Note to protestors: elitism and privilege are not the same thing

‘Theoretical perspectives on contemporary cities, with a specific focus on the global nature of urban social and political change and development. The course will consider classic and recent theory and analysis emanating from ‘Northern’ academic and policy contexts, while also challenging western-centric views of the city… The course will equip students interested in urban change and development to understand and consider appropriate responses to social and political aspects of cities.’
—LSE course module in Contemporary Urbanism



Trenton Oldfield, the smirking Australian halfwit who was dragged from the Thames having successfully disrupted the 158th Oxford-Cambridge boat race, is in this country for the purpose of taking the above university course at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Trenton presumably thought that swimming across the Thames was the appropriate response to one social and political aspect of the capital — its, uh, horrid elitism. Of course, he is a narcissistic idiot, probably considering himself a modern equivalent of Rosa Parks or that angry woman who jumped in front of a racehorse so that her gender might have the right, 90 years later, to elect people like Lynne Featherstone to parliament.

More to the point, though, it would look, from that prospectus, as if Trenton has been encouraged in his manifest idiocy by my old university, the LSE. Trenton was arrested by the police after his stunt. It might be a good idea if they arrested everybody taking a course in ‘Contemporary Urbanism’ as a sensible preventative measure — much as we arrested domiciled Nazis and pro-­Molotov-Ribbentrop pact commies in 1939. And much as then, we could intern them on the Isle of Wight, with their benighted lecturers, the facile Howard Kirks of this century. You can imagine the sort of glib, infantile, left-wing drivel that gets rammed into thick, impressionable middle-class Australian students studying Contemporary Urbanism, can’t you? I will bet any money that the people behind the course were also behind that hilarious ‘study’ the LSE produced in conjunction with, natch, the Guardian about last summer’s riots.