the coalition’s assumption of power and the trebling of tuition fees. In the aftermath of perhaps the largest student demonstration in a generation, the end of 2010 saw waves of student occupations of universities and protests. Often these were met with police repression: hours-long kettles in freezing temperatures, and officers swinging batons. At one protest in Parliament Square, I was among those who had to abruptly jump aside after police officers charged us on horseback.......

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