Millbank Tower protest.

Kill everyone, feast on the weak.

Is the solution to this sort of thing to tot up the cost of repairs and policing and deduct it from the universities budgets for this year? *via fatman

I can hardly over-exaggerate my faux moral outrage at these scenes enough. Why can't the disenfranchised underclasses behave in a more respectable fashion toward windows?

They might have been students you know. Believe it or not, some anarchists go to college.

london's burning !!!!!! enfin, les anglais se reveillent !

"These people are clearly dickheads"

That or they're pissed off.

Maybe you or I would use our learned grasp of language, the law of the land and our understanding of how the inner workings of the various mechanisms of social infrastructure to register our protest or try to manipulate the system toward our desired outcome. And good for us.

These guys are using what they know - admittedly that's kicking stuff - but if that's how you know how to register your dissatisfaction at the enormous gulf between 'us' and 'them' then stuff is going to get kicked.

If you don't like it, then you've got a job of work to do starting to put things right.

So what if they were students or not - everyone should try to fight the Tories cuts. Good on them I say. If I could of got out of work I would have wanted to be there to fight for the right of my kids to be able to go to college without facing crippling debts.

I cant condemn the actions of a violent minority.

camerons out telling chinese to embrace democracy, so when they do they can be treated like the rest of us and not have a say in anything, oh wait isn't that communism, we all now have for the moment the power through the web, facebook, etc to get things noticed. so i agree we are the people (power to the people) so we must protest we dont have to smash things up but we can disrupt things on a large scale. back the students,

Aggression and destructive behaviours are often side-effects of having an overbearing law enforcement system on the streets. While some people do firmly believe that violence is necessary, they often will not act in this kind of circumstance if a system of support and encouragement does not exist within the crowd. By treating a protest as inherently bad and rebellious, by people employed to keep order treating individual protesters as the enemy, we tease a crowd into supporting radical elements within it and are left with the symptom of violence as a result.

Harsher measures of law enforcement and prosecution at peaceful events will inevitably provoke harsher attitudes and behaviours within originally peaceful crowds.

one million people plus marched against the iraq war to no effect. 1,000,000 people feeling strongly enough about something to take to the streets - effect: zero. What were 52,000 kids gonna do? 'AWWW, SWEET!' the Tories'd say looking on from their tower while calculatedly demolishing the fabric of a society that 10's of millions have shed blood to create - and all in the hope we'll all become a mixture of Richard Branson and Mother Teresa to minimise the inevitable debilitating effects to our social cohesion, togetherness, well-being, happiness etc. etc. Protesters on the roof - history'll tell you the great Gandhi started with vandalism of destruction of public property in SA, then flouting the law on the salt levy in India. Breaking glass would not be seen as a tragic display of the destruction of his epic non-violent movement. Even the deified Mandela was part of a rebel movement responsible or outrageous violence. Bold statements are always condescended as petit, mindless violence by the authorities for the purpose of alienating 'them', the protesters from the rest of the disenfranchised in society - it quells further unrest - a tactic of power retention. Please please support these people - students, union members, benefits claimants, it matters not who they are, people don't choose to kick in glass of the seat of power in front of banks of cameras as a laugh - that is a daily mail reader's response, grow up and stand up for what your grandparents fought for and the tories are now taking away from them in their final years. I'll chip in £10 for the glass to be repaired after the tories have backed down, anyone else in?

lulz!

That was so predictable that I wonder what's the idea behind letting them do that.

"Premise Four: Civilization is based on a clearly defined and widely accepted yet often unarticulated hierarchy. Violence done by those higher on the hierarchy to those lower is nearly always invisible, that is, unnoticed. When it is noticed, it is fully rationalized. Violence done by those lower on the hierarchy to those higher is unthinkable, and when it does occur is regarded with shock, horror, and the fetishization of the victims."

"Premise Five: The property of those higher on the hierarchy is more valuable than the lives of those below. It is acceptable for those above to increase the amount of property they control—in everyday language, to make money—by destroying or taking the lives of those below. This is called production. If those below damage the property of those above, those above may kill or otherwise destroy the lives of those below. This is called justice."

www.endgamethebook.org/Excerpts/1-Premises.htm

The people who started the violence were a bunch of dicks. They weren't students - they had clearly arrived there for the sole purpose of starting a riot. I watched them put on their gear - face covering masks, helmets etc. then picking up sticks and going at it.

Interesting discussion. A lot of misconceptions. First of all the people of the British Isles have a fine militant tradition. This idea that we roll over and let the ruling class walk all over us is nonsense, the Chartists, General Strike 1926, 1970s trade union militancy etc & etc. The demo today was magnificent and good on the students for standing up to be counted. The 'violence' was almost irrelevant in the context of the numbers involved but understandable. It shouldn't be allowed to divert from the importance of what is at stake. We also need to remember that demos alone won't stop the cuts.The Tories/Lib coalition won't be convinced by numbers or good arguments - in the end they will have to be forced to back down with strikes and militant action. The students will have to unite with the workers to win.
Finally, I was on the Poll Tax demo in1989 and the Tories and press played the same lying game when they tried to divert the argument away from the mass non-payment campaign by harping on about violence but we stood firm and we won.
Students should stand firm today and be proud of what they have started today - it's the music of the future!

This is what happens when spoiled children grow to adulthood, or make that adolescence: If you don't get what you want, throw a violent tantrum in the hope that mommy and daddy will relent and give you what you're demanding. IOW, when you know that your demands are irrational and you know that you have no rational argument to present in support of them, you morph to Nazi and the Beerhall Putsch redux. A responsible parent - which in the case of this analogy is civilized society, or what remains of it - must either respond with overwhelming, irresistible discipline, or face the long-term consequence: a punk who, emboldened, becomes a tyrant. This is also a good example of what happens when kids are never taught the pithy lesson that "money doesn't grow on trees," not to mention the one that says, simply, "Slavery is evil." To make a violent demand for the enslavement of others, then wrap it in a veneer of righteousness, is doubly evil. If a frothing maniac ran up to a woman on the street, stuck a gun in her face and demanded that she pay for his education, most rational beings would consider that maniac to be a dangerous criminal and expect the police to come and haul him before a judge to face criminal charges. So someone tell me please: Exactly how does that precise same crime become "ok:" when committed by a mob? The simple, uncomfortable fact that all of these little brownshirts' defenders here are carefully evading - in their contemptible equation of them with demonstrators who had just, ethical causes such as those fighting for freedom in communist China - is that suddenly *being denied loot that was stolen from others in the first place*, is itself a consequence of justice, not "violence done by the 'high' to the 'low'" or any such intellectual fraud. The point being evaded strenuously is that the "funding" that is being cut was never ethically justified to begin with. And...money doesn't grow on trees. Every pound represents the time its earner took out of his or her life to earn it. Therefore every pound confiscated at gunpoint to give these spoiled brats a free ride represents: slavery. Sorry to hoist that mirror, but...welcome to your identity.

Well Done! Congrats on making Explore!

Eh?!
Absolute balderdash! The incident at Tory HQ was high jinks by youth looking for the best way to fight. Your analogies with Nazis & Brownshirts are well off the mark. The last time I looked it was the British state which was murdering innocent people in Iraq, Afghanistan and ..... on peaceful demos and oh yeah.... on the tube.

Hello Asif, I've talked about your video in my dissertation and would love to have an interview with you. My e-mail is sc.wilson@hotmail.co.uk if you could contact me on that we could do an interview from there maybe?

Simon