Those Protestin' Blues

The usual caveat that students, like everyone in our increasingly limited democracy, applies to this post. That said...

...the latest protest against spending cuts in education/tuition fee rises left me wondering just what the hell those involved wished to achieve. If it managed to achieve anything, it was simply alienating even more people. You could, as the students protested again, hear the whole of Middle England tutting in unison as their preconceptions about students were reinforced. Hell, even I muttered something under my breath about that combined "workshy" and "students", and I'm one myself at the moment. Way to win support, ladies and gents. Next up, you should have someone punching an old woman to make your "point". That should work even better. Assuming, of course, that your objective is to alienate as many people as possible as quickly as possible.

I dare say that the point of these protests was to draw attention to their cause. Which, in a sense, meant that these protests worked. In the same way that the tramp on the bus on the way home who has pissed himself also gets attention. Another protest so soon after the last one and before any real negotiation with the government takes place is the clearly the best way to make all those protesting look like gargantuan tools. And in the long term, it will cease to even get them attention. Tedious people doing tedious things over and over again is never the best way to capture the national imagination.

Of course, I suspect that there is a sense in which this was not a protest to actually make a point, but rather because protesting has become (probably briefly) very fashionable again. It's what all the cool kids are doing, see? At least until they get bored and find some other way of posturing.

Sure, I sound cynical - but guess what? That cynicism is borne from experience. These protests will achieve nothing - and the more there are of them, the more self-indulgent the students will look and the more powerful the government will become in this matter. If you want to stop these rises in tuition fees, then you need to work out a much better way of doing so. The efficacy of protesting can always be questioned; continued protesting is just plain dumb.