Being a responsible and mature adult I suppose I have to tut-tut the violence but I must admit that seeing those students rioting at Tory party headquarters in London during the protest against tuition fee increases last week did warm the cockles of my heart quite a bit. I didn’t think students had that kind of fight in them anymore, having long ago swapped the dangerous passion of political activism for dull, conformist careerism and it brought back fond memories of my own time at college — except without all the fire-starting and window-breaking stuff.

I was at Maidstone College of Art in the early 80s (the same year as Tracey Emin — oh, the stories I could tell you) when we had clear “enemies” in the form of Thatcher and Reagan and while there I went on (non-violent!) marches in support of the GLC, CND and the striking miners. More locally we were involved with fighting a plan to merge Maidstone with the nearby Canterbury and Rochester art colleges that was being forced through by the Thatcherite National Advisory Board for Education against the wishes of not only the staff and students but even the local Tory council. Being a soulless technocrat Thatcher obviously didn’t see the point of any higher education that wasn’t “practical” like the arts so we had to be made more “efficient” and the art school system turned into a vocational sausage factory. We had a big protest march through Canterbury but the main event was an all-night sit-in at the college which turned out to be more of a party than anything with live bands and dancing but who said political activism had to be boring? It certainly felt great to be involved in something like that and what’s the point of being young if you can’t make futile, idealistic gestures?

As usual it was all for nothing, Maidstone was merged with Canterbury and Rochester in 1987 after I left (though they were stopped from closing one of the colleges down completely) and now those have been folded into one multi-campus monster called the University for The Creative Arts. It turned out that our new Principal — the very man who attended all our Student Union meetings and assured us he was on our side in opposing the merger — was actually appointed by the Advisory Board tasked with the job of helping the merger happen so basically the bastard was a mole who stabbed us all in the back.

With the draconian budget cuts his government is passing David Cameron could become a hated bogeyman on a par with Thatcher and we could be in for a replay of the 1980s — futile or not. Let’s hope the music will be as good too, we may have been on the losing side in most of the battles but we had a bloody good soundtrack.

Download: Set The House Ablaze (live) – The Jam (mp3)