Not all students want to change the world. When I was a student, I barely even changed my jeans. Still, plenty do, and because of this the words “student” and “activist” sit next to each other pretty chummily. So you’d sort of imagine they might be good at it. But they aren’t. They’re rubbish.
This is a surprise. It’s sort of like realising that pensioners are rubbish at buying grey clothes, or that the bears actually have an Armitage Shanks showroom tucked away somewhere. And yet, it is true. Society’s most prominent activists are, when it comes to activism, actually pretty hopeless. They may have a lot of fun, but they get nothing done. They get nothing done.
You want to know who is good at activism? Parents. You don’t want to come down on the wrong side of them. Parents kick activist ass. Last week, for example, Gordon Brown indicated that he was ready, probably, to back down over his plans to scrap childcare vouchers. He announced them at the Labour Party Conference in September and those parent activists, they went into overdrive. Within weeks, more than 80,000 people had signed a petition asking him not to. Two months later, Gordon’s U-turn.
And not a keffiyeh in sight. Nobody organised a sound system. I suppose quite a few people probably did have sex with each other as a result of this protest, but they were probably going to anyway, and hardly any of them will have done it in tents. From a student activist point of view, as protest, this was unrecognisable. And that’s why it worked.
So what’s the problem with students? Well, I’d say various things.
Personally, I only marched once as a student. (I changed my jeans a few time more, I promise.) That was over the Government’s proposals to introduce tuition fees. 1998, or thereabouts. University was free at the time, and the thought it might one day not be seemed outrageous. So we marched through the town, we waved banners and blew whistles, and then we all met up in a City centre park for an impromptu “awareness-raising” boozy rave type thing. It seemed a good idea at the time, but in retrospect, I can’t think of anything that could have been more incredibly counterproductive. A bunch of frivolous middle-class idiots, whose lives were subsidised by the working taxpayer, flaunting this by spending a day holding up traffic and disturbing office workers, before heading off to get pissed in a field. It’s not exactly great PR, is it?
The world looks different when you get older. I know that probably looks like a terribly patronising thing to say, but it’s true. If your views don’t change, they should. It’s very easy to be anti-capitalism when you’ve never had a salary or a mortgage. It’s every easy to be green when you don’t have kids to take to school. By the same token, activism at a student level often looks suspiciously like too much fun.
I once heard a vociferous denunciation of the State of Israel from a guy freshly back from a gap year in the West Bank. He almost had me convinced, right up until the point at which he told me that the best thing about the West Bank was the way you could take acid and have sex on the beach at weekends. How can you have hobbies like that, and still be a fan of Hamas? I think the same, every time, about Climate Camp. If you really want to save the environment, then maybe some kind of Climate Video Conference might be a better idea.
The main way that student activists go wrong, though, is not by being students but by being activists. Successful activists aren’t really activists. They’re just people, who have a beef and get active. Nobody should be an activist first.
When I meet a passionate environmentalist who is also anti-capitalist, anti-vivesectionist, anti-fox-hunting, and pro-Marxist, while simultaneously being terribly worried about police brutality and Israel’s actions in Gaza, my first thought is that they have too much time on their hands. My second is that they might as well just go the whole hog, and get a religion. And my third, often, is that they ought to change their jeans.
