One thing I keep on trying to explain to those who want Obama to fail in order for progressive politics to commence, or who claim the administration is basically a right wing republican one, is the REAL experience of having a non stimulus, expenditure cutting government in power in the UK.
Well today, within a mile of where I live, students – protesting at an 80 per cent cut in the university teaching budget and a 200 percent increase in college fees, have occupied the centre of British democracy: Parliament Square. There have been mounted police horses charging groups of students (a shocking scene I haven’t seen since the Poll Tax Riots of the Thatcher years). Graffiti has been daubed on government buildings. Windows in the Treasury and Supreme Court smashed. Ten police have been seriously injured: twenty demonstrators.
And now the dispersed protestors – many of them schoolchildren – are looting shops and smashing windows on Oxford Street (our main shopping artery) and have surrounded the car containing Prince Charles and Camilla on the way to the theatre, smashing a window, kicking the doors, and covering the car with paint