Trouble at t'campus: where is this going?

I was a teenager when the anti-war protests hit US universities (and Grosvenor Square) and there was one of those historically quite frequent Paris uprisings.  It all seemed fairly apocalyptic at the time, with an undercurrent of Marxism & Trotskyism and something of a ‘radicalisation’ of a cohort of youth.  University-educated youth, that is, which in the UK at that time was a fairly modest percentage of the whole.  Large books are written on the impact this had – which wasn’t nearly as much as its instigators hoped; certainly not as radical or instantaneous as they expected, even if it might have set off some kind of decades-long Gramscian process.

When I was at the university myself in the ’70s, things were still fairly ‘robust’.  There were pro-IRA meetings in pubs (with the occasional actual IRA man in attendance) and a readiness to resort to occupations of buildings, street-skirmishing, fist-fights etc on a fairly frequent basis.  I recall a spectacular (and very well-organised) pitch battle between the Trots and a visiting band of National Front: a set-piece medieval contest.  The 1980s seemed to put an end to this, and a curiously placid thirty-year period has ensued where very little campus violence has happened at all**.

Well, if the USA is its usual harbinger of trends, this might all be about to end.  In America there’s no mainstream political outlet for pro-Palestinian sentiment (not even Bernie Sanders), absent which something ad hoc is bound to occur.  And there’s a fairly violent anti-anti reaction, seemingly from off campus.  As happened in the ’60s, it falls to an out-of-touch Democrat to preside over this, so a statesmanlike resolution seems unlikely and matters will fall to the frequently less-than-impressive local authorities.  The university authorities also seem fairly clueless as to what to do.  And elections loom.

Any lessons for us?  Well, Starmer is dead set against having the ‘official’ Labour Party offer any sort of mainstream political outlet for pro-Palestinian sentiment; and the university authorities are fairly clueless … so we’re also in a position where revolting students – in a vastly bigger overall student population than 50-60 years ago – are left to their own devices++.  Oh, and yes, elections loom here, too.

There are many dimensions to this but one that interests me particularly is: how does it play out in the GE?  Will the malcontents all vote for Galloway’s party?  The Greens?  I just can’t see a political pressure-valve for pro-Palestinian students, or indeed anyone with those sympathies.  Or maybe we find there aren’t so many malcontents at all.

The ‘traditional’ student rebel never wanted a mainstream political outlet anyway, as a matter of pride.  They wanted to hate The Man in all his besuited manifestations.  Maybe, then, they are quietly happy at their rebellious work today, and will just graduate in due course to get on with the rest of their lives.  Could be a few smashed windows in the meantime, however.  Oh, and no statesmanlike resolution from Prime Minister “DPP” Starmer, either.

ND 

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** Oddly, though, the little dears are so permanently petrified (of whom?) that there are key-pad locks on every door, where once everyone came and went as they pleased.  I have various fairly regular contacts with undergraduates and sometimes over a drink they will say – it seems your generation had more fun than we do ..?   I think they are right.  It’s sad.

++ I haven’t been to Germany for a while but from a distance it looks like many of the same factors are at work there, too.  France?