Writing for The Independent:
One student, persecuted in the press because his parents happen to be famous, has tried to explain that he was carried away in the spirit of the moment. Anyone who has been in a volatile, clumsily policed crowd, whether at a demo or a football match, will know how quickly mass anger can boil over. The police get carried away too, and the downward tumble into fighting begins.
These things tend to be forgotten by the reasonable non-marchers, sitting at home – except, that is, when they are in a historical context. Similar scenes of street fighting were commonplace 40 or so years ago. At the time, the anti-Vietnam war demonstrators caused outrage within the Labour government and in the mainstream press. Individual student leaders were vilified. There was mockery of some of the protesters' sillier ideas: at one point, during the Grosvenor Square demo, there was serious discussion as to whether that symbol of Yankee imperialism, the Playboy Club, should be attacked.
"A kind of contagious frenzy gripped many student bodies," wrote Bernard Levin with some distaste in The Pendulum Years, adding wearily that there was nothing new in the young going too far. Because it was written by the grown-ups, "recorded history ... had been in this respect one long catalogue of the crimes and follies of youth".
Not any more. When the grizzled veterans of Sixties protest look back, it is with nostalgia and fondness. What happened then is no longer hooliganism and unkindness to police horses, but a laudable expression of radicalism and citizen power which later played an important part in politics and society generally. The revolting students were not yobs, after all; they were heroes.
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