Anger building as G20 meets in London
Banners and manners marked the first demonstration in London yesterday at the start of the G20 summit week. With the Metropolitan Police beginning the most expensive security operation ever mounted in the capital, yesterday's gathering of 35,000 protesters from 150 organisations, billed as the Put People First march, went off with no arrests and none of the forecasted riots or civic disorder. However, the Met say clashes cannot be ruled out in larger marches and protests planned over the next four days as world leaders arrive for the London summit.
Thousands of police officers who patrolled the route between the Embankment and a closing rally in Hyde Park seemed surprised at how peaceful and calm the mood of the marchers were given advanced warnings that the trade-union-backed march could be hijacked by anarchist groups and others seeking a violent clash with the police to mark what authorities believe could be a "summer of rage".
However, as the march passed the Houses of Parliament in Westminster, by the Treasury and Downing Street and along a fence on Whitehall where hundreds of bricks were left neatly stacked and wrapped in polythene and within a stones throw of Number 10, there seemed little prospect that the police expected a leisurely march to change to a mob. Behind bands and banners, branches of Lloyds, RBS and Barclays all came and went without incident. Then came Trafalgar Square, the scene of poll tax riots in the early 1990s, and the glitzy shops of Piccadilly and the West End.
The line of protesters made their way peacefully towards Hyde Park. Police organisers must have realised that if their intelligence is correct and there are advanced plans to "Reclaim London" and "Storm the City", it was not going to happen then.
Banners asking "Can we overthrow this government: yes we can" and "Bankers, bosses and politicians: up against the wall" - alongside calls for peace in Gaza, action on climate change, justice on jobs and a rainbow of other calls on the G20 world leaders to focus on their cause - made the protest look unfocused.
However, with mayhem absent, the organisers seemed pleased that the first large gathering had passed without incident. Yesterday was seen as the first test for the Met, and police intelligence that said the march was likely to be peaceful and trouble-free proved correct.
Police now face five days of further front-line confrontations between the groups which have converged on London for the G20.
Although yesterday's march passed off peacefully, the Met maintain they still have to plan for intelligence they claim points to other G20 protests being "very violent". This has meant police, alongside Home Office intelligence officials, using the last two weeks trying to convince the huge array of protest groups converging on London that policing of the G20 will, according to one Met source, "plan for the worst and expect less".
With 5000 police officers, personnel taken from six forces, and thousands more on stand-by should they be needed, the security operation in London this week is the most expensive single police operation in British history. All police leave has been cancelled to deal with the various tasks facing the Met.
Sir Paul Stephenson, head of Scotland Yard, said that protecting the G20s venues, protecting the visiting dignitaries and protecting the routes they will use was just one part of his force's responsibilities.
If "the worst" does arrive, this week will mark the beginning of what some have already called a "summer of rage", a potentially global wave of citizen unrest, street battles and civil disorder, where victims of the downturn take to the barricades in a show of anger at the financial institutions held responsible for the onset of recession and mass unemployment, and against politicians who failed to regulate and curtail the economic catastrophe. Into this cocktail of fury senior police officers are adding a new ingredient absent from large-scale riots last seen on British streets in the 1980s - an angry middle class who have seen their progress of the last 20 years threatened.
There was no evidence of such a coalition on show yesterday, with the demonstration held in more of a carnival atmosphere than that of high tension. Police were called upon to do very little other than observe. However, some on the march did predict that serious disruption could not be ruled out.
A teacher from Manchester, and an Italian trade unionist on the march, both said yesterday's march was "always going to a family event". The Italian added: "Tomorrow? People are angry, very angry and it will take very little for things to get horrible."
The superintendent who heads the Met's public disorder branch, David Hartshorn, said the usually quiet part of the class divide, one that had never before seen a demonstration as being likely to achieve what they wanted, could now join resurrected and revived protest groups from the 80s. Dormant activists, according to police sources, are back and armed with something previous generations of protesters lacked: communications sophistication in the shape of the internet, Twitter and text messages. If there is serious disorder in London this week, and on the scale the police expect, it will add to the unrest that has been felt all over Europe since the shock waves of the global downturn were first felt.
In Ireland last week it was taxi drivers and airport workers protesting at job cuts. There have been small demonstrations, lunchtime strikes and huge marches: 100,000 recently marched through Dublin over cutbacks made by the Irish government. In Hungary this month police used tear gas in Budapest to disperse anti-government protest.
In Greece, the fatal shooting of a 15-year-old resulted in the worst riots in a generation last December. Unions in Greece are now staging regular protests demanding the government address the impact on Greece's poor of the downturn. There have been other demonstrations in Germany, the Czech Republic, Austria, Slovenia, Poland and Bulgaria.
In France, three million people took to the streets two weeks ago as part of a second round of strikes and rallies, all attacking President Sarkozy's handling of the crisis. More strikes and marches are expected this week.
Although the G20 summit talks will take place on Thursday only, the "Battle for London" is being seen by police as a wider campaign that will continue throughout this week. No-one of any high rank in the Met is talking officially of failure, but there is an undercurrent of operational concern that their ability to control protests everywhere will not be possible.
If the police do lose control of London, even for a brief time, their intelligence says this is what may happen: RBS's London headquarters near Bishopsgate will be attacked; hotels and government buildings will come under attack in raids by anti-globalisation groups; London underground system will grind to a halt as passenger safety cannot be guaranteed; the capital's traffic will be blocked with protesters lying in sleeping bags across key routes; "camps" inside the City will urge the public to vent anger against financiers and bank executives.
In addition, police fear a planned siege on the Bank of England; the dumping of hundreds of tonnes of sand on the City streets with groups encouraging children to stage "sandpit" protests; key routes into London, such as the Blackwall and Rotherhithe tunnels along with the main Thames bridges, being blocked; bankers in the City being targeted, as firms advise personnel to "dress down" to avoid being identified, and marches heading in different directions hoping to divide the police's power and split their resources.
Inside Scotland Yard, in one operations room, there have been computer projections of what the Met can expect this week. Commander Bob Broadhurst is said to refer to the combined protests as "Stop London".
From the perspective of one organiser of the protest, they are hoping for more than even Broadhurst's worst fears. Police may be predicting "the worst public disorder in a decade", but an organiser of the protest group G20 Meltdown believes the G20 is "London's chance to make the storming of the Bastille look like a school outing".
Their protest on April 1, dubbed Financial Fools' Day, has been named Storm the Banks, in an attempt to take the protest to the belly of the beast - a trial of capitalism where bankers will be "sent to the gallows".
Chris Knight, a professor at the University of East London was suspended from his post last week over his leadership of G20 Meltdown. The university claims his comments on "demanding a revolution" constituted incitement to violence, a claim Knight denies.
He will lead the "Four Horsefolk of the Apocalypse" on the Bank of England. Anarchy.net has a less subtle message: "F*** up the summit and other adventures" is their command for a full-scale protest on the ExCel centre on April 2. Class War's instructions includes a depiction of Sir Fred Goodwin in a guillotine, with the headline "Ready to Riot".
A climate camp is planning to swoop on police lines from different directions; the hard-core assault protesters famous from other international gatherings, the Wombles, are said to have reformed especially for the G20. Anti-war activists are focusing their energies on the US Embassy in Grosvenor Square on the same day as the Meltdown protest.
A senior official at the London Chamber of Commerce said that, speaking to members in London last week, there were plenty of firms that would have preferred to simply "close up shop" for the week. And there were fears inside the Chamber that Chris Knight was correct when he said "the army and the police will be so intent on keeping the ExCel centre that they will lose the city of London. This is our time".
Yet alongside the provocative, the tasteless jokes on how to keep warm during the recession: burn a banker, nearly all the protest groups insist their G20 week is not about violence and that the police have overreacted and appear to be looking for confrontation.
Andrew Dismore, the Labour MP, said the police's language over recent weeks had been "not very helpful". However, neither Sir Paul Stephenson, Bob Broadhurst nor David Hartshorn are answerable to Dismore.
Helpful or not, 5000 police officers in uniform and hundreds more undercover and among the protesters will be on battle alert this week. Yesterday's peaceful protest will not mean any guards being lowered and the police snipers assigned to London's roof tops can only hope that this start to the "summer of rage" goes down for what happens inside the ExCel centre rather than what happens outside it.
