University education. It’s not all its cracked up to be. Historians like me don’t have to do any work, so we indulge ourselves in more frivolous pursuits – running the country, say, or watching a Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em boxset. Surely this says something about how pointless university is. It must mean something.

My great-grandfather had to wake up at 4am, cycle ten miles to the pit, do ten hours’ hard manual labour, and cycle back again. I have to wake up at 4pm, cycle ten minutes to the Bod, do two hours’ reading about marginally interesting things and then brass off to the King’s Arms.

The Government, as you may know, is considering abolishing state humanities funding. In truth we don’t need it. Even at Oxford – the best undergraduate history course in the world – it would be possible to complete the work within a year of dedicated study, and moreover to complete it without the bother of attending university.

This idea’s a bit radical, but it certainly would work. If you live near to a good library and travelled to visit a tutor once weekly, then that’s your degree right there; motor board on, and real life to look forwards to. My point is that Humanities teaching should be abolished at universities. It’s organised reading. A list of books, the odd tutorial, and occasional public lecture is all that’s honestly required.
(This is ignoring the purposeless decreptitude of much of the reading itself. Academics are nonce writers. We ought to be sticking to the good stuff, not JStoring outdated bollocks from the 70s that no-one really cares about.)

Anyway. What should we do with the old colleges? Turn them over to masses – no. Turn them over to the scientists – hell no. Turn them over to the city of Oxford- you must be out of your mind. Nah, we should make them into hotels. Big, shiny hotels where the City dwellers can come and gloat over the city dwellers below. Move over Randolph, the Oxonian Ritz-Carltons are incoming. Effectively, it would be one big orgy where all the former humanities students can come and hold their lavish banquets and trendy ‘up in the clouds’ debates. That’s what they basically already are, anyway. Let’s make it official.

What happened?

You know that thing you totally meant to go to? Well, 30,000 people did. Incensed by the tripling of tuition fees and Higher Education cuts proposed by the government, hordes of angry students descended on the capital. The placards were seriously impressive. ‘We’re not the only ones willing to take it up the arse Nick Clegg’ from the LGBT socs; the immortal ‘Down with this sort of thing’ and ‘We’re not Sam Cameron, you can’t fuck us’ added wit and bravura to the march. Irreverent as this might sound, it got rather serious later on when over a hundred anarchists and students starting smashing up the Tory HQ – burning, looting and generally making it all the more difficult for the rest of us to make our voices heard. The rowdy ‘children of the revolution’ eventually made it onto the building’s roof, brandishing the red flag. The police finally brought the whole afternoon to a close as a van loads of riot officers took back the Tory stronghold.

What the papers say

The Mail’s take was actually fairly accurate. Not even it would deny that the smashin’ was ‘the actions of a disgraceful minority of balaclava wearing Left-wing agitators.’ Liberal papers were more sympathetic, largely because their esteemed editors wish they were doing this sort of thing while actually sitting behind their desks with only the Wire to look forwards to. Guardian: ‘the protests may be a lightning rod for wider public unease with the government’s public spending strategy.’ In other words, the Tories should be ousted. How nice that our press is so objective.

What now?

It won’t make a blind bit of difference. Nick Clegg is not going to change his U-turn merely because he is told to by a unruly mob of fire-extinguisher throwing activists. Defections are not made lightly. And unless every single Lib Dem MP rebels (and, even less likely, every single Labour member votes against) the fees will go through the House of Commons. Students walking about outside the Palace of Westminster will not change the hard realities of politics. Vandalism and battery don’t get you far either: the po-po have already arrested over 60 for the Tory headquarters cock-up. What has happened, though, is to give some tabloid publicity to what was otherwise a dull and largely middle-class bitch-slap of the ruling powers. It’s not often student issues get on the front of the Sun (apart from the occasional Lacrosse initiations), and arguably any publicity is good publicity, so even the violence had an advantage. But lets not pretend it was a good idea.

In the past week there have been many articles printed in the mainstream press which attempt to discredit the movement against Higher Education cuts and increased tuition fees. This weekend saw The Mail on Sunday’s latest session of protester-bashing with a piece slating the ‘hypocrisy’ of the demonstrating middle classes, which, quite predictably, took Oxford students as its main targets. Aside from the numerous falsities and misquotations, the questionable techniques used to gain information, and the weakness of the conclusion, which showed little more than that some protesters went to good state schools, the argument itself – that people whose families would be able to afford the proposed tuition fees are nothing but hypocrites if they fight against them – is deeply flawed. With this mind, it is simply wrong to suggest, as do The Mail and others, that protesters who campaign against something which will not directly affect them cannot have any worthy reason to demonstrate; protesting in solidarity with less privileged students, or on the basis of principle is not an option – according to them.

The tabloids seem unaware of the irony at work when they criticise the Millbank activists as hypocrites. In all the excitement of the recent manhunts for those who broke the windows of Tory HQ, the real hypocrites and criminals seem to have escaped unscathed. Could anyone stand as a better example of self-contradiction than Nick Clegg? Perhaps only fellow Oxonian, David Cameron, can match his level of duplicity. In his extreme reaction to the events at Millbank, (a reaction disproportionate to the breaking of a few windows), Cameron seems to have conveniently forgotten not only his own Bullingdon club days of smashing and trashing, but also the fact that the proposed cuts are a violent and destructive act against an entire nation. His vehement defence of the innocent, fragile panes of glass at Millbank only highlights, in contrast, his neglect of millions of the country’s poorest and most vulnerable who will be massively hit by the cuts; he wants activists to face “the full force of the law” for glass damage but takes no responsibility for the lives he is about to destroy. Why is the media not holding the real guilty parties to account?

The Daily Mail’s attack on middle class campaigners follows an early media attempt to characterize those involved in the direct action at Millbank as ‘professional agitators’ and ‘rent-a-mob lefties’, always up for a round of random vandalism and thuggery. Photographs of random protesters (often seemingly under the age of eighteen) were printed in a wave of name and shame style articles designed to instill fear in protesters and incite the public to turn against what they called the tiny independent group of extremists. But last week’s direct action was not conducted by a ‘small extremist faction’, as is shown by one of the best photos of the demonstration, taken from the roof of Millbank. Pictured are crowds of thousands below in the courtyard, and the caption underneath reads, ‘The tiny rogue minority. Can you spot it?’ Similarly, there has been media outrage that the protest was “hijacked by a load of anarchists – not even students!” as if the terms ‘anarchist’ and ‘student’ are somehow mutually exclusive. There is no evidence at all that the activists at Millbank were not students anyway, and going by sight only (unless students have developed some common physical feature by which they can all be identified) it is highly misleading to suggest that it was possible to know this.

And it is precisely this point, that we are not one small identifiable group of people that makes our movement strong, and really threatens the Government. Far from being detrimental to the cause, the fact that school, sixth-form, and university students, teachers, lecturers, tutors, unionists and workers from all professions marched together, in unity, is not only an incredible sight in times of apparent political apathy, but is also absolutely essential if cuts are to be successfully resisted. Historically, solidarity has, like civil disobedience been extremely powerful in winning campaigns against the state. At this very moment for example, the campaign against regressive changes to pension laws in France, are massively strengthened by the active support of thousands of lycéens.

It is convenient for both the media and the Government to characterize the direct action of the 10th November as the work of one confined social or political group, be that the middle classes or the ‘anarchist layabouts’. Conflating the different groups and individuals involved provides them with one clear target, and aims at dismissing the very real threat which the movement poses to the powers attempting to enforce the cuts (the powers that is, with whom Aaron Porter has so keenly attempted to stay in favour in order to secure his own future career). More than four thousand people from all ages, backgrounds, professions and political affiliations have now signed the statement in solidarity with those arrested at Millbank. Unfortunately for the coalition Government and the mass media, we have diversity, solidarity and unity; this is only just the beginning of great resistance to come.

OxfordEducation Campaign has called on Oxford students and lecturers to participate in the national day of walk-outs against the cuts, assembling at the Carfax Tower next Wednesday 24th November, at 12 noon.

Michael Crick is not what I expected. As a journalist who moves through Parliament Street like a shikari through the Kashmiri cloud-forest, and as the only man ever to have been both President of the Oxford Union and Editor of Cherwell, I had imagined Michael Crick to be the hackiest hack in Britain. Avuncular. Utterly at ease. Perhaps ever so slightly condescending.

The man in front of me is none of these things. He orders himself a slim-line tonic, citing two large glasses of wine at lunch earlier. It’s November 10, but he’s not wearing a poppy. Instead, an enormous and immaculate Ralph Lauren scarf – more of a stole, really – splashes scarlet over his chest. Little things matter in Crick’s world.

We make small talk about the student protests a mile away in Westminster. Crick mentions he went down to London for just this kind of demonstration in 1976; I ask if he would be out there now if he were 21 again. He dodges the question, a little awkwardly.

Well then, I continue, are the late 70s coming back? Rising unemployment, crashing cuts, simmering race issues, polarised politics – is Britain about to become an interesting country again? “I doubt it,” says Crick confidently. “Maybe a bit. But I don’t think you will see the level of unrest on anything like the scale that you saw in the 60s, 70s and early 80s.

“Although certain uninformed journalists” – I blush – “might say ‘aw, we’re back to the 70s’, these rallies are just token gestures. I don’t think we will return to the unrest that we saw in the 70s. I know you’ve just come from one of these demonstrations, and I’m sorry to disappoint you, but it ain’t gonna be like it was then.”

At this precise point in time just as Crick is speaking – I checked when I saw the news – 200 protesters burst through the police cordon into Millbank Street, heading for the Conservative Party HQ with grim determination. Just saying.

So. I have one of the most influential journalists in the country sitting opposite me, a man with more contacts in his little black book than Arnold Goodman, and more leads in Westminster than the National Grid. What shall we talk about? Journalism, of course.

And, surprisingly, Crick is both deprecating and proud about his profession. Its biggest failing, he begins, is its shallowness. “It’s a very imperfect profession,” he says. “The number of journalists who can read a balance sheet or understand company accounts is few.” Finance, science, Islam: all burning questions of the day that require a specialist knowledge beyond the average journalist’s expertise. So they are not held to account.

Crick is sceptical of the media’s power and reach: “We are one of the checks and balances in a free society. Parliament…the legal profession…the lobby groups – there are various forces at work holding people in power to account. I had an editor on Newsnight years ago who used to come in every morning and say, ‘right, how can we fuck the government today?’ He didn’t mean the then Labour government, he meant the government in the sense of ‘small G’, the people running, er, the world.”

So just how much has Crick buggered up the system? “I don’t know how successful I have been in fucking the government. I mean, I think I’ve probably irritated them, I know I’ve irritated them. There are times when they wish I wasn’t there.” Just in time, he comes over a little bashful. “I’m pretty sure I haven’t, you know, brought about any huge changes in government policy.”

This is partly modesty. Wikipedia tells me that during the elections earlier in 2005 somebody said the five most terrifying words in English were “Michael Crick is in reception.”

One of the most charming things about Michael Crick is his frankness about where he has been right and where he has been wrong. A life-long and ardent Manchester United fan, Crick is more forthcoming about The Betrayal of a Legend, his attack on the club’s spendthrift new management under an arrogant rookie called Alex Ferguson, than he is about his more political works on Jeffrey Archer and militancy in Britain.

“The ultimate judgement that my co-author and I reached was utterly wrong,” he says, “which was that so long as you are obsessed with money then you won’t be successful on the pitch. United then went on to prove me totally wrong. But it was revolutionary in that nobody up until that point had ever applied the normal kind of journalistic scrutiny you would apply to all sorts of other organisations to a sporting institution like that.Lots of modern politics really is sport. And we do cover it increasingly like sport. You know the Match of the Day highlights followed by the panel discussion? Well that’s how we cover politics these days. Since politics became, y’know, non-ideological in the last 20 years, it has really been a contest between the Blues and the Reds.

“The policies pursued by the Blues and the Reds are almost interchangeable- y’know, the Blues pursue one policy on, say, tuition fees” – his eyes sparkle – “and the Yellows decry it. Then they swap jobs and the Blues and the Yellows come into power and adopt that very policy, and then the Reds decry it.

“It is increasingly a sporting contest between two tribes who, like United and City fans, just hate each other. But the significant division between them is nothing like as great as it used to be.” You get the impression Crick would have loved the chariot-racing politics of Imperial Rome. His version of politics is about people, not policies, and, listening to him, you get the feeling that the back-stabbing rabble-rousing puppet-mastering machinations of the Senate never went out of style in the western world.

Meanwhile, the far left has had its teeth pulled out. “Polls suggest that most of the public do feel the time has come to cut public expenditure,” says Crick, “and I don’t think we’re going to see this government’s activities halted by industrial unrest. As for poor students and demonstrators, why should anybody take any notice of them?”
He giggles. 30 Millbank St burns. But in the long run, it looks like Crick will be right. Politics ultimately comes down to a group of men and women sitting around a table and compromising furiously. The hoodie-wearing placard-wielding student in me hates him for it, but Crick understands the nature of power better than any other man I have ever met.

Who was Benjamin Britten?

Britten was the leading British composer writing in the middle of the twentieth century, one of the few British artists who established and maintained an international reputation as a serious composer from early in his career. His attitudes were rooted in the left-wing intellectualism of the 1930s. His strong pacifism shaped his artistry: outsiders or those who suffer from misguided exercise of power are consistently alluded to in his music. British composers often display a fine understanding of vernacular texts; Britten’s friendship with the poet W.H. Auden in his twenties helped intensify his sensitivity to literary works and his music frequently engages with these on a sophisticated level.

What was his contribution to music?

He had a huge impact on the musical and cultural wellbeing of Britain. He established the English Opera Group, which toured the country to introduce operas, including his own chamber operas, to audiences nationally. He believed passionately in creating and performing music of the highest standard, yet he also knew that amateur musicians were to be encouraged and he wrote much music both for them and for children. His Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra was the piece of music (alongside Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf) that introduced schoolchildren to the world of classical music in the second half of the last century.

What made him such a great musician?

Britten’s composing output was consistently sustained by– at times impinged upon by– his activities as a practical musician. Alongside his composing he was hugely active as a conductor and pianist and a remarkable archive of recordings of this is available for study and enjoyment. With his partner, the tenor Peter Pears, Britten performed countless recitals at home and abroad, introducing his own work alongside the songs of Dowland and Purcell as well as the finest Lieder composers of the Western canon, Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Wolf. He collaborated also with many other leading musicians of the day, including the composer, Shostakovich, and cellist Mstislav Rostropovich.

What is his legacy?

Immediately after his death in 1976 Britten went briefly out of fashion: composers often do. But in the years since, various works are consistently performed in mainstream repertory. The two most frequently heard are his 1945 operatic masterpiece Peter Grimes and his most ardent pacifist statement, War Requiem of 1962. Britten also had a keen business sense and he established a music festival in his home town of Aldeburgh that remains one of the most impressive artistic events of the summer, happily avoiding a clash with the Proms. The educational work achieved at Aldeburgh is testimony to an incredibly rich and busy life of music making. Moreover, he showed British musicians that it was possible to be a significant professional composer; and the huge number of young composers writing in Britain today suggests how well he established this.