How can you defend Ed Woollard!!

This week,  Ed Woollard was given a 32 month prison  sentence for throwing a fire extinguisher from a 7-Storey building at police officers below. The event unravelled during the riots at Millbank Tower on the day of the Demo-lition demonstrations against a hike in student fees.

In response to the sentence the Evening Standard published Laurie Penny’s article, ‘Fire extinguisher student is paying too high a price for his idiocy‘ which has left me (like many others) totally enraged.

How can a young journalist possibly defend Ed Woollard, who makes all of us look like impertinent kids.

One reader even commented “I feel like my eyes and brain have just been raped, brutally sodimized by your ridiculous article”

It is concerning to me how a young adult such as this can justify vandalism and destruction of property with no suggestion of this being, ah, against the laws established by a free society, or at least morally reprehensible. She glazes over this, and almost suggests it is some kind of right, because she makes an assumption that the students are only damaged property of “tax dodging millionaires”.

Even if this assumption about the ownership of all the property they damaged were correct, which it is not, the vandalism and destruction perpetrated would still be illegal and wrong and the risk to life and health from these actions, as demonstrated, were very real. She also shows no sense the actions themselves absorbed public police resources and taxpayer funds to protect the broader public and properties from these actions; I guess like student fees, the author thinks these are not suffered by other citizens, but by that thing…”the government”.

The fact that the author doesn’t seem to get any of this, is very disturbing, and calls into question the quality of her learning experience. In addition to a lack of respect for the laws that protect her rights in this free society, it shows a lack of maturity, care, and a sense for the potential consequences of her actions. Irrespective of ones views on the tuition fees, these are characteristics of a spoiled child and should be abhorred by all citizens of a free society.

I have sympathy for the student that got carried away by the blood lust of his day of crowd infused injustices, but they were diminished by the authors lack of appreciation or acknowledgement of the above points. Like many, my sympathies for the students in general has been diminished by these actions and the thinking (or lack thereof) of folks like the author. Many in ‘the real world’ have grown tired of giving spoiled brats their attention.

This is further portrayed by some of the comments submitted to her article.

“Honestly, you have literally stolen a minute of my life, which I will subsequetnly never get back.”

“Overgrown schoolkid saying “Let’s play pirates”, He’ll find some real pirates inside.”

“If a junior banker waded into a bunch of police with a gun outside a nightclub in the City, firing one shot but not hitting anyone would you have the same view?”