Good morning. In my experience, at any protest, the most memorable and encapsulating slogans are always the ones written by hand with marker pen on cardboard placards.
“School is a right, not a privilege,” read one such sign held aloft by a student in Paris, where huge youth protests over the state of high school education have brought tens of thousands of young people and adults on to the streets, with further strikes planned today.
“A state that gasses high school students is a weak state,” another sign said, referencing growing public anger at alleged police brutality towards young protesters.
Tens of thousands of young people have also taken to Spanish streets in recent weeks to protest against the country’s deepening housing crisis. And outside the Labour conference in Liverpool (UK) last week, a crowd of jobless young people protested against what they saw as their bleak employment prospects. From Paris to the north of England, a similar thread runs through it all: a generation who feel betrayed by the absence of basic economic security and the erosion of public services that older generations took for granted.