This Ruckus is Sponsored by Political impotence

Whether smashing up banks, burning effigies of bankers or urging people to harm Bono, there was a lot of anger on the streets of London last week. The G20 summit attracted large-scale protests from diverse groups eager to vent their frustration on topics ranging from climate change to the credit crunch.

However, many commentators have argued that venting was about all that was going on. Even at the heart of the protest outside the Bank of England, there was a bizarre mix of spectacle and stagnation, with the sporadic excitement of dodging the battalions of baton-wielding robocops interspersed with the long periods of standing around in the sun. Protester doubled as photographer, demonstrator as dancer and provocateur as voyeur. Professor Frank Furedi described it as a "caricature of a riot," dismissing the demo as "a half-hearted ritual of pretend-rage and pseudo-concern."

This is unfair. Although the content of the protest was hardly cohesive or consistent, its form reflected a lack of other options in the current climate. The diverse groups involved are actually objecting to facets of the same thing: the current political arrangements that put profits before people, imperil the planet and, crucially, exclude the people from politics and power.

The G20 and Obama's attempt to disguise more of the same as a new world order won't address this. Neither will a middle-class day out with concessions to angry anarchists around the edges. What we need is real democracy, and for that we need to get engaged in politics by creating new political parties or reforming existing ones. We need to hold our governments to account, and although protesting alone won't achieve this, it isn't a bad start.

We need to build on this platform and get meaningfully political. Isolated meetings of touring world leaders only put us further away from power.

Originally Published in The Prague Post on 09/04/2009