Guest post by Matt Mahon

In June, the government announced a 22 percent cut in early years spending. At the time, the effect that was most widely discussed was the closure of SureStart centres, but now the direct impact on state schools and primary education is also becoming clear. Another ‘saving’ announced at the time was a cut in free nursery places, from 25 to 15 hours a week per child. It’s important to highlight this particular cut now because school governors are currently working on strategies to deal with the cuts in time for the September 2012 intake.

Although the cut was presented as a reduction in hours, local authorities are also able to implement the saving by offering fewer full-time places. In one typical North London primary (not named for obvious reasons), the number of funded full-time nursery places will fall from around 50 to around 30. There is currently a waiting list for places at the nursery, and all projections point to no decline in demand next year. Yet in Camden, there will be a reduction in nursery places from 1450 to 800 in 2012.

Camden council decided in July to allow schools to offer full-time nursery places above the government allocation at a cost to the parents. One community governor I’ve spoken to has put the cost of a full-time place in a nursery at £80 to £90 a week. Allocation of the free places is hierarchical – children with a statement of special educational need come first, followed by children with welfare concerns, children of low-income families, and children on free school meals.

Given that there’s provision for families in low income, you might wonder why I take issue with charging those who can potentially afford to pay for their childcare. But there’s a serious isssue here, and not just for the ‘squeezed middle’, as bad as it is for them. Rather, I’m worried about the effect of this cut on those families who are able to afford a nursery place for their child. These changes effectively move a large constituency of parents into a position where they must make an economic decision about where they send their children, and that’s an arena in which state schools will inevitably lose out.

Imagine a family who are capable of absorbing the extra £90 a week, and might be able to put a bit more money into their child’s day care. They may not have considered the possibility of paid childcare previously, but now that they have to, a range of options is open to them. Why send your child to the local comp, with its larger class sizes, when you could send them to a private nursery? Or if that’s a little far-fetched, why send them to your local school if you’re now a paying customer who can demand better? What about the one down the road? Once consumer choice is introduced, forcibly in this case, it has a tendency to trump other considerations, especially those to do with the community that surrounds a local school. At the very least, the cut in places will exacerbate the inequalities between so-called ‘sink schools’ and their better neighbours.

The prioritisation of lower-income families is the least we could hope for from local authorities, in that the vast majority of families who attend local schools in inner cities don’t have the odd £90 a week knocking around to cover costs. But these measures will force middle-income parents into a commercial relationship with their local school from the earliest stage. The outcome of the government’s decision to cut spending in early years will be the creeping segregation of schools into some for those who can afford to choose and others for those who can’t.

You can download the White Paper here, and I’ve added references according to the Paper’s own numbering system.

Make students more like commodities

The first main point is the creation of 85,000 new student places which behave differently from all others (0.8). Representing around 1 in 20 students in the 2012 intake, these students would be competed for by Universities. For the universities, this means desperately trying to get more students so that they can get the extra funding from the government which follows each student. For the government, this means giving an incentive for Universities to run marketable, attractive courses, and also to lower their fees, as 20,000 of these places are only applicable to institutions charging less than £7,500 per year. (0.8; 6.18).

Exactly how this competition for students will work is not explained. In 1.6 it’s implied that students are to wooed by quality and cost, which makes me imagine that triple A students will receive lots of letters from their chosen institutions once they get their grades offering fee-cuts; or perhaps the government envisages prospective students ringing round different institutions on results day, shopping for a better deal. Who knows.

Anyone can be a university

The second big deregulation would be the ability for big businesses to sponsor degrees, students, control courses and even set up universities. The main organ of this is external programmes, i.e. distance learning. This is what the New College of the Humanities wants to do – register its students in the University of London external programme. But it would also mean that these new universities wouldn’t need to have anything outdated like a campus (although that said, the most successful distance learning University, the Open University, does have a campus in Milton Keymns).

There’s also an argument made that any organisation applying to be a university shouldn’t need to prove 4 years’ teaching experience in the UK. They can show that they taught elsewhere for a short period, or even just that they’re a really, really big company. This even includes the idea of turning publicly funded universities into more privately controlled institutions (4.36), essentially asset-stripping, the kind we’re probably about to see happen at London Met. (also see 6.9b and 6.29).

And for a taster of what Willets and Cable really mean, in attractive blue text boxes, there are companies highlighted for good practice: Hewlett-Packard (3.30), Unliver, GlaxoSmithKline, Lloyds banking (3.35) and KPMG (5.35).

This all involves a great deal of ‘stripping back regulation’. As if deregulation wasn’t a word which strikes fear into anyone with a modicum of recent history under their belt, the White Paper boldly claims that the deregulation of the universities will liberate them. It all gets particularly bad at 6.19, where there’s a whole swathe of deregulation fever, attacking health and safety and equal opportunities legislation.

Information will solve all your economic woes

A recurring attitude is that the best way to help students from disadvantaged backgrounds enter Higher Education, and equally to ensure that a high standard of teaching, is to provide more information. In moments of monumental shirking of responsibility, the report does not lay any blame for poor tuition and a self-perpetuating social stagnation at the feet of the state, but instead sees the solution in more feedback forms, more websites, more full colour brochures, and more careers advice (5.10). There’s also an emphasis on tracking students – from school to university (or otherwise) (5.15) and after university.

All this extra administration is, of course, the nightmare of anyone in the education sector currently, But don’t fear, 6.13 makes it clear that for ‘high performing institutions’ (i.e. Oxbridge), there will be a more ‘light touch’ approach to all this monitoring.

In the foreword it says “we want the sector to become more accountable to students, as well as to the taxpayer”, followed by “We will tackle the micro-management that has been imposed on the higher education sector in recent years”. This cognitive dissonance is evident throughout. On the one hand, there’s a trendy rhetoric of listening, caring and accountability. On the other, getting rid of red-tape, stepping back, leaving institutions with their autonomy. The result is often very confused. This is particularly evident at 6.21, where there’s a whole paragraph about decreasing the amount of data collection, in direct contradiction to most of section 5.

Nothing about paying teachers

This is all particularly insidious in light of the unwillingness to look after teachers. At one point, there is a promise to improve teacher quality in schools (5.13) – a tall ask when 3,000 schools are about to close due to a completely demoralised workforce who are currently undergoing a wage freeze and having their pensions stolen from them. Early on it is stated that university employees are not public sector workers (1.1), which seems to be true in only the most technical of senses. I can only imagine that that sentence is there to underline the unwillingness to pay lecturers properly, or to come under fire for being about to essentially sell-off public institutions.

In fact, the report almost never makes any mention of employment of people within the university, except at 6.20 to abolish an unintentional rent subsidy for students employed by their university. In 79 pages, there is no mention of how teachers in HE are to be paid, or what the effect of this entire process might be on them, despite the often trumpeted recognition that universities are about teaching as much as research.

Internships for all

And in an amazing sweep of rhetoric showing how deeply out-of-touch the government is, there is a section entirely devoted to the merits of (unpaid) internships, and includes suggestions of how to better widen and advertise these schemes (3.42-3). No mention is made, of course, of the economic inability for most graduates to take part in such schemes.

Debt, debt & more debt

And this is what it really boils down to. As well as initing in vast quantities of private sector cash, the whole flavour of the document coagulates around debt reflation. Student loans are given in various shapes and sizes, most notably the £9,000 fees, which are central to the whole plan (1.5). The report sets our that by 2014-5, in what I can only imagine is an assumption of economic recovery, the government expects to be increasing HEFCE funding, alongside £4 billion in grants – and £10.5 billion in loans, for that year alone. That’s another £160 debt per capita. This debt will now be available to external students (1.12), and the interest rates will be set at RPI plus 3% (1.16). That would have put this year’s repayments on 8% interest, not a meagre sum – that’s an extra £1,600 on top of the £21,000 fees.

One good thing

There will be an increase in grants for families on £25,000 or less. That’s quite good money in your pocket actually, though they don’t say how much of an increase. Still, credit where it’s due – you can’t say that the Tories don’t have a heart…

David Willetts, Minister of State for Universities and Science; Douchebag.

A primary school teacher has avoided being barred from teaching following revelations in the press of her sideline as a dominatrix, the TES reports.

Faith-Anne Lesbirel, a primary school teacher, was exposed by a tabloid newspaper in 2008 as none other than ‘Mistress Saffron’, a dominatrix offering her services for money online.

[Lesbirel] insisted her fetish activities were private and of “no relevance” to her job, that her presence online was anonymous and she believed her identity was not traceable.

Following the newspaper article, Ms Lesbirel took down her website and admitted her activities to her headteacher, Lynn Samwell-Smith, who was “shocked” but supportive.

Mrs Samwell-Smith, who no longer works at the school, told a General Teaching Council for England (GTC) panel there had been disruption after the news came to light. Some parents told her they did not want Ms Lesbirel having contact with their children; others said her private life had nothing to do with her job.

Mrs Samwell-Smith said there was an “adverse impact” on the school and its reputation. Year 5 and 6 pupils asked Ms Lesbirel if she was a “prostitute”. Eventually the teacher, who had given notice before the incident, opted to leave her job early.

[Read the full thing here: http://bit.ly/mLuK4t]

Lesbirel was given a reprimand by a General Teaching Council for England (GTC) panel, which will stay on her record for two years.

It’s encouraging to see that the reaction from parents wasn’t entirely torches and pitchforks. Unfortunately, it is the ignorance and irrational fear of the more excitable parents that is routinely upheld by the GTC (pictured here: http://bit.ly/jzRUOE). The GTC’s code of conduct has been condemned by teachers’ union NASUWT, as it has been used to discipline teachers for attending gay pride events and having bikini pictures on their facebook accounts. (The code demands “standards of behaviour both inside and outside school [for teachers] that are appropriate given their membership of an important and responsible profession”. My emphasis.)

The comments of the GTC committee that questioned Ms Lesbirel are extraordinary in their contempt for basic ideas of residual freedom and their assumption that it is the Council’s right to police teachers’ private behaviour.

‘You promoted services of a sexual nature via a publicly accessible website that you instigated and you maintained a profile on the “Informed Consent” website, where you say in your written submission you also offered your services as a dominatrix.

‘Anyone could have gained access to these websites. [Children in Years 5 and 6 are accustomed to seeking out dominatrix services online, it seems.]

‘It is clear that the reputation and public standing of the profession was placed at risk by your choosing to initiate and run such a website and indeed the exposure of this did in the event damage the school and the profession. [This information was released, remember, by a tabloid newspaper].

Public trust and confidence was affected.’

[Quoted here: http://bit.ly/mcrTph]

Teachers in this country increasingly bear the brunt of our social and political ills. Pay is being frozen, while funding is cut. Creative and dedicated educators are forced to teach to the test, rather than attempt to inspire, to meet meaningless targets. Teachers are abused and harassed daily by children brutalised by urban squalor and inequality. And now their private conduct is subject to scrutiny from an unelected quango of puritans. Why does anyone sign up for this job?

This is a guest post by Andy McGowan, Access Officer at Cambridge University Students’ Union

So Nick and Dave are at it again – and I don’t just mean making embarrassing slips of the tongue like this one. They’ve also gone back to having a go at easy targets as a smokescreen for their own failures – in this case the number of black students admitted to Oxford.

As someone who has worked in widening participation for the past four years, I am obviously keen to see more bright students from under-represented backgrounds get the opportunity to study at Cambridge or Oxford. As a first-generation law graduate labelled by some student journalists as the “free school meals kid”, I am also very keen to see more students from ethnic minority and poor backgrounds do well in life. Under-representation, however, does not automatically mean that the institution is the one to blame.

Let’s look at the issue of wealth. On average, the University of Cambridge admits around 22 students each year who were eligible for free school meals. This is out of just under 3500 UK students admitted each year. Cue shouts of “shame on Cambridge – Cambridge obviously hates poor students”. At first glance, those numbers do look rather damning, but if you look at the issue of educational achievement amongst the poorest students on a bigger scale (think mosaic as opposed to postage stamp), the picture looks rather different. In 2008, only 160 students who were eligible for free school meals achieved 3 As nationally – that is out of around 30,000 students nationally who achieved AAA.

Shadow Higher Education MinisterDavid Lammy recently waded into the debate as well, and drew unfavourable comparisons between Oxbridge and the likes of Harvard and Yale. He mentions the fact that at Harvard (which he actually calls Yale), ‘no one with a household income of under $60,000 [pays] a dime in tuition or cost of living’. He seems to be suggesting that Oxbridge should do the same. Harvard’s financial support costs “a record-breaking $160 million”, which is about the same amount of money that will be generated when every single home undergraduate at Cambridge is charged £9000 a year (£95 million). Yes, Oxbridge have their endowments, but they are peanuts when compared to their Ivy League counterparts. The other way in which Harvard et al get their income is by charging the other 80% of non-eligible students much higher fees ($56,000 a year), and the average parental contribution is $11,400 per year per student. So unless he is all of a sudden advocating removing the cap on fees (which I sincerely hope he isn’t) or unless he knows of a huge pot of money that no-one else has found, it is rather unrealistic to assume that Oxbridge can all of a sudden do financial support the American way.

Lammy also seems to imply that Oxbridge should again ‘do as the Americans do’ by writing to every student from low-participating neighbourhoods who gets, for example, 3 As at AS Level. On the face of it, it sounds like a great idea – invite them along to an open day, give them details about how to apply, maybe even offer some e-mentoring. But like all ingenious plans that have yet to be enacted, there is a fundamental flaw – how exactly are the universities supposed to know which individual students from these backgrounds have got these high grades, without breaching the Data Protection Act? Once again, unless he knows something we don’t, it’s a bit unfair to expect Cambridge and Oxford (or indeed any university) to facilitate the breaking of the law, even if it is in the name of access.

As with students from poor backgrounds, there is again an issue of prior academic achievement impacting on ethnic minority students when it comes to university admissions. But this can’t just be labelled as a general “ethnic minority” issue. For example, if we look at Black students, UCAS data shows that fewer than 9% of Black students achieved 360 UCAS Tariff points or more (as opposed to 33% of Asian students). This means that Black students account for just 1.2% of degree applicants who secure AAA at A Level.

Where are the politicians calling these damning statistics on A Level performance, careers advice and inequality of attainment at secondary and primary education “a disgrace”? Where are the politicians questioning why 80% of students eligible for free school meals don’t get the GCSEs that many sixth form colleges require, let alone universities? And where are the politicians who are asking why, in 2011, your socio-economic background is still the biggest indicator of your likely educational journey? Positive discrimination, widespread use of differential offers and quotas are all methods that have been bandied around for years as a way of increasing representation of the under-represented, yet these would just be the plaster covering the bullet hole of educational inequality. Everyone knows they don’t solve the bigger problem and everyone knows that we need bigger action, But time and again we go for the plaster anyway.

Universities have a huge role to play in raising aspirations amongst students from a younger age and encouraging applications from a diverse range of students, but they cannot do it alone. Politicians constantly saying “naughty old Oxbridge” without the slightest bit of context (or sometimes even evidence) does not help in the slightest – all it does it cement perceptions about the “type” of student who goes to these universities. Instead, they need to be tackling the issue of low attainment, often triggered by low aspirations, amongst those from under-represented backgrounds. This is not about forcing students down one route or another, or claiming that one type of educational journey is less worthy than other. Rather, this should be ensuring that decisions about what and where to study are based on what is best for the individual student, not their gender, race or family income. It should be opening doors rather than shutting them off and it should be about promoting the opportunities available, rather than trying to grab easy headlines.

So yes, I do want to see more money going into outreach work with those schools who never send any students to Oxford and Cambridge; yes, I want to see Cambridge using creative ways to reach out to bright students through engagement with charitable organisations and local community groups as well as schools; yes, I do want to see more universities looking at more than just raw grades and instead consider the potential of the individual by looking at the environment in which those grades were obtained. But it is also time for the Government to up their game. Instead, what they’ve done so far is scrap EMA, treble tuition fees, and abolish AimHigher. So rather than the inevitable headline-grabbing finger-pointing at universities, let’s see their master plan for eradicating educational inequality, because frankly, it is their actions and their complete failure to deal with the bigger issue of educational inequality which are the ‘disgrace’.

Begging your A Level teacher for an extension on your coursework can be an uncomfortable experience. Begging your teachers for a tenner so that you can afford the bus to school is probably somewhat more degrading. Tonight the education secretary, Michael Gove, announced the replacement for the EMA.

The scheme will cost 180 million, a little over a quarter of what was put into the EMA. Just 12,000 students, less than one in every hundred, will qualify for a bursary. These will be the very, very needy. Meanwhile, 90% of the cash will go to headteachers to allocate at their discretion, to help students pay for books, food and transport.

All of which makes sense when you consider the mean spirited rhetoric with which the attack on EMA was justified. “In a slip seized on by Tories”. the Daily Mail reported at the time, Andy Burnham had “conceded that the cash was not all spent on essentials but also on having fun”. Indeed he had “confessed” that students “may spend some of it on food and even the occasional time out with friends”, so that they wouldn’t be completely excluded from the social life of their peers.

It was, of course, unacceptable to the Tory Press that poorer students might be offered the chance to enjoy a bit of basic autonomy while they studied for their A Levels. And apparently it is unacceptable to the coalition government. Like Victorian commoners appealing for charity, and promising not spend any of it on liquor, poorer students will now have to go cap-in-hand to their head-teachers and convince them that they will be good and spend any money they get on books. Please sir, can I have a tenner?

Gove has said that this move “fits in with our agenda of devolving power to head teachers”. In reality, this is sucking power upwards, from low-income students – who have hitherto enjoyed fairly meagre support as a right – towards school heads who will now be expected to act as godfathers. “Headteachers”, Michael Gove tells us, “are best placed to know who needs this money”. Does he honestly believe this? And does he really imagine that students will all be happy to let their teachers in on all of their family circumstances, as a prerequisite to getting help? Without hesitation, I would far sooner hand over such information to a faceless bureaucrat.

This is about making cuts, but it is also about so much more. It is about wiping away any conception of social rights. It is about replacing the ethic of the welfare state with a more ancient – and frankly degrading – system of charity and gratitude.

Guest post by Hannah

Cambridge students fighting for free education

Comparison of fees and maintenance costs for poorer students before and under the £3000 top-up fees system

Comparision of fees and living costs for poorer students at Cambridge and at a less wealthy university before and under the top-up fees system

Comparison of fees and living costs for poorer students at Cambridge under £3000 fees system and £9000 fees system

The Metro today reports a surge in cases in which teachers have been punished or disciplined over their private behaviour. Teachers’ union the NASUWT have hit out at the impact of the General Teaching Council’s code of conduct, which came into effect in 2009 and which demands that teachers “standards of behaviour both inside and outside school that are appropriate given their membership of an important and responsible profession”.

According to the union teachers have been disciplined for such things as attending gay pride, wearing fetish wear, or for facebook photographs showing them drunk or in skimpy attire. In such a situation it is necessary to defend the ,limits of the working day, to reassert that employees sell their labour power, not themselves to their employers. The predicament facing teachers is, it must be said, part of a broader attack on the autonomy of public service professionals that began under New Labour. As the government became increasingly obsessed with managing the behaviour of the people, public servants came to be treated not simply as professionals providing public services, but increasingly, as exemplars of the new model citizen. This blog has reported before on the nurses who were banned from smoking in their unforms, even outside of working hours, and the public sector workers forced to survive on the kind of super-healthy rations that even Jamie Oliver would deem over the top. Quite simply, the authorities got into the habit of treating public sector employees like human billboards.

Yet the attack on teachers’ personal autonomy a threat, not only to workers’ rights, but also to the quality of education. The educational welfare of kids is unlikely to be effected by whether their teachers get drunk, at the weekend, or go to fetish clubs or whatever. Yet they will lose out young, intelligent people who might otherwise join the profession are put off  by such unnecessary controls. The situation for teachers is compounded by the vetting and barring scheme, under which teachers cann effectively be banned for life for all manner of non-criminal behaviours, and perhaps more worryingly, by the rise and rise of  privately sponsored academies. Last year a teacher ended up in trouble after the conservative Christian charity sponsoring her Academy caught site of facebook pictures in which she was, shockingly, wearing a bikini.

Teachers can do a great deal of good for their students, beyond simply instructing them in their subjects. Yet to start treating teachers like quasi-parents is neither fair to them, nor conducive to strengthening our system of education.

To contact Reuben email reuben@thethirdestate.net

A doctor who gave medical assistance to protesters on 9^th Dec has spoken of the police risking a ‘Hillsborough-type’ disaster on Westminster Bridge:

The anaesthetist from Aberdeen Royal Infirmary, who gave medical assistance to the protesters, said that officers forced demonstrators into such a tight “kettle” on Westminster Bridge that they were in danger of being seriously crushed or pushed into the freezing River Thames.

The 34-year-old doctor, who set up a field hospital in Parliament Square, said that people on the bridge suffered respiratory problems, chest pains and the symptoms of severe crushing.

“Police had us so closely packed, I couldn’t move my feet or hands an inch. We were in that situation like that for hours. People in the middle were having real difficulty breathing.

[…]

The Aberdeen doctor added: “The sides of the bridge were only waist high and all it would have taken is one stumble and someone could have gone over the side. I’m surprised that no one died there. And if anyone had been injured, I would have struggled to respond even if I was stood next to them.” She said that when several police became caught inside the kettle they were screaming to get out. “They were experiencing what we were experiencing.”

[My emphasis.]

(She also stated that the ‘vast majority’ of injuries she saw that day were head wounds: “I was surprised how much force the police had used.” Read the whole thing here: http://bit.ly/i4O6V0.)

Hillsborough didn’t occur to me when we stopped moving across the bridge. As we all struggled to find the space to breath and the people got restless, I couldn’t help thinking of the stampede that happened on a bridge in Cambodia several weeks before. (456 dead). It only takes a few to panic and start pushing for people to get trampled.

The police know this. They remember Hillsborough, and know full well the dangers of a crush in such circumstances. Either the police knowingly risked the lives of protesters that day, or they were making it up as they went along. (As they were marching us onto the bridge, I couldn’t shake the feeling that, for all their scary frowning, the police were just as clueless as to the outcome of this as we were.)

Responding to the allegations that police took unnecessary risks that day, a spokesman for Scotland Yard insisted that kettling was used to control only violent sections of the crowd, while minimising the use of force. I can only assume that in the world of law enforcement, ‘sections of the crowd’ means ‘the whole fucking crowd’, while the word ‘force’ doesn’t cover imprisoning a group of people in a wall of batons and riot shields for three hours with no possibility of escape.

But this makes sense in a world in which government ministers can claim with straight faces that their decision to raise tuition fees in no way compromises their pledge not to increase tuition fees; in which the woman shagging the heir to the throne being poked with a stick becomes the very definition of inexcusable violence, while a 20 year old being hit so hard with a baton he needs emergency brain surgery is just good policing in difficult circumstances.

Very often the abuse of language and common sense in this manner by those in power is committed knowingly. But this is much worse: I have a strong suspicion that the police haven’t got a fucking clue what they’re doing. Be afraid.

Come mothers and fathers

Throughout the land

And don’t criticize

What you can’t understand

Your sons and your daughters

Are beyond your command

Your old road is

Rapidly agin’.

Please get out of the new one

If you can’t lend your hand

For the times they are a-changin’.

Wow! What a month! Are we not living interesting times? – Wikileaks revelations: Julian Assange’s locked in Wandsworth! US government sponsored boycotts! hackers fightback! – more financial turmoil: the Irish bailout! the crumbling of the Euro! the unpaid taxes of the mega-corps! – the escalation of the student protests: sit-ins! demos! the humiliation of the Lib Dems! riots and charging horses and attacks on royalty! – plus Clifford versus South Africa! Snow! The Ashes! Wagner on X-Factor! (Cameron really must take notes from Cowell – not only has the slimy-porky-man-peacock learnt how to make your vote meaningless: he’ll even charge you £1.50 for the privilege, now that’s capitalism!)

For example just look at that ‘good day to bury bad news’ items  – Byers, Hoon and Caborn banned from Parliament for, well… essentially for corruption. Not to mention Tory MP David Tredinnick shifty repayment an expenses claim of £755 for a ‘computer programme that uses astrology to diagnose medical conditions’ a story which on any other day would make the front pages for sheer mind-boggling stupidity – Look! Criminal, gullible, bonkers and neurotic all nestled beneath dead-squirrel-Donald Trump-possible-toupe homage. Surely a shoe-in for parliamentarian of the year?

And meanwhile the students throw breezeblocks while a legion of fatuous BBC journalists, one of whom appeared on the news at around 4pm in what appeared to be a tin bicycle helmet for fear of all those loud brash teenagers demanding ‘condemnation of the violence’ – and missing the point entirely (not to mention the baton twirling plods).

The ‘violence’ – and lets be frank its not quite Helmand yet – is bigger than that one protest. It’s the result instead of at least half a decade of dreadful government – protests by millions against an illegal war (happily ignored because they were peaceful) – an economic collapse the culprits for which have been paid off for their greed by their own victims (the fraudsters swanning off straight back into the casino) – and colossal cuts to universities deceitfully presented as vital austerity measures, yet only 1.3 billion will be saved – less than is being spent on the Olympics circus (at the moment the Tories are seeing if they can do without the ‘bread’ side of the equation), ideological cuts which will obliterate the humanities and hugely reduce social mobility as potential students are put off and every institution outside the Russell group goes broke. And finally, perhaps most significantly, the Lib-Dems now proving that not one of our three leading national parties is capable of standing for any principle beyond the pursuit of power for its own sake. Or if not its own sake, that of the plutocrats. This is weirdly the lowest moment for democracy in the UK I can remember. And in the interim the myopic goons in the mainstream press whine about broken windows and mutter dark conspiracies about the ‘Wombles’ and the ‘Whitechapel Anarchists’ and ‘Al Qaeda’ – no wait on that last one.

When Thatcher beat the unions they were already half way to the canvas (I mean how surprising was her victory when even the protest songs seemed to admit defeat in advance – Tracy Chapman, Christy Moore, Billy Bragg – why is it you never sounded like you thought you might win?) But Cameron has picked on kids, students, on a fresh new generation who are tech savvy, with nothing to lose and as we are now seeing – not afraid to mix it. And why should they be lumbered with the fault of the City’s Big Swing Sun King Dicks excesses [say it fast]? The recent student demos may not be simply the climax of the student protest but the beginning I hope of something wider, deeper and more likely to break open the doors of the Bastille. The recession nastiest nips are yet to come: May ‘68? Let’s see what happens around May ‘11.

If only the Labour Party had members worthy of its founding principles: yet I look around and all I see are gnomes. Looks like for the moment the kids will have to do it on their own.

But for now: vive la revolution!

The saga of Charlie Gilmour continues. The day after the biggest protest and mobilisation of police violence since the Poll Tax (and very possibly exceeding it), a photo of a long haired, black clothed young man clinging to one of the flags on the cenotaph was published by the Torygraph in one of their demonic witch-hunts. Within a few hours, the press had identified the youth as Charlie Gilmour, son of a Pink Floyd guitarist.

The Torygraph published 3 articles about him on the web within a minute, and the next day the tabloids went apeshit for pictures of and stories about his whereabouts at the protest. Even before the protests, thanks to a police press release, the tabloids led with the story of ‘peaceful protest hijacked by anarchists’, containing the usual froth designed entirely to divide the protest and allow the police greater powers in the eyes of the Evening Standard’s readership.

Charlie provided another perfect storm for the tabloids. A symbol of rock ‘n’ roll heroism turned wrong, degrading a symbol of real heroism, could hardly have been better constructed if done so artificially. But what really happened around the Cenotaph at that point, as happened on November 30th as well, was horse charges of baton wielding police, driving into a crowd of unprotected citizens, whose only crime was protesting an unjust system. Is this the memory of the cenotaph people would rather invoke? It seems to me that any concept of heroism associated with that stone had already been snuffed out.

Charlie has now been arrested on suspicion of violent disorder, among other charges, and his phone and laptop seized. This is an incredibly serious charge, with a maximum sentence of 5 years imprisonment – and this is the same charge under which many of the arrests on Thursday have been taken forward. On November 10th it was Anti-Social Behaviour, on the 24th it was Breach of the Peace – the police are upping the anti in the courts.

In 2009, several young muslim protesters were arrested at the Gaza demonstrations in London, and charged with assaulting a police officer. Without proper legal advice before or during the police proceedings, they ended up with 2 year sentences. We cannot allow trumped up charges to destroy this movement by making people afraid of turning up on the streets in defense of their education. Charlie Gilmour deserves our full support and solidarity.

For what is it that the cenotaph stands for, but an ossified version of a lie, purporting that war is glorious and death more glorious still? Surely it is the same lie, that the state can do no wrong, that violence by Our Country is always legitimate, which was again envisioned around the base of the cenotaph as Alfie Meadows was taken to hospital.

In the end, it’s the cenotaph which has done more wrong than Charlie. Supporting an idealised vision of war, symbols like the cenotaph have perpetuated violence in Iraq and Afghanistan, long after any of their previous supported could find an excuse, and backing up the disgusting militarisation of the Metropolitan police last Thursday. The real headline should be: ‘Cenotaph arrested for violent disorder; musician’s son is witness.’