Right place, wrong time

The Evening Standard had an article tonight on President Bush’s up coming visit to London.
Apart from the amazing entourage he’s bringing, 250 secret service guys, 400+ advisers and aides, two personal 747’s and a third plane, a couple of helicopters and two identical motorcades of 20 armoured vehicles, the thing that strikes me is why he’s even bothering with this trip right now.

When the White House asked for the visit they must have realised that it would be a ‘red rag to a bull’ situation, with every protest group gagging to get near Bush.
Now they want big chunks of the city shut down as an exclusion zone and all marches banned.

Whatever PR value he can get out of having a cup of tea with the Queen I think he’ll lose when you get thousands of Stop The War/Socialist Worker/Pro-Palestine/Muslim etc protesters going head to helmet with the police.

The last line of the story makes me laugh when it says that Scotland Yard and the Secret Service have ‘agreed rules of engagement allowing Bush bodyguards to shoot anyone threatening the life of the President’.
Hope they’re not too trigger happy.

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