Entitlement protests in England

When I studied in England, I did so using money I’d saved from a decade of work (starting when I was ten).  I took care of neighbor’s houses, mowed their lawns, babysat their kids, cleaned their cars, etc.  I had a goal and I worked to pay for it.

I was taken completely aback by the fact that all of the students I met in England had government subsidies for their education.  The working class students were completely subsidized.  The upper class were partially subsidized.  All had running overdrafts at their banks, meaning none had to live within a budget.  Each told me earnestly that this was to ensure that everyone had equal access to education.  Considering how class stratified England still was 30 years ago, that made a kind of weird sense to me.  Universities weren’t about education or hard work, they were about breaking the class barriers.  I got it.  (Or at least, I thought I got it.)

This week, we learned that certain Brits think that education is about breaking more than class barriers:  it’s about breaking budgets, windows, heads, etc.  As it happens, the outsized violence of the protests against tuition increases is not coincidental.  The leaders of the protests, the ones who took it from a march of spoiled children to a mob of violent anarchists, had far left ideology as their drummer.

Nowadays, wherever there’s bloodshed and violence, you can be virtually assured that one of two forces is behind it:  Islam or Leftism.