The Time is Now for G20 Protesters

This is an exciting time to be a Londoner what with the Mr Ice Cool and his smokin’ wife leading a procession of prime ministers, heads of state and, yes, even a king, down the red carpet to a vamped up number 10. How often do we receive visitors that travel with a 500-strong entourage and a sample of their own blood type in case of emergency?  How often do you go to bed knowing that Sarkozy, Merkel and Medvedev are tucked in and snoring within one square mile? It’s not every day.

But the glamour is a side show to the big, ugly worldwide recession that is the cross of our times and not everyone, particularly those who have lost their jobs and savings, is feeling very cooperative about it. This G20 is not just the property of the who’s who of power players, it is also a time for the anti-war, anti-climate chaos, anti-financial crime and anti-land enclosures (to name the themes of the four different coloured horseman of the apocalypse) to march and shout and protest to the best of their dissident abilities.

Unlike Chris Knight, the lecturer from the University of East London, I haven’t been suspended on full pay for suggesting we hang the bankers and so it was from a small office in Angel rather than Bishopsgate itself that I learnt that after crying, ‘Whose bank?’ ‘Our bank!’ protesters smashed through the windows of Royal Bank of Scotland, darted in through the newly viable entrance and absconded with computers.

After work I hotfooted it onto the Northern Line to be told by a dry voice on the tannoy that Bank station was closed and if we wanted to get there – and really he advised against it – we should seek alternate routes. Spurred on by discouragement I flew out at Moorgate down towards Threadneedle Street where I encountered two police cordons that were not having any of my beguiling overtures. Fortunately I fell into step with an orange-jacketed legal observer for the Climate Camp. She had colleagues inside the mêlée and we headed off to London Wall to try this point of entry.

We had no further luck but there was still a lot going on. The democratic nature of protests means that in amongst the politics students and raconteurs roam all kind of vague souls. A boy in a yellow bandana clutching a bottle of nearly drained Lambrini bopped up and down with his petite black-clad girlfriend singing a song of their own penning that went simply, ‘West side!’. A police van pulled up which they felt merited some kind of protest, and after few uncertain rude gestures were made, the girl squatted down decisively, put her hands under the  van and had an honest go at turning it over.

After trying another back street we gave up, and I stationed myself on a wall with a photographer who desperately ached to be inside where a festival atmosphere was gradually taking hold. There was drumming and dancing and the occasional flash of pink hair. This was punctuated by odd splashes of outrage by protesters who had left only to discover they couldn’t go back in again.

The photographer, a member of Climate Camp, had this to say about his motives for involvement: ‘We’re hoping to make people think that there’s something they can do. The time is now and it is very critical that we highlight the connection between political systems and climate change. If not us then who? If not now then when?’