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.By 1968 there were simply toomany areas where the government had let down the hopes it had raisedin 1963 4 for a new progressive politics: the most frequently cited weresupport for the US in Vietnam, racist immigration controls (together withan increase in the fees charged to overseas students), the refusal to useforce against the illegal Smith regime in Rhodesia and tough stands takenby the state against striking workers.On top of this were a set of concernsthat were specific to colleges and universities.One of the main issues wasthe right for students to be represented on academic committees and gov-erning bodies.Two of the first such campaigns were at the Regent StreetPolytechnic and the Holborn College of Law and Commerce in December1967.At Hornsey Art School there were disputes over both curriculumcontent and the granting of sabbatical leave to the student union presid-ent, resulting in a six-week long occupation (supported by some staff )that fuelled copycat occupations at art colleges in Croydon and Guildford(Students and Staff of Hornsey College of Art 1969: 29 57, 139 189).· 145 · SB_C10.qxd 06/12/2004 12:16 Page 146SI XTI ES BRITAINBirmingham Art School and the universities of Aston, Bradford, Hull,Keele, Leeds and Leicester all saw minor disturbances, so too did Essexwhich earned itself a reputation as the national centre of student radical-ism (Marwick 1998: 635 9).Confrontations tended to be sharpest whenstudents intervened to prevent an unpopular speaker from airing theirviews.Enoch Powell attracted demonstrators at every university he spokeat following his controversial rivers of blood remarks in April 1968 (seechapter 11).In July the Home Secretary, James Callaghan, ignored theauthorities advice to leave Nuffield College by the back door and had a fierce confrontation with Oxford students at which there was some sug-gestion of physical violence (Morgan 1997: 311).At Essex, three studentswere expelled after they helped to prevent a scientist from Porton Down,the Ministry of Defence s germ warfare establishment, from delivering alecture.A sit-in supported by university staff followed and the three werelater reinstated.The London School of Economics (LSE) had already seendisturbances in 1966 and 1967, sparked by the appointment as SchoolDirector of Dr Walter Adams, then Principal of University College,Rhodesia.Adams, it was claimed, had links with Ian Smith s minoritywhite government.The student campaign to block his appointmentinvolved occupations, marches and suspensions for the ringleaders,but Adams took up his post in September 1967 all the same and theuniversity entered a brief period of calm (Blackstone, Coles, Hadley andLewis 1970: 151 73; Fraser 1988: 112 4).The following summer, how-ever, perhaps envious of the way French students had paralysed France,and energised by the arrival of Red Danny Cohn-Bendit to feed back onthe situation in Paris (Callaghan refused to invoke his powers to keepCohn-Bendit out of Britain), a minority of LSE students renewed theirmilitant activities.In June they helped to launch the RevolutionarySocialist Students Federation (RSSF), which listed among its aims theuse of the universities as red bases for capitalism s overthrow.InOctober supporters of the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign (VSC) won avote at the LSE student union to occupy the School as a temporary head-quarters for anti-war marchers who were scheduled to protest outside theUS Embassy that month.On the weekend of the anti-war demonstrationsome 800 students took over LSE buildings and turned them into a restcentre and base for political discussions.· 146 · SB_C10.qxd 06/12/2004 12:16 Page 14710 u 1968, cultural crisis and women s liberationIn common with the pattern of events in other countries, opposition tothe Vietnam War was a major catalyst for the British street politicsof 1968.It was also the one strong bridge that connected disaffectedstudents with a wider body of protesters in the country.As Tariq Ali, theformer President of the Oxford Union who became a leader of the radicalleft, later commented, helping the Vietnamese to drive the Americans outof their country became the overriding priority for radicals, socialistsand democrats in the West (Ali 1987: 61).Vietnamese resistance to USimperialism was inspirational.Moreover, as Hewison rightly notes, theissue of Vietnam had a much greater urgency than the CND campaigns ofthe early sixties: the issue was a far more bloodily visible one, thanksto television, than the hypothetical horrors of the Bomb.Emblematic-ally, here were romantic guerrillas pinning down the bureaucrats andtechnologists of the most powerful and affluent nation in the world(1986: 158).Thus in place of the Quaker-inspired sit-down protests usedby the Committee of 100, the anti-war movement favoured the moreaggressive stance of the American Students for a Democratic Society(SDS), whose methods were imported into Britain by US graduatestudents.In July 1967 Tariq Ali helped to organise the VSC and was atthe forefront of the 10,000-strong anti-war protest outside the US Embassyat Grosvenor Square the following October.Buoyed by the success ofthis first demonstration, the VSC organised a follow-up on 17 March 1968that saw the Embassy besieged by a crowd of perhaps 25,000 protesters.This was the most violent of all the anti-war marches.Unquestion-ably some of the demonstrators relished the prospect of a violent clashwith the police.Equally, the police hardly shrank from cracking a fewheads during fighting that went on for two hours.Dave Clark, a studentfrom Manchester University, recalled how he and a fellow demons-trator dragged a police horse to the ground as it was used to charge thecrowd:We d worked out in advance how it could be done.There were theoriesaround that lion s dung would scare police horses, and there was evenan expedition planned to Manchester zoo to get some.But I and a blokefrom Sheffield University planned that as the horse charged, one of uson each side would grab the reins and pull down.In retrospect it was a· 147 · SB_C10.qxd 06/12/2004 12:16 Page 148SI XTI ES BRITAINcrazy thing to do because the horse was just as likely to trample you todeath.After we d done it the police went absolutely barmy, and I took areal beating from their fists, knees and boots.Fortunately for me, a largegroup of people behind me saw what was happening and pulled meback.(cited in Fraser 1988: 161 2)Although the press reported that 117 police and 45 demonstratorswere treated for injuries, these figures failed to include those beatenmarchers who were hauled away by friends to avoid arrest and whowere left to nurse their own wounds as best they could.That evening stelevision news programmes were dominated by images of Britain s mostviolent civil protest in living memory, pictures that seemed to confirmthat a new phase of militant activity had opened.The hippie culture of1967 may have seemed freakish to straight society, but at least it wasessentially passive and self-contained.This latest form of resistance washeavier and more confrontational [ Pobierz caÅ‚ość w formacie PDF ]
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.By 1968 there were simply toomany areas where the government had let down the hopes it had raisedin 1963 4 for a new progressive politics: the most frequently cited weresupport for the US in Vietnam, racist immigration controls (together withan increase in the fees charged to overseas students), the refusal to useforce against the illegal Smith regime in Rhodesia and tough stands takenby the state against striking workers.On top of this were a set of concernsthat were specific to colleges and universities.One of the main issues wasthe right for students to be represented on academic committees and gov-erning bodies.Two of the first such campaigns were at the Regent StreetPolytechnic and the Holborn College of Law and Commerce in December1967.At Hornsey Art School there were disputes over both curriculumcontent and the granting of sabbatical leave to the student union presid-ent, resulting in a six-week long occupation (supported by some staff )that fuelled copycat occupations at art colleges in Croydon and Guildford(Students and Staff of Hornsey College of Art 1969: 29 57, 139 189).· 145 · SB_C10.qxd 06/12/2004 12:16 Page 146SI XTI ES BRITAINBirmingham Art School and the universities of Aston, Bradford, Hull,Keele, Leeds and Leicester all saw minor disturbances, so too did Essexwhich earned itself a reputation as the national centre of student radical-ism (Marwick 1998: 635 9).Confrontations tended to be sharpest whenstudents intervened to prevent an unpopular speaker from airing theirviews.Enoch Powell attracted demonstrators at every university he spokeat following his controversial rivers of blood remarks in April 1968 (seechapter 11).In July the Home Secretary, James Callaghan, ignored theauthorities advice to leave Nuffield College by the back door and had a fierce confrontation with Oxford students at which there was some sug-gestion of physical violence (Morgan 1997: 311).At Essex, three studentswere expelled after they helped to prevent a scientist from Porton Down,the Ministry of Defence s germ warfare establishment, from delivering alecture.A sit-in supported by university staff followed and the three werelater reinstated.The London School of Economics (LSE) had already seendisturbances in 1966 and 1967, sparked by the appointment as SchoolDirector of Dr Walter Adams, then Principal of University College,Rhodesia.Adams, it was claimed, had links with Ian Smith s minoritywhite government.The student campaign to block his appointmentinvolved occupations, marches and suspensions for the ringleaders,but Adams took up his post in September 1967 all the same and theuniversity entered a brief period of calm (Blackstone, Coles, Hadley andLewis 1970: 151 73; Fraser 1988: 112 4).The following summer, how-ever, perhaps envious of the way French students had paralysed France,and energised by the arrival of Red Danny Cohn-Bendit to feed back onthe situation in Paris (Callaghan refused to invoke his powers to keepCohn-Bendit out of Britain), a minority of LSE students renewed theirmilitant activities.In June they helped to launch the RevolutionarySocialist Students Federation (RSSF), which listed among its aims theuse of the universities as red bases for capitalism s overthrow.InOctober supporters of the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign (VSC) won avote at the LSE student union to occupy the School as a temporary head-quarters for anti-war marchers who were scheduled to protest outside theUS Embassy that month.On the weekend of the anti-war demonstrationsome 800 students took over LSE buildings and turned them into a restcentre and base for political discussions.· 146 · SB_C10.qxd 06/12/2004 12:16 Page 14710 u 1968, cultural crisis and women s liberationIn common with the pattern of events in other countries, opposition tothe Vietnam War was a major catalyst for the British street politicsof 1968.It was also the one strong bridge that connected disaffectedstudents with a wider body of protesters in the country.As Tariq Ali, theformer President of the Oxford Union who became a leader of the radicalleft, later commented, helping the Vietnamese to drive the Americans outof their country became the overriding priority for radicals, socialistsand democrats in the West (Ali 1987: 61).Vietnamese resistance to USimperialism was inspirational.Moreover, as Hewison rightly notes, theissue of Vietnam had a much greater urgency than the CND campaigns ofthe early sixties: the issue was a far more bloodily visible one, thanksto television, than the hypothetical horrors of the Bomb.Emblematic-ally, here were romantic guerrillas pinning down the bureaucrats andtechnologists of the most powerful and affluent nation in the world(1986: 158).Thus in place of the Quaker-inspired sit-down protests usedby the Committee of 100, the anti-war movement favoured the moreaggressive stance of the American Students for a Democratic Society(SDS), whose methods were imported into Britain by US graduatestudents.In July 1967 Tariq Ali helped to organise the VSC and was atthe forefront of the 10,000-strong anti-war protest outside the US Embassyat Grosvenor Square the following October.Buoyed by the success ofthis first demonstration, the VSC organised a follow-up on 17 March 1968that saw the Embassy besieged by a crowd of perhaps 25,000 protesters.This was the most violent of all the anti-war marches.Unquestion-ably some of the demonstrators relished the prospect of a violent clashwith the police.Equally, the police hardly shrank from cracking a fewheads during fighting that went on for two hours.Dave Clark, a studentfrom Manchester University, recalled how he and a fellow demons-trator dragged a police horse to the ground as it was used to charge thecrowd:We d worked out in advance how it could be done.There were theoriesaround that lion s dung would scare police horses, and there was evenan expedition planned to Manchester zoo to get some.But I and a blokefrom Sheffield University planned that as the horse charged, one of uson each side would grab the reins and pull down.In retrospect it was a· 147 · SB_C10.qxd 06/12/2004 12:16 Page 148SI XTI ES BRITAINcrazy thing to do because the horse was just as likely to trample you todeath.After we d done it the police went absolutely barmy, and I took areal beating from their fists, knees and boots.Fortunately for me, a largegroup of people behind me saw what was happening and pulled meback.(cited in Fraser 1988: 161 2)Although the press reported that 117 police and 45 demonstratorswere treated for injuries, these figures failed to include those beatenmarchers who were hauled away by friends to avoid arrest and whowere left to nurse their own wounds as best they could.That evening stelevision news programmes were dominated by images of Britain s mostviolent civil protest in living memory, pictures that seemed to confirmthat a new phase of militant activity had opened.The hippie culture of1967 may have seemed freakish to straight society, but at least it wasessentially passive and self-contained.This latest form of resistance washeavier and more confrontational [ Pobierz caÅ‚ość w formacie PDF ]