The protests organised by Britain's National Union of Students have rather lost their way, with media coverage focussing on the violence rather than the purpose of the demonstrations. At the first, the Conservative Party's HQ was attacked, and one thug threw a fire extinguisher at police from a high building. At the most recent, the bomb proof windows on the Treasury were smashed, and a car carrying the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall was attacked.
Did the NUS anticipate such violence? Possibly. They certainly should have, as they chose the tactic of mass demonstrations and the route that took marchers past Conservative HQ.
But all sorts of people, including the NUS, like to assert that the small number of trouble makers are not students, but professional agitators. As if being a student and being an agitator are somehow mutually exclusive. When I was a student, most professional agitators were enrolled on some sort of course, though, in those days, students typically paid no fees and even received government grants. Today, agitators who wish to be professional, in the sense of receiving a government stipend for their revolutionary activities, need to sign on for the dole.
This is where I part company with all sorts of commentators. It is absurd to describe as anarchists anyone who accepts a government dole and demands higher government subsidies for education - or indeed anything else. Anarchist don't want government controlled education. They don't want government. That's what makes them anarchists.
Like most demonstrators, the NUS wants to give the impression there is mass support for their cause. This is plainly absurd. No demonstration has any role in such a thing. The most popular marches of recent years - against the Iraq War, for example, or in support of the Countryside Alliance - mobilised less than one percent of the UK population.
Even causes which have mass support, cannot prove such support with a march. A march is the plaintive cry of the powerless, not a demonstration of power. It is a fun day out for totalitarian groups like the British National Party or the Socialist Workers' Party. It is how causes with minority support demonstrate that they are failing.
In that sense, a demonstration is hardly ever what it claims to be and almost always attracts the elements that organisers later claim they didn't want. Far from losing control of their brand to a motivated group of agitators, NUS has deliberately adopted a tactic which can only ever be used to demonstrte how passionate some of its supporters are, and cannot possibly demonstrate the breadth of its support. This being so, they must have anticipated, and counted on, the presence of the violent agitators. They didn't lose control of their brand. They chose to brand themselves that way.
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