Police seal off G-20 meet from protests

Bloomberg

Police erected barriers about half a mile (0.8 kilometers) from the Excel Centre, where world leaders were discussing ways to end the global economic decline.

The arrests were made Wednesday and early yesterday after the demonstrations, dubbed "Financial Fools Day," drew around 5,000 people to the streets around the Bank of England. Protesters and police clashed, and some demonstrators broke into a Royal Bank of Scotland Group branch. One man died after collapsing, police said. No cause of death was given.

This week’s operation, involving 10,000 officers, may be the biggest for the U.K. capital’s police since the hunt for failed suicide bombers in July 2005. About 5,000 officers were deployed in November 2003, when then-President George W. Bush came to London for a state visit.

The protests follow worldwide economic decline. The World Bank is warning of an "unemployment crisis." In Britain, the economy has contracted the most since 1980, and the U.S. Labor Department was forecast by analysts to report yesterday that the nation’s jobless rate is now the highest in a quarter century.

"Unemployment is hitting young people hardest, and we don’t see why young people should be paying for the losses of the banks," said Becci Heagney, 21, a student at the University of Leicester, in central England. She was among around 100 people on a Youth and Jobs march to the Excel Centre.

Extraordinary measures

The area around the exhibition center was being guarded by police in riot gear, officers on horseback and others in boats at the Royal Victoria Dock adjacent to the site.

Demonstrators outside the Bank of England on Wednesday blew whistles and banged on drums, while others carried signs reading "abolish money" and "capitalism kills." They hanged a banker in effigy from traffic lights and scrawled "built on blood" on the wall of the central bank.

Many workers in the financial district, known as the City, dressed casually, spurning business suits and heeding police warnings that they should avoid becoming targets for protesters. The arrests included 11 people found wearing police uniforms inside a modified military personnel carrier near RBS’s London headquarters in Bishopsgate, police said. Sixteen people were arrested for violent disorder, and police are reviewing videotape of yesterday’s protests to identify suspects who caused violence, said O’Brien.