REINO UNIDO: el desarrollo de un nuevo movimiento político?

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Student protests: the riot girls

The picture of schoolgirls peacefully stopping attacks on a police van during this week's student demonstrations sends out a powerful message of hope and defiance

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• • Jonathan Jones
  • guardian.co.uk, Thursday 25 November 2010 21.00 GMT
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Schoolgirls join hands to peacefully stop attacks on a police van during student protests in London. Photograph: Demotix/Peter Marshall They are conscious of what they look like – angelic spirits of 1968. Their school ties are knotted around their heads as if dressing up as the Woodstock generation for a classroom history play, but this act of street theatre is for real. Some who were at the student protests this week accuse police of deliberately leaving a solitary van in the middle of the "kettled" crowd to invite trouble and provide incriminating media images of an out-of-control mob attacking it. Whatever, the schoolgirls who brought attacks on the police vehicle to an end by standing around it with linked hands in flower-power poses understood the power of images better than their elders. For this picture tells a lot, very quickly. It tells us the menace of violence is real as anger grows among groups directly afflicted by the coalition's cuts. Yet it also reveals that most protesters are peaceful, idealistic, with a sense of history and of the gravity of their actions. Most of all it tells us how amazingly young many of them are. Future historians may well write that the Conservative-Liberal coalition was doomed the day schoolchildren took to the streets to assert their right to a university education. Yet this picture tells us that this is not merely a reactive protest. The 1968 allusion is not superficial: the images these girls are summoning, just as much as the van-smashers did, are pictures of revolution – the real thing, in its romantic and large-minded soixante-huitard form. But the students of 40 years ago were affluent; they lived in a confident time. How amazing for children and teenagers and 20-year-olds to show such courage now, when their elders are scared and cowed. Politicians are always going on about getting young people interested in politics: well, that's one thing this government has achieved. Perhaps Nick Clegg can turn that into a boast. Meanwhile, we can look at this picture and see a mass movement rapidly evolving as a generation goes beyond merely taking to the streets and starts finding a larger meaning in its rebellion, and imposing order in new ways. What these girls are showing us is that this is not just about rage. It is a defiant stand for youth and hope.