Tom Burgis | ukwatch.net

Making G8 History

christian — Fri, 08 Jul 2005 09:30:14 +0000

The battle of Auchterarder has been fought and lost. More than 5,000 protesters achieved on 6 July 2005 what snow over Prestwick airport could have accomplished the G8 dignitaries arrived two hours late, but still in good time to meet Queen Elizabeth II.

But then, the battle was always going to be lost. It had to be waged, yet in the war for what is generally called justice, it was no more than a necessary sacrifice.

The victory of the G8 Alternatives march in Scotland on Wednesday was that it took place at all. At 10.30 am, it had been cancelled outright. Anarchists had descended on Stirling from the Dissent! rural convergence site and clashed with police forces already fraught after Mondays disturbances in Edinburgh.

The anarchists played into the hands of those determined to make the Live8 celebrity shindig at Murrayfield the days sole permitted protest. (That shindig featured an African campaigner thanking the G8 in advance for whatever it will do. She was not arrested.)

The Black Bloc, the Wombles and the other anarchist groups that demolished the front of Stirlings Burger King may have shown an anger that is sorely lacking elsewhere, but their motives are often dubious. Some in their ranks simply wouldnt know what to do with themselves if their goal of the states demise was attained and there was no one in authority left to goad. In terms of collective tactics, they have the acumen of plankton.

Wednesdays march, had it been co-ordinated, focussed, and broad enough to include the most radical elements, the untrousered peaceniks and the swathe of social resistance in between, could have made at least one G8 leader quake. But, as one disappointed activist from Pamplona observed: Its so disorganised. Theres no message to unite people.

A second victory was to overcome a calculated barrage of misinformation from the police. In ninety minutes around noon, I made four calls to the Tayside press office. The information was both inaccurate and at odds with what officers were saying on the ground. Given that the summit is being held on a golf course in the middle of (picturesque) nowhere, the efforts of the G8 Alternatives organisers were as savvy as they were calm. The clashes with riot police near the security fence around Gleneagles were as much the product of honest vexation as the work of any mischievous element.

Were not going to shut them down: theyve got American military everywhere, said Globalise Resistances Guy Taylor, whose coach was blockaded in Edinburgh for three hours. Were here to show theyre not a legitimate body to solve the worlds problems.

While Make Poverty Historys final push attempts to show that the G8 unelected, unaccountable and, seemingly, unstoppable is indeed Africas messiah, radicals are in for the long haul. The only thing that unites the G8 is that they are the richest nations in the world, said Taylor. Theyre there to retain that wealth and power. Poorer countries at least have some representation at the UN, the WTO and the World Bank.

*Solace or subversion?*

There is no such recourse at the G8. Not even Bob Geldof has a veto. There is no one inside the summit for the protesters to express solidarity with. That renders Make Poverty Historys efforts to harness the G8s power for the good of all mankind seem even more deluded. But with the Security Council omnipotent at the United Nations, and the World Banks one-dollar one-vote structure skewing its policy grotesquely, it has been at the World Trade Organisation that those poorer countries have been able to muster some collective clout. The most ominous part of the communiqué expected from the G8 on 8 July will be its recommendation for a daring round of development talks at the body whose doctrine was described by Ralph Nader as trade über alles.

Britain is part of a big push for the Doha [development round], says veteran Filipino activist and head of Focus on the Global South, Walden Bello. The December ministerial will be about the survival of the WTO, the engine of global misery, or whether it gets stopped for a third time. Bello, who laments British demonstrators mellow approach to protest, identifies the Achilles heel of the titan of global finance: the consensus required for the WTO to issue a communiqué.

In 1999, the WTO talks broke down for the first time since its foundation in 1995. In the streets, as police wiped the blood from their batons, something had happened, a child of many names had been born. Its general sobriquet is the global justice movement. Before Seattle, Bello argued, the globalisation of free trade was considered inevitable. After it, globalisation was something that could be resisted, partly through direct resistance to the WTO, G8 and the Bretton Woods institutions.

At Cancún in 2003, the WTO was dealt a massive blow. Emboldened by the mass protests on the Mexican streets, Africa united and new coalitions of developing countries the G20, G33 and G90 squared up to the big boys. Such was the resilience with which the Davids fronted up to the Goliaths ultra-liberal draft proposals, the ministerial was unable to issue a communiqué. They continue to coordinate resistance to the wests economic bulldozering at governmental level.

The network of insurgent solidarities goes wider. Where Richard Curtis offers solace to leaders who will lose no sleep as they condemn the global south to another cycle of privatisation and privation, radicals in the social justice movement have fostered links between civil society and those in developing countries determined to resist the pillage of their resources.

Others in Auchterarder, including George Monbiot and Trevor Ngwane, head of the South African Anti-Privatisation Forum, argue for more direct action. Monbiot recommends that the global south call Paul Wolfowitzs and Gordon Browns bluff on debt. If debtor countries simply refused en masse to service their debt, they would have the west by the bankrolls, says Monbiot: the total debt is $2.5 trillion; the global financial reserves are only $1.5 trillion. That would give poor countries real power.

*Resisting the global carve-up*

Within the protest establishment, that argument is barely countenanced. Were only asking the G8 to do what those eight countries can. We (also) challenge the way the express their power. We are not legitimising them, says Matt Phillips, one of the senior figures within Make Poverty History. We dont have time, frankly, to wait for a more legitimate entity to turn up. While were here today, 30,000 African children will die. We give the British government credit for pushing an ambitious agenda. I dont question Blair and Browns commitment what were bothered about is the outcome.

The furore over whether the G8 could turn benign if it is cuddled for long enough ignores the fundamental illegitimacy of this sacred group. It has no democratic mandate. Any attempt to challenge the misery the masters of the universe perpetuate must consider the fundamental question: where does its power come from? It comes from the entrenched, feudal privilege of corporate capital, expressed through structures either overtly or covertly unrepresentative of the planets population.

The Battle of Auchterarder was doomed from the outset. As the polyglot protesters left Gleneagles on Wednesday night, the mood was sombre. The carve-up will continue on the other side of the fence though thanks to Make Poverty History, the vocabulary will be different.

The next struggle will be for the will of those who have been politicised by Make Poverty Historys mass appeal those who scratch far enough below the surface of the G8 communiqué to see that the only slogan worth shouting is make the G8 history.

Vote for Independence!

jo — Thu, 21 Apr 2005 21:45:29 +0000

Independent, non-party members of parliament embody a contradiction. In Edmund Burkes terms, are they to be representatives who owe responsibility to their own judgment rather than electors opinion, or are they peoples tribunes whose larynx is the property of their constituents? The rise of independents in public life there are now over 2,000 in Britains local councils may be read as a direct response to the presidential style of Tony Blairs New Labour government, for which parliament functions as a baroque rubber-stamp.

Many voters are disillusioned rather than apathetic, and troubled as much by Iraq and Britains submission to the United States as they are by jammed roads and nutrition-free school dinners. They are trying to renegotiate their contract with power. When government seems arrogant and opposition parties moribund, where can they go? For many of them, the box marked independent seems an attractive option.

Independents are the Alka-Seltzer of the body politic, says Martin Bell. When party politics fails, they purge the system. In 1997, Bell, his white suit a signifier of moral authority, won a bruising campaign in Tatton against Neil Hamilton an especially venal symbol of eighteen years of Conservative government to become the first independent MP in Britain for fifty years.

In 2001, Dr Richard Taylor stood in Wyre Forest to protect Kidderminster hospital and was rewarded with the largest majority of any opposition MP that year. In 2005, around twenty independent candidates are mounting serious challenges. They are part of a new breed of electoral Davids who might just leave the Westminster Goliaths stunned on 5 May.

Taylor, who is tipped to hold his seat, has widened his portfolio considerably. The fury he felt as he saw the staff at his hospital stripped to a skeleton crew was directed at unelected quangos and civil servants. That was his ticket accountability and less meddling by Whitehall and he travelled on it, voting to make control orders subject to judicial discretion, against the hunting ban, for an all-elected House of Lords. Naturally, he has been a vociferous critic of foundation hospitals.

Iraq has produced two of the noisiest single-issue candidates this time around. Reg Keys says his son, a military policeman killed in Majar al-Kabir, died for a lie. After initially planning to challenge Geoff Hoon, the defence secretary, in Ashfield, he has launched a highly organised campaign in Tony Blairs Sedgefield to take on the organ-grinder, not the monkey. His message is simple: let me be the catalyst to hold Blair to account for the catastrophic political blunder of his ill-founded bellicosity.

Craig Murrays claim is subtler, and thus more difficult to stake. He is fighting Jack Straw in Blackburn over human rights abuses in Uzbekistan. As British ambassador in Tashkent, Murray objected to the use by Britain of information that had been beaten out of detainees by Uzbek heavies, a delightful band not averse to boiling people alive. He was shushed, smeared, suspended, and finally severed in February 2005. His campaign, conducted from an ancient Green Goddess fire-engine exemplifies one of things independents can do just by running: expose the mechanisms of constituency politics.

Blackburn is a Labour rotten borough, he says, observing that, in a constituency where a Labour councillor was recently jailed for vote-rigging and where only 43,000 people voted in 2001, there have been 20,350 applications for postal votes. Ten Muslim voters have separately told Murray that they were instructed to submit their postal ballot to Labour party members. Such is the disquiet at Labours Old Queen Street headquarters in London over Murrays challenge that it has placed Straws seat on its list of marginals, despite his 9,249 majority.

Neither Keys nor Murray are readily compared to Jordan, the glamour model who garnered 713 votes as an independent in Stretford in 2001. But there is a link: as single-issue candidates, all are wholly reliant on their central assets.

Elsewhere, a new breed of indie is emerging: candidates who make their independence their platform. They have high local profiles; they are not bound to a single issue; their war cry is representational, accountable democracy.

Kate Allsop is wired in to Ashfield, not least because she used to run a detective agency there. Nottinghamshire born and bred, she is now a local councillor the antithesis of the parachuted candidate. (Hoon, her target, has houses in London and Derbyshire. Asked to comment on this, his constituency staff hung up.) Both she and Stewart Rickersey, who is standing in neighbouring Mansfield, present themselves as the vessels of their constituents will. When the House of Commons divides, their feet would belong to the electorate. Allsop, nothing if not frank, bemoans the sesquipedalian nature of political communication. People dont understand the language of government, she says, citing Hoon as a leading exponent of euphemism: collateral damage means sons and daughters blown to pieces.

Mansfield is perhaps the most likely venue for an upset. In May 2003, twenty-five independents broke Labours thirty-year hold on the local council. Rickersey, managing director of the Chad newspaper for fourteen years, masterminded the campaign. He was selected to take on Alan Meale, an old Labour man with a majority of 11,000 who has passed the tellers in fewer than half of this parliaments votes.

Rickersey takes representation deadly seriously. He enthuses about a consultation system being tested by the Independent Network (IN), a loose affiliation set up to boost the resources of independents who do not have the luxury of round-the-clock Tippex teams. Peter Lay, who heads the IN, says the system could be rolled out early in the next parliament and involves secure IDs that would allow everyone on the electoral register to vote on major decisions by text, email, phone or letter. The idea is to generate in politics the interactivity that mobilises millions of votes for Pop Idol. Six young people in a pub having a bloody argument about Europe could text me and see themselves represented in parliament, Rickersey says.

The arguments against the independent are strong: they split votes, they lack bloc clout. But the first conflates hustings pragmatism with the flaws of first-past-the-post. The second is countered by something Ralph Nader said: The function of leadership is to produce more leaders, not more followers. If it is not an oxymoron, this is the parliamentary equivalent of direct action: Reg Keys threatened to hang himself outside the Labour conference to extract an apology from Blair. To emancipate the electorate from the long whip of the party system, the independent candidates must show that they can contain multitudes without allowing ethical judgement to be stampeded, to stretch the constitution without snapping it.