Financial Fools, Climate Camp and Criticising Capitalism - Pressures for Peaceful Protest

Most businesses are horribly aware of the dangers of the economic external influences that they face at present – but in case they missed the point, pressure group action will make the point loud and clear to them next week. Pressure groups are promising action in the City of London to coincide with the G20 summit next week. Protest expert Professor George McKay, of the University of Salford says that we are at a pivotal point which “will add to a new level of angry energy.” The ‘G20 Meltdown’ group insist that they are peaceful protesters, but Commander Bob Broadhurst, in charge of policing the G20, has said a £7.2m police operation is being launched to deal with the level of threat which is said to be at the “severe end of severe”. Following the damage to the home of Sir Fred Goodwin (former RBS Chairman) in Edinburgh the threats have to be taken seriously.

Not all of the protestors are such a threat. The police do not expect the first scheduled protest on Saturday to be “anything other than lawful”. More than 100 charities and unions will call for democratic governance of the world economy, measures to tackle climate change and an end to global poverty and inequality. This alliance brings together household names, such as development charities ActionAid, Oxfam and Plan, green campaigners Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and Stop Climate Chaos, and jobs and homelessness groups like the TUC, the Salvation Army and Shelter. They see the downturn as offering governments an opportunity for change not seen for decades and want to raise the profile of that opportunity amidst the financial threats and gloom.
However Climate Camp - the group behind direct action at Heathrow airport and power stations in North Yorkshire and Kent - has been using text messages, emails and social networking sites to plan what it calls a day of “spectacular action” on Wednesday, which will see supporters “set up camp” in the City. One of their main aims is to protest against the policy of carbon trading. G20 Meltdown are also using technology to communicate and coordinate plans for action, and the police are advising workers in the City of London to dress down and postpone non-essential meetings. There are fears they will be forced to run the gauntlet of protesters. “Burn a banker,” says one anarchist poster, and a university professor who warned that bankers could be “hanging from lampposts” during G20 protests next week has been suspended from his job.

So businesses in the City are set to deal with threat and disruption and to bear the cost of policing, on top of the chaos they have faced in the last few months. Similar summits have attracted anti-globalisation protests for some years now, often with very violent results as in Seattle in 1999 and Genoa in 2001, and damage to properties particularly those associated with ‘cultural globalisation’. The right to protest is a fundamental part of our democracy. Businesses will be disrupted though, and several are bound to lose out on yet more revenue and can only hope that their contingency planning and risk management strategies will be sufficient to protect them against whatever action is being planned by the anarchists.