The view from Threadneedle Street
David Blackburn 3:49pm
Despite appearances, the G20 meltdown protest around the Bank of England is fertile ground for the Conservatives. There is an enormous middle class presence here that is nothing short of livid with the government’s economic policy. I spoke to a group of young women from south east London who would have looked more at home Sloane Ranging than in the midst of an allegedly anti-capitalist demonstration. They were aged 18-24, the age group the recession is now hitting hardest, and they made it clear they were opposed to nothing other than “excessive bailouts and stimulus at the expense of hard pressed taxpayers” and the government’s “headless chicken approach”. They expressed “broad support” for the Tories’ caution.
This supports recent poll findings that the Conservatives are now more trusted to run the economy than the government. If the Tories are finding widespread support here, then surely this government must be lurching to its deathbed.
Obviously, not everyone here is for Cameron and Osborne. When I first arrived, a group of cultured anarchists were taking elevenses outside the Bank of England; they were breakdancing unenergetically, labouring under a surfeit of tea, crumpets and other substances. Russell Brand was also spotted, fully made up for the cameras, standing next to a banner titled: ‘Consumerism Sucks’. That his magnum opus, My Booky Wook, was last year’s celebrity bestseller was an irony entirely lost on him.
There are a number of environmental campaigners here, but the largest contingent was sponsored by that ultimate contradiction in terms, The Socialist Worker. They were armed with four bamboo Horsemen of the Apocalypse, a plethora of Hammers and Sickles and rousing slogans from the past. A representative of the socialist youth movement ‘Revolution’ said she wanted to take the banks away from “fat cats” and award control to the workers. When asked who those workers might be she replied, “The people who work in them.” So more bourgeois bankers then; I’d say that’s a non-starter for Marxists.
Up until about half-past one, this protest had a carnival atmosphere. Admittedly there were cranks: groups in threatening looking Balaclavas and people alleging that 9/11, 7/7 and probably the Princess of Wales’ death were organised by Anglo-American security services. Prior to one thirty, a few scuffles led to the arrest of 11 people, but other than that it was placid. At around two o’clock there was an upsurge of noise and, I imagine, violence at the RBS end of Threadneedle Street, but I couldn’t get through the crowd to investigate. Despite the BBC’s alarmist reporting, this protest remains largely peaceful, certainly nothing on the scale of 2000’s May Day riots at the moment.
Even more surprising is the number of former bankers who are protesting about the need for effective supervision in financial services. Again, this is good news for the Tories. People I spoke to agreed that soft-touch supervision is preferable to heavy-handed regulation. A former banker, Damian McAllvenna was contemptuous of the government and proposed - as Nigel Lawson has and George Osborne seemed to at yesterday’s treasury debate - dividing retail and investment banking arms and supervising level three assets, derivatives that are manipulated by financiers to inflate their value. “Something remains seriously wrong with this system...the government has achieved little so far.” There is enough evidence at this protest to suggest that people think the Conservatives would do far better.
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Wilhelm
April 1st, 2009 4:26pm Report this commentAs Claude Rains said in Casablanca ''round up the usual suspects.'' Student slackers, hippies, save the tadpole greens , a nutty Palestinian belly dancer singing some Arab songs in Trafalgar square and snake oil salesman George Galloway as the MC. Throw in some Hamas loving, middle class, do gooding twits and there you have it.
Its a bit like X Factor with Simon Cowell.
Nick
April 1st, 2009 4:28pm Report this commentI was around the Bank of England for a couple of hours till 1pm and it seemed to me that the protesters were hugely outnumbered by photographers, both professional and amateur.
Wilhelm
April 1st, 2009 4:34pm Report this commentWhy dont they put these summits in Iceland or Alaska ? then the Hamas loving nuts and other riff raff wouldnt turn up.
Fred Bloggs
April 1st, 2009 4:53pm Report this commentAny piccies of said "young women"?
Erasmus
April 1st, 2009 5:09pm Report this commentExcellent post, David. Both amusing and open-minded.
Jasmine
April 1st, 2009 5:32pm Report this commentI hate the middle-class Guardian-reading phonies who organise these marches.
I hate the police for their de facto sponsorship of Islamic extremism:
www.spectator.co.uk/melaniephillips/3506226/into-the-teapot-in-londonistan.thtml#comments
And I hate the bankers who can’t wait to sell us all to the Middle East for the bunce they can make on shariah-finance.
To watch them all knocking lumps out of each other like this is simply wonderful. As far as I’m concerned, the bonfire of the vanities can burn well into tomorrow and beyond.
Ironically, today was a day when these three ghastly parties actually weren’t able to get on with the cultural ransacking of Britain that they all so excel at in their day jobs.
Andy Hinton
April 1st, 2009 6:50pm Report this commentYou can't have been at the same protest I was at, David. Didn't look much like a Tory-voting crowd to me!
Denis Cooper
April 1st, 2009 9:02pm Report this commentWell, apparently these protests didn't stop the Bank printing £3.5 billion and using it to buy back existing gilts today, while half a mile away in Philpot Lane the Treasury's Debt Management Office successfully raised £3.5 billion by selling new gilts ...
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=a9EQiFzNtAYo
"Gilts advanced after the U.K. sold all 3.5 billion pounds ($5 billion) of six-year notes at an auction and the Bank of England bought the same amount of securities as part of an asset-purchase program designed to lower borrowing costs."
and
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=a.xrEYNN8i4U
"Notes maturing in six years fall within the range of securities the Bank of England is buying as part of its so- called quantitative easing program. Gilts rose after the sale.
“There is appetite for issues that fall within the Bank of England’s quantitative easing zone,” said Richard McGuire, a London-based fixed-income strategist at Royal Bank of Canada. “This shows the Bank of England needs to be there to support sufficient investor appetite, given the poor supply picture.” "
Unless it was an April's Fool.
El Sid
April 2nd, 2009 1:59am Report this commentI'd look at it another way. These are natural Tories that see no prospect of redemption from our present difficulties via the ballot box. They have been forced to join the crusties by the incompetence of the Tories, particularly in economic policy.
Certainly that's a common theme among people I talk to, they get no hope from the Tories of change they can believe in - or even that things can only get better under the Tories. I'd suggest that the polls bear this out - given all that's going wrong, the Tories should be 32% ahead of Brown, not 12%. If there was a Thatcher figure, or even a Tory Blair (and Cameron is no Blair), then Labour would be facing annihilation. If the Tories fail to get a landslide at the next election, the blame can be firmly put on Osborne's ineffectiveness, and to a lesser extent Cameron. Osborne needs to go.
EGR
April 2nd, 2009 8:59am Report this commentI am not sure about the Tory-voting masses, seems to genralised. However any unproductive situation like a "protest against capitalism" only fuels anger. Protestors became angry because they couldn't march freely, yet bankers hardly heard their protests (most were working from home, I was). Those that did go to work felt angry at the fact that an individual should be made into the Capitalist anti-christ. Meanwhile, the ones who really should listen (are world leaders) are too busy making elaborate press statements, and giving ipods to the Queen. At the end of the day maybe our leaders got it right for once, the protests were completely useless. An angry side show demonstrating that Gordon Brown has lost all sense of reality. That is the real Conservative advantage.
Paul
April 2nd, 2009 11:06am Report this commentI agree with everything Jasmine said (above). I hate every party involved here - the police, the anarchist window smashers (who would happily smash windows in London even if the planet was run by The Anarchist Tree Hugging Party) and the bankers. I particularly despise the police beacuse instead of arresting bad people, something you would think the police might do, they now arrest people for defending themselves from burglars, saying "hateful" things about religions that condone the execution of anyone who criticises them or has a lifestyle they don't like. The Undercover Mosque programme, and how the police responded by taking action against the Tv company for inciting hatred of islam by filming Immans talking about throwing people off cliffs shows how morally bankrupt our police are. They even now arrest people for making politically incorrect jokes - but don't expect them to turn up to a crimescene. The police find criminals on top of houses, throwing roof tiles onto cars and rush into action... to order food from KFC to be taken up to the roof top. I hate the police so much - and I know other people who do. Criminals should hate the police. I am not a criminal. I am the director of a company. I have a stable life. I pay taxes. I believe in a well-run society where people are safe. Yet I truly hate the police. I am the sort of person who, before the police were politicised under New Labour would have been one of the strongest allies of the police. Now I hate them with a vengeance. I hate the sight of them. The sight of a policeman/woman makes me sick. It makes me sick because these people are no longer here to protect me. They are here to protect criminals and to harass me if I do any one of a million things that New Labour does not approve of. I am not alone on this. I know of other people who hate the police and would have laughed their heads off at the sight of the police being attacked by demonstrators. I recently read that a policeman is attacked every hour - I found that FUNNY because if the police are in such a dangerous job, as they would have us believe, how can they find the time to arrest people for political incorrectness. How did we ever get into this state where normal, law-abiding people can despise their own police like this? It is time the police woke up, took notice and realized that public support, which is what they rely on to function, is disappearing.
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