There will be blood: a frontline dispatch from Tuesday's student protests

The police thought they were so clever. They warned protestors as they exited Charing Cross: “You could be here longer than you think.” They did not mention the word ‘kettle,’ they didn’t have to—everyone knew what they meant. Like last Wednesday they had prepared to hem student protestors into a neat cordon off Parliament Square. They lay in wait. Along the side streets off Whitehall, police vans were parked up; each packed with police officers—some 600 in all. And then there were the horse boxes, containing perhaps the same horses who had been involved in last week's action, when protestors were charged at until they dispersed, until they ran.

Déjà vu in less than six days. But this time it would be different. Again 4,000 protestors marched down Whitehall. Again the police blocked their way. And then something different. The protestors turned. Like swallows catching the air current, in unison they wheeled. Four thousand people reversed back up to Trafalgar and then under Admiralty Arch and straight through St James Park. The police desperately tried to reform their neat, strong, unified lines. But they were just too slow. The students roamed freely, testing every entrance into Parliament Square, reforming and flowing outwards again at every blockade. Wherever they gallivanted they closed the streets and stopped the traffic. They would be heard. There were no leaders, no one pointed a way forward. They just carried on moving.

Why were they here? Who were these kids—some as young as ten—rallying through London’s streets? These are no revolutionaries, anarchists, or even socialists. It is worse than that. They want something more than just a reversal of higher education cuts and the scrapping of the Education Maintenance Allowance which allows poor 16 year olds to go to college. They don’t want stuff per se; they have long since tired of their iPods and the latest version of Medal of Honour. They want the most intangible accessory of all: aspiration.

At heart these really are Thatcher’s children. Most of them will say they hate her—a remarkable thing given that almost all of them were born after she left office. But in truth they believe in free markets, in individualism, in liberty and autonomy. They’d be the first to reel back in horror should a socialist state tell them they could no longer take currency out of the country to fund their gap year in Thailand or that Primark will no longer stock cheap jeans imported from China.

But even Thatcher knew that a world in which people would no longer be secure, that would no longer provide housing or a decent wage for all would at least have to compensate for such loss with an alternative. That alternative was aspiration, the idea that people could—if they were dedicated and worked hard enough—be whatever they wanted to be, including of course the chance to get filthy rich. Every kid on the street knows if they don’t play football or have the nerve (and luck) to make it onto The X-Factor, the only way they might just be able to buy a house or succeed in life is to get an education.

In a knowledge economy what else would one do? Without a degree you’re out of luck. Without A-levels you are, and always will be a loser; dole scum or forever destined to compete with eastern European immigrants for minimum wage jobs in Burger King or Holiday Inn. So aspiration is all they have. They all want to try at being doctors or engineers or architects or television producers. And if you take that away from them, they will get angry. Outrageously angry. And vicious.

Some of these kids are spoiling for a fight. They’re the ones who hung around Trafalgar Square taunting the cops, throwing bottles and smashing windows in sub-zero temperatures towards the end of the protest. They’re probably the same kids who were Asbo’d off every street corner during the last decade. They hate the police. And it won’t be long now before the kids figure out how to storm Parliament—students learn fast—or worse, someone gets killed, either through police violence or a protestor’s rock or fire extinguisher. Another protest has already been planned for this Sunday. So politicians, take this warning very seriously—give the young something to aspire to or there will be blood.