G-20 Demonstrations: Two Years On
On Thursday the Guardian reported on a High Court ruling , holding that the Metropolitan Police were unlawful in ‘kettling’ protesters during the G-20 demonstrations in April 2009. Two years ago, I took this photo. It was some three hours after the police line came like a running of the riot bulls down Bishopsgate, randomly trampling flower-children in a startling display of the arbitrary powers of the state. The bulldozing was sanctioned for some official reason not quite understood by anyone present, especially considering they’d chosen to target the hippies rather than the anarchists, but apparently it was necessary, for some reason, unknown to anyone present. Note the Financial Times in the foreground. There was an article in it by Martin Wolf entitled ‘ The urgency of now: Why tomorrow’s G-20 summit will fail to deal with the big challenges .” It made for interesting reading while the police deployed their state-of-the-art kettling strategy. This...