TWENTYSOMETHING blogger Laurie Penny is a self-proclaimed former burlesque dancer. And an erstwhile anorexic. So if you read somewhere that she shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die, remember that the girl has had an eventful life so far.

Now Britain’s Oxbridge-educated answer to Dita von Teese has emerged as the Danny the Red of the recent wave of student protests, with a widely-publicised swipe at the ‘traditional hierarchies of the left’ in a post on – where else? – Comment is Free.

She starts off by taking a pop at Ed Miliband’s ‘join Labour for just 1p’ offer to under-25s, goes on blithely to dismiss parliamentary democracy as having nothing to offer the young, notes the uncanny parallels between cockroaches and ‘sour-faced vendors of Socialist Worker’ in their ability to survive nuclear holocaust, and suggests that getting flash mobs to descend on Topshop represents a ‘direct challenge’ to big business.

‘The young people of Britain do not need leaders, and the new wave of activists has no interest in the ideological bureaucracy of the old left,’ she writes.  ‘The young people of Britain are no longer prepared to take orders.’

Ah, bless, you can almost hear the petulance. Come mothers and fathers throughout the land, and don’t criticise what you can’t understand. Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command … and all that.

The eternal snotty-nosed teenager in me genuinely sympathises, up to a point. After all, Labourites of my generation presided over dismantling of the Labour Party as a mass presence with meaningful roots in working class communities, while Leninists of my generation messed up multiple attempts to build a more radical alternative, in a period in which the political space clearly was there. Epic fail FTW, as I believe youngsters say.

But anyone issuing proclamations in the name of ‘the young people of Britain’ should stop to ponder just what proportion of the young people of Britain participated in the student demos. However generously you do the maths, it works out to a single-figure percentage.

Only a smallish minority of students played any role whatsoever, while the average NEET in the former coalfields remained too smacked up to notice what was happening.

Moreover, a movement cannot make a strategy out of not having a strategy. The coalition has gone ahead and voted through the trebling of tuition fees and the abolition of Educational Maintenance Allowance. In other words, all that wonderful, spontaneous, situationist-inspired, principled, theoretically well-versed, Rolls-Royce thrashing campaigning did not achieve its desired end.

That was always going to be the way, because students as a social layer lack the weight to force a government to change its tack. That cannot happen unless the grown-ups get on board, in the shape of the organised working class.

If we can only get our Zimmer frames out the front door and remember where we put our Freedom Passes, I hope to see this happen in 2011.