Lucy and Miles on the demo, photograph by Betty Hall
By Lucy Hall
Blasting out dub step, noisy young people are singing and dancing around big speakers. Others try to make phone calls over the noise, attempting to meet up with friends. Some have painted faces,some are dressed up in costume- they look ridiculous. Notting Hill Carnival? A party on Clapham Common? No, actually. it’s a 50,000 strong demonstration, and most of us are youngsters.
Since the cuts were announced I’ve protested outside the Tory conference in Birmingham. I've protested here, I've protested there. The marches are always enjoyable. The feeling of standing up for what you believe in is the best kind of feeling, and you are among like-minded people. It is refreshing and inspiring.
But Wednesday’s march against the rise in tuition fees and the cuts was like nothing anything our generation has ever done before; our apathetic, apolitical generation suddenly stepped up, and gave everyone a shock.
As I traipsed into a pub afterwards, with ‘No Cuts’ scrawled across my face in marker pen, eyes rolled. But a middle-aged woman came up to me, one of the minority of older people who had joined in with the demonstration.
‘The media are exaggerating it all massively’ she said, ‘but I’ll tell you what, I think it’s been bloody brilliant. In my generation, we protested all the time, we got things done. This generation is so apathetic and it’s nice to see them fighting for a cause.’
I took this to basically mean, ‘It’s about bloody time.’
So why has it taken this long for our generation to get into gear? The cuts and the damage to education and welfare that the implementation of the cuts will cause is on a scale that has not been seen since Thatcher. But does it really take something this drastic for us to come out in numbers?
We should be fighting all the time against every injustice, every piece of unfair legislation. We shouldn’t just be fighting for ourselves either, for most of us are the privileged ones. We should be fighting for the Burmese, the Palestinians, the Zimbabweans, against the human rights violations that happen across the world on a daily basis, the human rights violations that our government has the power to do something about.
Democracy was hard won, politics is a constant struggle. We need to fight the same battles over and over again. It is exhausting, it is frustrating, but it is what happens in a democracy.
How did it get to the point where a government is trying to charge us 9,000 pounds every year for higher education when less than a decade ago was free?
Until now we have been asleep. It has taken the unexpected and unprepared for extremism of this government to wake us up.
Until now we have been asleep. It has taken the unexpected and unprepared for extremism of this government to wake us up.
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