Tuition Fee Increase Spark UK Student Riots
Earlier this week Cameron announced that tripling tuition fees will be part of his plan to get the economy back on track, meaning prospective students will have to foot some of the bill. This caused outrage in student communities who flocked together from all over the country to march through Westminster, taking in the Millbank building, also known as Conservative HQ.
L ate yesterd ay afternoon, news broke out of riots on the streets, with the Millbank building a key target. Students smashed a ground floor window endangering their own lives and the lives of people inside. The students stormed the building, some making it up to the roofed, where they dropped objects on the police officers below.
Police with shields attempted to contain the crowds, but with just two hundred officers send to a protest made of up around thirty thousand people, they were powerless to make an impact, and focused on protecting staff in the Millbank building. Of course the rowdy mob are to blame for these unacceptable scenes of violence and destruction, doing nothing to help their cause, but the Met police should have planned better for the event.
It was in fact a small number of students causing the trouble, tarnishing the protest as a whole. While the students certainly got publicity, rather than winning public sympathy for their supposed peril, they earned detractors who condemned the way the protest went. If prospective students still want to attend uni, despite the cuts, they will need to take out loans as a student in Hungary would say, to subsidise it.
Protesting students may be getting more than they originally bargained for however, images of the riot were caught on CCTV and those who caused damage or harm to others will be found and prosecuted, possibly compromising their future studies. Students have really given themselves a bad name.