Excerpt:
Thugs who hijacked the tuition fees protest narrowly avoided seriously injuring or even killing police when they threw a fire extinguisher off the seventh floor roof of the Tory HQ, it emerged today.
The dramatic moment was captured on video footage, showing the extinguisher crashing to the ground just inches from a group of officers desperately battling to regain control in Millbank.
A youth was seen on pictures clutching the missile on top of the building and the film showed it being launched over the edge and falling at speed.
It glanced off the helmet of one territorial support group officer and grazes the knees of another. Had it properly hit any of the thousands of people below, it would almost certainly have left fatal injuries.
[…]Militants from far-Left groups whipped up a mix of middle-class students and younger college and school pupils into a frenzy, setting off the most violent student unrest Britain has seen in decades.
The focus of the violence was Tory HQ in Central London, where hundreds of thousands of pounds of damage was caused.
The glass frontage was smashed and protesters swarmed seven floors up to the roof, from where a fire extinguisher was hurled down at police below.
Effigies of David Cameron and Nick Clegg were burned to cheers from the roaring mob. At least 14 casualties were taken to hospital, seven of them police officers, and 51 demonstrators were arrested.
Notice that the signs in the pictures have logos from socialist organizations on them. These are violent left-wing thugs and they nearly killed police officers. And why? To protest against anyone who would cut the flow of taxpayer money that subsidizes their work-free lifestyle.
WINTERY KNIGHT 
Socialists foster a sense of entitlement and deny all responsibility to work for the things they want.
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This has no relevance to this article but I wanted to let you know that William Lane Craig will get to “debate” Richard Dawkins this Saturday on whether the universe has a purpose as per RF’s Facebook:
http://ow.ly/38O09
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I should blog that. I need a 6 PM post and I am swamped with work. Which is why comments are taking so long to approve.
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It was a shame that violence by a minority of the protesters marred the protest.
And I do think it’s outrageous that the government plans to raise tuition fees and price poorer students out of university. Higher education should be for the brightest students, not the richest.
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Well, I disagree. I’m sorry to be mean.
I think that it’s a shame that people feel entitled to steal other people’s money to pay for their own educations. Especially when the victims of the theft work harder than the students and have families to support, whereas the students just get drunk and have hook-up sex while studying Marxist studies, Ethnic studies, Peace Studies and Women’s Studies – which are essentially classes in accepting the views of the professors.
If smart people need money to go to school to learn real stuff like engineering and computer science, let them take out loans and pay them back when they get jobs. And they should have to study something that will allow them to GET A JOB and pay the loan back. I think the decision about who gets loans should be a business decision – like a loan to a start-up business.
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I agree that the system should definitely be run on a tuition fee loan system, where the government pays for the tuition fees but the student pays the government back when they start earning. However, I also strongly believe in means-tested grants and bursaries from the government. If they weren’t in place many of the lower class students wouldn’t go to university because their parents have little or not savings to give them for university. They would then completely rule that out of the equation, instead focusing on getting jobs stacking shelves and being waiters; nothing wrong with those jobs but a complete waste of talent for the brighter students.
Society as a whole hugely benefits from poorer students getting a top level education and so should be prepared to help them to do so. Overall, I agree that the tuition fees should be raised much higher, but I don’t think grants and bursaries should be cut AT ALL and am worried about the cuts in university budgets. Conservatives have argued that if we don’t cut back drastically on the debt and deficit now then we will compromise long term growth- which they are absolutely right about. However, cutting back on investment for education would also compromise long term growth as where are these world-class graduates going to come from otherwise??
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These are good points, Michael.
I am just concerned that people are being subsidized to study subjects that are not valuable, and then they are not getting good grades, but instead just partying. Let people apply for loans for their engineering degree and their community organizing degree and then let a banker decide if each loan can be paid back. There is money available for people who are willing to study hard useful things and who are willing to get job. I want people to be responsible with their choices. Poor students can get loans and if they are smart and work hard, they’ll be able to pay it back.
We shouldn’t be paying people to go to college when all they learn is how to be radical. I am opposed to taxpayer indoctrination in left-wing ideologies. Engineering and Physics yes, Marxism and feminism no.
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One other thing on this. You need to go out and find Thomas Sowell’s “Economic Facts and Fallacies” and read chapter 4. I just heard it in the car while on a long trip. You need to listen – it’s about the universities and tuition charges.
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Thanks for the recommendation by the way, even though I haven’t got that book last night i listened to some audio of Sowell, an interview here http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2008/02/sowell_on_econo.html and I thought it was great. I found myself agreeing and being persuaded by ALMOSt everything he said. Great guy!
I wish there would be more people in Britain who would be more like this and more prominent really conservative commentators too, because the american and british landscape and issues are so very different.
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Oh, I am so happy that you are getting exposed to Thomas Sowell. He is incredibly popular here – the most preferred economist of the conservative movement.
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“Smart Sex” by Jennifer Roback Morse
“Love and Economics” by Jennifer Roback Morse
“What Our Mothers Didn’t Tell Us” by Danielle Crittenden
“The Politically Incorrect Guide to Women, Sex, and Feminism” by Carrie Lukas
“Taking Sex Differences Seriously” by Steven Rhoads
“A Return to Modesty” by Wendy Shalit
“Who Stole Feminism?” by Christina Hoff Sommers
“Women Who Make the World Worse” by Kate O’Beirne
Also, check through my posts on Jennifer Roback Morse for audio stuff.
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The government steals 50% as tax the income of people earning over a limit they set. The studies you list are not the only subjects universities offer. It is the graduates that pay more tax when they get a good job, some why penalise them twice by raising tuition fees like this? The government will steal 50% of their income anyway when they get a job–why steal even more through tuition fees?
In fact, it is better for a student to study a subject like the ones you list, because then they will enter a low paid job, and will never reach the threshold required to start repaying the loan, so they get education for free, while the students taking “real stuff like engineering and computer science” (the latter having the highest number of unemployed graduates, by the way) will suffer.
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