MALIGN LEGACY OF ‘68
Fifty years ago today, Left-wing firebrands were fighting police at the bloody riots in Grosvenor Square. So what can we learn about Jeremy Corbyn and the Marxists round him from the year that shook Britain to the core?
ExACTlY 50 years ago today, late on the afternoon of March 17, 1968, thousands of demonstrators were making their way towards the U.S. Embassy in Grosvenor Square, Central london.
The Vietnam War was at its blood- soaked peak. In the jungles of South-East Asia, almost half a million young Americans were locked in battle against communist guerillas. And in cities across the democratic world, young people were seething with fury at what they saw as the crimes of Western imperialism.
The year 1968 was one of revolutionary change and violent bloodshed, defined by the sound of the Rolling Stones and the smell of tear gas. So far, Britain had been relatively untouched.
But when some of the estimated 25,000 peace marchers reached Grosvenor Square, the antiAmerican rhetoric became more strident, the pro-communist chanting more ferocious — and then the fighting started.
‘Suddenly,’ reported one paper, ‘violence took over. Police helmets soared high into the air. Policemen were punched and kicked. Smoke bombs were hurled. Clouds of choking smoke billowed over the scene.’
later, the march’s organisers — notably the former Oxford Union president and outspoken Trotskyist Tariq Ali and the hard-left actress Vanessa Redgrave — blamed police brutality. And undoubtedly some truncheon-wielding policemen did lose their cool.
But many demonstrators told a different story. They talked of marchers using flagpoles as spears, or throwing bricks, rocks and marbles at the police horses, all to a chorus of ‘Victory for the Viet Cong’ and ‘Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh’ — the name of North Vietnam’s communist president.
‘One mounted policemen was repeatedly beaten over the head with a banner and, with his horse, dragged down,’ wrote one watching journalist. ‘A young constable sat on a kerb being horribly ill. Another just sat, shaking.’
AFTER an hour or so, the police managed to restore order. Most of the demonstrators drifted away in shock, though small groups of agitators besieged nearby hotels, smashing windows and terrifying tourists. At one stage they even broke into the Hilton, though they were soon dispersed.
In all, 86 people were injured that afternoon, including three police officers with serious spinal, neck and head injuries.
As even the hand-wringing Observer newspaper put it, this had turned out to be less a peace protest than ‘a highbrow version of football hooliganism’.
later that evening, as workmen wearily cleaned up the mess outside the U. S. Embassy, one long- haired student went up to a policeman and screamed at him: ‘I’ve got glass in my eye and it’s all your fault.’
The constable just stared at him, then said calmly: ‘ You shouldn’t have come then, mate. We didn’t want to.’
At the time, the Grosvenor Square riot could not have been more shocking. There had been nothing like it in Central london for decades.
Yet as older readers will know, what happened that day was only part of a wider and more colourful story.
The year 1968 was a dizzying melodrama that included the assassinations of John f. Kennedy’s brother Robert and the civil rights leader Martin luther King, a student revolt against france’s president Charles de Gaulle, and capitals across the Western world torn apart by race riots, anti-war protests and police violence.
In some ways all this feels like ancient history. Vietnam has become just another destination on the backpacker trail, while the long-haired, would-be revolutionaries who once hurled missiles at the Metropolitan Police are now silver- haired pensioners enjoying a comfortable retirement. The U.S. Embassy has moved to a new site in Battersea, south of the Thames.
And when you look at newspaper reports from the time, one obvious difference jumps out at you.
Then, as now, students were idealistic, self-important and bombastic, as so many of us are when we’re young.
But although there could be no excuse for the appalling violence in Grosvenor Square, the demonstrators could at least claim to be motivated by genuine concern about something other than themselves.
The students’ horror at the Vietnam War was hardly unwarranted. After all, the U. S. bombing of North Vietnam killed tens of thousands of civilians, while headlines were dominated by the Pentagon’s indiscriminate use of napalm, as well as horrific war crimes such as the rape and murder of at least 347 Vietnamese by the U.S. infantry at My lai.
Indeed, the fact that Britain’s politicians refused to get involved in Vietnam, judging it an unwinnable and immoral war, surely tells its own story.
It is true that some student sit-ins and demos of the late Sixties and Seventies, such as those at the University of Essex and the Polytechnic of North london — alma mater of Jeremy Corbyn — were about petty campus politics. By and large, however, what got young people animated and angry was the state of the world.
After all, virtually no British student had ever been to Vietnam and very few had been to South Africa, where the cruelties of the apartheid regime were the other great fashionable cause of the day. Their campaigns were motivated by genuine idealism, though, about the bloodshed in South- East Asia and the plight of black South Africans.
However naive they may have been, they cared about something far beyond their immediate horizons.
We, too, live in an age of student protest. But there the comparison ends.
Those who marched on Grosvenor Square in 1968 were very conscious of how lucky they were. Indeed, they felt guilty about it and were fired with zeal to help those less fortunate than themselves.
By contrast, today’s student protesters weep tears of selfpity, not sympathy. Their supposedly burning issues —
the importance of ‘ decolonising’ the curriculum, the horrors of a Churchill-themed North London cafe, the terrible feelings of oppression caused by a little noticed statue of Cecil Rhodes — are so footling, so narcissistic, they are almost beyond parody.
If they wanted, the students could march to protest about the oppression of women in the Middle East, the slaughter in Yemen, slave labour in Qatar, the horrors of North Korea or the crimes of Vladimir Putin.
THESE self- proclaimed victims instead invest their energy in campaigns to call transgender people ‘ zhe’, to insert ‘trigger warnings’ before difficult scenes in classic literature, and to rename halls of residence associated with the great figures of the past.
I don’t meant to suggest that the protesters of 1968 were saints. They certainly weren’t, as events in Grosvenor square showed. But while they were fired, like today’s students, by a sense of entitlement, a belief that the world belonged to them, they did at least channel it towards issues greater than themselves.
On the face of it, you might think we are living in an entirely different world. Yet when you dig a little deeper, the parallels between 1968 and 2018 are disturbing.
The most obvious is the wider political atmosphere. After all, the themes that dominated so many events of 1968 — the slavish cult of youth, pervasive anti-Western sentiment, the glamorisation of revolutionary violence, the mood of political hysteria — are rarely far from the headlines today.
As in 1968, the mood among the young is stridently anti-American. students may no longer chant about Vietnam, but the disastrous occupation of Iraq and the election of Donald Trump have done lasting damage to the image of the West’s pre-eminent power.
In 1968, many students were hysterically Left-wing. Yet at the time — even though the headlines were dominated by the vociferous hard-Left — a large proportion of dons and students were actually card-carrying Conservatives. And of course, many of the activists who were at Grosvenor square grew up, cut their hair, put on a suit and abandoned the moralistic posturing of their youth.
Today the mood is very different. Unashamed conservatives have largely vanished from campuses or been driven underground by the boorish intolerance of their peers. student unions are packed with self- proclaimed radicals, while activists try to ban speakers whose views don’t accord with the politically correct fixations of the day.
And as anybody who has been following the recent lecturers’ strike will know, senior common rooms are dominated by a lazy, knee- jerk, unreflective and self-satisfied Leftism.
Which brings me to the man who, more than anyone, can claim to be the true heir of the spirit of 1968. I don’t mean that as a compliment.
I mean, of course, Vladimir Putin’s friend Jeremy Corbyn.
Fifty years ago, having left his shropshire grammar school with two grade-E A-levels, Mr Corbyn was on his gap year in Jamaica ( he spent two years there in the end).
In his instinctive anti-Americanism, his hatred of capitalism, his fondness for dictators and his belief that everything, everywhere, is always the West’s fault, Mr Corbyn embodies the conventional wisdom of the 1968 generation.
Yet unlike many of the Grosvenor square activists, he remains an adolescent trapped in a 68-yearold man’s body, the Peter Pan of the hard-Left, a posturing studentunion agitator who never grew up.
Even his trademark black Lenin cap, as worn by countless student leaders, radical activists and countercultural rock stars in the late sixties, conforms to the stereotype, although he seems to have discarded it in recent months.
As heir to the hysteria of 1968, Mr Corbyn never fails to pander to the narcissistic entitlement of today’s student activists.
With the shameless dishonesty that has become his trademark, he tells them the world is rigged against them and that, if only they back him against the ‘capitalists’, he will conjure paradise into being overnight.
What is more, he and his Marxist puppet-master, John McDonnell, seem to be seeking a re-run of the violence that scarred Central London half a century ago.
Just look, for example, at the shamelessly belligerent way they exploited last summer’s Grenfell Tower fire, when Mr Corbyn called for people to ‘occupy’ houses in Kensington, and Mr McDonnell said the residents had been ‘murdered’ by the Government, and their supporters demanded a ‘Day of Rage’.
And then, of course, there is Russia. Even by Mr Corbyn’s standards, his response this week to the salisbury poisoning strikes me as utterly disgraceful.
No other Labour leader in history — not Clement Attlee, harold Wilson, Michael Foot or Neil Kinnock — would have responded by casting doubt on Britain’s security services, blaming the Government and effectively siding with Vladimir Putin.
It was almost as if Mr Corbyn was taking dictation from Moscow. And in a sense he was. For not only has his press spokesman, the former Guardian columnist seumas Milne, appeared on stage with Mr Putin, but he has written numerous columns defending him, claiming that Russia is being bullied by the West and even making excuses for stalin.
And who was it, on Wednesday afternoon, pouring scorn on the evidence for Russia’s responsibility? Why, seumas Milne.
FIFTY years ago, people like Mr Corbyn and Mr Milne were throwing stones at police in Grosvenor square. Today, their successors are making plans to move into Downing street. I doubt I’m alone in finding that a terrifying thought.
For there is another 1968 anniversary that should give us pause for thought. It is 50 years since the Prague spring, when Czechoslovakia’s bid for freedom from communist oppression was crushed by the tanks of the Red Army.
Those who howled about the Vietnam War had very little to say about the 137 Czechoslovakians killed. They were too busy shouting about the crimes of the West to notice that the Kremlin had brutally crushed a European nation’s bid for freedom.
If something like that happened now — if Vladimir Putin sent Russian tanks across the border of a little Eastern European country, — what would the students do?
Would they protest outside the Russian embassy? Would they be all over Twitter, donning ribbons and shouting slogans to show their horror at Russian imperialism?
We all know the answer to that, don’t we? They would be far too busy polishing their MeToo hashtags even to notice.
And one last question. Whose side would Jeremy Corbyn be on?
Well, we know the answer to that, too. he’d be on the same side he has been on this week, the same side he would have been on in 1968, the same side he has been on all his life.
he’d be on the other side. Any side but Britain’s.