Thousands of officers acted absolutely professionally and proportionately, thousands were actually able to demonstrate peacefully on our streets, criminal activity in the rest of the metropolis was kept to an absolute minimum and the police also maintained high levels of security.

And I think we should be extremely proud of them. This does not excuse acts which are criminal and there are now investigations taking place for those particulars.

But in general I think we are very well-served by our police. I am very proud of them and the way I approach it generally is they are on our side and they are our people…

I have to say I do not like the thought of water cannon, baton rounds or shooting people all of which seem to occur in some other countries and I am jolly glad I live in this country. But all of those things will be looked at.

In contrast, Denis O’Conner, the policeman heading the inquiry into the protest, has branded police tactics ‘unacceptable’…  

(See also, Charlie’s concerns about how the police were hyping up the potential for trouble before the demonstrations and Alex’s account from afterwards.)

Update: It’s interesting to see what Lord West had to say about the G20 before it happened. Speaking in the Lords, he was in chipper mood. City workers might have advised to dress down during the protests, but he was planning to “dress up slightly”. Oh how his fellow peers laughed!

Asked whether young people should be allowed to protest about financial issues and climate change, the ex-First Sea Lord replied:

I have a number of youngsters myself [presumably, he's referring to his children, not the herd of semi-feral youth he grazes on his back lawn]. The young people in this country are generally very good. I have been very impressed with the cadet forces and all sorts of groups, so I would certainly not say that they are all anarchists.

However, as I said, when there are so many thousands of people involved some will be troublemakers who are not there to be peaceful demonstrators. They do not have deep-held feelings about these things but are there for other reasons and ulterior motives. That is extremely unfortunate.

Perhaps we should expect keelhauling for troublemakers with ulterior motives to be proposed in the next Criminal Justice bill…

Update II: Here’s another weird one. Asked by Pauline Neville-Jones what monitoring of social network sites was undertaken by “government departments, agencies or bodies”, Lord West offered a flat denial: “The Government do [sic] not monitor social networking sites.” What at all? You have to be kidding me…

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).

As Chris’s account shows, the officer who assaulted Tomlinson was not a solitary ‘bad apple’ – although the Met and the Home Office may well seek to present him as such, if a prosecution results from the IPCC investigation. On the contrary, the problem was systemic.  As former Met Police assistant commissioner for special operations Andy Hayman wrote in the Times after mingling with both police and protestors on the day,

…the commissioner [of the Metropolitan Police] must ask serious questions about the style of policing. If left unchecked, we have a more violent crowd in uniform than the crowd demonstrating.

So while it’s right that the IPCC should concentrate for now on the circumstances of Tomlinson’s death, it’s also important to get underway with a broader inquiry - and a broader process of re-establishing confidence in the Met through re-establishing accountability.  One question that such a process should look at is whether sufficient measures are in place to identify officers that overstep the line at these kinds of event – not by name, obviously, but by their number.  There’s something strange and worrying in the fact that the IPCC should have said in its statement yesterday that,

At the moment the investigation is focused on identifying the officers in the footage. Several have already come forward and all efforts are being made to trace those who haven’t.

“Several have already come forward?” We’re not talking here about a bunch of kids thumping someone in the dead of night.  We’re talking about the police, at a public event, with hundreds of cameras on them – and yet the Independent Police Complaints Commission is having to ask for help in identifying them.

This is absurd.  The solution, surely, is that police riot uniforms should have individual officers’ numbers printed on them in letters large enough to be picked up on cameras – not just in small letters on the backs of their helmets.  Officers in co-ordinating roles already have this (see photo – h/t Flickr user David Hoffman); it should become standard for all officers in public order contexts.

More fundamentally, we need to take a long, hard look at whether recent legislation on public order has created an enabling environment for this kind of policing. What has happened to civil liberties over the last decade is not a shining example of what one might have hoped for from a Labour government – whether you’re looking at the Terrorism Act 2000, the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005, the Terrorism Act 2006, or the Racial and Religious Hatred Act 2006.

As policymakers in the UK, the US and elsewhere consign the term “war on terror” to the trash, it’s a good moment to ask whether we shouldn’t grab the chance to bin some of these Acts at the same time. (In considering this, staff at Number 10 might wish to reflect on the fact that Gordon Brown’s diplomatic success is now being overshadowed – all over the world – by stories about the summit’s policing: c.f. the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, Die Welt, Le Monde, China Daily…)

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!)

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.

Moving towards this more comprehensive action requires at least four things that have so far been missing.  One is leadership and political will to tackle the toughest issues and talk seriously about the big issues of equity that are involved.  Another, closely related need is for publics to give leaders the political space to cut deals on these issues.

But two other gaps stand out as well.  The third gap is what you might term ‘content’: ideas about the kind of ‘global operating systems’ we might ultimately be trying to get towards, even if the political space for them isn’t yet open. Where are these ideas supposed to come from? Whose job is it to think them up? In recent posts I’ve criticised NGOs for falling short on this front – but the same criticism could equally be levelled at governments, the media and yes, those of us in think tanks.  We need to think bigger than we’ve been doing so far – these are big challenges, after all, and need big solutions.

Fourth, the ‘content’ gap is matched by a ‘bandwidth’ gap.  Even if we had the leadership, the political space and the ideas, do current multilateral decision-making systems support and enable negotiation processes on complex, cross-issue bargains?  Answer: no.  G8 sherpas, for instance, meet just a handful of times before the main heads’ level summit – and sherpas invariably have busy day jobs too.  Adequate to producing a communique?  Sure.  A cross-cutting grand bargain on how the global economy runs for the 21st century? Less clear.

At the summit today, I put this question to two people in a position to provide informed answers: Michael Froman, the US deputy national security adviser for international economic affairs (and its G8 and G20 sherpa); and Mark Malloch Brown, the Foreign Office minister of state for the UN and global issues, and former Deputy Secretary-General of the UN.

I expected something from both along the lines of “well, the issues you raise are pretty difficult, but today was a step in the right direction”.  Actually, though, both gave rather more upbeat – and notably similar – answers.

What they both started with was that today marks quite a significant milestone in global governance reform.  This was only the second time that G20 leaders met at heads’ level, after all - and let’s not forget that a leaders’ forum including both developed and emerging economies was a key recommendation of Kofi Annan’s 2004 high level panel on threats, challenges and change, which (despite strong advocacy from Canada and others) looked politically impossible at the UN world summit in 2005. Moving to G20 is, as Froman put it, “a big step”.

A second point is the communique’s language on reform of international financial institutions, which although vague on the issue of voice for developing countries, is according to Froman and Malloch-Brown underpinned by genuine willingness to look at bigger picture issues in IFI reform. The FT’s Alphaville blog also notes that the new SDR allocation agreed today

represents no less than 10 times the current value of SDRs in circulation and is a clear capitulation by the US on the issue of approving the Fourth Amendment.  As background – the US was one of the last major IMF members to ratify the 1997 instituted proposal to create a special one-time allocation of SDRs. Except, of course, that particular proposal was focused on doubling cumulative SDR allocations to SDR42.8bn [i.e. a small fraction of what was agreed today].

It continues,

Either way it’s an all-round G20 capitulation to the ideas of George Soros, who pitched for exactly this measure as early as October last year. It’s also very much in line with the call coming from G20 protesting group Avaaz, who earlier on Thursday petitioned the UK government as follows:

The petition calls on leaders and officials at the G20 Summit for bold  action on stimulus, regulation and reform — to invest in a sustainable green recovery, to fundamentally reform the international financial  institutions, and to  *create $250 billion of new international reserve  funds (”SPECIAL DRAWING RIGHTS”)* — a key point of contention at the summit.

They’ve dubbed a decision on SDRs as “onward to a new Bretton Woods”. As the group — which describes itself as a web-based mass movement of 3.4m citizens with a positive policy agenda for the G20 summit — very succinctly explained it in their own communique, the SDR issue was one of the most contentious issues at the summit:

They are a key point of contention around the summit, with some countries opposing this measure and others seeking to turn SDRs into a global reserve currency to replace the dollar.

That takes us into the area of currency reform that I went into in more detail in a post yesterday. Furthermore, as Michael Froman pointed out, the G20 also agreed another significant move: the membership of the Financial Stability Forum has finally been expanded to include all G20 member countries.  What the communique said was this:

to establish a new Financial Stability Board (FSB) with a strengthened mandate, as a successor to the Financial Stability Forum (FSF), including all G20 countries, FSF members, Spain, and the European Commission

That’s not a bad haul of global governance reform for one day.  And lastly, there’s this interesting little paragraph in the communique:

21. In addition to reforming our international financial institutions for the new challenges of globalisation we agreed on the desirability of a new global consensus on the key values and principles that will promote sustainable economic activity.  We support discussion on such a charter for sustainable economic activity with a view to further discussion at our next meeting.  We take note of the work started in other fora in this regard and look forward to further discussion of this charter for sustainable economic activity.

When I first saw that, I didn’t think much of it.  But if Froman and Malloch-Brown are right to be as upbeat as they were about prospects for discussion of the tough issues, then perhaps this language really does signal something new, different and long-overdue.

If so, that would leave us in much better shape on gaps number 1 and 4 in my list above: leadership / political will, and bandwidth.  But still very much on the to-do list would be 2 and 3: political space (which is all about wider public attitudes), and content (the big ideas on policy options).

That brings us back to our old friends, the need for a better theory of influence for the new diplomacy - in which publics are recognised as having become major foreign policy actors in the 21st century – and the need for shared awareness as a precursor to starting to move towards shared operating systems.  And that’s where we need to concentrate effort between now and the G8, and beyond.

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.

He continues:

A senior adminstration official said that the President pulled Mr. Sarkozy aside, took him to a corner, “and discussed possible alternatives,”. Once they arrived at one, President Obama “sent a message to the Chinese” that a counter-offer was on the table. The Chinese spent some time considering the offer. But they took a few minutes.

Obama, accompanied by translators, suggested that he and Mr. Hu have a conversation as well. They, too went to the corner to talk. After a few minutes, Mr. Obama called upon Mr. Sarkozy to join them. Translators and sherpas in tow, they reached an agreement, and then everybody shook  hands..

The final statement declared that the G20 “stand ready to deploy sanctions to protect our public finances and financial systems. The era of banking secrecy is over. We note that the OECD has today published a list of countries assessed by the Global Forum against the international standard for exchange of tax information.”

This classic summit compromise allowed China to save face. The word “note” — as in “we note the OECD has today published a list” — doesn’t necessarily carry any weight. Macao and Hong Kong are not included in the blacklist (although China itself gets a clean bill of health on a ‘whitelist’ of transparent nations). Furthermore, any sanctions are “future-oriented,” the senior official said, meaning there are as of now no actual sanctions.

Soon after the US President sorted out the issue, Gordon Brown announced that “we have agreed to tough standards for those (tax shelters) who don’t come into line in the future.” The Americans said that this seems to overstate the case. “I’d suggest we’d still be in there had he not done this,” one senior Obama administration official said.

FOOTNOTE: Sarko wouldn’t have even got a hearing from the Chinese but for Paris releasing a statement backing off independence for Tibet. Sadly, it just goes to show that human rights will always be trumped by high finance and sheer economic power.

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.

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.

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.