Student protest: how the Harry Potter generation turned into a band of rebels

[Joanne98]

The essentially middle-class, self-interested demonstrators in London on Wednesday had a benign, even naive, view of the police. The experience of the Kids' Kettle changed all that

Last Wednesday morning Alice, aged 16, set off from her school in north London with fellow sixth-formers on her first demonstration. The night before, she and her friends had prepared their slogans and were raring to go. The national student protest against tuition fees had fused a dissident teenage cocktail of anger, anxiety and frustrated ambition into a determination to make her voice heard on the street.

Alice's mother, Anne, who does not want her daughter or her school to be identified in case it jeopardises her career, says she was intrigued to watch her previously apathetic daughter become politically aware. "Alice is a very conscientious student who never misses a day of school," she said. "Until a year ago she showed no interest in politics."

The sight of Alice with her "9K No Way" placard stirred mixed memories of her own radical youth – Greenpeace sit-ins and Free Nelson Mandela marches – and she watched her daughter and friends head off to Trafalgar Square "like babes in the wood", expecting them home by teatime.

What happened next to Alice and her friends and to thousands of London school kids – all "Harry Potter children" – in the eight or so hours between arriving in Whitehall full of hope and excitement and straggling back through the dark, cold, angry and disillusioned, to the comfort of home and family, is one kind of snapshot of coalition Britain. From a wider perspective, the run-up to the Kids' Kettle was also a classic moment of anti-government fury in the tradition of English protest, an odd mixture of street action and street party.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2010/nov/28/student-fees-protest-police-kettling

[DonCoquixote]

1. Signs there is hope

The richest lady in the UK is not Queen Liz or her inbred brats, but a former WELFARE MOM who wrote a big big book, then broke it up into several big books.

The same lady refused to go abroad, though she would save millions on taxes, like the "English" who live in enclaves across the world, yet still demand all the rights London offers.

That big book proved children CAN read.

The sentiments in that book proved children can act (after all, what better metaphor for the right wing than "death eaters."

[Saokymo]

2. Why were the protesters kettled in the first place?

That makes absolutely no sense. All it did was piss the kids off and harden their resolve to be heard. These bully tactics can only set a pattern of increasing unrest and violence until a lot of good young men and women get killed.

[nxylas]

3. Sounds like this journalist was told to "find a Harry Potter angle"

And obliged by bunging in the words "Harry Potter" at random intervals.

[fasttense]

4. Instead of sitting at home and fretting about their children, why didn't the parents

organize and act. If it had been my children, I would have been down there demanding they release my underage son or daughter. If the parents had advanced on one or both sides of the kettle and demanded their children be released, I doubt the police would have Kettled for very long.

I certainly would NOT have waited around for the police to get tired of abusing my children.