the peasants are revolting!
It did make me smile to hear that the French students were committed to returning to their violent anti-austerity cost-of-living protests now their half-term holidays were over. How very French that they wouldn’t allow such necessary actions to impact leisure time.
Mind, at least they’re still prepared, as both individuals and as part of a collective social movement to get off their bottoms, display white-hot righteous anger and make a pain of themselves to those in authority. Are we? For decades and across generations we have failed to show anything but apathy over the carelessness of national institutions and the disasters that followed as a result.
Almost exactly sixty years ago, a colliery tip collapsed onto Aberfan, a South Wales mining village, killing 116 children and 28 adults but no-one was ever prosecuted or held to account even though the subsequent public inquiry was damning in the extreme. It found the devastation foreseeable and preventable, with the National Coal Board “wholly responsible in its ignorance and bungling ineptitude”. It even went as far as singling out particular engineers, managers and the chairman for incompetence, stonewalling and factual inconsistency. This lack of accountability has been witnessed more recently at Hillsborough, Grenfell and following the Covid pandemic. En-France, they would be manning the barricades yet here it’s met with a shrug of the shoulders and largely a belief that it’s either nothing to do with us or there’s nothing we could do about it.
From an early age, French children are taught citizenship (Liberté, égalité, fraternité) and what it actually means to potentially have some control over their destiny. In reality, or even in their imagination, they possess a sense of ownership of their country’s politics and institutions that we appear to have lost. Could that be because we are not citizens? Class distinctions may have blurred a little but we have no actual guaranteed rights written in the stone of a constitution. Our historical, hierarchical society grants us only permissions and whilst ‘they’ write the rules ‘we’ acquiesce and obey them.
However, this weekend witnessed an event which does highlight anything’s possible. Serbia’s election contest pitted a grassroots student movement against an incumbent autocratic government that had ruled for over fourteen years. Yet against the odds, it was the Student List which triumphed: on an exceptionally high 70% turnout, it won 53% of the vote, to 39% for Putin’s pal, President Alexsandar Vucic’s Serbian Progressive Party. The scale of the students’ achievement cannot be overstated and it was born out of a roofing disaster that killed sixteen people. How successful they prove to be in government remains to be seen but from small acorns…
