That old May '68 playbook

Time to dust off those records of the '68-'75 years of unrest: first student then working class led struggles.

As the sixties ended, the long boom of the fifties was finally playing out. Profitability was falling and the economy looked tired. Those old patrician classes - those Tories who seemed to live in another land-owning age - were still in power with their strange articulations of English. Most students looked at them as if they were fossils: the ruling class had never looked so alien.

And students there were: so many of them. The education reforms of the sixties had introduced comprehensives into the secondary sector plus 'new universities' to provide the human resources for a more technological age. These new working class and lower middle class students, often the first of their families to go to university, were culturally nothing like the Eton-processed. They had been promised a dream the economy could not provide. No wonder they felt alienated.

I was such. In '69 I was on the streets protesting with the far left. If you had asked me why I was there, did I care about the Vietnamese Revolution, I would have given you some Marxist account of the combined and uneven struggle against Imperialism. The future might be hazy but it would be our people, the dispossessed, who would be in charge.

In my heart of hearts I hated and despised those who ruled us. They were people nothing like me or the folk from whence I had come. Patronising, superior, arrogant and entitled - the bubble people of their age.

Plus ça change...

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It took more than a decade for the insurgent tide to recede. The last gasp of the NUM was defeated and the economy (under Thatcher) retooled for a globalist, financially-led neoliberalism. The masses were back in their boxes for a generation while the Marxist-Leninist dream died.

So here we are again.

In 2020 the ailing economy, now drained by more than a decade of secular stagnation following the muted recovery from 2008-9, is again tottering on the brink of deep recession. The current cycle of growth is just about played out, hamstrung by zombie firms, too much debt and with COVID-19 providing the coup de grâce.

The current cohort of young people - just like in '68 - look at the establishment and don't see themselves or their concerns; they don't see prospects for themselves going forward. They feel alienated. All it needed was a spark and the George Floyd death was it, at least for this month.

Dusting off the playbook I would expect an endless sequence of demonstrations and événements going forward propelled by the 'new petit-bourgeoisie': students, left-professionals such as teachers, academics and government workers together with black activists and other groups who feel themselves unintegrated and aggrieved, those whom the dream has left behind (there are so many!).

The industrial working class may be less salient, organised and visible than in the 1970s but it's still there. They won't be easy sign-ups to the new woke, but when their jobs in manufacturing, logistics and technology start to evaporate over the next year or two don't expect them to sit on their hands.

I imagine there are mandarins in the Home Office as I write drafting memos to the Home Secretary and Prime Minister calling for a quiet reorganisation and upfunding of the police. The Government might have been woefully slow off the mark for the onset of COVID-19 but they will surely be sensitive to their forthcoming public order challenges.

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