Protesting at the G8

From Sunday Herald via maudnewton.com.

My march, by Al Kennedy

Remember the tsunami? All around the world ordinary people enjoying one of the year’s more indulgent weeks were allowed to see pictures of unimaginable misery. The kind of pictures we could see every day from Iraq but are never shown. Parents wept for their lost children, bodies were heaped, wreckage was everywhere. Like in Darfur. Hundreds of thousands were dead. Like in Tanzania. And the reporters were there – mainly talking to European victims, in case we found it hard to identify with foreigners, giving us plaintive voiceovers involving this or that heavy object being thrown about “like a toy”. The public were being officially informed and permitted to grieve. So not like Iraq, then. Or Darfur. Or Tanzania.
Having been shown all that pain and horror, the public decided to respond with unprecedented international generosity. They gave money in buckets, literally, and made the world’s governments look as cheap and nasty as they generally are. Feeble, and often illusory donations were shamed out of politicians while the public organised, kept giving, volunteered to go out and aid the rebuilding. Citizens started to look generous, altruistic, powerful, ingenious, fast-moving and humane. Meanwhile, a few journalists started talking about the damage already imposed on Indonesia by Exxon Mobil and the violence in Banda Aceh.

Which is when it started – the New Big Spin against mass activism. Every conservative commentator in the US and then the UK parrotted the same line: charities are corrupt and bloated with cash, you can’t trust your money will do any good once it leaves your country, or even your pocket; keep it with you at all times and use it to buy CDs, chocolate, plastic surgery; you’re powerless, your leaders know better; get back to the bread and circuses we provide. (The loonier fringe also strongly suggested that gay holidaymakers had brought the wrath of God to Indonesia – the established biblical punishment for stylish thongs and a little too much Abba apparently being death by whatever means necessary to you and everyone within a 10 mile radius.)

We were told Live8 wouldn’t work because African governments are corrupt – presumably we’re supposed to be unaware of the subterranean moral position occupied by Berlusconi, Bush, Blair, et al. Clare Short pitched in, saying it was tasteless to enjoy ourselves while millions are dying – but isn’t that what living in the West is all about? Again we were told charities can’t be trusted, Africans are feckless and can’t progress without the Empire’s guidance: you’re powerless, your leaders know better; get back to the bread and circuses, the ones where you enjoy yourself without thinking of the millions of dead, without finding out what you can do to save lives, change policy. As Bill Hicks put it: “Go back to sleep.”

But, oddly enough, the public don’t seem sleepy. Which is why thousands had been active for months, preparing for the G8 summit, and millions had been active since July 2. It’s also why we were quietly milling in George Square, Glasgow, on July 6. There were a handful of police standing about while the usual pre-demo things happened. Different left-wing organisations tried to sell their newspapers, a hawker sold whistles. The usual types were there: students, crusties, activists, and feisty pensioners – people who could take a weekday off. But there were others, too – the middle-aged and the middle-class, Blair’s target voters. There were people who’d protested in the 1960s and returned for the anti-war marches before the official start of hostilities in Iraq. A man who writes protest songs asked people to sing into his tape recorder. And there was smiling. It would be impossible to emphasise how much smiling goes on at these occasions – and chatting with strangers and laughter. There is also the kind of exaggerated politeness I’ve only seen elsewhere among the Tartan Army – another potentially frightening mass of people, anxious to be non-threatening, to make the right impression. What was unusual was the high level of organisation – stewards herding us, counting us, getting us on buses, making sure nobody had weapons, drugs, making sure we knew this was intended to be a peaceful demonstration. There was already a sense that we’d have to police ourselves to avoid police action hijacking the day.

And on the bus? A steward for both decks – Beth and James – a school trip atmosphere and could everyone write down their mobile numbers in case anybody gets lost? And, above all, the craic. Not just banter – “Can we give him to the police now? Would they take him?” – but the chance to talk. When there’s so little content in the mainstream news, it’s a blessed relief to talk about facts.

Like the fact that between 1952 and 1960, the dirty British war in Kenya killed around 150,000 and put thousands more in torture and rape camps. We still support violence in Nigeria which has killed over 10,000. Ted Heath’s government actively supported Idi Amin’s terror which claimed around 300,000 lives and we supplied weapons and training during the Ugandan civil war that may have killed a further 300,000. In 1994, John Major’s government played a key role in blocking UN intervention to prevent genocide in Rwanda – helping murder up to one million. We supported the 1998 US bombing in Sudan which destroyed a factory producing most of Sudan’s drugs. We continue to follow the US’s oil-related agenda in Sudan, rather than take meaningful action to prevent the Darfur genocide. And the list goes on. But, remember, it’s those feckless Africans who are the problem.

Meanwhile, police attempts to cancel the march, police road blocks and searches and anarchist road blocks made it tricky to reach Gleneagles. We dodged through Skinflats and Menstrie before a call came through to say the march wasn’t cancelled. We hadn’t known it was. We reached our own tiny anarchist roadblock and set off on another detour towards Perth. There were now four people advising Davie the Driver on routes.

But we make it into Perthshire and, contrary to the TV spin, locals seem supportive. Kids and families wave. There are home-made signs in windows. Nearer Gleneagles, the convoy of buses is joined by a convoy of white vans containing riot police in the usual black, others cluster at the side of the road – no lapel numbers visible. But some of them wave when we wave, some of them smile. Some of them are massive and grim, pumped up. We pass elderly couples giving us thumbs up on the doorsteps, ladies in slippers. We only get one set of hard looks – from a golf course. Hard looks from men in pastel slacks are not as chilling as might be intended. Auchterarder itself is on odd mixture of welcome signs on boarded-up shops, open shops and more waving. We feel welcome, there are few visible police, and we file into the park to learn more of the chaos and delays and the number of times George Galloway’s car was searched. The press take little interest in the rally and although there is plenty of space at the park for cameras and cranes, there are none. But we make speeches, listen to speeches, deal with facts.

For example, in Mozambique, Rhodesia set up the Renamo guerillas in 1975 after the Portuguese left. In 1980 South Africa took control and things got more vicious – cutting off civilians’ lips, noses and eyelids, stuff like that. Teachers and nurses were murdered. In 1984, South Africa withdrew overt support. Britain’s far right pushed in money along with USA evangelists, including Jimmy Swaggart who portrayed Renamo’s rampages as a noble fight for reviving Christianity against communism. Jimmy sent tracts to Renamo bases. The IMF and the World Bank offered Mozambique loans tied to the usual restructing programme that involved charging the desperately poor for health care and education and removing government subsidies that kept down prices of staple foods.

In April 2000 Tanzania had to borrow money – the only way it could get it was to sign up to 157 restructuring conditions from the IMF and the World Bank. Well over a million people are dying of Aids in Tanzania, but one of the conditions decreed that free hospital appointments should be charged for. Attendance at hospitals plummetted. Another condition insisted that education must no longer be free. Enrolment fell from 80% to 66%. Those crazy Africans! We just keep helping them and all they do is die!

I was in the first section of the march which progressed at a crawl, surrounded by press, police and stewards. Householders waved or took snaps from their windows as we wound through very narrow streets. A few stared, apparently undecided, bemused. At the foot of a little road a small crowd had gathered – three generations. A pretty young girl held up a small Make Poverty History sign. She didn’t cheer or wave, just offered up the sign, a strange mix of emotions in her face, something like faith, something like hope. I remembered having faith when I was her age – believing that if something was good it should happen, believing I could make a difference.

The photographers were bored, mumbling their hopes for a riot. And, of course, we all knew where it would be if it came. At one point the march route led straight to the fence – every section of the march was held there for a while, just to give us that nice sensation of risk, crush injuries, confinement. Then we were allowed to make a right turn along a little lane to the only open area: the area with the wide field, the area with the cranes and the cameras, the security weak point where simple ranks of police (there were a few thousand available) could have prevented anyone from even stepping on the grass – unless a riot was required. When I passed, all was quiet and stewards were keeping things that way. But we knew what might happen – there was something ominous about the cranes, the horses stationed ready nearby. A crowd released from confinement, a few anarchists up for it, local neds up for it – then the police with no numbers get to justify the expense of their chinooks and B&B bills. The police, who practice crowd control with football supporters every week, practised it on Wednesday and produced a riot – so the following day’s headlines were about anarchists, not poverty.

Not Trips. Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights: Trips – another wizard wheeze from the WTO that means corporations can control who buys what and at what price. This means Aids drugs like AZT (which was developed by a US government agency and then acquired at minimal cost by Glaxo) remains unobtainable for the vast majority of Africans and needlessly expensive for Western health services. Trips is a life-or-death issue for millions, but it’s useless for headlines.

The first I heard of the riot was in the chip shop, from two firemen ahead of me in the (very long) queue of hungry marchers who’d completed the course. The firemen were complaining because the price of suppers had gone up. A socialist in the queue noticed their uniforms and congratulated them on their strike action, assured them of public support. The socialist couldn’t see, but one of the firemen was rolling his eyes at the other. Later he leaned in and murmured: “If there’s any trouble, just walk out.” It really didn’t look as if there would be any trouble – even over the cost of chips. I asked if they were getting overtime. They said they were on a break and wouldn’t have the chance to go home before they needed to come out again. They weren’t on overtime. They weren’t sure if they still get overtime. Possibly they were independently wealthy firemen – pay and conditions certainly weren’t high on their list of priorities. Someone in the queue remarked on how peaceful the march was. One of the firemen murmured sourly, “He hasn’t been at the fence.” The firemen got their suppers and left without being attacked.

Outside, the main street had altered, there were far more police, mainly in riot gear, with blank cloth bands on their epaulettes rather than numbers. I asked one man why he’d made himself unidentifiable and was told he wasn’t legally obliged to display his number. Sometimes policemen get to make up the law. A dozen or so police horses trotted up the hill, riders in riot helmets, heading for the fence. Friends coming back down the hill were shaken, talking about baton charges and horses. Mark Ballard MSP, also caught in the engineered fracas in Edinburgh on Monday, was incandescent, unable to decide which disgusted him more: police tactics, or the press’s inability to report what they see rather than what they get in a press release. A senior journalist on a national paper passed while we were talking: “That got a bit tasty.” He was happy, he’d got his story – the one about a riot.

Earlier in the afternoon the clown army paraded down the main street with music and the usual pain-in-the-arse clown capering. I don’t like clowns. A woman from the Spar shop came out and took a photo, people laughed. By the early evening they’re parading again, but escorted by ranks of police – it looks like a clown funeral and even I feel sorry for them. By 6pm, the street is lined with police vans and unidentifiable riot police. Local youths in hoods and baseball caps have gathered outside the pub. I wonder what the little girl with the sign has seen today. And I wonder if she’s scared, disappointed.

So the riot got the front pages and the politicians were let off the hook. And the G8 haven’t delivered. And while Gleneagles was still drowning in police, including the Met, bombs went off in London. So should we give up, let violence breed violence, keep our heads down, go back to sleep?

Well, nobody sane suggested the G8 would crumble immediately, that next week there would be a new world, that spin and corporate greed and media complicity were going to disappear overnight. But we have the choice to try for a new world every day, to tell what we know of the truth every day, to take small actions every day. Millions of people taking even small actions every day – that does change the world.

Of course, people can be greedy, fearful, self-interested, willfully ignorant, vicious and worse. Of course, that has political effects, nobody ever doubts it. But people can also be generous, altruistic, powerful, ingenious, fast-moving and humane. And that also has political effects. Don’t ever doubt it.