Entangled Alliances

Gathering at Bethnal Green police station

I went to the demonstration for justice for Ian Tomlinson, as I mentioned in this post yesterday. I just felt like, you know, I had to do something. And I guessed in that sense it would be rather more cathartic – for my own benefit, to set my mind at rest – than because I thought it would actually achieve anything in particular.

The statement by the family at Bethnal Green police station, the start of the march, really was very moving, and I’m glad I took part. We needed to make a statement.

However, I think I was right on the second part – the demonstration measured (I guess) 500-600 people at most. Thankfully it got a fairly good (brief) report on the BBC News website.

But on the first part, I was wrong. It didn’t lead to a sense of catharsis for me, just a sense of hopelessness, as the demo was hijacked by various people trying to push their respective political agendas. In this case it was largely the SWP who plastered their logo and website across their banners stating “Who killed Ian Tomlinson?”. There were plenty of others there hawking their Socialist Workers and various other hard left newspapers, and several large banners were on the march for the Union of Servicemen (?), the Socialist Workers and the Stop The War Coalition.

Using this event – a solemn march to demand justice for a man who had died – to push any sort of other agenda just seems to me to be incredibly tasteless.

Marching towards Bank

This wasn’t about “the system”, or about capitalism. It was about a man who died, at least partly due to police tactics. How is that partisan? How could anyone think it appropriate to make it exclusive to their political creed?

Perhaps I am just expecting too precise a message than is possible in a group of several hundred people, and perhaps this protest was extraordinary. But it at least made me reconsider the final paragraph of this comment I wrote on Ed’s G20 post. Do protests work? (Obviously, they do sometimes.)

I’m now watching Persepolis, a really brilliant film – the original French version – apparently the English version isn’t as good (Marjane really can’t sing though.). In the Iranian Revolution, protests against the Shah’s pretty awful regime, only partly down to religious concerns, were hijacked and used to justify wholehearted support for the new theocracy.

Obviously the parallels aren’t direct (er, at all), but it’s an interesting contrast, perhaps.

Maybe I’ll feel better about it all tomorrow.

(Penny Red has another report from a different perspective and highlights an incident I had forgotten)

When did “Law and Order” become just “Order”?

Nine days have now passed since the death of Ian Tomlinson, and in that time, one thing has become very clear: he did not simply die of ‘natural causes’, as the police at the time suggested. In fact, his death was a very unnatural one indeed – and the police are directly responsible.

It’s easy to get very angry about this sort of thing and descend into hyperbole. But two things have become clear:

1) Police tactics are at fault

The police tactic of ‘kettling’ is unnecessary, counter-productive, and unacceptable. Last year the House of Lords ruled that the practice of ‘kettling’, deployed in the May Day protests of 2001 (where thousands of protesters were held for SEVEN HOURS at Oxford Circus) was compatible with the ECHR Article 5(1), as “the sole purpose of the cordon was to maintain public order, that it was proportionate to that need and that those within the cordon were not deprived of their freedom of movement arbitrarily”.

Let’s hope this senseless policy gets overturned at the European Court of Human Rights. When 3000 people are held in an area of less than 2000 square metres for 7 hours, until 21:30, with no food, water, or sanitary provisions, how can that possibly be justified?

Similarly, with the G20 protests, how can it be justified to hold people for such a long period of time, and only allow them to leave if they agree to provide their details and be photographed?

And how can the police get away with smacking people on the head with truncheons, cordoning off and then baton-charging peaceful climate camp demonstrators (who hours earlier had been pitching tents, playing music, and selling flapjack) and setting dogs on people who had been posing no threat at all?

If there’s one video you watch today – assuming you’ve watched the videos of the police beating Ian Tomlinson (1, 2)- watch this one. Riot police march in to beat unarmed, peaceful protesters, with their hands in the air. Then watch this one from the film Goodbye Lenin, which depicts the Stasi’s tactics of violently breaking up demonstrations. That there is any resemblance between the two at all is appalling.

How can these things not be seen as a deterrent to future protest, and a breach of Article 5?

2) The policeman responsible for Ian Tomlinson’s death should go to prison – and for a long time. But he’s not the only one.

I’m afraid, not for the first time, that I am going to have to disagree with the charming commentator on this (very good) Daily Mail article (via) who said:

“Ian Tomlinson, drunk and out for trouble, decided to deliberately walk into a riot situation and blatantly obstruct the police. He was pushed out of the way. He died because he was a chronic alcoholic and was likely on his last legs anyway. The police did nothing wrong and, compared to other European countries, acted in a very restrained manner. This whole media frenzy is pathetic, transparent and more to the point, very boring. Nobody cared about this man when he was alive, not the media, not the readers of this column and certainly not his family, so let’s have less of the crocodile tears and public lamenting now he’s dead. If people want to criticise the police then do so, but don’t assume everyone is of such low intelligence that putting a bit of spin about a story of a drunk having a heart attack will prompt any right-thinking person into outrage and anarchy.”

- Dom, UK, 10/4/2009 10:40

Ian Tomlinson wasn’t doing anything wrong. He was a bystander, making his way home from selling newspapers. The video clearly shows him shuffling away from the police with his hands in his pockets.

But even if he was doing something wrong, that is obviously no excuse for smacking him in the legs and violently throwing him to the ground. The policeman actually lunged at his back. The only threat to public order was from that policeman himself.

As others have pointed out, this particular piece of brutality which led to Ian Tomlinson’s death was not exceptional; there were countless examples of this on the day. So yes, this stupid thug should go to prison, and for a very long time, both for what he did and to set an example to others thinking of going the same way. But this goes much higher than that.

The Met is not only responsible for the police tactics, it’s also responsible for the disgraceful way that it responded to Ian Tomlinson’s death, briefing that it was “of natural causes” and that demonstrators threw bricks, bottles, etc. while police were trying to save his life. And the media’s responsible for unquestioningly lapping it up. It’s since “emerged” that he was an alcoholic Milwall fan staying in a bail hostel. Oh, well that’s ok then.

So what’s going to happen now?

Well it’s clear that IPCC inquiry is not going to be sufficient. As the Guardian’s editorial on Thursday noted,

“And what kind of independent body is it whose first reaction to the Guardian’s evidence on Tuesday night was to call at our offices (accompanied by a City of London policeman) and ask for it to be taken off the website?”

Surprise! The CCTV cameras “weren’t working”. Sorry, that must have come as a shock. And from that Channel 4 News interview, the chairman of the IPCC is clearly an idiot.

We need a full judicial inquiry, and the only way we’re going to get that is if sufficient pressure is placed on those who can make it happen. Protests might not help much, but it’s better than nothing.

Join the protest against police brutality, tomorrow (Saturday 11th April) at 11:30, at Bethnal Green police station.

I want to have confidence in my police service again. I want to trust them, and to believe that they’re there to protect me. How can I do that when nine days ago, a man died at their hands, and they don’t seem all that bothered?

Some more coverage:

• Liberal Conspiracy: Who’s to blame for this accidental death?
• Liberal Conspiracy: So who will excuse police brutality now? (includes lots of other links)
• Liberal Conspiracy: I still blame police brutality (2nd April)
• Chicken Yoghurt: Ian Tomlinson: video reveals G20 police assault on man who died
• Bloggerheads – Why aren’t these people working to protect us?
• Laurie Penny – Fuck.
  

photo credit: thefost

It’s now been a whole week since the G20 met (an event which, if it was a Friends episode, would surely be called The One Where The Canadian Prime Minister Missed The Group Photo Because He Was In the Toilet) and yet commentators are still very much divided on the deceptively simple question: Was the summit a success? This isn’t really surprising, since the answer depends on how you define success. For example, if you were looking for a demonstration that in the midst of global recession the world’s leaders are able to get together, put aside their differences and promise to sort stuff out then the summit was very successful indeed. Alternatively, if you were looking for a solid commitment to prevent a global crisis like this from ever happening again, then you must have come away very happy with the result. And if what you were after was a bunch of vague commitments that will probably/maybe be ratified in the future but more importantly look very good in the present, then you’re probably still doing triple backflips of joy.

But if you were hoping for a substantive commitment to lifting the global economy out of recession – and doing it now, rather than later – then it’s hard not to see the G20 summit as a bit of a let-down, albeit a very glamorous and show-stopping one. It’s true that restoring growth and getting people back to work was never the sole aim of the summit- in the final communique it’s merely listed as an equal pledge amongst eight others -  but lifting the world out of recession is nevertheless the first thing you’d expect someone to say if you asked them what the summit’s main goal was. And with good reason – the current numbers coming out of America alone suggest that we might have to soon start switching out terminology from talk of global recession to the use of the dreaded “d” word (“depression” that is, though doom and devastation work quite well too).

To prove my point, let’s examine what have been touted as the main substantive achievements of the summit – the clampdown on tax havens, the new regulatory framework and the headline-grabbing sum of $1.1 trillion.

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18:45 BST: Well, the time has come for me to quit this epic live-blog, given that I’ll soon be entering my twelfth hour of continuous live-blogging.  I know; I know – Obama’s about to give his press conference. But I’m about to collapse; so that’s that. I hope you enjoyed the  random, disparate, often unhelpful observations from yours truly. I know I did – live-blogging’s great! There’ll be some more analysis tomorrow from Entangled Alliances, looking in more detail at the exact provisions of the groundbreaking G20 agreement: what they are, whether they’re good and whether they’ll actually change anything, as well as a look at how the G20 will benefit its main players. But for now, I’ll leave you with a fitting quote from BBC business correspondent Robert Peston:

There are no surprises in the deal announced today to reform the banking system, to prevent banks making the kind of risky loans and investments that precipitated the worst global economic crisis since the 1930s.

But it’s nonetheless a historic event that the world’s 20 most powerful economies have signed up for these reforms – because they represent the death knell for the Anglo-American doctrine that economies flourish when financial firms are left alone to do as they please.

Indeed.

18:32 BST: Buried under all the G20 news has been the potentially groundbreaking meeting between Barack Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, which resulted in an agreement to reduce the nuclear arms of both sides much further than the current agreement demands. This could be very important…

18:30 BST: A wise comment from the Guardian’s Andrew Sparrow (whose live-blog was probably better than mine but nowhere near as epic!):

I’ve been busy updating our main story, having sat through the opening of Brown’s statement. First reaction: I found myself sitting there thinking ‘David Cameron could not pull off an event like this’. That’s not because I think Cameron’s a lightweight. I don’t. It’s because the most important summit conclusions involve international finance, global trade and the inner workings of organisations like the IMF and there are probably very few prime ministers or presidents in the world who understand this stuff as well as Brown.

18:20 BST: Lest I be judged  by my comments below to have been a bit too harsh on the protests, I want to stress that I have great respect for most of them. I say most of them, because the anarchists were just so annoying. Proper anarchism is really cool. It’s an extremely sophisticated ideology . These guys, however, were just pathetic. Bad anarchists!  The majority of protests, however, made some good points.The fact remains, though, that they surely made no difference on the summit at all. If you want to get something changed, you focus on it like a laser and you don’t go off message. But the protests were never on message to begin with – from homelessness to climate change to ending the war to the death of capitalism; only a minority were  actually focused on the topics of the summit! The question becomes then – did they really want to influence the summit? Or did they just want to get their message out there in a sort of vague picture of defiance?  In their defence, however, you could respond that they never stood a chance anyway: governments don’t respond to the people anymore. No-one listened to Iraq protests, for example and they were very focused. So it’s an interesting debate. But I do think that they could have maybe stood a chance at getting some traction if they focused on one message and, you know, stuck to it.

18:13 BST: Here’s the full text of the communique, courtesy of the Guardian. There’s tonnes of details here…

18:10 BST: Oh and I forgot to add that hedge funds and other non-banking institutions will come under the aegis of this new Financial Stability board. Since the mysterious financing of hedge funds helped to exacerbate the mess, this is also good news; but again it all depends on how strong the regulation is…

18:05 BST: The headlines are focusing on the issues of tax havens and that $1 trillion figure, but there’s tonnes of other stuff that’s just as interesting. For example, there’s going to be a new Financial Stability Board that will work with the IMF to monitor the risk of banking transactions and impose limits on things like capital reserves and leverage requirements (not to mention executive bonuses.) This is absolutely crucial in getting the banks back on track and preventing such a crisis happening again, since it was an inherent failure in the banks’s ability to evaluate “systemic risk” that made the crisis so bad. This is pretty complicated and I’ll come back to this another time, but suffice to say it’s a good move – that is, as long as this new regulatory body actually has proper regulatory oversight.

17:54 BST: A timely article over at Foreign Policy discussing whether protests ever work. I agree with its basic conclusion: protests have to be unified and targeted; and focused on changing the system not overthrowing it. The G20 protests were none of these things and so I’m afraid that they’ve had absolutely no effect whatsoever.

17:46 BST: Did Sarkozy and Merkel get their victory? Or was there never any “victory” to begin with? Everyone was in agreement over the basic regulatory provisions. and had been for weeks. The real controversy-  over the possibility of national stimulus packages – was won by Merkel and Sarkozy weeks ago, and so it was no surprise to see no such provisions today. However, Sarkozy must be feeling pleased that the language on tax havens was quite fierce. In the big picture, it’s not really much of an issue, but he’ll make a big deal of it, which is fair enough…

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In 1996, Stryker McGuire launched the age of “Cool Britannia” with an ode to the city’s burgeoning chic in Newsweek magazine:

Right now, London is a hip compromise between the nonstop newness of Los Angeles and the aspic-pre-served beauty of Paris, sharpened to a New York edge. In short, this is the coolest city on the planet.

photo credit: *spud*

Thirteen years later, Stryker is back with an altogether more despondent vision.  Looking back over the Blair-Brown era, he casts back to the millennial optimism of the 1997 Labour victory and London’s world leadership in fashion, the arts and architecture.  The contrast, and it’s a stark one, is with a modern-day London heading into deep recession – the symbols of its former glory now insistent reminders of its current predicament:

Glitzy restaurants and cutting-edge fashion that used to be signs of welcome creativity reek of excess in a time of belt-tightening. Heavily mortgaged homes that looked like brilliant retirement nest eggs when property prices were soaring year after year now just look like basket cases. Construction sites and street works that once raised expectations of things to come now seem like major inconveniences. 

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photo credit: vaviolino

Remember the old Chinese curse “may you live in interesting times”? It’s worth keeping in mind as we head towards April and the meeting of the 20 richest nations in the world: London’s G20 summit is going to be very interesting indeed.  As Mark Bailey reported in his recent post “G20 Preview: Gordon and Goliath”, Gordon Brown and Barack Obama are both calling for a global fiscal stimulus. The likes of France and Germany, however, are rejecting talk of more stimulus, choosing to focus solely on bank regulation – specifically the regulation of hedge funds and tax havens.

Now I like a good campaign against hedge funds and tax havens as much as the next man, yet it must be said that Gordon is completely right to demand that global stimulus packages be pursued at the same time as international bank regulation. As far as Europe is concerned, a large influx of government public spending would work  particularly well, as thanks to the free trade policies of the European Union any stimulus one country puts in place will immediately benefit their neighbours. This, however, is what concerns the likes of France and Germany: the fear that heavy national spending will simply leak out and end up as international spending.This particularly irks Germany who are already gritting their teeth at the prospect of having to bail out the troubled states of Eastern Europe (who, it turns out, are just rubbish at that capitalism malarkey).

But what the likes of Sarkozy and Merkel are forgetting is that with more and more Europeans losing their jobs, governments are facing lower tax revenues and higher welfare costs. The higher cost of paying benefits is particularly onerous on European governments, as unlike America the welfare systems of Europe are commendably generous (Britain excepted). Large stimulus packages, therefore, are essential to get people back to work and kick start Europe’s economy.

However, though Gordon Brown’s logic is sound his pan-European ambitions are leaving a bitter taste in the mouth – well, in my mouth anyway – because, despite his calls for a global stimulus, Britain has hardly had one worth the name. Indeed, so far the only “stimulus” we’ve had is last November’s £20 billion scheme, the majority of which went on a much derided cut in VAT. Let’s compare this with other countries, shall we?

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When domestic politics is getting you down, the international stage can prove a welcome diversion.  Just ask Bill Clinton.  But here in Britain we’re talking plummeting poll numbers, not impeachment, and the diversion of international economic policy, not cruise missile strikes.  Yes, what a breath of fresh air the international stage has been for Gordon Brown.  Far away from a seemingly insurmountable deficit in the polls, and rumblings in the Labour ranks, Brown has been reveling in a reputation as a far-sighted guru of economic policy, feted by the likes of Paul Krugman and fulfilling a boyhood dream (I’m with you Gordo) of addressing a Joint Session of Congress.  Next month, however, these two worlds will collide in a bold all-or-nothing attempt by Brown to merge the two currents of his premiership; an attempt to rescue his domestic political prospects and cement his role as a world leader in one fell swoop.  In April, the G20 is coming to town, and for Gordon Brown the stakes could not be higher.

photo credit: World Economic Forum

The London Summit, which will be held on one fateful day, April 2nd, is a follow-up to a session held last November in Washington D.C. – a session in which rather little was decided, except vague assurances about cutting taxes and increasing government spending.  The Prime Minister’s zeal was already clear at this stage.  He declared that the summit  was “the road to the new Bretton Woods. It is absolutely clear that we are trying to build new institutions for the future.”  For him, London is where the deal will be sealed.   His agenda is extraordinarily ambitious.  As the Economist sardonically put the issue:

The summit should not only stimulate the economy and renounce protectionism, but also bolster the IMF and other international financial outfits, revamp regulation, create an early-warning system for crises, and save the poor. It was as if Mr Brown thought the ailing economy would yield to an act of governmental will, if only it were colossal enough.

The Economist, ever pragmatic, argues that such overreach risks undermining the immediate necessities of global government stimulus and a united front against protectionism.  This pessimism seems to be borne out by the unenthusiastic noises coming from G20 capitals and an emerging transatlantic gulf in attitudes.  Below the fold, I look at the opposition to Gordon Brown’s plan for new financial institutions, and the implications for his domestic political fortunes.

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