When it was announced that London would host the first G20 meeting since the beginning of the worst financial crisis in almost a century, everybody knew it was a matter of time before protests were called. First the Climate Camp network – known for their annual ecological direct action camps – announced it would set up a ‘flashcamp’ in the City to make sure the G20 leaders put stopping climate change on their agenda. Their language was inoffensive and acceptable – the media found nothing to demonise in it – but they were well aware that any attempt at direct action protests in the City came with a precedent of serious disturbance and radical anti-capitalist politics, from the Stop the City marches in the 1980s to June the 18th 1999. The second group to call a protest, “G20 Meltdown”, were all too happy to publicly embrace this legacy, with publicity calling to ‘storm the banks’ and ‘eat a banker’. This exceptionally loose coalition centres around a 66-year-old university professor called Chris Knight who is currently suspended from work for telling the media that ‘if the police want violence, they’ll get violence’. Funnily enough, G20 Meltdown were united by anything but violence, more their love of making strange statements and dressing up – having a ‘zombie pancake walk’ for instance, the message being that ‘capitalism is dead and bankers are therefore zombies’. Indeed.
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