The destruction and violence that went on in London during the protest about the government's intention to increase student tuition fees is to be roundly condemned but there should be no surprise on the government's part - particularly the Liberal Democrat wing of the government - that many of our young people are angry about the breaking of a solemn promise and about their views being dismissed as fantasy.
Over time those who have been personally and professionally involved in the care of children and young people get to know that when parents break the promises they make to their children, the children are upset. If a parent breaks a solemnly made promise it is destabilising for the child because it threatens the trust that is necessary in the relationship between parent and child. When promises are broken frequently there is a significant chance that the child will not only become troubled but may also become troublesome. When you feel powerless, what else is there to do if those you trust to know better than you continually do what they have demanded that you do not do ? for example, break promises.
Once upon a time, not too long ago, students throughout the United Kingdom enjoyed free further and higher education. As a state we should have been proud of this. Now only Scotland provides its young people with free higher education. Many of us who benefited from a free higher education were also provided with a grant to help us with our living expenses, and, as we left home, often for the first time, we were warned by our parents and elders not to get into debt. This sensible advice was sidelined by the big financial institutions' drive to increase their customers' debt and to increase the numbers of debtors. We know how that ended.
Members of the last "New Labour" government should hang their heads in shame for having, in effect, made student debt compulsory and so now it is appalling to see the Liberal Democrat faction in the coalition government fail to pin its pre-election pledges to the mast of free higher education. The government says we cannot afford to provide free post-school education for our youth. It suggests we are financially naive to consider it. If this is so, how can we afford to save the banks from the consequences of what in the heady pre-general election days Mr. Cable described as their outrageous financial activities ? how can we still afford to allow many employees of these institutions to pocket obscene amounts of money in bonuses ? and how can we afford to finance wars (in which many of our young people have already lost their lives) that few want or believe necessary ? If we can afford to do these things and yet cannot give our young people free higher education, then the whole fallacious edifice deserves to fall.
The vote has been counted. Government policy will for the time being prevail but perhaps the many who are sympathetic to the student's cause should continue the protest peacefully, each in his or her own way, to remind the government - intent it seems on marginalising our young people - that the students were and are not on on their own. Their issues remain everyone's issues. It is not, as Mr Clegg would have us believe, our young people who are living in "Dreamland."
( First posted on the goodenoughcaring.com home page on December 10th, 2010).
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