By Alex S,
Yesterday, a bunch of angry students got together and smashed the pot noodle out of Tory HQ, making Daily Mail readers quiver in their armchairs and everyone else form rational opinions. People are already looking back to the 1980’s with nostalgia, particularly at that long employed cry of ‘Tory Scum,’ and everyone is sitting in two categories: for and against.
While it’s all very well saying shut up to those who don’t agree with you but that’s not actually a real argument. You see, violent protest in not a new thing. We haven’t conjured it out of pent up rage from lack of masturbation and waiting for the new series of Breaking Bad. In fact, violent protest has, believe it or not, been around forever and it has actually worked. What the mummy’s boys on the left who can’t handle a bit of fire don’t realise is that peaceful and violent struggle often walk hand in hand, one being essential to the other to work and vice versa.
In the early 20th century, women were seen as accessories to the house, as tools for the benefit of males and as such they weren’t very happy about it. They weren’t allowed to vote and so they decided that the best way to get equal was to get the vote and so this is exactly what they did. The Pankhursts were notable suffragists/suffragettes who initially started to campaign peacefully, through leaflets and marches. However, a few soon realised that this wasn’t working and all the government were doing was force feeding them through their noses and laughing at their puny attempts to take power. Thus, a militant wing was born and they smashed windows (sound familiar?) burnt down buildings and generally caused havoc for the government at the time. Women were eventually granted the vote and so it can be argued that this violence was essential in making the government sit up and realise what it was the public wanted. At the time, newspapers across the country vilified them and damned their actions as despicable. Now they are looked back on as important figures in British history that were unhappy with the state of affairs and did something about it. The gift of hindsight is a great one and maybe in a hundred years times, those masked lads will be figures of importance. Who knows?
Now, when innocent people start getting hurt, then you know you’ve gone to far. This is one of the reasons the IRA didn’t achieve a unified Ireland. Once you start causing serious casualties, people start to lose sympathy with you. A lot of students are angry at what’s going on and this is just one way of venting this beef with society. We don’t deserve to be raped by a government that is completely going against everything that people voted for. The fact is that those in charge now are the ones that benefitted from a free university system and yet they’re the ones with the audacity to want to charge us extortionate amounts of money. It’s important to make your views heard. You’ve only got to look at today’s papers to see where the attention lies; it’s not with the 50,000 voices that marched, it’s with the 15 broken panes of glass at Tory HQ.
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Alex S. is a first year student at a London College. Guest Blogs are always welcome
