The Seige of Millbank.

That's the name being given to the events of November 1oth that saw British students clash with police at 30 Millbank Tower. Having taken at a closer look at those events the level of damage done, the number of people involved and the level of disorder means that as far as I'm concerned it qualified as a small but very real riot.

In order to understand how that riot came to be you have to understand the role that student tuition fees play in British politics. Prior to 2010's General Election the Liberal Democrat (LibDem) Party were the only party that promised not to increase the fees that students pay for university tuition. Some including the Party leader, Nick Clegg even went so far as to personally sign a public pledge to vote against any attempts to raise tuition fees regardless of who won the election. This stance meant that the LibDems attracted lots of support from students, their parents and the parents of children who would soon become students. It was these votes that helped the LibDems to their strong showing at the election and left them holding the balance of power in the formation of the coalition government.

Then when the LibDems, or the Yellow Tories as they're now known, got into power their leader, Nick Clegg turned round to these voters and basically said; "F*** You! I get to be deputy Prime Minister." by announcing that they would be tripling tuition fees. So it was hardly surprising that when around 4000 of these voters found themselves marching past Tory party HQ they pretty much spontaneously decided to return the sentiment. With only around 50 police officers initially guarding the office complex this led to a six hour riot that saw £1million worth of damage being done to the building, 40 police officers (mostly lightly) injured and 60 arrests so far.

To make matters worse Millbank Tower not only houses the Conservative Party HQ it is also home to London offices of the spy agency GCHQ. Staff there along with their colleagues at MI5 headquarters a few doors down were forced to spend the afternoon locked inside their offices in order to protect themselves from the rioters. For a security service that is about as humiliating as it gets.

Having been visibly shaken by the riot the British state in it's entirety is now expected is to launch into something of a vendetta against the perpetrators. The first stage of this, which happened almost immediately, was to claim that the legitimate National Union of Students (NUS) march had been hijacked by anarchists who committed the disorder. The main purpose of this tactic is to create a split amongst the students and their supporters by making a distinction between "Good" protesters who engage in ineffective protest and "Bad" protesters who engage in effective protest. The secondary purpose is to provide reassurance. If the rioting was orchestrated by a small group of anarchists and left-wing radicals then the activities of these small groups can easily be disrupted preventing the threat of future disorder. However if the rioting was simply ordinary people spontaneously resorting to insurrection in response to the spending cuts then it is much harder to control meaning that the state has a very big problem indeed.

The second part of the vendetta will be to identify those involved in the rioting and then punish them either judicially or extra-judicially. To this end some British newspapers have been forced into publishing photographs and setting up tiplines to help identify people while other British newspapers didn't need any encouragement. I also suspect there will be a special edition of the BBC's "Crimewatch" TV show just to deal with that one protest. I'm not sure how successful this will be because while even the police hate grasses a vast number of the protesters were inexperienced enough to be caught on camera committing criminal acts without even taking the basic precaution of wearing a mask to disguise their identity which does rather rule out serious anarchist involvement. One of the first things intelligence will be looking at is who decided to route the march past Millbank Tower in the first place even though most marches routed through Westminster pass Millbank Tower at some point.

With all the debate about the polices tactics and whether the protesters have damaged or enhanced their cause still raging I can't help but think that the most depressing part of the day was that it was carried out by university students. These are meant to be some of the brightest and best young minds in Britain yet they can't seem to work out that a recent defence pact between the UK and France means that it might not be the best idea to march to the beat of the French drum. As a result they've decided to move on from this success adopting the failed Iraq War strategy of marching everyone into submissive boredom with another march where the police spotters will no doubt be out in force.