http://www.express.co.uk/

http://news.sky.com/…

Around lunchtime, riot police had to be sent in after activists attacked a uniformed officer and stormed a branch of the Royal Bank of Scotland in the City.

A handful of men with black scarves obscuring their faces and hoods over their heads smashed a hole in the windows with a metal pole and crawled in.

Protesters removed equipment, daubed graffiti on the walls, threw a chair through a window and started a small fire.

Police entered the branch at around 2pm and shortly afterwards began driving demonstrators away from the branch, which had earlier been closed by RBS.

Officers on foot backed up by a line of mounted officers lined up outside the building as smoke bombs were thrown by a baying crowd.

More than 4,000 demonstrators, most of them peaceful, gathered near the Bank of England to demand action from world leaders ahead of the G20 summit.

But several hundred clashed with police, who were pelted with eggs, paint bombs and empty beer cans.

One of the videos on Sky I saw showed a young woman saying that the march was to show solidarity for the homeless. Why not go out and help them clean themselves up, create a resume and submit it to businesses. Or get together with others and start a business. Showing solidarity doesn’t feed, cloth or shelter people. Instead of bitching why don’t you act?

http://business.timesonline.co.uk/…

PARTS of the United Kingdom have become so heavily dependent on government spending that the private sector is generating less than a third of the regional economy, a new analysis has found.

The study of “Soviet Britain” has found the government’s share of output and expenditure has now surged to more than 60% in some areas of England and over 70% elsewhere.

Experts believe the recession will tighten the state’s grip still further as benefit handouts soar and Labour directs public sector organisations to create jobs to soak up unemployment.

In the northeast of England the state is expected to be responsible for 66.4% of the economy this year, up from 58.7% when a similar study was carried out four years ago. When Labour came to power, the figure was 53.8%.

Across the whole of the UK, 49% of the economy will consist of state spending, while in Wales, the figure will be 71.6% – up from 59% in 2004-5. Nowhere in mainland Britain, however, comes close to Northern Ireland, where the state is responsible for 77.6% of spending, despite the supposed resurgence of the economy after the end of the Troubles.

Even in southern England, the government’s share of spending is growing relentlessly. In the southeast, it has gone up from 33% to 36% of the economy in four years.

“It’s not that the public sector in the northeast is too big, it is that the private sector is too small,” said Malcolm Page, deputy chief executive of One North East. “The decline of traditional industries in the past means we need to establish more big private-sector companies in the region.”

Latest figures from the Office for National Statistics show that since Labour came into power in 1997 jobs in the public sector have swelled by more than 500,000. In 1997, more than 5.1m people were employed in the public sector. The figure for 2008 is 5.7m.

http://www.lewrockwell.com/…

Some town councils in England have taken to prohibiting government employees from using such Latin words as “status quo,” “bona fide,” “vice versa,” “via,” “et cetera,” “per se,” and “quid pro quo.” The rationale for such a ban is that these words are “elitist” and “discriminatory.” Apparently, government officials exercising coercive power over others is not regarded as “elitist!”

Such a measure was praised by one person who noted that the “national literacy level is about 12 years and the vast majority of people hardly ever use these terms.” Perhaps the low literacy level has something to do with the poor quality of state education. Another cause may lie in the failure to recognize the added richness of thought that arises from other languages, fostering a complexity that permits one to better “discriminate” amongst subtle meanings of words. As a 13 year old in a government school, I was required to study Latin. I don’t know to what extent this added to my adult literacy level exceeding that of most 12 year olds, but I suspect that the challenge of having to refine the meaning of words was far more beneficial to such ends.

George Orwell would have quickly grasped the implications of such restraints on the mind.

I wasn’t expecting this one. They are just full of surprises.