Eamonn McCann: Students are in the vanguard of modern politics

Students on both sides of the Atlantic have this year turned the tide of ideas towards the left.

This runs counter to the conventional wisdom that undergraduate militancy is long-gone, a distant memory from times when students might march towards the golden future, fists scarcely unclenched from one weekend to another. I recall the late Paddy Lynch and myself, awol from Queen’s, slumped on the Piccadilly Line regretting the night before.

“Hey,” asked Paddy, suddenly alert as we neared Hyde Park, “What is it this week?” (Angola, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau, as it happens, a triplet which doesn’t trip off the tongue as lightly as way back then.) Nowadays, we are invited to believe, personal ambition has displaced communal solidarity as the driving force of activity on the campi (from the Latin campus: think cacti, radii, alumni.)

This last paragraph can be taken as continuation of my campaign to save Latin from the knacker’s yard to which the philistines who run higher education these days want it consigned because, while it provides a channel connecting us to the early efflorescence of Western civilisation, it has no obvious role in the generation of economic growth.

But education should be seen as a social good in itself, not as training for service in the class-riven economy currently collapsing around our ears. Latin should be saved for the same reason rock and roll is a necessity. Rock and roll, as recently noted here, saved the Oxford Comma.

It can help rescue Latin. Start with Steeleye Span’s ‘Gaudete’, Behemoth’s ‘Ora Pro Nobis Lucifer’, Enya’s ‘Pax Deorum’, Sinead’s ‘Regina Caeli’, The Streets’ ‘Memento Mori’, Rufus Wainwright’s ‘Agnus Dei’... I could go on. I will. ‘O Caritas’ – Cat Stevens; ‘Perpetua Lux – Deus Ex Machina; The Misfits’ punk-classic paeon to wolverines and warlocks: “Formulae ueteres exorsismorum et excommunicationum/ Strigas et fictos lupos credere/Daemon pellem lupinam.” And so forth. I say nothing of Status Quo.

CREATING AN EQUAL SOCIETY

Ok, I’m stretching it a bit. But the point stands, that Latin doesn’t have to be uncool, that the reason dead-head administrators want the old language ditched is that education has been colonised by capitalism for the factory-farming of STEM-celled Stakhanovites.

This is a good enough reason for the rest of us to take the contrary view. In Britain and the US this year, students have been, if not back on the barricades, at least back on the streets striving for change. The mass campaigns which gathered behind Corbyn and Sanders reconfigured the political landscapes, made what had hitherto been held impossible suddenly seem within reach.

In both cases, students were in the vanguard.

A survey by the NME in the wake of the Westminster poll found “a significant increase in turnout among young people as well as a significant increase in overall turnout in university towns.”

The most dramatic swings to Corbyn came in “student-heavy” constituencies - Newcastle East, Newcastle Central, Manchester Withington, Manchester Central, Cambridge, Canterbury, etc. It wasn’t just that students registered and went to the polls in unexpectedly high numbers, but that by polling day thousands who had never paid much attention to politics were out canvassing for the Corbyn cause.

NUS president Malia Bouattia – nobody’s idea of a roaring revolutionary – reported that, “Our research has demonstrated that students were less geared towards personal gain and more concerned about the future for generations to come. It was about creating a collective, fair and equal society.”

TRAMPING THE STREETS

In the US, Sanders, 74, an excellent age, opened campaign rallies with a Dutch auction on student debt. “Anybody here got student debt? What numbers you got? You? 35,000. You? 55,000? Who else? A young lady here… 100,000 dollars. You win! I don’t know what you win, but you win!”

The very fact that he led off with students’ concerns was a factor in itself. In response – “Bernie! Bernie! Bernie!” Bernie had a head start. Libyan-American Jamal enthused, at a home state Vermont rally, that he’d been 10 when he first heard Sanders speak, at a reggae festival. “He was talking about legalising weed and stuff. And I was like, wow, this guy is something else.”

Sanders openly called himself a socialist, took steady aim at Wall Street, major corporations, the military–industrial complex, Big Pharma. One New York Times report suggested that that as many as half those staffing the phone banks or tramping the streets for Sanders were students.

Of course, Sanders didn’t win, and neither has Corbyn, yet. And even if they do win in the end, class war won’t be over. As Ken Livingstone murmured back when he was somewhat more sensible, “If we could overthrow the system by the ballot box, elections would be banned. ”

What’s been overthrown already is the notion that we are all new-liberals now, and none more so than students, laser-focused and driven by desperate ambition to join the elite. It’s clear as we enter a new academic year that it doesn’t have to be like this. The future is bright. Help keep politics cool again.