Winter is here and the time is right etc...

This has to be the photographic image of the week. London - where the rabbit is now due to return next Wednesday - seems to have decided that winter is here and the time is right for fighting in the streets. The heir to the throne and pal are attacked in their limousine on the way to the theatre last Thursday night to noisy universal condemnation. For overseas readers and those who have been fast asleep under a stone for several months, the issue was a proposal being voted on in the House of Commons that night to create a new framework for student tuition fees, potentially tripling them in some cases. The proposal was carried by 21 votes in the middle of scenes of general uproar on the streets. Interestingly, all the YouTube clips of the attack on the Charles and Camilla car have been taken down so here is what can be found online from something called Access Hollywood - intermixed with a lot of other guff for the benefit of the hard of thinking (after some advert).

The other 'celebrity' dimension of the day of rioting was that the son of Pink Floyd guitarist Dave Gimour attracted considerable odium after swinging from the Union Jack on the Cenotaph - that's the national war memorial overseas readers. He subsequently claimed he didn't know what it was. He is a Cambridge University student doing an - erm - history degree.

In the meantime and more seriously than either of the above, a student protester had emergency brain surgery after a police officer hit him on the head with a baton. This story has got somewhat buried in tthe froth about Charles, Camilla and son of Dave Gilmour. There is a general surprise at the extent to which the protests have spilled into violent or - perhaps more accurately - destructive behaviour. Of course this is the behaviour of a minority but the size and determination of the minority is somewhat surprising. Although finding monarchy absurd, I bear Charles no personal ill-will - the tragedy of his life is probably that he finds himself well into his sixties and still in a seemingly endless rehearsal for a part he probably has no wish to play. He would surely be happier as a gentleman farmer being left in peace to indulge such eccentric theories as he may hold - and there are many. The attack on his vehicle added nothing to anything like other outbreaks of deeply unattractive behaviour.

Of course there is a lot of standard issue huffing and puffing about the disorder - although so far as I can gather no police officer or bystander was seriously injured and there was nothing on the same scale as the November Millbank events. Of course there have been counter-accusations as regards police over-reaction - no doubt with considerable force (so to speak) in many cases - how a student comes to be in need of emergency brain surgery requires some serious explaining - which no doubt will not be forthcoming. Certainly the practice of 'kettling' seems a recipe for cranking up the disorder by giving people a sense of being trapped in a kind of cage which they then try to break out of as a fairly elementary response. Just two points for the moment: firstly, although the protests are about tuition fees I suspect that there are a number of other issues bubbling under the surface, which presently lack articulation. If the protests spill over from the narrow issue of tuition fees to broader issues then the government is in huge trouble. When the rabbit was a revolting student the approach to any issue was to look for links with other issues. Secondly, where is the articulation - and in particular the generalising of disparate issues - to come from? It may even be that the extent of the disorder is a kind of blind rage - reflecting the lack of a coherent process of linking. The English notoriously dislike theory but some theorising seems in order. Do not expect the quintessentially useless Labour opposition to provide any of it, though. There's only one song to end with...