20 years on from the Gleneagles G8 summit protests

The National

20 hours ago

Weeks earlier chancellor Gordon Brown spearheaded an African debt relief programme, 'Make Poverty History'.
Protesters travelled to Scotland and established a camp in Stirling. The anti-G8 movement had debuted in Genoa in 2001, ending in extreme violence from Italian police towards protesters sleeping at night.
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The stakes for participants were high, but as British activist Jay Jordan says: 'In Europe, there is confrontational policing. In the UK, policing is cleverer – the bosses have read their Foucault.'
Protest at the time was divided into two main 'blocs', pink and black. The pink bloc used non-confrontational, artistic, musical, mocking and playful approaches to get their message across, while the black bloc would sometimes resort to confrontation, rioting and destruction of buildings.
In 2005, I was part of the pink bloc, as a member of a samba band called Rhythms of Resistance based in London. I took my 11-year-old daughter, a drummer in the band, to Scotland.
The anti-G8 organisers had hired a train from London to Edinburgh for protesters – 'for about £2000', according to one of the leaders, Amy Stansell. Rhythms of Resistance occupied a carriage. We practised drums while speeding through England. I'd brought a picnic, including a large trifle containing Malibu as well as wild strawberries from my garden.
King's Cross station was crammed with police looking wary as excited protesters assembled to get on the train. On the platform, I spied Helen Steel, a defendant in the 'McLibel' court case against McDonald's, the longest running libel trial in British history, in which she was represented by Keir Starmer.
As a well-known protester, she had been tricked into having a long-term relationship with an undercover 'spy cop'. Many of the interviewees for this piece are participants in the ongoing Mitting Inquiry into the spy cop scandal. All of them talked about the phenomenon of being infiltrated by undercover police. Mark Kennedy, one of the spy cops, was present in Gleneagles and organised most of the protesters' transport.
One Scottish activist, whom I'll call Fraser, said: 'I knew Mark Kennedy quite well. I thought I had some sort of 'spy sense', but I didn't know. I was a bit humbled. All I knew was I didn't like him.'
The anti-G8 protest at Gleneagles was well organised. Amy Stansell explains the preparation: 'We moved to Scotland six months before, sofa surfing and staying in communities such as Bilston Glen protest camp.'
Amy and her partner Robin spent months trying to find a piece of land where they could set up a convergence camp, which, inspired by a No Borders camp in Schengen, was divided into small local 'barrios' each with a kitchen.
The idea was to create a horizontal democracy: 'Providing space for people to meet, network, connect – a safe non-capitalist space, where people can be without having to spend money, where people can dream and have ideas. We wanted to change people's hearts by creating a miniature vision of the world we wanted to see.'
Fraser recalls the difficulties that arose when they met with farmers: 'There were a number of sites where we had handshake agreements, we had a site and then … we didn't.'
Amy explains: 'We had a big pot, around £5000, for renting some land. We were looking at land, assessing it on the basis of accessibility, of drainage, of water, the flatness. One person intimated that they had been basically pressured not to make a deal with us.
'We'd lost our first two choices due to what we termed at the time 'dark forces'. I remember ringing up the chief executive of Stirling Council at 8pm one night and saying, 'In a few weeks' time, you're gonna have 5000 activists descending on your town, and if there's not anywhere for them to go, they're just going to be around in the town, and it's just going to be really hectic'.
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'The next morning, the people at the council who we were liaising with contacted us and said, 'We've got a bit of land for you'.'
But the land was not ideal, Amy remembers, 'One of the things that we really worried about was that the site was completely surrounded by a brook. There was one road in and the rest of it was surrounded by a river. We felt a bit like, 'are we in a trap now?'.'
Fraser agrees: 'It wasn't what we wanted. There was the danger of getting kettled and the danger of when we got kettled, people jumping in the river.'
On July 2, 2005, some 2000 people and the samba band marched through Edinburgh in a carnival atmosphere. The weather was hot; the buildings tall, grand and grey. I played a surdo, a huge drum (in general, the smaller the woman, the bigger the drum) for miles, which was exhausting. Then the band made our way to the camp in Stirling, the nearest large town to Gleneagles.
I'd already attended an anarchist anti-G8 camp in Evian in 2003, which was the political equivalent of the Glastonbury Festival.
Organised along the barrio system, it had music, workshops, tents, food stalls, activities and meetings. I cooked meals for the camp using donated and waste food from dumpsters for the Manchester barrio kitchen. I blogged at the time: 'Have attended more meetings in a week than ever before in life.'
Meetings used hand signals, eg waving hands for agreement (silent clapping). Much of the language started in 1960s protest movements and has since been used in civil rights, Reclaim the Streets, climate camps, anti-globalisation movements and Occupy.
Protest hand signals were added to the basic samba vocabulary, as players cannot hear each other. This is also a good way to cross language barriers for international participants. Sister protest samba bands travelled from Belgium, Germany, Holland. The camp was multilingual.
I was surprised by the efficiency and organisation of the Stirling convergence camp. There were toilets, food stores and a sophisticated ecological greywater system for wastewater.
Kate Evans, a political cartoonist who was present, recalls: 'There was an impromptu Highland Games. I won the caber toss!'
We even had a camp witch – an American called Starhawk who cast spells over the campsite to protect it from the police.
On Wednesday, July 6, the main day of protest against the Gleneagles summit, many activists walked through the undergrowth overnight, hiding in the heathery hills, to reach Gleneagles.
I wrote at the time: 'The call came through at about 5am that the M9 had been taken by us. Big cheer. This was the least likely blockade to succeed.
'By 7am, the A9 was blocked, and many B roads. I was standing next to the medics as they received news: 'Lancaster took the B2499, Nottingham have taken this other road' and so on. It was like the Wars of the Roses!'
Starhawk had been doing invisibility spells for the walkers who blockaded the roads. 'I think magic doesn't work in theory, only in practice,' Jay says.
I spent the rest of the day on the 'baby bloc', a children's protest convoy headed by a London double-decker red bus (maximum speed 30mph).
Once we arrived at the police lines, near Auchterarder, close to the Gleneagles hotel, we set up a 'terrorist toddlers' picnic, which included a sound system, clowns, bubbles, rain, banners, colour and an enormous umbrella under which we played samba.
Entertainment was provided also by the Geishas of Gaiety (white-faced, dressed in kimonos and waving fans) and the Radical Cheerleaders, as well as the award-winning poet Kae Tempest (at that time Kate Tempest). The police appeared nonplussed.
Jay, who led the Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army (Circa), which used clowning, satire and absurdity to critique the establishment, remembers with amusement: 'Bored cops were convinced to play a game similar to paper scissors rock, called wizards, goblins, giants. At the end, they couldn't help but laugh and we hugged.'
That night in the camp, we were on high alert, blockaded by police. From time to time, people would run about, screaming, 'we are going to be raided'. Others sneaked out slowly, avoiding police lines.
On July 7, the morning after the confrontation at Gleneagles, we heard the news – terrorist bombings on public transport in the centre of London. We gathered for a large meeting. People were sombre and concerned. I was holding back tears.
My sister lived in King's Cross and I was terrified she'd been caught up in it.
Our protest and the Make Poverty History message were wiped off the front pages. As Amy explains: 'That took the attention from us, which is terrible to say but that was our experience.
'We'd put in months of our lives to do this, and no-one noticed, apart from a few delegates who couldn't get to a few meetings. We wanted it to be big news and it wasn't because of the bombing.
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So, do participants in the 2005 anti-G8 camp at Stirling think protest works? What did they learn? Giovanna Speciale, a music leader in the samba band, reflects: 'The change is us. Politicians are very rarely changed by protesters coming up and saying, 'You should change, you should change your attitude. You're really bad'.
'Protest rarely changes anyone's mind, but it does change what is politically feasible to talk about.
'Nothing changes someone more than having gone out, taken, done an action, got a placard, written on it saying what their attitude is, then showing that to everyone else. There is a massive problem with protest in that often we're othering ourselves, so we make ourselves look different, sound different.
'There is nothing less likely to change a politician's mind than a bunch of people who are clearly outsiders.'
Amy says: 'That question actually makes me well up a little bit – that's quite an emotional question. I variously go through phases where I'm just like, 'there's no point', right? It does nothing. Years and years of doing massive protests like the Stop the War march in London and they just still invaded the next day.
'You do all of these massive events and then the only coverage we'd get would be the traffic news. I gave up the whole of my 20s, pretty much, to fight capitalism and be an activist.'
Jay says: 'Stirling was the end of a cycle. It was a symbolic victory. Protesters were saying, 'This isn't normal. This isn't democracy.' But there is a burnout culture in activism. I teach regenerative activism now to combat it.'
Fraser says of direct action: 'Obviously there is a sort of bravado – of youth or masculinity.'
Giovanna adds: 'There were huge amounts of courage and, yes, sacrifice and creativity.'
Amy says: 'I don't want to categorise my life in a hierarchy of excitingness, but they definitely were very exciting times. There was a sense of heroism, we're the ones who are standing up. Danger intertwined with righteousness – which is what makes heroism, isn't it?'
It is often wondered whether there is really a point to protest, not least by activists themselves. There is little doubt, though, that the Stirling camp and anti-G8 protest at Gleneagles was a deeply meaningful experience for those involved.