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Bring back rent-a-mob
It is the duty of the young to go to the barricades for foolish causes, but today's students would rather drink than demonstrate

Max Hastings
Wednesday April 27, 2005

Guardian

At a recent Oxbridge dinner, I heard a college dean remark that he had taken part in two political demonstrations lately, one against the Iraq war and the other against the ban on foxhunting. By contrast, it was some years since his students had marched further than the pub.
When undergraduates were told about a forthcoming rent review, college authorities awaited a howl of outrage. Instead, to their amazement, the proposal was received with polite acquiescence. This was not because the students in question are rich. Rather, it is because few today are willing to rouse themselves to protest about anything at all.

Our conversation about all this seemed comic. Here we were, a gathering of men and women of whom few were under 40 and most a good deal more, lamenting campus tranquillity. It is fair to suggest that more anger was apparent at our dinner table about the shortcomings of Blair's government, the Iraq war and WMD, than among a host of twenty-somethings in their rooms across the quad.

Evidence suggests that this lack of student excitement is endemic, as it has been for a couple of decades. There are pockets of activism. The Iraq war prompted one huge spasm of protest in London, but this was exceptional. How can we be surprised that the Apathy party is likely to prevail at this general election? If the best-educated section of British voters do not see any point in making a fuss, then why should millions living in relative economic contentment up and down the land? Real anger today seems the privilege of a small metropolitan circle focused on the media, though characteristically many of its members kid themselves that they reflect popular views.

I never thought I should hear myself, well, protesting, about student inertia. In the 1960s and thereafter, when successive generations of long-haired weirdos seemed never to leave the streets, when a banner was a more important part of a student's equipment than his library ticket, I was a cross little Conservative. My kind watched in disdain as university faculty buildings were trashed, files ransacked, teachers abused. There seemed a silliness about many protests, which attained its nadir in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. The eagerness of Foots and Benns to offer a cry of anguish against their own society as a substitute for rational thought about the threat from the Soviet Union appeared pathetic.

Forty years on, it seems much easier than I found it then to recognise how important it is for the young to be angry about something - it does not much matter what. Old Jacob Bronowski, a 60s figure if ever there was one, was surely right when he wrote about university life in 1973: "It is important that students bring a certain ragamuffin, barefoot irreverence to their studies; they are not here to worship what is known, but to question it."

This principle obviously extends beyond the lecture room, to life. Today, I feel a respect for the 60s protesters (if not for the decade's violent extremists) that at the time I lacked the imagination to muster. True, they were often protesting for the fun of the game, rather than because they had thought coherently about the merits of the cause.

Their enthusiasm for Mao Zedong and Ho Chi Minh (no liberal democrat, he) was absurdly naive, as even Jane Fonda concedes. Yet they were right that the Vietnam war was a barbaric American folly. It was good that they shouted slogans and asked questions, because somebody had to.

Maybe even the CND protesters contributed something, by articulating revulsion. The wise men on both sides of the Atlantic knew that a nuclear conflict meant the end of civilisation, but we now know that some generals, on the American as well as the Soviet side, were occasionally tempted to think otherwise.

All this brings us back to today's students. It is said that they are too preoccupied with the struggle to prepare themselves to find jobs to have time for political frivolities. These are the university kids whom Camille Paglia described contemptuously as "an army of pedestrian, toadying careerists".

I do not buy this line. Even if a minority are working harder than we ever did, most still have plenty of leisure. They simply choose to spend it in different ways. They would rather drink than demonstrate. They are more passionate about sport than the fate of Iraq.

It seems bizarre to be promoting the cause of student activism. Yet surely anyone who cares about British democracy should be bothered about our culture of acquiescence, not least in the re-election of a British prime minister who committed the nation to war on the basis of massive falsehoods, some of George Bush's making but most of his own. Where are the Peter Hains, Jack Straws, Tariq Alis? Where is the fierce, intolerant conviction that old men and women are getting it wrong, that it is time for a new generation to seize the levers?

The excuse will not wash that life has become so serious that, for a student, self-preservation is all. It seems more plausible that the young are succumbing to the material complacency that is paralysing the peoples of several western democracies, rendering them apparently unwilling to consider idealistic issues at all.

They profess some interest in the environment. They want to save whales, but it is hard to imagine them renouncing the wares of Sony and Sanyo in the cause, as the Hains renounced apartheid sherry. They are dismayed by horrors in Africa, but would rather spend Saturday afternoon watching Man U than demonstrating outside Downing Street about western supineness.

They shrug: what difference can we make? Yet the young are supposed to cherish vain hopes and go to the barricades for foolish causes. A world in which a college dean protests while his students swot in their rooms or head for the pub is topsy-turvy indeed. Bring back rent-a-mob. It does not matter what they protest about, if they will only bestir themselves to become agitated about something. They might even demonstrate against Peter Hain.

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