Millbank Tower and the failure of the ‘Innocent Smoothie’ generation
Just before heading down to the Millbank protests on Wednesday, I read a couple of interesting tweets. One was from @_richardking, who works at Domino Records. He wrote: “Hats off to everyone marching today, especially young people - showing the innocent smoothie generation how it’s done”.
The other was from @wdjstraw of Left Foot Forward. He wrote “Good luck everyone on #demo2010. We failed u in 2002/3 when Lab introduced top up fees.” Will was one of the leaders of the student protests against the introduction of fees in 2002 – protests that I attended, and which I left thoroughly disillusioned.
Innocent Smoothies was founded in 1998, and although I didn’t go to university until 2001, I still pretty much fall into the generation King was talking about. And I was certainly one of the people who ‘failed’ today’s students in 2002. I remember the soggy march through London to Kennington Park, and the feeling that this was all a sorry charade. I remember looking around at my fellow marchers and doubting their motives for being there, and then in turn doubting my own motives. Halfway through the march, as it snaked past council tower blocks in Lambeth, I couldn’t hack it any longer, and left.
Ostensibly, the main thrust of the 2002 protest was that fees would deter poorer students, undoubtedly a commendable political aim. But my experience of meeting students in that period made me more cynical. I went to Cardiff – a decent enough, middle-ranking university. After a couple of years there, two things stuck in my mind. One, the number of cars parked on the streets all over Cathays, the main student area, during term time. Nearly all belonged to students: these were not poor people. Second, the complete lack of political engagement from the vast majority of the student population.
Cardiff couldn’t even scrape a full coach load of students for the 2002 march. In total, between 5-10,000 marched (maybe more, police estimates are notoriously low). Given the national student body at any one time numbers around 2 million, it would seem likely that Cardiff’s disinterest in politics was one that was replicated across the country.
The majority of the early noughties student body were apathetic in that singular way that only the truly pampered can be apathetic. An economy that grew through the entirety of our adolescence meant that we didn’t even have to think about our job prospects. Of course there would be work. A booming housing market might mean it was hard to get together a deposit yourself, but it also meant that most people’s parents had plenty of equity to put one together for you. Top up fees were just another bill for their parents to pick up. Annoying yes, but just the way it was. Mum and Dad could afford another couple of grand anyway. We were a generation of victors. No wonder politics was an irrelevance – who thinks about changing the rules of a race when they’re winning?
This luxurious state of affairs directly translated into the cutesy pie brand of capitalist conformity represented by Innocent Smoothies and the like. The message was ‘as long as we’re having a lovely time and we’re healthy and not harming anyone, what’s the problem?’. Economic comfort created space for a newly ethical consumerism. This was a form of sanitised political engagement, in the sense of demanding the right to choose healthy fruit smoothies, or to be able to buy fair trade and eco-friendly produce, and even to oppose the Iraq war. All of these issues were wrapped up in the consumer credit model, just a better, friendlier model: consumerism with a human face. They did not require any wider analysis of political or economic structures – even Iraq, which was an issue that was easy to separate from any wider socio-economic context.
It’s no coincidence that it was around this time that the hipster movement really started to gain momentum. This was and is a movement whose (admittedly sometimes) beautiful art and music not only signifies nothing beyond itself, but is actually defined by its lack of significance. An artistic world was created in which any expression which wasn’t ironically self-referential or obsessed with childhood became an embarrassment.
The students who did engage in politics were not immune from these forces either. All of the issues that did get people out protesting were focused on how our (or the government’s) choices affected ‘someone else’, whether it be poorer students, African coffee farmers or Iraqi civilians. Commendable causes, no doubt, but causes that we had the luxury to choose. Ultimately, it wasn’t us who would be affected.
This is what, I think, made the anti-fees protests of 2002 – and even the giant anti-war march of February 2003 – feel so anodyne. There was some anger at the Stop the War march, but it was the anger of ‘Not In My Name’, anger that our country’s agency in the world was to be used in a way we didn’t like. There was some irate rhetoric at the student protest, but it felt hollow – as if we were going through the motions, protesting because ‘that’s what students do’. It was inevitable an overwhelmingly white and middle class event: I doubt most of the marchers had even been to state school, let alone knew anyone poor enough that the prospect of debt might put them off going to university. In one sense, this should mean that the fact they turned out at all is worthy of more congratulation. But in reality it lent the whole event a distasteful noblesse oblige, lifestyle-choice tone. This kind of mood is not one that leads to people smashing windows, or storming political party offices. Nor is it one that governments find hard to ignore.
The contrast with the protests at Millbank Tower could not be starker. It was as middle-class as ever, but there was a visceral undertow of resentment in that crowd that I had not felt before. The people at the front who were smashing windows, grappling with police, and scaling the roof were being supported by the thousands at the back – this was not the ‘extremist minority of outsiders’ that the NUS leadership and media is trying to portray. And the signs and placards that were on display were not just about fees – there were messages of support for schoolchildren’s EMAs, and raging slogans denouncing the banks, the coalition government and the forthcoming demolition of the public sector.
This was not a protest of the ‘ethical consumer’. It was the protest of the furious dispossessed, defending not just their own status but an entire model of social organisation. It is an anger that is not a simulation, is not going away, and cannot be ignored. My generation was mollycoddled, complacent and, ultimately, complicit – our happy position in a bloated economy ensured any sharp edges we might have had were sanded down to nothing. We helped to dump this generation in the mire, and it is the least we can do to join in the battle to get them out.
