Two weeks ago, I sat in this same warm office, look­ing out at the cold world out­side. And this is what I saw. I saw Lau­rie Penny’s Spi­der Jerusalem-esque piece for the New States­man, cov­er­ing the stu­dent riots, and I saw Wik­ileaks prepar­ing to dump 250,000 clas­si­fied US Embassy cables on the world. It all felt like a sud­den rush towards the hor­rid, glo­ri­ous dystopia that as a British cit­i­zen I am required to fetishise. (c.f. H.G. Wells, George Orwell, John Wyn­d­ham et al.)

One of those retains the abil­ity to stir up more trou­ble. The other, I fear, is now a lost cause.

Being approx­i­mately a social­ist, and hav­ing voted for the Lib­eral Democ­rats as I felt they were the only almost-credible party of the Left, I was almost warmed by the scale of the protests — not only were the Lib Dems’s bro­ken elec­tion promises not being taken lightly, but only six months in to a gov­ern­ment of the centre-Right, we were already see­ing the peo­ple up in arms.

The vio­lence involved in some of those protests, of which I of course do not approve, was referred to in the media at the time as being the actions of a “hard core” of pro­test­ers intent on stir­ring up trou­ble. The reac­tion of the pro­test­ers to that was often along the lines of “no, we all feel that strongly!”.

I won­der if they’ll be say­ing that this morning.

Last night, as it became appar­ent that the protests were inef­fec­tive at con­vinc­ing more than half of the Lib Dems to vote against the pro­posal, some pro­test­ers attacked a car car­ry­ing the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Corn­wall. Nat­u­rally, this made the front page of every news­pa­per in the coun­try (Guardian, Inde­pen­dent, Tele­graph, Mail, Sun, Mir­ror, nice pay­wall there, Times).

The Twit­ter hash­tag #sol­i­dar­ity has been used by the pro­test­ers and their sup­port­ers for a while now — I do hope some of that sol­i­dar­ity remains. But aside from amongst stu­dents, schoolkids and twenty-somethings who still fondly remem­ber their uni­ver­sity days, I sus­pect that sol­i­dar­ity just took a mas­sive hit.

The tabloid press was never going to be kind to stu­dent protests, but if they were qui­etly depriv­ing them of col­umn space before, by god they are not any more. The attack on Prince Charles’ car last night was one of the most impres­sive acts of shoot­ing one­self in the foot I have ever seen.

My great­est fear over the whole mat­ter, though, is the effect it has had on the young — the peo­ple whose edu­ca­tion was at stake. What have they learned over the last few weeks?

That break­ing into Mill­bank Tower, that light­ing fires and putting bricks through win­dows, that spray­paint­ing walls and break­ing down doors, that being ket­tled by riot police and attack­ing the Royal Fam­ily, isn’t enough. It’s not changed the minds of more than a dozen peo­ple inside the House of Com­mons, maybe none at all.

So what’s left to do? Give up hope and aban­don what mea­gre trust remains in our politi­cians, hop­ing that by the time the pro­test­ers reach mid­dle age they’re elec­table and their opin­ions haven’t changed? Or protest harder, get ket­tled more viciously, dream­ing of glo­ri­ous rev­o­lu­tion while all around the coun­try turns against them?

Dystopia is a great thing to expe­ri­ence for two hours of a film or two hun­dred pages of a book. But when you have to live in it, two weeks is about the point at which it stops being fun.