The voices in G20's chorus of protest
By Ed Vulliamy and Richard Rogers, The Observer, in The Guardian, Sunday 8 March 2009
A mass demonstration ahead of the London G20 summit is set to attract a huge mix of different interest groups as a new coalition, Put People First, takes shape. Ed Vulliamy and Richard Rogers report
The G20 summit of industrialised nations in London next month will be marked by one of the biggest demonstrations since a million people marched against war in Iraq in 2003.
On that Saturday, the issue was simple. This time the protest - although it draws on equally diverse social and political quarters - is a complex weave of movements and priorities united by one emotion: a disgust at the latest incarnation of capitalism that demands a different way of organising the economy of the planet.
To say that the protests will invoke the causes of social justice, the environment and fair trade would be to put it too simply, so we have published brief statements by some of the prime movers about why they will be taking to the streets.
Some preach the message of Jesus, while others urge outright revolution and much in between, forming perhaps the widest coalition of pressure groups ever assembled in Britain. And there will be the thousands of normal people angry at the way politicians and their friends in the banks, thinktanks and corridors of power are mismanaging our lives.
Apart from the main demonstration on Saturday 28 March, a flurry of further protests is envisaged, including Financial Fools Day, a blockade of financial institutions to prevent people from getting to work on 1 April. While trade unions will be aware that the protest comes close to the 25th anniversary of the Eighties miners' strike, a group called G20 Meltdown will stage carnivalesque parades, one of which will "honour the 360th full circle anniversary of the Diggers" - Civil War revolutionaries.
The G20 protests have been seen in some quarters as a shadow over an otherwise grand occasion, hosted by Britain as an honour to its - and its prime minister's - standing in the global discourse on how to tackle the crisis, as Gordon Brown said in Washington last week.
But the range of opinions united in protest shows the demand not for a quick fix to our capitalist institutions but, to borrow the mantra of the new American president, for change. There is a certain edginess in the air, not because of warnings of a "summer of rage", but because those who feel they have history on their side for once.
The London G20 takes place against a backdrop of front-page headlines that scream "Scumbag Millionaires" and a general awareness that the average citizen works hard to pay taxes in order to bail out the multimillionaires who got them into this mess. No mass protest is spontaneous; all are months in the planning. For every 99 marchers, there is one who knows where he belongs and has been busying away for a long time. These constellations have a core, or at least a small cog that turns the bigger wheels, such as CND and Bruce Kent in the peace protests of the 1980s and the Stop the War Coalition, propelled by the Socialist Workers Party, in the march against war in Iraq.
This time, that core is called Put People First, an umbrella of organisations that first met last September at the invitation of a small organisation called the Bretton Woods Project. A campaign watchdog created in 1995 to scrutinise and influence the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, the Bretton Woods Project started work before the onset of the financial crisis, campaigning against injustices in world trade and financial management. Together with partners such as Action Aid and the TUC, they regard the financial crisis as the final curtain for a free market that had failed to address world poverty and inequality long before the banks began to fail their shareholders.
The Bretton Woods Project thinks that the financial crisis is just one of the major problems facing humanity, along with the environmental dangers produced by climate change, food shortages and the blight of world poverty. They also saw an economic root to all these problems and a need for a global economic solutions. Their aim was to create an alliance that could engage with the collective concerns of its many members through a coherent voice central to one demand: to reassert democratic governance of the economy at national and international level.
The coalition now has more than 100 organisations in its ranks, the largest cross-UK coalition since 2005's Make Poverty History, with an assembled membership of many millions, some of whom are represented on this page. From the Vatican-funded development charities Cafod and Progressio to the Muslim Council of Great Britain; from Engineers Against Poverty to the Stop Climate Chaos coalition's 11 million members. A massive mix of ideologies have united to march on London on 28 March, denounce the current capitalist system and demand change from the G20. But while mainstream charities and faith groups converge, there are other engines at work. On 28 January, Shoreditch town hall in east London was full to bursting, as were other locations all day, for a rolling conference called Six Billion Ways, addressed by Bianca Jagger and activists from across the world brainstorming their way to, as War on Want director John Hilary put it, "properly and fundamentally restructure the global economy to end oppression - we had people packed in the aisles, and broke all the fire regulations".
Another tributary into the river of protest has been largely overlooked: the rupture between Christianity and capitalism. Christian activists from all denominations are preparing for 28 March, denouncing what they see as a summit of materialism. Illustrating this is a service that will be held before the march at Westminster Hall, which will probably fill the great hall's capacity many times over.
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