United Kingdom: Who’s to blame for violent protests?

London turned ugly last week, said Esther Addley in The Guardian. Some 25,000 protesters, furious that Parliament had sharply raised university tuition fees, rampaged across the city. From the afternoon of the parliamentary vote until far into the night, they threw rocks and bottles at police, smashed up government buildings with makeshift battering rams, and set fires. Even the royals weren’t safe. Demonstrators in balaclavas yelled “off with their heads” as they smashed a window of a car carrying Prince Charles and his wife, Camilla. Prime Minister David Cameron said the protesters had become a mob “hell-bent on violence and destroying property.” The next day, the city was littered with broken glass and smoldering trash cans, and some 50 police and protesters were in the hospital.

It’s always the same story, said Janet Street Porter in The Daily Mail. Ever since 1968, when mounted police charged demonstrators at an antiwar rally, British police “have never managed to deal with volatile demonstrators without being accused of heavy-handed tactics.” In this case, they resorted to “kettling,” a technique of herding large knots of demonstrators into confined spaces to break up the crowds. Police in riot gear formed human walls, preventing some protesters from leaving the freezing streets for hours. That technique, predictably, “enrages people and doesn’t stop acts of vandalism.” Why couldn’t the police have identified the troublemakers at previous protests, then focused on corralling just them? The protests have been going on for weeks, after all. “Surely they could’ve worked out who was worth removing?”

The riots may have “damaged the reputation of the police,” but they’ve done even more harm to “the cause of the students,” said William Rees-Mogg in The Times. Seeing college students act like thugs, defacing a statue of Winston Churchill, does not make taxpayers more eager to subsidize them. In fact, the government’s tuition plan is eminently fair. Students won’t have to pay their tuition up front; they will receive loans, which they won’t have to start paying back until their salaries reach more than $33,000 a year. But that’s not good enough for today’s “self-righteous” youth, who “see themselves as the victims of a hostile establishment.”

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Not to defend the rioters, but the students do have reason to be upset, said The Telegraph in an editorial. This generation is “the first in modern history to be bequeathed a worse standard of living than its predecessor.” Let’s not forget that the mostly wealthy members of Parliament who voted to slap fees on today’s youth had their own university educations “lavishly subsidized.” Of course, they had little choice but to reform the tuition system; digging our way out of debt requires cutting spending. Yet as Universities Minister David Willetts said, “A young person could be forgiven for believing that the way in which economic and social policy is now conducted is little less than a conspiracy by the middle-aged against the young.”