After watching the videos of mobs of supposedly progressive students at Manchester University, shouting, swearing, threatening, intimidating and attempting to terrify a handful of their contemporaries – who had the temerity to set up a pro-life student society on campus – it’s hard not to ask the question: What on earth possessed them?
Sometimes there are moments when idiomatic language gives away more than we might expect. The scenes in Manchester appear to constitute one of those moments. The "protesting" students appeared to be in the grip of something dark and dangerous. Their ordinary personalities and dispositions disappeared. They were instead inhabited by rage, expressed in contorted, spitting faces, bulging eyes and threats of violence and even rape in one reported case. Was this just an eruption of bad humour, or does it constitute something more?
