More Tantrums in London Over Tuition

09 Dec, 2010 by Dave Blount

Print this article Font size -16+

Liberalism promises everything you want at someone else’s expense, hooking the unscrupulous on the opiate of government largesse. The problem, as Margaret Thatcher famously pointed out, is that eventually socialists run out of other people’s money. That’s when the withdrawal symptoms set in — including violent tantrums by Big Government’s beneficiaries:

Police with riot shields held off angry student protesters marching to London’s Parliament Square on Thursday as lawmakers debated a controversial plan to triple university tuition fees in England.

Thousands of students held demonstrations and sit-ins throughout the country, heaping pressure on the government to reverse course. Students marched through central London, banging drums, waving placards and chanting “education is not for sale,” as weeks of nationwide protests reached a crescendo.

Small groups of protesters tore down barricades and threw paint bombs as police with batons fended off others in attempts to reinforce a security cordon near Parliament.

In a free country, the cost of tuition would have nothing to do with the government. If your school was too pricey, you would transfer to a less expensive one. But free market solutions no longer apply in Britain, where moonbattery has reduced the public to spoilt children unwilling to settle for what they can afford. Inevitably, the government is now forced to raise tuition as part of disastrously overdue measures to reign in state spending.

This is a scary stage in the disease known as Fabian socialism. If England is still the proud and resilient nation that fought off the Nazis, it will weather riots and demagogues and reemerge as a free and prosperous country with a healthy contempt for all things left of center. If it isn’t, it will plunge deeper into collectivism, in which case its future will resemble Eastern Europe prior to the Soviet collapse.