It wasn’t until the middle of the afternoon that things got out of hand. Around 3:30 pm, some of the more radical marchers, seeking an outlet for their opposition to the policies of the G8, breached the summit security perimeter. But safely ensconced behind the security cordon, those of us at the summit scarcely noticed a thing, aside from what we saw on television.
It was July 6, the first day of the 2005 G8 summit. As part of U of T’s G8 research group, my job was to wander around the media centre on the grounds of Scotland’s luxurious Gleneagles hotel. It was here that my fellow journalists and I would cover the progress of G8 leaders as they met to (hopefully) hash out deals making at least some headway on the pressing problems of African debt and global climate change.
The day was cold and drizzly, but the mood inside the media centre was upbeat. The morning news had just announced the success of the United Kingdom’s bid to host the 2012 Olympic Games, and the terror of the London bombings was still a day away.
By noon the only pall on the day-besides the weather-were the dozens of radical protesters blocking the shuttle-buses driving journalists from their hotels to the media centre at Gleneagles. Their rather blunt attempts to limit freedom of the press had turned a standard one-and-a-half hour bus ride into a car-sick three-hour tour.
When I finally disembarked at the security centre, my tummy hurt, I’d missed the breakfast hours, and I’d seen more than enough bucolic glens and frolicking sheep for one lifetime. But I was also curious.
If some protesters were motivated enough to rise at the crack of dawn and sit in the cold rain for hours to block bus after bus full of harmless journalists, what else would others get up to?
Just before four o’clock, some of the demonstrators deviated from the police-approved route, and before long a large group of protesters managed to break through a security fence surrounding the hotel. Sadly for the marchers, the fence was in fact so distant from the central compound that nary a disruption was felt at the summit. However, as soon as they crossed the fence, the summit security apparatus-part of the largest police operation ever mounted in the history of the U.K.-sprung into action and completely overwhelmed the protestors.
Watching police clamp down on this protest, with a Chinook helicopter spitting out riot police and all, felt like watching an outtake from the opening scenes of Apocalypse Now rather than an expression of dissent on a world-famous golf course inside a democratic state. An hour later, the police had forced all the protestors back across the fence.
The incident was one of the last major shows of protest at the G8. Early the next day, terrorist bombs would detonate on the London underground, changing the tone of the summit. No more marches would occur. Even so, that brief period of protest revealed the flaws inherent in such an extreme method of conveying opposition.
Protests of the lawful sort are without a doubt a crucial part of democracy and democratic expression. If a society represents itself as free, it must accommodate the voices of all citizens who choose to express themselves within the boundaries that society has established through law. Scotland had provided for protest within this model. But crossing a fence and scrapping with helicopter-borne riot police? That’s just pointless; it gives peaceful protests a bad name, increases chances that future peaceful marches will be banned or monitored intensely by police, and accomplishes little except providing some excitement to the small coterie of radicals whose idea of a pleasant Wednesday afternoon is being clubbed by a burly bobby from Lancashire.
