Un conflitto diviso: l’eccezione britannica

A Conflict Divided: The British Exception

Since September, waves of student protests have spread across central Europe, breaking headlines.

In France, what began as a teachers’ strike in Créteil grew into mass demonstrations, with over 800,000 people taking to the streets on 17 October.

In Italy, from Milan to Naples, students have occupied universities and marches have taken place throughout the entire country. Belgium, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Austria, Germany and Ireland have also seen protests of their own, mostly due to dissatisfaction with housing access, the cost of living, school conditions and military spending.

Yet, the United Kingdom has largely stayed quiet. British students face many of the same pressures as their European peers, yet few have taken to the streets. Why, then, is the United Kingdom the exception to this widespread political phenomenon?

The Private Cost of a Public Good

The first explanation may lie in how British students pay for their education. In England, university tuition amounts to more than £9,500 a year, with fees now set to rise with inflation every year until the end of labour parliament. In France, by contrast, a public undergraduate degree costs around €178 per academic year. The important distinction, however, is that English students rarely feel this cost directly. University instalments are usually covered by government student loans, which graduates only start to repay once they earn above a certain threshold, at 9% of their income for up to 40 years. The debt is enormous, but also deceptively distant: it arrives not as a bill, but as a deduction from a potential future salary.

Thus, education becomes a private investment rather than a public right, turning students into consumers rather than citizens.

The second factor lies closer to home. In November 2010, tens of thousands of students gathered in London against the coalition government’s plan to triple tuition payments, forming the largest student mobilisation the nation had seen in decades. The roads were not the only thing taken over: protesters stormed the Conservative Party headquarters at Millbank, and in the weeks that followed, clashes with police left students injured and arrested, with one needing brain surgery.

Yet, regrettably, none of these marches changed the outcome. On 9 December 2010, Parliament voted to raise tuition fees in England from £3,290 to the whopping number they have now, with the backing of the Liberal Democrats, the very party that had promised to oppose any increase. Today’s students were only children at the time, but no doubt, the lesson stuck: the biggest student movement in a generation ended in defeat and a broken promise. If protesting did not work then, why would it now?

Another obstacle is the law itself. Over the past few years, the space for dissent throughout the country has steadily narrowed in scope. The Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 has allowed police to restrict demonstrations simply for being too noisy or disruptive, a standard so vague that it leaves much of the decision to the officers on the ground. Just a year later, the Public Order Act 2023 went even further. It created new offences such as “locking on”, making protesters who attach themselves to buildings or to each other criminally liable, with penalties of up to six months in prison.

The effects of this legislation are already clearly visible. Since Palestine Action was banned as a terrorist organisation in July 2025, thousands of people have been arrested at demonstrations against the ban, many of them simply for sitting silently and holding signs. Not even age is a shield: at one demonstration in central London, police arrested as young as 18 and as old as 87. Therefore, for a student, the calculation is simple: a criminal record can cost a visa, a job or an entire career, in a job market that is already plummeting for the younger generation. In France or Italy, marching may feel like a right; in Britain, it increasingly feels like a risk.

Not Silent, Just Local

These reasons are, of course, not exhaustive. Why today’s students choose whether or not to take to the streets is complex, and no single factor can fully account for Britain’s relative silence. It would also be wrong to conclude that British students simply do not care.

In fact, they do mobilise, just differently. Although…perhaps less effectively.

In 2023, students at the University of Manchester launched a rent strike over high prices and poor housing conditions, withholding rent and occupying university buildings for weeks. A year later, in the spring of 2024, students set up Gaza solidarity encampments at more than a dozen universities, demanding that their institutions disclose and cut their financial ties to arms companies. The academic institutions often responded firmly: the London School of Economics became the first to remove the settlements through a court order, and seven of its students - later known as the “LSE 7” - faced months of campus bans and restrictions after a peaceful demand.

What sets these movements apart from those in Europe is their scale and their target. Rather than marching on Parliament, British students have turned towards the establishments closest to them: their landlords, their universities, their own campuses. These campaigns are a sign that student activism in Britain is far from dead. Yet the problems they confront, from rising fees to unaffordable rents, are ultimately decided in Westminster, and they may need a national voice to match.

As students across the continent show what collective pressure can achieve, British students risk being left behind, paying more, owing more and saying less. If 2010 taught them that protesting can fail, it should also have taught them that silence guarantees nothing. The question is no longer whether British students are angry, but whether they are willing to make that anger heard.