Quintin Jardine's blog

Scotland is a nation steeped in tradition. In the Borders they ride the Marches. In Shetland, they have the annual Fire Festival. In Edinburgh, the reigning monarch holds a garden party to which the great and the good and those who know someone are invited to stand, more often that not in  the rain, drinking tea and munching miniature sannies in the hope of a glimpse of William the Bastard’s current descendant. In Glasgow, the polis batter the shite out of students at the city’s oldest university.

The fourth is dying out, I’m pleased to say, but it came close to being celebrated again yesterday, when 80 police officers with vehicles, dogs and a covering helicopter were called upon as a university building was cleared of students who had been occupying it in peaceful (if mis-guided) protest against cuts. Anarchy ensued, inevitably. The knee-jerk reaction is to blame the unwashed, unruly and shiftless, but I’m not for that, for forty-something years ago I stood on the balcony of the university union and watched as officers of the Marine Division of what was then the City of Glasgow force exercised crowd control over a bunch of youngsters who were armed with nothing more dangerous than flour and water. The response involved assaults with batons, innocent kids thrown, literally, into police vans, and other acts of violence that I remember to this very day.