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No benefit will follow next week's hell on earth in London. The leaders of the major economies attending the G20 summit have lost the plot. They roam the world at get-togethers, agreeing on nothing but the urgency of meeting again.
The latest festival of hot air takes place next Wednesday and Thursday at the ExCel centre in the Royal Group of Docks. This is ludicrous paranoia. A day and a half of summitry, parroting meetings held by the same participants every month, will cost Londoners £7 million in police overtime and a further £12 million in other costs. That is apart from the disruption.
The event displays the Olympian extravagance now typical of many public-sector events, undimmed by a concern for recession, decorum or economy. One firm is reported to have been paid £6 million for fitting out the chamber for two days. A project co-ordinator and two "delivery co-ordinators" are being paid £200,000, and an obscurely titled "content writer" £27,000. If a minister ever tells you he is too short of money for a clinic or drug centre, cite these figures.
Can Downing Street really not think of a cheaper way of having a conversation about the banking crisis than by spending public money in this way? Diplomats and international bankers can surely deal among themselves. The internet and the conference call were supposed to render such gatherings obsolete.
At the very least, if sums of this order are to be spent on a super-junket, surely we can show London's best face to the world and boost its visitor economy. What is wrong with Lancaster House or Spencer House or Downing Street or Kensington Palace? Alternatively, make a recessionary point. Put the leaders in the Canning Town Holiday Inn or take them to the East End by Routemaster bus.
The road from Henry VIII's Field of the Cloth of Gold to the ExCel Centre is a humiliating one. The French would never pass up the chance of showing off the charms of central Paris. They would not dump the G20 in the equivalent of a suburban goods yard up the Seine. As for the problem of getting the leaders and their 1,000 or so support staff along privileged routes to the docks, it will be an intriguing preview of the Olympics.
The G-summits are past a joke. They began in 1975 with the French president Valéry Giscard d'Estaing proposing occasional "library chats" of the top five economic powers, meeting informally with no aides present. They were a reaction against the stiffness of customary summits.
This did not last long as protocol and ostentation seized the show. G5 became seven, then eight, then nine and now 20. Each venue was an opportunity for national showcasing. In 2000, the Japanese spent £500 million on just two days on an island, supposedly discussing world poverty.
In 2001 the Italian leader Silvio Berlusconi staged a sensationally vulgar summit in Genoa, with submarines, anti-aircraft batteries, athletic masseurs for each guest and the Three Tenors over dinner. The bill for security alone ran to £10 million per head. Outside, thousands of carabinieri beat up demonstrators on the streets and in police stations, leaving one dead, 60 seriously injured and 329 arrested.
At Gleneagles in 2005 Tony Blair arrived from a world tour in which he had bizarrely gathered "celebrity endorsements" from Madonna, Sting, Elton John, Bono and Bob Geldof. All agreed to "halve world poverty in a decade", the sixth world summit in a row with that admirable but cynical ambition. Geldof, who was admitted as an observer to the summit, supported it with his famous plea: "Just give us the f***ing money." The "us" was all too true.
Such events are politically obscene. They are power jeering in the face of the poor and taxpayers alike. A United Nations poverty summit in 2000 was famous chiefly for having exhausted even Manhattan's supply of lobster and champagne. It had more in common with a medieval orgy than modern democracy. Next week we assume that Barack Obama will bring a squadron of tanks.
A result of the obsession with security is that all communication from the G20 to the outside world must be through the media. In which case it would make more sense to hold the summits in just one ultra-secure location - perhaps these days it had better be Fort Knox.
The true beneficiaries of next week will be the agitprop lobby, which will be in festival mood. ExCel's inaccessibility offers a challenge to which protesters are responding by planning the desecration of central London. On Saturday demonstrators from outfits as varied as the Church of England and the Anarchist Block will march through Westminster under the cliché Put People First. Chaos, if not violence, is certain.
This will build up to a climax on Wednesday and Thursday with marches to the City and (if the marchers find it) to ExCel. This will embrace such splinter groups as Stop the War, Government of the Dead, Class War, Stop the City and the G20 Meltdown Alliance. There will be sandpits in the streets, samba carnivals and ice mountains. Militants intend to declare next Wednesday Financial Fools' Day. Banks have advised their staff to dress like rioters to avoid assault. All police leave has been cancelled. It will be a Seventies retro-politics rave.
London hardly needs these antics just now. So why does the Government indulge such people when it knows that nothing will emerge from the summit that could not have emerged from last week's summit of finance ministers in Horsham? There is no way this will be £20 million well spent, unless you are London's police officers. We have other thing for them to do just now.
Gordon Brown is not popular at present. He could have won himself global plaudits by saying to his fellow leaders: look, this is honestly not a good time for yet another display of conspicuous expenditure. Let's swap notes by email, stay at home and do some proper work.
Reader views (14)
To get the best effect, is to stand in absolute silence. OR by turning yoiur backs on those that want to destroy every nation state. That is far more unnerving than any shouting and getting arrested.
- Anne, Wolverhampton. England
The G20 summit will, as Peter Oborne rightly suggests, achieve nothing. The G20 meeting in November already committed the G20 to reforms of the financial system which are to be in place by next week - no progress. The G20 economies are already highly in debt, with the US debt exceeding $10 trilling and Ireland's debt over 10% of its GDP - further stimulus spending is out of the question. They will reaffirm their no protectionism stance, ignoring the fact that 17 of the members have enacted protectionist measures since they last met. The G20 is one expensive junket.
- Professor Stephen Murgatroyd Phd Fbpss Frsa, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
Martin luther King also said "A riot is the language of the unheard" Mr Carleton. One might also say, terrorism is the politics of despair.
These fat cat politicians and bankers will get what is coming to them one day, and so will the bully boys of the Met, their private security corps.
- Kerry, Purley
The time is fast approaching when 'the man on the Clapham Omnibus' ie those ordinary people who have limited money,but possess integrity and common-sense, as opposed to the new political class beholden to greed in all its forms, says enough is enough. Only today, UK MP's are suggesting a £40.000 pay rise for themselves, while those who work for the minimum wage are largely ignored. 'I see trouble ahead...'
- Jon Kent, Hertford. UK
Brown reminds me of the story about the emperor with no clothes? His pathetic vanity is becoming perverse.
When the jeering stops, can he take the silence?
- Hilary, Germany
Like Mr Angry of Evesham I too am heartily sick of our corrupt politicians who, here in the UK, don't represent the majority, or even gain the votes of the majority (current government 27%).
- Neil, Gloucestershire, England.
Thank god the Evening Standard has Simon Jenkins writing. Even though I don't always agree with what he says, at least he never writes in a trivial way. Another muscular piece Simon, thanks
- Jess, London
The real reason for all this junketing is to give our Prime Minister a platform for the re-release of his minor 2008 hit "Gordon saves the world." Brown loves big government, and the G20 is about as big as it gets for a politician who likes to flaunt his ego on the world stage. It's a fitting epitaph to big government under New Labour which is now on its last legs.
- David, Doha Qatar
Well, I'll be in London with a home-made banner on the 1st April.
I will be travelling alone, not part of any political group.
I'm simply sick of our corrupt politicians, greedy financiers, lazy public servants.
It comes to something when an ordinary middle aged, middle class person feels that the only way to register his anger is to take to the streets.
- Mrangry, Evesham, UK
Everyone here in this office agrees and you made us laugh with the bit about banks warning their employees to dress like rioters.
Seriously, though. Just like fat cat bonuses, we keep saying 'this greed can't go on' but it does. Why? Because the basic belief that money and power can make us feel better remains (largely) unexamined and unchallenged.
Politicians and protesters alike should take the day off, stay home and read Oliver James' 'Affluenza' or Eckhart Tolle's 'A New Earth'. That would be progress.
- Sam, London
I expect all these politicians will wine and dine each other in style, turn their noses up at ordinary people who are legitimately protesting, or rather have them arrested, before continuing their junketting. All at our expense. After it is over Mr "Potato Head" Brown will claim to have saved the world - yet again.
- Neil, Gloucestershire, England.
Thank you for the article, excellent! you express the feelings of millions of people all over the world.
- Les, uk
Yes, the best way to promote London as a center of commerce would be to stuff visiting world leaders into a Holiday Inn.
- Chris, London
"rioting is not revolutionary but reactionary because it invites defeat" Martin Luther King.
- Peter Carleton, Richmond, UK
