Could Ben Page’s IPSOS-MORI ‘worm’ could have predicted this?
Ed Miliband sitting on the picket line, whatever the hot-air discussions between Baroness Sayeeda Warsi, John McDonnell, Ed and Rosie Winterton amount to in the end, will achieve relatively little. It certainly won’t ‘topple’ Dave Cameron.
I have, on a matter of principle, not got carried away with the hysteria surrounding, for example, the ULU sit-in protests. More to the point, I think Vince Cable’s is possibly in fact correct, and we have a mechanism for voters to get what they want; they can chuck out members of the legislature at given opportunities, and also the legislature themselves can vote down legislature proposed by the Government. This is even the case if the Government is the major government in a Coalition.
So what can legal riots achieve? Well, actually, quite a lot actually, potentially. The UK Poll Tax Riots were a series of mass disturbances in British cities during protests against the Community Charge (commonly known as the Poll Tax), introduced by the Margaret Thatcher. By far the largest occurred in central London on Saturday March 31, 1990, shortly before the poll tax was due to come into force in England and Wales. The disorder in London arose from a demonstration which began at 11am. The rioting and looting ended at 3am the next morning Interestingly, at the time, response of the London police, the government, the Labour Party and the labour movement and some of the Marxist and Trotskyist left, notably The Militant Tendency, was to condemn the riot as senseless and to blame anarchists. Nonetheless, Thatcher went, and John Major announced in his first parliamentary speech as Prime Minister that the Community Charge was to be replaced by Council Tax, which, unlike Poll Tax, took account of ability to pay. Who can forget those iconic days?
The strength of campus students feeling currently is undoubtedly strong, as they’re the ones who helped to contribute to a Liberal Democrat vote the most. Students are taking part in a day of action in protest at government plans to raise university tuition fees. In my alma mater, Cambridge, around 1,,000 students from universities and sixth-form colleges took part in the protests. A number of students climbed over railings at the university’s Senate House, where onlookers described the scene as “crazy”. Only two students were arrested by Cambridgeshire Police for obstruction, and there were some reports from protesters of police violence. Students from Parkside Community College staged a walkout to show their support.
The demonstrations come ahead of an MPs’ debate later on the proposals and other plans to cut university teaching budgets and support allowances for low-income further education students.
More significantly is that Liberal Democrat MPs are due to decide next week how to vote on the move to cut higher education funding and force students to pay fees of up to £9,000 a year. Vince Cable, who has responsibility for universities, confirmed he would abide by the decision even if it meant he was blocked from voting for a system he supports and helped to create. Having all signed a pledge before the general election to scrap tuition fees altogether, the party’s MPs are under pressure to vote against the hike. This means that the Liberal Democrats, should they choose to use it, have a casting vote in their future, and, more importantly, in a key plank of their policy, which Tim Fallon MP himself admitted that he ‘hadn’t read properly’. Onwards and upwards, this will achieve much more than Ed Miliband sitting on the picket line, but there’s one man who doesn’t come out of this smelling of roses.
