Protests have been high on the agenda throughout 2010 and while some have had a positive impact, the student protests about tuition fees in November seemed to do more harm than good. With a solid cause behind them and a lot of favourable public opinion they appeared to have everything to gain from a large scale protest, but when things descended into ineffectual violence they threw it all away almost over night.
Protests have the potential to have a genuinely positive impact on everything from public awareness, government policies and business decisions. They have changed the world in which we live in many times in the past, with a number of notable examples, including helping to bring an end to the horror show of the Vietnamese War, creating independence in India, bringing about both an end to slavery and the advancement of the Civil Rights movement in the USA, as well as putting pressure on governments to pursue nuclear disarmament.
In more recent years, protests, along with the new interaction levels we have thanks to social media and the internet, have helped to safeguard BBC 6 Music, while modern protest orgnisations use these modern means of communication to generate and deliver massive petitions to government leader and the UN on everything from human rights to climate change.
However, the credible arguments behind the student protests were lost amid violence, resulting in a complete lack of positive impact. Losing the sympathy vote of the general public, students were reduced to the image of angry vandals, instead of the insightful voice of youth, determined to safeguard a brighter future for themselves and their future equivalents.
With so many positive protests to learn from, it’s sad to see students not paying attention to history and simply giving in to destructive outbursts. If we’d used our votes effectively during the general election maybe we wouldn’t have found ourselves in a Britain on the brink of an exclusionary higher education system.
With the higher fees proposals passed in both the House of Commons and the House of Lords’, it’s hard to look at the student protests and see any good in their methods whatsoever. With a private sector mentality ushering its way into the UK, maybe the student population can find a genuine voice of protest that can do more than shatter a little glass. If you’re a student and you’re looking for protest methods that have a proven track record of success you might want to do a little reading on the work of Martin Luther King, Gandhi, Hugh Brock, Pat Arrowsmith, Michael Randle, Frank Allaun and Walter Wolfgang.
For anyone that took part in the 2010 student tuition fees protest violence you can look back on one of the worst examples of protest activity in recent years and know that you helped to seal the fate of students for years to come.
