This demo will be a flop

**”Never in the field of human education was so much owed by so many for so little” would be my choice for a rallying cry for this year’s student demo. **

Not the pithiest slogan, perhaps, but it beats “dream for our future” or “fight for hope” or whatever this year’s official line is. Perhaps we should just be happy that the NUS has not yet resorted to block quoting Rage Against The Machine lyrics in its official press releases.

This university, I’m led to believe, will have its own hashtag for the demo: #wearewarwick. Presumably that’s supposed to be broken down into “we are Warwick”, though spoken aloud it sounds suspiciously like “weary Warwick” – a catchphrase which, if nothing else, is rather perceptive.

Weary Warwick, it seems, doesn’t much care for this demo. We’ve been there, done that, got the makeshift placard. Some of us remember that famed day in London in 2010, when fire extinguishers rained from the sky and the china in the parliamentary tea rooms rattled to the sound of thousands of chanting students. But the anger of those days has faded into mere grumpiness, the energy of the protests replaced by a pervasive apathy.

And who can blame students for having given up? £9000 fees are here to stay. Never again will universities be able to rely on taxpayers’ money to research and enlighten. The government which took a sledgehammer to our higher education system is still here, and Nick Clegg – at least in name – is still Deputy PM. Ed Miliband, whose Labour Party first introduced tuition fees, can offer only a slight fee reduction if students will deliver him the votes he needs, rather as the prison warder offers the convict a shortened sentence in return for good behaviour.

We must accept it: the students have lost. The NUS seems to recognise this, at least tacitly. November’s demo has no obvious objective or demand. Its theme, “educate, employ, empower”, sounds like the title of a leaflet you might pick up at a job centre. In 2010 the fees hike bound angry students to one powerful message. It politicised students outside of the usual hard-core of left-leaning protesters and united the movement around a single central issue. 2012’s demo, by contrast, will be many things to many people; a “no more of this sort of thing” demo with no coherence and no message.

The great danger of organising a demo with so many similarities to 2010’s offering is that comparisons will inevitably be drawn. And the comparisons will not favour this month’s march. It will attract far, far fewer students. Its impact will be dramatically smaller, its presence in the press much quieter, because there is no great legislative issue at stake.

I desperately hope that I am wrong. But when the historians come to look back upon the great decline of British higher education, this year’s demo will be a mere footnote.

The demo itself, by the way, falls on the 21st November. I won’t see you there.