Barometer | 30 October 2010

Exit stage right

A new far-right movement, the English Defence League, held protests in Leicester and London. Postwar British history is full of the corpses of failed far-right parties.

— The League of Empire Loyalists was a neo-Nazi party which split in 1957 over whether to allow Jews to join. Why any would want to was a mystery.

— The National Socialist Movement was founded in 1962 but split two years later after two of its leaders, Colin Jordan and John Tyndall, fought over the same woman.

— The British Movement was formed from the remains of the National Socialist Movement in 1968. It won 2.5% of the vote in Aston in the 1970 general election but dwindled after its leader, Colin Jordan, was prosecuted for stealing three pairs of ladies’ knickers from a Tesco in 1975.

— The National Front still lingers on but never recovered from a split in the 1980s which culminated in two factions, the Official National Front and the Flag National Front, barracking each other in the Vauxhall by-election of 1989.

New jobs

The government estimates that 500,000 public-sector employees will lose their jobs as a result of the cuts. This is how parts of the private sector grew or shrunk in the second quarter of 2010:

Construction +9.5%

Manufacturing industry +1.6%

Business services and finance +1%

Mining/quarrying 0%

Utilities -1.3%

Transport, storage, communications -1.5%

Days out

The RMT and Fire Brigades Union are threatening co-ordinated strikes. Last year 455,000 working days were lost to strikes. Days lost during most strike-affected years:

1926 162m

1921 86m

1919 35m

1979 29m

1984 27m

Police numbers

Number of police per 1,000 population:

Finland 1.56

Norway 1.78

USA 2.30

England and Wales 2.41

Germany 2.89

France 3.81