Remember, remember the 9th of December
14th December 2010
Remember, remember the 9th of December
‘Remember, remember the 9th of December;
Privatisation and plot.
We see no reason why Lib Dem high treason
Should ever be forgot.’
It is tempting to view the date that the vote on tuition fees took place as D-Day – the end of the protests and the end of universal education. The resistance was futile, although it did provide ample opportunities for photographers to capture our own ‘spirit of 1968’ moments: the smashing of the windows at Millbank Tower, the masked protester rising above a sea of demonstrators and booting the blue lights on a police van, a Union flag being torn from the Cenotaph, Camilla being poked. The streets were ripe with defiance.
That rabid bulldog of the Establishment, The Daily Mail, lapped many of these images into its pages and howled, Cujo-like, at the ‘hooligans’: “[The protesters] defiled a statue of Winston Churchill by urinating on it, ripped flags from the Cenotaph, then lit fires and sprayed slogans on the ground in the shadow of the Houses of Parliament. From the bottles of urine they hurled aloft, to the scaffolding poles and increasingly dangerous missiles they threw, democracy was held in contempt.”
It’s curious that The Mail chose to represent the protesters as anti-democratic, considering that the rise in tuition fees was rejected by the electorate. Only 36% of the population voted Conservative; a clear majority - 64% - voted against their policies. The Lib Dems received 23% of the vote, but they stood on a platform of abolishing tuition fees and opposing draconian cuts to public spending. When the perfume of ministerial power drifted up his nostrils, Nick Clegg abandoned those manifesto pledges and became a Yellow Tory – in effect, a prosthetic leg to a government that could not otherwise stand. He betrayed his electoral platform and offered his 23% to Cameron.
There is the ghost of another photograph hovering just beyond these images of violent protest, one that The Mail would be hard pressed not to describe as ‘holding democracy in contempt’. In this image, Nick Clegg stands with Julian Huppert (now Lib Dem MP for Cambridge), smiling at the camera and grasping signed declarations that read: ‘I pledge to vote against any increase in fees in the next parliament and to pressure the government to introduce a fairer alternative’.
To understand that these men promised one thing and delivered the opposite is an intellectual process; but to witness this frozen image of smiling betrayal produces a deep-seated intuitive response about what is right – and what is wrong.
Photographs are more powerful than arguments, articles or moving images, says Susan Sontag, because they capture a neat slice of time: “Photographs like the one that made the front page of most newspapers in the world in 1972 – a naked South Vietnamese child just sprayed by American napalm, running down a highway toward the camera, her arms open, screaming with pain – probably did more to increase the public revulsion against the war than a hundred hours of televised barbarity”.
There are those images in The Daily Mail that aim to provoke revulsion against civil unrest, and to turn public opinion against the justice of the cause. And there are those that can be used from a different perspective, depending on where we stand. Is it possible to capture the self-interest of shareholders of a privatised education system? How can the abolition of Education Maintenance Grants for the poorest in society be captured? Can a single image depict the effects of the decrease in social mobility?
The fury of protesters makes a potent image, but there are other images to be taken. “There are various eyes,” says Nietzsche. “Even the Sphinx has eyes: and as a result there are various truths”. The following account in The Guardian from one student protester would, undoubtedly, have had a more powerful impact upon the public consciousness if a single shot could have encapsulated it:
“I am a 21 year old literature student and I am a protester. I danced to music on Parliament Square as people spray painted ‘NO’ on the grass. I shouted: ‘Tory ****, Tory ****’ with pride. I got pushed to the police front line and charged by horses on two occasions. If you want to look at thugs, look to the police.
“I am a girl of five foot two. I was pushed several times in the face, dragged on the floor and laughed at by police when I told them I have asthma. This is why people get angry, because they were being trapped and wanted to get out.
“All afternoon we were told people were able to leave from various places, but this was just not true. I asked a policeman where I could go to the toilet; he pointed at the floor by his feet. Another shouted: ‘Move, bitch, or I’ll squash you with my horse.”
“Eventually, when the protests had died down and people were desperate to go home, a group of around 1,000 protesters were finally escorted to Westminster Bridge to exit. However, this was a trick. What then happened was we were held on the bridge for hours in the freezing cold. The crowd remained calm, but after hours of freezing, people began to chant: ‘let us out’, and then the crowd pushed forward. Being small, I was carried by the crowd and ended up by the police line. I was tired and cold and hadn’t eaten for 12 hours or had any water.
“I screamed at the police not to hurt me because I was being pushed, but they still went for my face, almost pulling me to the floor. A man to my right put his arms over my face, screaming: ‘leave her along, she’s a girl and she’s not harming you,’ but the police began to hit him several times on the head”.
There are no images of this particular girl’s experience but if there were, they would undoubtedly arouse public condemnation of police tactics. Only obliquely would they arouse support for the underlying cause of the protests.
The reasons for the protest have been obscured by the visual manifestations of resistance, particularly by the likes of The Daily Mail. The effects of the marketisation of education may be easy to capture: the closing of 30% of higher education institutions, longer unemployment queues, increased deprivation – just as the effects of the Vietnam War were easily distilled into potent images. But is it ever possible to capture the underlying battle of economic ideas in a single image? How can we photograph the debate?
The Economic Debate
In the battle over tuition fees, the reasons for the rise have been put forward often enough: students will now be burdened with between £30,000-£50,000 of debt before they begin their working lives because the Coalition Government has slashed 80% off the budget for university teaching, and withdrawn all state funding from many humanities degrees. These costs must now be met by a marketised university system – not the taxpayer.
We are told that there is no alternative to these changes because of the ‘unprecedented’ financial situation. However, the reality is somewhat different to the propaganda: The current UK debt is around 70% of GDP, which is historically low as the debt never fell below 100% between 1920 and 1960 – and was at 250% in 1945.
If public spending is cut excessively during a recession, it leads to an exaggerated rise in unemployment and fall in tax revenues. Cutting education funding during a recession leads to a greater number of under-skilled workers, leading to even higher unemployment and lower income tax revenues. The alternative to reducing the deficit is by encouraging growth through investment in jobs, in business start-ups, in empowering people with potentiality – ultimately, in education.
Free higher education and maintenance grants were an established entitlement 20 years ago, funded by general taxation. The only variable that has changed in that period is a creeping self-interest to pay less tax. Reducing higher education for reasons of tax relief is short-termism of the most self-destructive kind. A highly skilled and knowledgeable population benefits everybody. In return, everybody should contribute towards an accessible education system.
In addition to general taxation, fees and grants could easily be funded by closing tax loopholes. Vodafone – a financial sponsor of the Conservative Party – has recently had its £6billion tax bill inexplicitly wiped off the ledger by George Osborne. This £6billion revenue would have paid the full grants and fees of 200,000 students to attend a three year degree course. (Incidentally, Vodafone’s financial director, Andy Halford, has now been appointed onto the Government’s Advisory Board on Business Tax Rates by Osborne.)
Once the principle of free education for all is eroded, once university places come with a price tag, there is no reason not to charge students at secondary or primary schools – fees that can also be paid back once the child earns more than £21,000.
How we can capture any of these current issues in a single frame is the task of the socially conscious photographer in 2011. As we face the tide of 500,000 public sector job cuts, reductions in welfare support, dismemberment of the National Health Service, and dissection of social housing, the new decade will no doubt provide a rich canvas of dissent for photographers of all political hues. The task for those who shoot for social justice will be: how can we transform the outcome?
“Nothing I have seen – in photographs or real life – ever cut me as sharply, deeply, instantaneously,” says Susan Sontag of the time she first saw a photograph of Dachau. “It seems plausible to me to divide my life into two parts: before I saw those photographs – and after. Something went dead; something is still crying.”
Cliff James, photographer and jouurnalist
