Just when it seems that the rolling controversy over tuition fee increases has at last died, the issue somehow manages to resurrect itself like an insistent cadaver. Its most recent reanimation has proved mildly reminiscent of the storming of the Bastille: angry mobs inflict criminal damage on a totemic if wholly unimportant building in a comparatively minor event of an altogether broader and more protracted struggle.

And yet, the events of Wednesday afternoon have altered the rules of the game. The single achievement of the demonstration, and the subsequent assault on Millbank Tower and bloodying of a handful of policemen, has been to shift the debate from the subject of apparently scandalous hikes in tuition fees to the appropriate etiquette of protest.

You’ll be pleased to hear that I do not intent to rehearse or regurgitate the tired arguments of the past few weeks on this matter; everything has been said and everybody has said it. I would, however, like to refer you to remarks I made on these very pages just a few weeks ago. In Recreational Revolutionaries (Oct 22nd) I noted how ‘we can but hope that the coming months see a principled approach taken towards the issue of tuition fee increases, and not merely activism for the sake of opposition’.

Frankly, I should be startled by my own prescience. But in reality, anybody with a hint of foresight should have seen this conflagration coming. For too long the silence of the student body has been deafening: from 1998 with the introduction of fees, their increase in 2006, and the ominous commissioning of the Browne review last year, reaction has remained muted, and now tempers have boiled over (which is perhaps why the police tactic of kettling seemed so miserably apposite). In this context, it seems hardly surprising that the chants of ‘You say Tory, we say scum’ finally morphed into attempts to torch Tory HQ.

Yet this sort of radical, direct action not only underscores the anger of students with a Coalition government bound by its own financial hand-cuffs, but also the level of disillusionment with the ineffective methods of the NUS, the treason of the Liberal Democrats, and the increasingly functionalised attitude taken towards higher education in which a degree is regarded as an ‘investment’ and a graduate as a ‘product’.

I have little doubt that the reprehensible actions of the rioters will prove counter-productive, but to dismiss the vandalism as nothing more than a scrofulous sideshow of anarchists and hoodlums would be naïve. Nevertheless, that is exactly what the omnipresent TV personality (and some time leader of the NUS), Aaron Porter has done. Their actions were ‘despicable’ – and he should know, having encouraged students to ‘hound’ MPs out of their constituencies just last week.

He was of course right to say that the demonstrations had been hi-jacked; but given the gathering fire-storm of public disapproval, I think I can claim to be equally accurate in suggesting that the campaign against tuition fee rises, which begun in earnest on Wednesday, is already lost. A minority of a minority it may have been who sought windows to kick through and bonfires to set alight, but who now remembers seeing any footage of the 50,000 strong peaceful procession meandering through Westminster?

Denouncing the perpetrators is not enough; indeed, as an unsympathetic friend of mine jubilantly noted at the outbreak of the violence: ‘If the fees were drastically increased then riff-raff like this would no longer be able to afford their angry student lifestyles’. It seems to me unlikely that this was the outcome Porter et al had envisaged.

If the show is to be gotten back on the road, then the NUS will need to rethink its approach. The demonstration was a damaging mistake, and this will need to be a moment of maturation in which concessions and compromises are made. But they also have a further problem.

Any fool can lampoon Nick Clegg (takes one to know one, I suppose). A trifle more grit will be required to face down a mob that has decided it knows what it wants and is entitled to get it.

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