Police have surrounded thousands of demonstrators near London's Houses of Parliament. A police van abandoned by officers in the middle of the crowd was attacked by a small mob, who rocked the vehicle back and forth, smashed its windshield with wooden poles and spray-painted an anarchist sign on the roof.
However, soon after the attack began, other students formed a human chain around the vehicle to prevent further vandalism.
"I didn't want other people to get injured -- people don't realize that when you rock a van it can fall over," Zoe Williams, one of the group who tried to stop the violence, told Sky News. "The cause we are here for today is not about hating the police."
Students are showing their fury over government plans to raise annual tuition fees up to $14,500 in 2012 -- a substantial rise from the current cap of $4,735 -- by occupying university buildings around the capital, and in the English cities of Bristol, Plymouth and Birmingham. Dozens of walkouts, marches and protests have hit other universities and schools across the country.
The government has defended the plans -- which will also see state funding withdrawn from many humanities subjects -- as "progressive." Graduates won't have to start repaying tuition fee loans until their annual earnings hit $34,000 -- up from the current level of $24,000 a year -- and would repay at a rate of 9 percent of their income above that level. Interest rates will also be higher for graduates who earn more.
Much of the anger is targeted at the centrist Liberal Democrat party -- the junior partner in the ruling coalition. Many students feel betrayed by the party because before the May election, many of its senior members signed a pledge to vote against any future rise in tuition fees. However, when the Lib Dems entered into a government with the center-right Conservatives, they swiftly dumped that policy and agreed to ramp up student fees to help lower the country's record $245 billion deficit.
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Tuesday night, masked demonstrators hanged and set fire to an effigy of Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg outside the offices of The Guardian newspaper, where he was delivering a speech. "Nick Clegg, shame on you for turning blue," protesters chanted, referring to the traditional color of the Conservative Party.Today's protest is the second anti-tuition fees demonstration to hit the capital in two weeks. The last march on Nov. 10 attracted 50,000 protesters and saw a breakaway group try to smash its way into the Conservative Party's headquarters. Sixty-six people were arrested during or after that protest, including 18-year-old Edward Woollard, who today appeared in court to plead guilty to violent disorder after admitting throwing a fire extinguisher off the roof of the eight-story building. The extinguisher narrowly missed two riot police officers on the ground.
Woollard could now face up to five years in prison.