Most of the news coverage I've seen of yesterday's violent demonstrations against a hike in tuition fees in London's Parliament Square portrayed it as a show of strength of student protesters.
Yet while there were doubtless numerous students protesting, left-wing and anarchist groups have easily glommed onto the occasion to hijack formerly peaceful demonstrations for their trouble-making purposes.
Kudos to Newsweek's William Underhill for noting as much in his November 10 article at the magazine's website:
Ostensibly, the demonstration, which attracted some 25,000 to Westminster, was called to protest government plans to hike university tuition fees, approved yesterday by Parliament after weeks of fierce public debate. But the language and the violence suggest a wider challenge to authority from anarchists and far left groups looking to hijack the student cause.
Indeed, ahead of yesterday’s clashes police were warning of a resurgence of extremist groups that have little to do with student politics, flourishing long before the financial crisis or the fiscal crackdown imposed by the current Conservative-led coalition government. For some, yesterday’s scenes revived memories of the anticapitalist May Day riot in central London of 2000, when more than 90 people were arrested after a riot that included defacing the same Churchill statue.
The extremists’ role is bad news for the mainstream student bodies that are fighting to reverse the proposed tripling of maximum tuition fees, to $14,500 a year. The risk: that media images of vandalism and assaults on the police will taint the students’ campaign as well as the wider opposition to the government’s program of spending cuts.
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But the moderates may struggle to shake off the fringe groups, fired up by yesterday’s riot and the allegedly heavy-handed response of the authorities. The website of the Whitechapel Anarchist Group, based in London’s rundown East End, claimed today that “young people” have been “taught a valuable—if painful—lesson in whose side the state is on. This is still only the beginning.” The cold start to London’s winter may be about to turn hot.
