It’s more like Paris ‘68 than the traditional British reserve on view today in London ’10. Students have hurled bricks and firebombs, smashing their way into the wrong building – all under the watchful eye of news helicopters and a hapless Kay Burley not knowing that the Conservatives had moved out of the building months ago and also mixing up MI5 and MI6.

In a neat cycle, the BBC are reporting that concrete and a fire extinguisher has been thrown from the roof onto police below, whilst on the ground floor the students are trying to set fire to the building. Meanwhile Sky shows the rioters writing “Fuck the Pigs” on a wall and anarchists protesting that the State won’t pay their tuition fees. Very retro.

So where do these impoverished students get the time and money to take a break from from studies and travel to London, attack policemen and destroy property? It’s from our taxpayers’ money, that’s where. Which is also how they have afforded the expensive cameras they’re using to take pictures of each other jumping up and down on office furniture.

Doubtless plod will find those snaps useful when rounding them up over the next few weeks.

And who is pushing all this? Labour’s paramilitary yoof wing – the NUS. That’ll be the same Labour who were elected in 1997 “with no plans to introduce tuition fees”, and introduced them soon afterwards. The same Labour whose 2001 manifesto explicitly ruled out top-up fees before going on to increase fees threefold.

All the banners were neatly furled in cupboards then; the Maggie masks gathering dust. But now even the Scots NUS have thrown their haggis out of the pram and have been bussed down to protest too…despite the fact they don’t pay any fees.

It would seem that in a world of cuts, the police have just made a better case for funding than students.

What do we want?
More beer money
When do we want it?
After Countdown has finished.