Schoolboy warned by police over picket plan at David Cameron's office | UK news. The mother of a 12-year-old boy has criticised Thames Valley police for taking her son out of lessons because he was planning to picket David Cameron's constituency office today. Nicky Wishart, a pupil at Bartholomew School, Eynsham, Oxfordshire, organised the event on Facebook to highlight the plight of his youth centre, which is due to close in March next year due to budget cuts. The protest, which was due to take place today, has attracted over 130 people on Facebook, most of whom are children who use youth centres in Cameron's constituency, Witney. Wishart said that after the school was contacted by anti-terrorist officers, he was taken out of his English class on Tuesday afternoon and interviewed by a Thames Valley officer at the school in the presence of his head of year.
During the interview, Wishart says that the officer told him that if any public disorder took place at the event he would be held responsible and arrested. BBC - Barnsley girl's account of violence at fees protest. Police officers clash with protestors during student demonstrations in central London Rachel Bergan from Barnsley is 17 and looking to her future. University might well be a part of that future so Rachel and some of her friends made their way to London on 9 December to join the student protests over planned increases to tuition fees. In spite of an agreement to leave the demonstration if it turned violent, Rachel found herself at the centre of clashes between protestors and police. 'It was awful' Still shaken up, with tremors in her voice, Rachel told BBC Radio Sheffield how she and her friends tried to leave when the protest turned violent.
In angry scenes, protesters battled with police in Parliament Square. There were angry clashes as protesters - some throwing missiles - fought to break through police lines. Rachel and her friends found themselves caught between the violence and police. "We were right at the front. "They didn't show any mercy whatsoever. "It was awful. Being kettled was a shocking experience | Jacqui Karn. Last night I experienced, first hand, what it is like to be "kettled". Having been a researcher on criminal justice for the past 10 years this had particular poignancy.
It was impossible not to feel the full force of dilemmas of balancing civil rights, protection of the public, the police's response to disorder and the role of the media in these events. I went to the student fees protest in the late afternoon, a middle-aged protester with memories of student marches past, but when I got there at 3pm, three sides of Parliament Square were blocked off. I witnessed police on horseback twice charge into a crowd and young people coming out bloodied and shocked. I could only sympathise with the woman next to me whose 14-year-old was still inside the police lines.
From that point, despite repeated pleas and tears (I am no courageous protester, I discovered), the police refused to let me go – for seven hours. I could not help but be shocked at my situation and at this police strategy. Inside the Parliament Square kettle. There is blood on my face, but not all of it is mine. I'm writing this from the UCL occupation, where injured students and schoolchildren keep drifting in in ones and twos, dazed and bruised, looking for medical attention and a safe space to sit down. It's a little like a field hospital, apart from the people checking Twitter for updates on the demonstration I've just returned from, where 30,000 young people marched to Whitehall, got stopped, and surged through police lines into Parliament Square.
They came to protest against the tuition fees bill that was hauled through the House yesterday by a fractured and divided coalition government. They believe that parliamentary democracy has failed them, that the state has set its face against them. When they arrived at Parliament Square, they found themselves facing a solid wall of metal cages guarded by armed police. Then the crackdown began and it was worse than we feared. The protest was never supposed to make it to Parliament Square.
UK Parliament - Early Day Motions By Details. Adam Curtis Blog: FROM PIGEON TO SUPERMAN AND BACK AGAIN. Karen Buck on the real effects of welfare reform | Society. Welfare reform has swiftly become one of the most venomously disputed themes of these early months of the coalition government. When the changes to housing benefit were first announced in the emergency budget in June, there was only muted outcry. By last month, the Labour leader, Ed Miliband had identified the subject as one of his most potent lines of attack, while the mayor of London was talking of Kosovo-style social cleansing. And last week, the language of work and pensions secretary Iain Duncan Smith's proposals for a reconstructed benefits system triggered new controversy.
The Labour MP for Westminster North, Karen Buck, was one of the first to predict the long-term consequences of the cuts announced, and over the past five months has been a loud and constant voice of opposition to both the housing benefit changes and some of the government's stereotypes about welfare reform. It is the proposed changes to housing benefit that Buck is most worried about.
Nationwide consequences. Nick Clegg regrets signing anti-tuition fees pledge. UK gov't wants to legalize racial profiling. U.K. Government to Snub BBC, Google Over Web Access, FT Reports. U.K. Communications Minister Ed Vaizey will say today that Internet service providers should be free to favor traffic from one content provider over another, provided customers are informed, the Financial Times reported.
In a speech at a London telecommunications conference organized by the newspaper, the minister will say the market should decide the extent to which service providers can charge for preferential content delivery and slow down other traffic. Vaizey’s refusal to support so-called “net neutrality” will disappoint companies such as the British Broadcasting Corp. and Google Inc., which argue that unimpeded Internet access furthers innovation; his policy promises new revenue streams for service providers such as BT Group Plc, TalkTalk Telecom Group Plc and Virgin Media Inc., by permitting them to charge media companies for faster access, the FT said.
To contact the reporter on this story: Alan Purkiss in London on apurkiss@bloomberg.net.