Things Can Only Get Wetter - one person's report-back from Monday's visit to the City...
A small but spirited group of concerned people brought a mini-carnival into the home of capital today to make clear connections between profit, climate change, floods and fuel protests. A makeshift Rising Tide samba band went through its paces as commemorative blue plaques, such as Londoners see fixed to the homes of famous historical individuals, were fixed to the offices of a selection of companies causing climate chaos as well as attempting to make money out of it through emissions trading and other fabulously dodgy 'mechanisms'.
And now, a minute-by-minute account from a brand new samba player whose novices' blisters might just be healed in time for upcoming fun and games in The Hague (location of the COP6 climate talks) later this week...
The Rising Tide samba band came together at the end of a day-long Saturday gathering of direct action people planning to travel to The Hague. The inexperience apparent as we practised our one big tune inside Liverpool Street Station's most famous huge rusting statue soon gave way to a fine, solid rhythm as we made our way to the first stop in our magical mystery tour. Lunch-hour City workers must either have been convinced they were hallucinating or else suffering a flash-back to the June 18th 1999 Carnival Against Capitalism (which also met inside Liverpool Street) as their jaws dropped and their hands gripped their lunches even more tightly at the sight of this motley posse of green goddesses on bikes, samba wannabes and assorted other folks handing out leaflets headed 'Things can only get wetter!'. (This leaflet showed the tip of Canary Wharf - one of London's most distinctive high finance landmarks - redesigned as a shark's fin swimming through floodwaters, and presaged a somewhat long-winded text that managed to take in floods, fuel protests, the uselessless of government & democracy, the monumental misguidedness of green NGO's; oh, not to mention Big Oil, J18, Peoples' Global Action and climate justice, all inside one folded sheet of A4.)
Anyway, there we were, led by a beautiful blue and silver banner reading 'A Rising Tide for Climate Justice', unexpectedly blocking the traffic while heading out of Liverpool Street and into...the City of London Police had to put on their thinking caps here...Finsbury Circus, home of that newly branded, newly caring, newly 'beyond petroleum'...British Petroleum. The plan - such as it was - was to fix a new Rising Tide-commissioned blue plaque onto BP's headquarters, but the police presence made that impossible. So we drummed frantically for a while to make sure BP CEO Sir John Browne - also board member of DaimlerChrysler, opera lover and all-round 'pillar of the community' - had been disturbed in the 4th floor of his Lutyens masterpiece of a building, before we made our way out into the cruel waters of the City.
Slowly we made our way to Ropemaker Street, home of BP Finance, where we were able to affix one of our beautifully-crafted laminated plaques. Here the point was made that BP employees' pension fund has a huge stake in its supposed arch-rival, Shell, and a further conclusion was aired that these companies were more akin to brothers, or even as different parts of the same organism, although they would rather we the poor under-informed public saw them as poles apart. After all, what a masterstroke it is when every driver angry at Shell's treatment of people in the Niger Delta pulls instead into the conveniently-located local BP station, seemingly reassured that this is a cuddly oil company that really cares about 'global warming'.
But that has dragged us too far from the tale in hand. The short-lived branding of BP Finance for its services to 'profit-driven destruction' was followed after a few steps by a visit to Merrill Lynch, which provides analysts to both Shell & BP and which also naturally rakes in the cash when Big Oil reports record profits (and, conversely, when working people forced to use fuel to scratch a living are squeezed even harder.) The Merrill Lynch plaque was stuck bravely a few feet above the reach of your average City policeman, so lasting a bit longer as we heard the reason for this particular visit, and as samba drummers stole swift drinks (of water) before moving off again.
This time we had a much longer journey past the Bank of England (no plaque), south towards Queen Street and a hitherto much-ignored company trading under the homely name of Shandwick. (Even the police didn't anticipate this one.) Shandwick are a PR company, and as such hate the prospect of being exposed to daylight. But this lot are of interest because it was they who ran Shell's PR during the Ogoni 'crisis', when that oil company ran the risk of losing global trust and - dare we say - affection as Ken Saro-Wiwa and his fellow strugglers for justice were hung in Nigeria because they posed too real a threat to the cosy relationship of government and oil in that country. Another plaque fixed onto the wall, another connection made, although by now the police 'facilitation' of the 'protest', which 'allowed' us to process up and down the street, was becoming a bit claustrophobic as the expressionless ones in big boots had formed a close cordon around us, conveniently giving us the appearance of being present in greater numbers than we actually were.
We're near the end now, so hold on if you can...
Back past Bank we went, a ruddy-faced passer-by berating a mother for bringing small children on a demonstration, a group of construction workers gazing bemusedly at this strange gathering passing them by and providing their lunch break with a little more spice. There may have been other visits set to be made, who knows, but the drummers' knees were bruised, the kids were falling asleep on parents' shoulders, and it was time to wind round and back to Liverpool Street and the offices of Warburg Dillon Read, brokers and analysts to Shell & BP, which was well and truly plaqued. So there we unloaded drums, children and the last-remaining leaflets and allowed the police to photograph us conclusively. Then we allowed these same police to facilitate our safe passage across the road as if they were all really just frustrated lollipop men, and we found ourselves a local caff to nurse bruised drumming fingers, eat soup and stare bemusedly at the police van across the street facilitating our safe consumption of lunch.
All in all a mad day when we either a) made crucial connections between capitalism and climate change, moving the 'blame' away from fuel protesters and reiterating the uselessness of appeals to government for meaningful change, as well as reminding the world that COP6 has begun and there's a planet and its people at stake... b) brought a ragged, confusing circus into the Square Mile to entertain City workers during their lunch break, or c) parts of both of the above.
I'd vote for c), if I believed in voting.
