Feral Youth

The Tory party has been waging a war against the youth since they came into power using the Lib-dems as their shield. First they took a hit at the already breaking education system with huge cuts and trying to open up the system to privatization. For a party that claims to be for education this truly spat in the face of the youth that try to get educated.

Furthermore the party and David Cameron himself have called for harsher punishments and benefit cuts to the "feral youth" after the riots. This is not only greatly insulting to the young that work their ares off to get where they want to but also ignores all of the contributing factors to the riots. These include things like the wealth gap widening faster and the closing down of many youth centers. This not only puts more young people on the streets and takes away vital parental roles many do not have but also leads to people becoming more disenfranchised leaving many with a feeling of having nothing left to lose.

By forcing things like free school breakfasts to stop and youth centers to close the Tory party have made it clear that they do not care about the young of this country. Many of the poorer need to work multiple jobs to make ends meet and this can lead to children not getting all the help they need, I realize that at times the parents may not care but a lot of the time it is very hard to look after a child when working for minimum wage, especially for single parents. The Tory party does not care for them rather for their own multimillionaire needs.

It is not only the Tory's that have been beating down on the youth alas, that would be a very wrong message to spread, they are just taking it to new extremes. Can you remember the last time exam results came out and you read or heard a story congratulating the students? Why does ever story of a young person doing something worthwhile need to include a section saying how it proves that not all young people are terrible? Why do we only ever see the young in shows like "Young, Dumb And Living Off Mum"? No the war against the youth started long before the Tory onslaught.

Is it because the older generations are scared of what we can do? Do they fear the day we realize we can make a difference. We briefly caught onto that idea and it left Parliament square and Milbank tower in rubble. The student protests are not over, and never should they stop. The fight over fees and education isn't over but it is not only that. People need to fight to show we have power to show we can make a difference and to stand up for our generation. This needn't be through simply marching. No, that will not have the full impact needed. We need to change attitudes by being proactive.

Rather than taking from society we need to give back. Many of us already do this, in many different and wonderful ways yet this is never what is shown. We must fight against the media Juggernaut and make it known that we can and do do great things. I haven't got all the answers, hell I'm just an annoyed young person but rather than let this get us down I say we bounce back. We can educate ourselves and organize ourselves, not just for protest but for community activities, for each other, for ourselves.

Time is not to be wasted, rather it is to be utilized. Read, watch and listen to things, education can be fun if you find something you are interested or passionate about. If you hated school then don't give up on educating yourself, we have these minds for a reason. Basically what I'm trying to say is, in the words of Scroobius Pip, "Get Better". I often let myself lull into a place of apathy and laziness, that doesn't mean doing nothing, I mean doing nothing constructive. I've lost my way here a bit but all I want to say is, fight back against the Tory cuts to the young and other sections of society, fight back against the media onslaught against the youth and get better.

Sorry this was a bit wishy washy but I just felt I needed to vent.

Stay Alert, Stay Free.

The Lies, The Slander

Now I am unsure as to how this post will go, I have so much I want to say and much of it is in an incoherent mess within my mind but I feel like if I wait too long to post this I feel as though it may never be made and will not be an accurate portrayal of my feelings.

Any way I and around 30,000 other people marched onto parliament square on Thursday the 9th of December 2010 to protest against the increase in student fees, the education cuts and generally against the effective privatisation of the education system within this country.

The measures put forward by the Con-Dem government will put further education out of the reach of many of the young people of this country under the guise of cutting the deficit. However this is not the case, how can increasing fees in 2 years decrease the deficit now and help us get out of the current crisis. A crisis which was caused by people taking out loans that they could simply not repay. How are the majority (not all as some, namely the upper class, student will be able to) of students be able to repay a debt of around £40,000. A lot of this debt will go unpaid which will do no favours for anyone. We already have the highest fees in Europe [link] why should they be any higher? Do we want a system similar to that of the USA were parents need to start saving from the birth of a child in order to send them through education or indeed for people to be completely priced out of further education. We need educated people to build a future for this country.

Furthermore the idea that cutting the funding by 80% or even 100% for the arts is a good way to ensure our education system is well funded and world class is an utter disgrace. Other countries are investing in their future whilst ours is cutting back, I say cutting back more like cutting out. This will cause the closure of many universities which many less well off students rely on again pricing students out of university.

A Con-Dem proposal for paying the first year or two of the poorest 16,000 or so student does little to compensate for those who are just above this threshold who will be left to suffer the full brunt of the fees. Furthermore the fact one or two years is payed doesn't help when the people still come out with more debt then they would previously, some A LOT more.

Alas at the moment I do not wish to dwell on why these cuts and increases in fees are a terrible idea. I would prefer to dwell upon the illegal and out of proportion response of the police to these actions.

Firstly I shall start on the point of police horses. The whole idea of having an animal in this sort of situation is sickening and cruel. Sure these animals are trained but there is only so much an animal can take. An excuse often used for police brutality is that the person gets stressed out. Now we are logical animals and have more of an understanding of the situation, an animal no matter the training will not understand the situation. That amount of noise and violence will stress out a horse and cause it to become dangerous, both to us and the police [link] as well as itself. This is animal cruelty and must stop.

I shall take a step back and explain what I meant by violence in relation to police horses. A tactic used a lot on Thursday was to charge into the crowd of protesters (never mind some were as young as 13/14) in an attempt to separate them. The crowd however is not always able to separate resulting in people getting trampled causing great damage to the person. This causes great fear as people could well die under the hooves of these horses. If a person is faced with the possibility of death or serious injury they may well throw whatever they have to try and stop this. The protesters did not target the horses in a malicious manner and even when something was thrown in a last ditch attempt at self defence it was undoubtedly aimed at the police on the horse. This means that the police by introducing the horses lead them directly to harm which is cruel and should stop.

Furthermore the actions of mounted police aside the rest of the force were also staggeringly heavy handed and illegal. As we entered parliament square we were instantly kettled, few, very few, people were able to leave from that point onwards the majority had no chance of leaving and had no real access to toilets or food and water. This is a direct attack on our freedoms and human rights and is an attempt to anger the masses into escalating the violence. A lot of violence was due to people aiming to leave the kettle, especially near the end when we had been detained for at least 6 hours. The majority of the demonstration were peaceful, no matter what is portrayed in the media, and we were all trapped on Westminster bridge for around 3 hours. This serves no end but as an attempt to scare as many of the first time protesters from protesting again. This is not however the effect it had, if anything it has made many protesters question the establishment and yes the police.

The kettling and the provocation it caused is just the tip of the iceberg. The sheer force that the police used against unprotected people is astounding. Now I can understand some force in order to keep people out of parliament, after all these peoples jobs have been manipulated to mean that their duty is to protect a government that is gong to cut their jobs. However the sights that I saw cannot be fully described by my words but I shall simply tell it like I saw it. People of all ages returned from the front line after clashes literally pouring with blood from their heads and young girls crying their eyes out along side old women hysterical with fear. People with broken bones were sent back into the kettle and denied medial help leaving them to have makeshift slings made until they were aloud out.

The violent methods used by the police did nothing but anger the protesters and escalate the violence. Images of fences being carried across the top of crowds were pounced on by the media and the masses told that they were being thrown at police. This was NOT the case. Fences were being taken to the front line. They were not however, being used as weapons. What actually happened was that the fences were being placed between the protesters and the police in order to protect the protesters from the truncheons of the police.

A person was nearly killed after being hit by a truncheon to the head. As a result of this he got bleeding on the brain, he was then denied medical assistance by police officers before an ambulance worker intervened [link]. Another protester was dragged from his wheelchair multiple times. We are expected to be thankful that they did not open fire? What has happened to this country? It is disgusting but it will not stop us. As long as the government acts to destroy out country we will continue to fight.

Now the point of this post is not to be anti-police because in most situations the police are necessary and a force for good but I fail to see how nearly killing people is for the people. We will hold solidarity when you are cut if you march. We will march for the more general cuts then just in education. This is our fight, this is your fight. Rise together and win together, solidarity until the end.

I'm sorry this post has been a lot more opinion and first hand experience than being backed up by sources as usual but this has made me very angry. I will endeavor to make a post supported by more factual sources next time but I hope this has made you question a few things said by the media and at least entertained.

Stay alert, stay free.

A New Beginning

One good thing about the Torys, they're waking up this generation to the absolute bull that comes from downing street and the media. They can kettle and they can shutdown Wikileaks but they can't shut our eyes once they have been opened.

A new generation took to the streets, a generation that supposedly doesn't care. Sure this is over fees which many feel will effect them financially in a direct way, for many this is the first time they feel as though their way of life is under direct attack by the government. It feels normal for a change to take up a banner and march in the street, I don't feel marginalised for wanting to go out and show my disgust with the way things are ran.

There has been a shift in the consciousness of the young people of this country. No longer are they content to say "If you don't like it then move" or "At least its better than [insert country name here]" and for that I thank the Torys and their elitist regime. This is an exciting time to be a student, we finally have an enemy we all identify with. Cameron the smug upper class weasel that we all resent and Clegg for lying straight to our faces.

What is most exciting though is not that students and none-students a like are fighting against cuts in their thousands, it's that there are thousands of people simply mobile in the streets. One act of civil disobedience over an issue will make it more likely that they will continue onto other issues. The police have tried to quash the protests for this reason, planting police vans and kettling protesters to try and scare us from returning. Alas all it shows is that the powers that be are scared, the Lib-Dems changing dates and venues for meetings shows this. As Thomas Jefferson once said "When governments fear people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny." We are witnessing a scared Government, we are regaining our liberty.

However there are two sides to this post. As you may all now Wikileaks released a great deal of documents dealing with the Iraq and Afghanistan war as well as other documents. My opinion on the matter is that information should be able to freely move and if there is evidence of the Government lying to it's people then we should be able to access this information, obviously information on current operations should be kept secret to protect our troops but I feel as though we should have a right to know if we are being lied to. Yet as we stand on the brink of our generation waking up we are confronted with outright censorship by our freely elected governments. Wikileaks has been shut down and has moved servers many times in the past weeks due to political pressure. This is a blatant act against freedom of speech and information. When we live in an age were we are told that North Korea fired unprovoked into South Korea [link] before discovering this is may not the case at all [link].

We are entering an age were the government is more open to blatant abuses of power and attacks against our freedoms yet we are also seeing more and more people wake up and fight back. It may be student fees and education cuts that have got people onto the street but there is a sense that this is only the beginning. These are exciting times, the balance of power is shifting. We can fight and we can win. A mere few months ago that sentiment would seem ridiculous to many but now it seems this thought has penetrated the zeitgeist. This is merely the beginning of the war, the people together will never be defeated.
Stay free.

We will march on the 9th, we will march until we win.

Quotes

Today we play a little game. I will post some quotes and you guess who they are from.

Number One:
(On being asked why they said no1 successful outside politics would want to be an MP)
“Basically, it’s being nationalised, you have to live on rations and are treated like s**t. I spend my money on my garden and claim a tiny fraction based on what is proper. And I could claim the whole bloody lot, but I don’t.”

Number Two:
"[I] wouldn't wish [the NHS] on anyone"














Answers?

Number One:
Mr Duncan, a former oil trader and a multi-millionaire. He is also a Tory MP.

Number Two:
Daniel Hannan, a Tory MEP.


Now there are two things similar with these remarks I believe. Firstly both seem to come from a point of view of a rich person. People who can easily afford to survive on the £100000 or so MPs get in wages. People who can afford to pay for private health care, unlike most of us.

The second, and more worrying, similarity is the fact both are from Torys. Now this isn't surprising due to the history of the Torys. Alas in the current climate it appears we shall be stuck with these people in power for the next four years after an election. This will come from people angry at Labour and not from people who actually believe in the ideals of the Conservatives.

Now if these statements at all represent the ideals of the people involved in the Tory party then I do not have high hopes for our future under their power. If people cannot survive on £100000 a year and moan about a health service that quite frankly is amazing compared to many then there is no hope for the common man. I hope these statements do make people reassess the Tory party for what they really are, and if they want to vote for them after that then fair dos to them, but a blind vote is a dangerous vote.