One thing I keep on trying to explain to those who want Obama to fail in order for progressive politics to commence, or who claim the administration is basically a right wing republican one, is the REAL experience of having a non stimulus, expenditure cutting government in power in the UK.
Well today, within a mile of where I live, students – protesting at an 80 per cent cut in the university teaching budget and a 200 percent increase in college fees, have occupied the centre of British democracy: Parliament Square. There have been mounted police horses charging groups of students (a shocking scene I haven’t seen since the Poll Tax Riots of the Thatcher years). Graffiti has been daubed on government buildings. Windows in the Treasury and Supreme Court smashed. Ten police have been seriously injured: twenty demonstrators.
And now the dispersed protestors – many of them schoolchildren – are looting shops and smashing windows on Oxford Street (our main shopping artery) and have surrounded the car containing Prince Charles and Camilla on the way to the theatre, smashing a window, kicking the doors, and covering the car with paint
I have no truck with the small number of anarchists involved in this violence. But they are only out, and only get the space to conduct such activities, because of the massive anger – especially among young people – about this change in policy. Their anger is particularly focused on the Conservative’s minority Coalition Partners – the Liberal Democrats – many of whom were elected in University towns because they made personal pledges to abolish tuition fees, but have actually tripled them
The vote to increase fees in Parliament cut the Coalition’s majority to 20, with half the Lib Dems rebelling against their leadership
I can’t help feeling that this is what happens if the you abandon the politics of pragmatism, and the right gain power in the wake of a split discredited centre left.
To many, New Labour under Brown and Blair became the kind of apology for progressive values, triangulators, traitors, and cheats. Yet, when the protest vote split the left, and the right gained power, things for the ordinary populace were a lot worse.
These student protests are only the first signs of discontent with right wing cuts. A huge rise in value added tax won’t come in until January. Then the huge cuts in benefits will also start to hurt. The main victims of the Coalitions Cuts are those who can least afford to pay for the failure of the finance system – the poor, the vulnerable, the sick, the very young and very old.
This is just the beginning of trouble in the UK. But there’s a lesson here for my American Friends.
I don’t think you realise how bad things could be.
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