Law and disorder

Police officers were injured, property was destroyed and potentially lethal missiles were thrown by protesters. It is no exaggeration to say somebody could have been killed. The rally organisers, the National Union of Students, quickly sought to distance themselves from the minority who turned a peaceful demonstration into a violent rampage.

However this lawless action has been condoned and even welcomed by supposedly responsible figures, such as MPs and university lecturers, who should have known better rather than harking back to their own youthful exuberances and the student protests of the 1960s.

The sheer number of students taking part in the demonstration, and the clear anger at the hiking of tuition fees, will have been felt by the coalition Government – especially those Liberal Democrat MPs who had aligned themselves with the NUS campaign against fees before the election.

It is natural to expect Labour MPs to want to capitalise on this – perhaps conveniently forgetting that it was their party which introduced tuition fees and then commissioned the controversial Browne report.

For some backbenchers to appear to celebrate mob rule simply beggars belief. Using the social networking site Twitter, which seems to give people from all walks of life a platform to talk before they think, MPs have congratulated students on their anger, for "getting stuck into" the Government and even called on their party to "build on this."

For MPs to celebrate civil unrest and mindless vandalism as a way of fighting Government policy can only be seen as an admission that they are incapable of providing meaningful opposition through reasoned debate.