Tea, history and football are three things that Britain is world-renowned for. As I sat doing some history in Brasenose Library last Thursday, it suddenly dawned on me that the British are awful at protests.
Looking down on the High Street at the swathe of students marching against the Browne Review last Thursday, this was clear for all to see. Protesters were queuing and walking round with an air of politeness that the British public are world famous for. There were obviously no football fans in the crowd, either, because the chants were rubbish too. The protesters had no coherent idea about what they were protesting about. The spending cuts? Fee rises? The creation of a Marxist state? I honestly couldn’t tell you.
Unlike the Americans, the British do not do a good peaceful protest. We cannot muster up enough support to march peacefully and effectively. No Britain has a made an oratorical submission to the history of peaceful protest to rival that of Malcom X or Martin Luther King for African American Civil Rights.
Unlike the French, we cannot do violent protest either. In 1968, Parisian students, disgusted at a ban on having women in their rooms, decided to take over the city and came close to overthrowing the government. Now, there were some banners last Thursday which said ‘change the streets of Oxford into Paris’, but this simply isn’t the British way. Violent and forceful British protests usually lead to claims of police brutality from protesters and the police saying that they were just responding to violence instigated by troublemakers. It’s safer than Paris, though – there, they sent in the army and the president retreated to a nuclear bunker.
What was achieved by the Oxford protests? They stopped Vince Cable from visiting, they caused the Bod and Brasenose to shut down, and gave the Socialist Worker its widest circulation in Oxford since World War Two.
But, although they achieved little of value, the protests still provided me with light entertainment for the afternoon. They also provided great distraction from my essay and also proved that radicalism is not dead in Oxford just yet. We just need to put a bit more effort into it.
