In my experience, at any protest, the most memorable and encapsulating slogans are always the ones written by hand with marker pen on cardboard placards. Tens of thousands of young people have also taken to Spanish streets in recent weeks to protest against the country’s deepening housing crisis. And outside the Labour conference in Liverpool last week, a crowd of jobless young people protested against what they saw as their bleak employment prospects.
From Paris to the north of England, a similar thread runs through it all: a generation who feel betrayed by the absence of basic economic security and the erosion of public services that older generations took for granted. I spoke to our Paris correspondent Angelique Chrisafis who has been reporting from the centre of the French protests. But first, the headlines.
UK politics | Kemi Badenoch has announced that the Conservatives would abolish inheritance tax on family homes if elected, prompting criticism that she is prioritising cutting taxes for the rich. Education | Labour’s flagship changes to special education in England are at risk of unravelling because parents are rushing to secure support for their children before the system changes, new analysis has found. Spain | María del Carmen Abascal, the 87-year-old whose eviction set off a nationwide wave of protests against Spain’s housing crisis, has died.
Science | A type of gene therapy based on Nobel prize-winning science is safe and can partly restore sight in blind people, researchers have revealed. Epstein | British billionaire Sir James Goldsmith warned that Jeffrey Epstein was a “sexual deviant” decades before the FBI closed in on the abuser, a Guardian investigation has found. The most significant youth movement to emerge across France in recent decades started on 17 September.
Pupils returning to the Lycée Saint-Exupéry in Créteil, southwest of Paris, after the summer holidays, discovered they couldn’t continue their studies because of the extent of staff absences. The 15- to 18-year-olds blockaded their high school in protest. After negotiations with the education ministry, those staffing gaps were filled, but the impassioned complaints about crumbling buildings, overcrowded classrooms, and long school days – alongside a wider sense of inequality in the education system – resonated in the suburbs.
And over a couple of weeks, it has spread to hundreds of schools across France,” Angelique tells me. There’s a tendency to mythologise youth protest, especially in France – my uncle Joss was in Paris in 1968, and I lapped up his tales of pulling up cobblestones with his bare hands to build barricades. But youth activism is often diminished.
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