No surprises

Yesterday's student protest marked the end of public acquiescence to the coalition's programme of spending cuts - cuts that have been condemned as unfair in independent analysis by the Institute for Fiscal Studies.

Comparisons with the Poll Tax protests have been made, and they hold some weight. The anger of ordinary people has bubbled to the surface in dramatic fashion. People are realising that we are not all in this together.

There is a huge difference between advocating the destruction of property, and accepting the inevitability that it will occur. Yesterday's violence was predictable given the public anger over the Lib Dems' cynical U-turn on an explicit pre-election pledge.

We must not allow the government to turn this into a debate about public disorder. This is a debate about a government reversing some of the twentieth century's hardest-won gains in social mobility. It is a debate about a rich political aristocracy entrenching the already shameful record of inequality in the United Kingdom.

A choice that means something

The situation is bad. A rightwing Tory government is dismantling the welfare state, and their savage spending cuts will hurt the poorest the most.

A new higher education funding policy is being drafted, designed to fulfil the Conservatives' secret desire to reduce student numbers by pricing poor people out of universities.

And we have been subjected to the depressing spectacle of the Lib Dems' U-turn on tuition fees which has exposed Nick Clegg's "new politics" as a naked electoral gambit.

But in one key way, things are better than they have been in some time. For the first time in over 15 years, everything is to play for - and the electorate are being offered a genuine choice in the direction of British society and economics.

On the one hand, we have a small-state vision from Cameron's Tories. Here we are being offered an American-style economic model where the winner takes it all, and the losers lose big time.

On the other hand, Ed Miliband's resurgent Labour Party is offering a genuine departure from neoliberal economic thinking. Labour is - for the first time in years - openly defending a social model where elected government ensures a fair game for everyone.

But the election is five years away. In the meantime, it is the responsibility of progressives of every colour to ensure that any damage done to the UK in the intervening period is mitigated and reversible. This duty falls largely to the Liberal Democrats.