Millbank was staffed by that narrow group of graduates who’d bought into the whole story of mainstream politics: the bad suit, the neat hair, the drug-free lifestyle led in hopes of one day becoming an MP. Now they found themselves besieged by their alter egos: girls dressed like Lady Gaga, boys wearing pixie boots and ironic medallions.
By 2 p.m. the cackle of circling media helicopters alerted the whole of central London that something was going on. Students had pushed their way into the forecourt of Millbank Tower. Police, in pitifully small numbers, found themselves squashed against its plate-glass windows. Now the protesters surged into the building using side entrances, fire-doors and eventually—after smashing the glass—the actual windows. Soon, a crowd of students were milling about on the roof. Others had already made it to the floor where the Conservative apparatchiks, locked inside, were watching it all on television.
Edward Woollard, an eighteen-year-old further education student, recklessly threw a fire extinguisher off the roof towards the police lines.1 In the forecourt the chant went up: ‘Stop throwing shit.’ The police, outnumbered, looked helpless.
Then things petered out. The students hung around a bit, lit fires with placards, painted some graffiti and then went home. But on their flame-lit faces you saw the look of people who had discovered the power of mayhem.
Millbank was one of those unforeseeable events that catalyze everything. The Liberal Democrats under Nick Clegg had ridden a wave of centre-left support in the May 2010 general election. The party’s MPs had signed a pre-election pledge not to raise university tuition fees; after gaining power as part of the Conservative-led coalition, they promptly signed up to support the tripling of fees, to £9,000 a year, and to abolish a small weekly grant for low-income school students.
The reaction among working-class school students went beyond outrage: they panicked. It was an impossible sum to comprehend. One told me: ‘My mum only earns £9,000 a year.’
Both the political and media classes anticipated that opposition to the fee increase would be led by the usual ‘student leader’ types, eager to join the Millbank set themselves. They thought Nick Clegg’s residual popularity with students—who, like @littlemisswilde, had voted massively for the Lib Dems in May 2010—would hold things together. They assumed, above all, that the youth were too engrossed in their iPhones and their Twitter feeds, too in thrall to postmodernist insouciance, to notice the freight train of economic doom coming at them.
Millbank shattered all these certainties. The mainstream media decided that, even if this student movement came to nothing, they had better start covering it as if it were part of something bigger—though they did not yet know what that something would be.
Spontaneous horizontalists
29 November 2011. At the London School of Oriental and African Studies, they had occupied a room in the library, which they’d plastered in hand-crayoned manifestos. Their demands were modest, focused on the running of the school, the non-victimization of the protesters and, finally, a request for the college management to state its public opposition to the fee increase.
In the corner was a prayer area for Muslim students. On the floor lay those iconic books: Hardt and Negri’s Multitude; a Foucault primer; Debord’s Society of the Spectacle, Fanon’s collected works.
They’d called a mass meeting about 300 strong, a young guy with a beard officiating. To his right huddled a small group of hard leftists; at the back were some of the college staff, including a few veterans of 1968 with long grey hair and beards. The question was whether to continue the occupation—they had been going for a week—but very few people spoke to the issue. One man, a young Syrian, stood up to say: ‘What we’re doing is having a global impact. This French journalist came up to me and said, this is amazing, this never happened before. What are the Brits doing? I said—what, you think the French are the only ones who can riot?’
The method, as people speak, is to waggle your hands: upwards if you agree, downwards if not, more vigorously if you agree more, etc. I first saw it used in the late 1990s by the anti-globalization movement. But in the space of ten years the whole menu of ‘horizontalist’ practice —forms of protest, decision-making, world view—has become the norm for a generation.
And the meeting we are attending is not the only meeting: there is another one going on, in the form of tweets and texts that people are sending to their friends in other colleges. This is normal in the student movement: ‘virtual’ meetings that will never be minuted or recorded. As @littlemisswilde describes it: ‘We use Twitter to expand the room.’
It comes to the final vote. Shall they stay in occupation? One of the Sixty-Eighters pipes up with a last-minute call for a strike and occupation of the main admin block. He is applauded—almost as if it is okay to applaud somebody whose politics and hairstyle date from the epoch of applause instead of hand-waggling.
But this is a blip. Most of the meeting is conducted in an atmosphere of flat-faced calm. This is an obvious but unspoken cultural difference between modern youth protest movements and those of the past: anybody who sounds like a career politician, anybody who attempts rhetoric, espouses an ideology, or lets their emotions overtake them is greeted with a visceral distaste. The reasons are hard to fathom.
First, probably, it’s because there is no ideology driving this movement and no coherent vision of an alternative society. Second, the potential for damage arising from violence is larger than before: the demos, when they get violent, immediately expose the participants to getting jailed for serious offences, so they will go a long way to avoid getting angry. Third, and most important, it seems to me that this generation knows more than their predecessors about power. They have read (or read a Wikipedia summary of) political thinkers like Foucault, Deleuze, Dworkin. They realize, in a way previous generations of radicals did not, that emotion-fuelled action, loyalty, mesmeric oratory and hierarchy all come at an overhead cost.
At the end of the meeting, the consensus is to stay in occupation for another night. ‘That’s good,’ smiles the bearded guy announcing the result, ‘because my house is shit anyway.’
Day X: Kettled youth
After Millbank, in the occupations, squats and shared houses, the makeshift ideology of the students had veered rapidly towards a kind of makeshift anarchism. ‘Don’t underestimate this generation, Paul,’ one chided me. ‘Unlike you, they’ve had to do tests every month of their lives; some of them were working for the Lib Dems and Labour six months ago, but they are so angry now, some of them are heading in the direction of insurrectionary violence.’ As the mood changed, students started to talk about a ‘Day X’. The posters proclaiming this new demonstration, slated for 24 November, had begun to borrow the imagery of Paris 1968.
But since Marx is out of fashion, and Lenin and Mao have been branded left fascists, who else is there to study but the Frenchman whose musings have become required reading in the era of Lady Gaga: Guy Debord?
Many students were familiar with Debord and his Situationist movement, for the simple reason that he is taught on every art course, and the big London art schools—Slade and Goldsmiths—were centres of militancy. But also because, as we will see, some of the Situationist tactics that failed in May 1968—basically, spreading out to create chaos—do not look so ludicrous if you own a Blackberry.
While the undergraduate occupation movement grew, the sixteen-to eighteen-year-olds at further education colleges (the British equivalent to high school) were facing a double hit. If they got to university, they would be the first to pay the fee increases. But in the interim the government had decided to cut the Education Maintenance Allowance, a payment of up to £30 a week Labour had introduced in 2004 to combat —or conceal, depending on your viewpoint—structural youth unemployment. At the time of its abolition, 647,000 under-eighteens were receiving EMA. Though conceived as a kind of paternalistic ‘pocket money’, most of those I talked to were so poor that they were spending the money on essential