Student Protestors Turn Violent in England over Tuition Increase

British student protests turned dramatically violent this week as Parliament voted to raise the cap on university tuition fees from £3,290 to £9,000 a year. The images from central London shocked a political class that had grown accustomed to the orderly, permit-holding British protest tradition.

The vote itself, held on Thursday, passed by just 323 to 302, cutting the coalition's majority by three-quarters. Twenty-one Liberal Democrat MPs voted against their own government's plan and eight abstained or were absent, while two Lib Dem parliamentary aides resigned to vote no. The party that had campaigned on a pledge to oppose fee increases was now pushing them through, a U-turn that would haunt Nick Clegg's party for years.

Outside, thousands of demonstrators converged on Parliament Square. Fires were lit, the Treasury's ground-floor windows were smashed, and protesters were kettled into the square late into the night, with dozens of officers and demonstrators injured and around 150 arrests. At the Cenotaph, a protester was photographed swinging from the Union Flag — an image that dominated the next day's papers.

The most startling image of the night, though, belonged to royalty. A car carrying Prince Charles and Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, en route to the Royal Variety Performance at the London Palladium, was attacked on Regent Street by protesters. It was splattered with paint and one rear window was cracked, though both were unharmed.

It was the second eruption in a month: on November 10, protesters had stormed and ransacked the Conservative Party headquarters at Millbank Tower, with a fire extinguisher dropped from the roof. The broader context was austerity across Europe in the wake of the financial crisis — graduate unemployment, rising rents, and now higher education costs mobilizing young people in ways that prefigured the protest movements of the early 2010s.

The Millbank and vote-day incidents became a Rorschach test for British political opinion, with perspectives on the violence revealing underlying positions about inequality, institutional legitimacy, and the acceptable forms of political expression.