This article was written as we were being barricaded in the city of London by a mass of Police officers, after participating in the G20 Meltdown protest to mark the G20 summit hitting our city on Thursday 2nd April 2009. The protest was organised as a message to the 20 world leaders gathering in London that the people were no longer going to accept failure to act on the biggest issues hitting our world. Financial fraud, climate change, war and house repossession were all represented by a horseman of the apocalypse, in a protest that started in 4 corners of central London, and united in the heart of Britain’s finances, outside the Royal Bank of Scotland and The bank of England.

I joined the Black Horseman of the Apocalypse branch of the protest at 11am, based all around housing and human rights, this march demonstrated for the notion that everyone on this earth be provided with the basic need of food drink and shelter, highlighted by the recent repossessions of housing as a result of the recession that has swept our world in recent months. While housing is a huge problem at the moment in this country, in the developing world they are often compounded with the problems of having access to necessities such as clean water and enough food to live on, one of the demands were for the G20 to consider that.

One of the most noticeable things about the protest was that while the four corners of the march were set around very different  issues, all were intertwined together: all were a result of greed and excess, from the western hemisphere, and repercussions of this always hit the developing countries, harder than the very countries who caused the problems.

Climate change, for instance, will spell the end of the world if something is not done soon, rising sea levels as a result of more extreme weather conditions however will hit the most vulnerable countries first with nations like Bangladesh facing a very uncertain future, all as a result of our richer nations living above their means.

In the same respect, the financial crisis has been caused by bankers living in a dream world, a huge game of Monopoly with fake money flying through bank account after bank account, while they are safe in the knowledge that if they go bankrupt, the International Monetary Fund will make it rain in front of their very eyes with Trillion pound notes to get them back in the game, but who really suffers? The little guy, the person who gets made redundant or the developing nation that sees its aid cut as a result of the 'credit crunch'. 
The fact that we were part of a human rights protest didn’t bother the police and you could smell the irony in the air when by midday they had barricaded all exits and entrances to the centre of the protest. Human rights were not even on the register as Police officers denied thousands of peaceful protesters the right to go to the toilet, or even have a drink of water for 4 hours, spurred on by the violence of a minority of anarchic protesters, the police proceeded to contain what was meant to be a gathering of agitators of change, be them students, pensioners, office folk, the lot, regular people showed up to declare that these issues were on the publics agenda, a message that was intended to spread throughout the world as a statement of intent.

The message from a protest often gets lost in the violence from the anarchic side or the brutality of the police on the other and this one was no different, it is disappointing, depressing and unjust that an event like this, in which thousands of people were uniting for something they feel so strongly about can be manipulated by the police and spun by the media to make it look like it was just a bunch of jobless hippies shouting their mouths off and breaking things, I would like to have thought it was lazy journalism, but if we look at the state of our democracy, one in which we cant even use Facebook without getting traced by the police, it seems a lot more contrived.
The media are owned by the rich, and the governments are in the pockets of the same people, so the Police often play a role of pawns to the corporations that are profiting from the issues that we were demonstrating against,  the anarchists don’t really help, most who lets be realistic, do more harm than good a lot of the time, constantly reaffirming the stigma that sets the stereotype of hippie/ anarchic/ layabout /soap dodger image that scares off so many people who otherwise would be passionate about the topics in question.
The situation was frustrating but not pointless, and we can only hope our point was not completely lost in the madness.

All photography by Patch Cordwell, videotographer with Arts London News.