Via flickr user woo-war

The story of Ian Tomlinson’s death following an assault by a police officer during the G20 riots continues to develop: last night Channel 4 News found new footage providing additional context to the assault, while the Independent Police Complaints Commission announced that it will undertake the investigation into Tomlinson’s death itself – rather than (as initially planned) outsourcing it to the City of London Police, who were involved in policing protests on the day.  Now, attention is focusing on the prospect of a criminal prosection.  As former deputy assistant police commissioner Brian Paddick put it yesterday,

If it is held that there is a link between the violence he [the officer] was inflicting and the heart attack [suffered by Tomlinson], that then is an assault, resulting in death, albeit unintended. If a court held it is an assault, it is an unlawful action resulting in manslaughter.

But in focusing on whether the officer who beat Tomlinson and shoved him to the ground will be prosecuted, we risk losing sight of a bigger point – that this was far from an isolated incident.

To see why, read the following disturbing account of how the police cleared the “climate camp” on Bishopsgate that took place later that day.  The account was written by a friend and colleague, Chris Abbott – the deputy director of the Oxford Research Group, and (ironically, in view of what happened) a leading expert on conflict resolution - in an email sent to me and others, and reproduced with his permission.

I went down to the climate camp after work on Wednesday as I had heard that it was completely peaceful and I wanted to see what it was like. Unfortunately, I got trapped there when the police first charged and then penned everyone in early in the evening and none of us could get out (this was about 7.00-7.30pm). Footage of this is now on YouTube. During this first, entirely unprovoked, attack I lost my girlfriend in the crowd – but I later found out she was punched by a policeman while trying to stop another girl being trampled on after being knocked to the floor.

Once that had calmed down, my girlfriend and I found each other and were sat with others in front of the line of riot police on the south side of Bishopsgate. It was completely peaceful once again and we were even joking and talking with the police. We were there for a couple of hours when they suddenly charged again without any warning (this was about 9.30-10.00pm). We were still sat down and offered no resistance at all. My girlfriend was pressure pointed on the neck (extremely painful), dragged backwards off me and had both her wrists bent behind her back by two policemen who threatened to break them. They dragged her outside the police cordon and then said “what should we do with her now?” before the other said “let’s throw her back in”, which they did – head first, with her hands behind her back. She landed on the floor and has now got severe bruising on her legs (which we have photos of) and very painful wrists (which we actually thought might be broken).

At the same time, I was punched full in the face by one of the policemen. I was on the floor and absolutely no threat, but he still punched me. I was pulled up and shoved towards the crowd as a group of policemen descended on me, several of them smashing me in the head repeatedly with the sides of their shields. The whole time I had my hands in the air and did not fight back at all, but that didn’t stop them. Luckily someone saw what was happening and managed to pull me free from the group of policemen just before they completely surrounded me and cut me off from everyone else. It frightens me to think what they might have done had I not been pulled free. My nose and the side of my head are still very painful, but I was lucky given the damage that they could have caused from hitting me in the head.

Immediately after it happened we saw that the girl we had been sat next to had also been injured and was going into shock. We tried to get her medical attention, but none of us were offered any assistance at all by the police.

Once we had calmed down and made sure everyone was alright, we went to the other end of the camp to try and get out because my girlfriend needed to get home and take medication that she requires. We spoke to a police medic to explain the situation, detailing the medication and why it was needed, but were told that they were under specific orders not to let anyone out even for medication. We continued to try and get the medic’s attention to explain the urgency of the situation, but he ignored us. By now things were getting very tense between the police and the crowd and my girlfriend got very panicky, falling to the ground. Only at this point did the police finally let us through the line to seek medical attention (this was about 11.30pm).

(more…)

Cute story from the Obama visit: a few Foreign Office staffers picked up that Obama and Brown were going to do their joint press conference on Wednesday in the FCO’s (vast) Locarno Room rather than the smaller room usually used for press conferences at Number 10.  So, obviously, they decide to loiter around the grand staircase to catch a glimpse of the great man as he passes.

Well, the security staff soon cotton on to their little game and usher them away.  A game of cat and mouse proceeds for a few minutes until, in an example of the kind of lateral thinking one looks for from a 21st century ministry of foreign affairs, they hit on the idea of “having a meeting” in a room that just happens to be strategically placed on the way to the Locarno suite.

A long while later, David Miliband passes with Hillary Clinton, who gives them a nice smile and a friendly wave, and this is thought to be pretty cool. 

A further wait ensues. 

Then, at last, Gordon and Barack stride past.

Squeals of delight are stifled. 

And then Obama glances back… catches sight of them… pauses… breaks stride… turns around… and comes in to say hello, while Gordon chuckles indulgently in the corridor. 

Bastards.  Bastards!

(I, on the other hand, spent 15 minutes amidst the crowd of tourists loitering outside the gates to Downing Street later that day, hoping in equal measure to (a) see the Motorcade sweep in, and (b) avoid being caught behaving in this embarrassingly starstruck way by anyone I know. First the motorcade drops the President off in Horseguards Parade, on the other side of the block. And then, two minutes later, a Downing Street foreign policy adviser I know walks past… catches sight of me… pauses… breaks stride… turns around… and asks solicitously: “are you protesting?” Bastard. Bastard!)

I’ve already done a post with some quick reactions to the specifics of the communique, but before I pass out with fatigue, a final reflection on the day.

As summits go, today was a big success, particularly for Gordon Brown.  If you thought Obama was warm about Brown’s leadership yesterday, that was nothing compared to some of the language he used in his press conference at the end of the summit – where, incidentally, he charmed the assembled press to the extent that they couldn’t help applauding at the end. ‘Things you seldom see’, as they say.

But at the same time, today was always – of necessity – going to be about fighting the immediate crisis, and trying to prime some kind of immediate-term economic recovery. 

What remains so far unaddressed in leaders’ in-trays is a set of longer-term crises - and the need for longer-term recovery - on at least four key underlying issues: climate change; global economic imbalances; the issue of reserve currencies; and the need to head off another oil and food price spike, which could well get underway before the economic downturn is over.

All four of these issues raise big questions about changing the way the global economy works, and the need to ‘manage globalisation’ to make it more resilient, sustainable and equitable. All also involve big questions about power relations between the developed economies, emerging economies and low income economies.  And most fundamentally of all, they’re inextricably interrelated with one another.

At the moment, as just about every commission, task-force or high level panel on international reform in recent years has noted, the international system deals with these kinds of issues in a particularly fragmented, ’stove-piped’, silo-riven fashion. 

That’s one reason why more and more of the hardest global issues get escalated to heads’ level, in bodies like the G8 or the G20.  But as the track record of the G8 over the last decade demonstrates, heads’ level bodies don’t obviously have the capacity to cope with them.  Initiatives and carefully crafted communique language all too often trump far-reaching, genuinely comprehensive action; it’s the old problem of the urgent crowding out the essential.  That was the case before the credit crunch – and it’s doubly so now.

(more…)

This post from Evening Standard political editor Paul Waugh is a must-read:

Much ink will be spilled tonight and tomorrow about Gordon Brown personally securing various victories in the G20 London summit.

But here’s a fascinating clue to the real power broker. Conducting himself assuredly as if he were a summit veteran rather than a first-timer, Barack Obama appears to have been the crucial player in securing a form of words on the thorny issue of tax havens.

American sources have now revealed that it was the US President who stepped in to knock heads together (in the nicest possible way) to get Sarko and China’s President Hu to come to an agreement.

In the final plenary session with just minutes to go before a deal had to be signed, Sarkozy and Hu were having a heated disagreement about tax havens. France wants urgent action, while China fears a crackdown would hurt banking centers in Macao, Shanghai and Hong Kong.

As they went through a revised draft, the exchange between Sarkozy and Hu got so heated that it was threatening the unity of the G-20 leaders’ meeting.

Sarkozy specifically was pushing for a list from the OECD to be included in the G20 Leaders’ Statement. China, which is not a party to the OECD, opposed any such list being included in the final Leaders’ Statement.

But Mr. Obama stepped between the two men, urging them to try to find consensus, and giving them a “pep talk” about the importance of working together.

(more…)

I have long thought that we’ll live to regret our failure to use the current crisis to nudge the global economy onto a greener trajectory. A WWF/E3G report, published today, heightens this fear.

By weighting elements of national stimulus packages, it offers a quick and dirty estimate of how green each one is. The answer is ‘not very’ with the UK’s risible effort one of the worst offenders.

The share of ‘climate friendly’ stimulus is small, researcher find, and it’s more than offset by investment in roads (including one to Manchester airport) and fossil fuel R&D (yes – read that and weep).

You can quibble with the analysis. Investment in nuclear is not included on the green side of the ledger – which seems unfair on the French, who have low per capita emissions relative to GDP and expect additional nuclear investment to push them lower. But the scoring is transparent and easy for others to replicate with different weightings.

And there’s a much bigger point: why is it up to a couple of NGOs to do this work? By now, the G20 should have set up standardised and sophisticated systems for monitoring the net carbon impact of each country’s stimulus package.

That they haven’t shows how confused and fragmented our thinking remains about the interlocking crises the world faces.

Disclosure: I recently agreed to act as an adviser to E3G in the run up to Copenhagen, but have had no involvement in any aspect of this report.

Today’s summit marks the first time that bloggers have been included as fully accredited members of the press at a heads’ level summit meeting - in their own right, that is, rather than because they persuaded a newspaper to accredit them (which remains the route that a lot of NGO campaigners have to follow).

Another first from today: during the Chairman’s press conference, Gordon Brown called on one of the G20 Voice bloggers, Richard Murphy, to ask one of the questions: the first time a blogger has ever asked a question at a heads’ level summit press conference.  (Newsnight have already booked him for an interview for tonight.)

The organisers of G20 Voice are ebullient, and they should be. As Tom Watson (who took the day off from being a minister of state at the Cabinet Office in order to sit here and blog with us) told me earlier, this is the result of a small group of quietly determined people focusing very hard in the run-up to the summit on the objective of establishing the blogosphere’s right to representation at such events.  It looks a lot like they’ve pulled it off.  Hats off to them.

So: the outcome.  Here’s the communique - and three thoughts from me.

First, the biggest winner from today is the IMF. This is an organisation which looked like it might go bust just a couple of months ago; now, its funds have been trebled to $750bn, much higher than the $500bn that David Miliband was touting last week.

But the IMF’s win isn’t just financial; it’s existential.  At the beginning of last year, it was set to lose a sixth of its staff.  People were openly wondering what is was for.  And now?  The G20 has just issued a clear, ringing, and very public, declaration of its continuing centrality to global governance.

Here’s my hesitation, though.  If the declaration of faith in the IMF is clear, the path towards reforming it is much less so.  The communique calls on the IMF to complete the next review of quota votes by 2011, but says nothing about the principles that should underpin this review. It includes the traditional call for “greater voice and representation for poor countries”, but doesn’t get into specifics.  As Oxfam have put it, the IMF’s back, it’s big and it’s bad.  Whether it’s reformed is another question.

Second, the movement on tax havens is actually pretty significant.  The communique says that “the era of banking secrecy is over”, and actually, it might be right.  We’re told to expect a list of tax havens, broken down into ‘white’, ‘grey’ and ‘black’ – and Stephen Timms, a junior UK Treasury minister, briefed this morning that he expects sanctions against countries that don’t sign up to the required disclosure standards.

For development advocates, tax havens have long been a massive bugbear.  Back when I was working a DFID at the time of its 3rd White Paper in 2006, tax havens were already starting to be recognised as one of the most critical policy coherence issues in development – but it was clear there was no chance of getting reform of them onto the global agenda.  A lot can change in three years…

Third, a big disappointment: climate change.  I blogged earlier that not much was expected on this, and so it has proved. On green new deals, in particular, the lack of numbers is a very major omission.

OK, just had chats with a couple of senior UK officials, and here’s where things are at inside the negotiations:

- Lots of discussion about SDRs and IMF finance.  It looks like we’re heading towards a $250bn SDR issue as part of a larger package on IMF financing; things look hopeful for getting beyond the important $500bn level.  Germany has apparently been a bit difficult over the SDRs issue – they’re keen on applying a lot of conditionality.  The SDR discussions were also complicated by China’s recent suggestion of ending the dollar’s role as global reserve currency, and using SDRs instead – this made the US somewhat suspicious of SDRs in general.

- A big fight is underway on tax havens. Sarkozy’s going in hard for tough language, but China is against as it’s worried about the effect on Hong Kong and Macao.  Gordon Brown is looking for a compromise on that right now at the lunch.  The Czech Presidency has been ‘unhelpful’.

- On trade finance, there are hopes for a pretty good package, which would then be presented as a key outcome for low income countries.

- But it looks like today’s big disappointment will be on climate change and green new deals.  Both sources told me that there will be no numbers at all on green new deals, either in terms of percentages of stimulus packages, or overall dollar totals.  Worse, there are real struggles underway on keeping language about Copenhagen in the communique at all.  The issue here is apparently largely with China – which is reportedly worried about linking climate and the G20 process, on the basis that this would provide Congress with another platform for protectionism. Right now, all language on “greening”, “low-carbon” and “Copenhagen” is out of the communique, at China’s request.

That’s it for now.  As ever, apply a discount rate to all this: this is about the time you’d expect host government officials to be lowering expectations, so that they can pull a rabbit out of the hat in about an hour’s time…

Although the food price crisis has slipped from the agenda as the credit crunch has gathered pace, for poor people around the world it hasn’t gone away – and may now be set to worsen again. 

While the FAO’s food price index has fallen by around 30% since its peak last summer, that only takes it back to May 2007 levels: still well above recent norms.  Meanwhile, the global total of undernourished people is now over a billion, up from 850m just a couple of years ago. Now, FAO officials say privately that they expect the next findings from the index to show a new increase. 

If that’s right, then we’re really moving in to worst case scenario for developing countries, who are already reeling from the credit crunch. So what’s happening here at the London Summit on this front?

I asked that to Douglas Alexander, the UK’s international development secretary, in a press conference he did an hour or so ago.  He pointed to the £200m the UK has committed to a new ‘rapid response social fund’ to provide safety nets for the most vulnerable people, and applauded the work of the World Bank and WFP in particular. On increasing supply, meanwhile, he suggested that infrastructure investment is crucial (which it is).

I also caught up with Peter Mandelson, the UK’s business secretary, and asked him how the trade system could be proofed against the kind of crazy security of supply perturbations that caused such problems last summer, when over 30 countries had export restrictions in place. He stressed that what’s needed is to keep markets open, and that any impediments to this would harm supply by undermining incentives.

In analytical terms, I can’t fault anything either of them said. But note the lack of specifics about what this summit should be doing: there’s no getting round the underlying fact that preventing a resumption of the food price spike isn’t on the agenda here.  It should be.  As a senior IMF official put it to David and I when we were over in DC recently: “the last thing we can afford now is another crisis creeping up on us”.

Alex Barker at the FT’s Westminster blog:

This is my first dispatch from the G20 media hangar, which has so far proved to be full of journalists and free of information. But Britain’s intrepid press pack have succeeded in digging up one important story: the “minty green” colour of the “lounge area”.

We’re told that the world’s leaders will be plotting the course for economic recovery from a modern, functional, informal “break out zone”. There are comfortable chairs and tables, but “no bean bags”, according to one well informed source.

Leaders left breakfast a short while ago (the menu remains top secret) and are now “milling around”, chewing the fat and bargaining over the world’s future. Here’s to hoping the coffee is better than it is in the press area.

Actually, an informal ‘break out zone’ is probably a good idea.  Watching the TV feed of the formal summit room a couple of minutes ago, I couldn’t help wondering how any kind of shared awareness could emerge from such stilted surroundings…

So here I am in the cavernous media centre at the London Summit.  Some of the main excitement of the day so far: (a) the police found an unexploded World War Two bomb sunk in the dock next to the Excel centre, and will be detonating it shortly; and (b) there are free bacon sandwiches.

Plus, it turns out that one of the other G20 voice bloggers is Daniel Kaufmann - now at the Brookings Institution, before that at the World Bank.  He’s one of the top governance experts in the world (the FT’s words), and was one of the World Bank staffers who really put pressure on Paul Wolfowitz during the 2007 graft kerfuffle - if you recall the letter that he and other Bank staff sent to Wolfowitz, it read

The credibility of our front-line staff is eroding in the face of legitimate questions from our clients about the Bank’s ability to practise what it preaches on governance.  In these circumstances, we cannot credibly implement the governance and anti-corruption strategy.”

Hats off for that.  Next up: bloggers’ press conference wit Douglas Alexander coming up shortly.

Earlier this week, I did a post on Chinese central bank governor Zhou Xiaochuan’s essay calling for the replacement of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency.  Today’s FT contains another instalment of big picture thinking from China on the global economy – this time from Yu Qiao, an economics professor at Tsingua University’s School of Public Policy and Management.

Like Zhou, Yu is explicit on Chinese worries about the potential erosion of the value of their rather large stash of US dollars – $1,200 billion of T-bills alone.  “Most of Mr Obama’s stimulus spending is devoted to social programmes rather than growth promotion,” he notes, “which may exacerbate America’s over-consumption problem and delay sustainable recovery”.

What’s more, he continues, that could in turn end up doing exactly what Tim Geither was worried about in the wake of Zhou’s essay: an erosion of the dollar’s role as reserve currency.  Here, interestingly, there’s what looks like a signal of preparedness to moderate the position set out in Zhou’s essay. Yu says explicitly that,

No other international monetary system offers a viable alternative. However, we can make the main reserve currency power more accountable by creating an instrument to help manage the global crisis.

Admittedly, Yu is an academic and not a member of the government.  But it’s very hard to imagine that a senior Chinese professor would directly contradict his government’s position, on such an acutely political issue, in a time of such severe risks, in the FT, the day before the G20 summit, without clearance.  At the same time, using this approach avoids losing face for Zhou – and may signal a willingness to talk, rather than a definite climbdown.

So what does Yu propose as an alternative way of safeguarding China’s assets, if not reform of the dollar’s reserve currency role?

(more…)

Please do send your crap placards to the team here at Global Dashboard. Some placards – like make love not leverage raised smiles – most, however, were woeful.  Your starter for ten, which I think should win for sheer laziness and hypocrisy (is that a pair of Levi’s and Reebok trainers on the protester?) is the following:

As well as looking out for the pointless initiative of the week to emerge from the London Summit, another important contest to keep an eye on is NGO stunt of the week. 

In that vein, please doff your hats (so to speak) for Paul Hilder, campaigns director of Avaaz.org, who takes an early lead in managing not only to persuade the IMF’s Dominique Strauss-Kahn to accept Avaaz’s petition - but also in retaining a straight face while doing so in a very fetching green hard hat.

Paul is now here at G20 Voice with me and still in possession of said hard-hat, so he seems to be growing quite attached to it.  (Either that or it’s all kicking off outside…)

Space Hijackers have driven their armoured vehicle through the City, making it as far as the Royal Bank of Scotland – much to the amusement of everyone bar the police.

Like Charlie, I wonder whether they – the police – are making a mistake by fixating on demonstrators, rather than lower probability/higher impact threats, and on the capital, rather than the rest of the UK.

After all, the attack on the 2005 G8 came from Islamist terrorists and was not on Gleneagles itself (where security was suffocatingly high).

Following that pattern, I’d expect the threat level to be highest tomorrow morning – and in a city other than London, where many fewer security precautions have been taken. Given the Lahore cricket attacks, I wonder whether tonight’s football international at Wembley might be a target.

Panic not necessary. But a good time to be vigilant…