President Obama today announced the repeal of ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell’, a policy passed in 1993 which banned US soldiers from discussing or displaying homosexuality.
Later, Obama called for restraint and cooperation from the new republican majority elected to sit in the House of Representatives this spring. “With greater power, will come greater responsibility,” he said.
Now I swear I’ve heard that somewhere before — click here
What an amazing week: first Thursday’s 10,000-strong student protest on Parliament Square, and capping it off on Sunday night, Miley Cyrus, 18-year-old pop sensation and star of Disney series Hannah Montana, caught hittin’ the bong!
Protesters threw paint and kicked Prince Charles’s car, then attacked Top Shop. What’s next on the anarchist hit-list — Toys’R'Us?
Here’s how it happened:
I spent today at the protests. I arrived at the UCL Union building in Bloomsbury at 11am where the first few hundred protesters gathered. I found a space in the crowd, next to a 20-something looking girl in a black hoodie with a black scarf pulled over her face. In her right hand was a plastic shield with screws protruding from the front. Her friends smelled of beer.
“You never know when you’ll need it,” she said.
I nodded. Every so often enclaves of the predominantly late-teenage crowd broke out in a coordinated chant. A portly guy started one in which he subtly transformed the Deputy PM’s name into an expletive: “Nick Clegg! — Nick Clead! — Nick Clead! — N’Dick Clead! — DICK HEAD!!!”
At the risk of sounding like a conservative, proto-geriatric American fart: it was no wonder young people erupted in violence.
The march had no structure, no real organisation, no over-arching theme, and lacking most, no parliament-addressed petitions for protesters to sign. When results from the Commons vote circulated through the crowd, thousands of disappointed, cold, hungry, toilet-deprived kids who whose hopes of participating in something larger than themselves were dashed — so they wandered to Oxford Street.
And whose motorcade should happen to be there at that precise moment, but Prince Charles and the Duchess of Cornwall on their way to the Paladium!
From the Commons hiking tuition fees to Prince Charles driving to shake hands with Andrew Lloyd-Weber is a massive leap over already tenuous ground, but an attack on Top Shop? Sounds like the kids, anarchist or otherwise, needed a hot sandwich and a hot mug of herbal tea.
On the other side of the debate, the coalition Government don’t deserve a prize for clear communication. They have yet to articulate how increased university tuition would play out in students’ financial futures. How many pounds will students pay each month and for how many years? How much interest will be charged on their debt? If a graduate earns a £21,000 salary and loses his job, does he have to keep paying? Most importantly, what is the end game — completely scrap government funding for university fees? If so, what are the tangible benefits to such a move?
Tonight, police herded young people out of the kettle in Parliament Square. Cleaners will arrive tomorrow morning and erase all evidence of a march. No-one can predict the actions of a mob, but had the Government articulated responses to questions like those above, and had demonstrators — students, NUS members, socialists, and unionists — thrashed out a joint petition to present to MPs, I wonder how many young people could have returned home with sense of continuity and purpose, rather than hurling paint at Prince Charles’s car and smashing up the Kate Moss collection at Top Shop.
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