Weather is wonderful….wish you were here

PCAN demo report…..a cyclist’s perspective…..

For a start I thought it was odd that the pedal bikers started at Lincoln’s Inn Field rather than London Field (Hackney) or Highbury Fields. Possibly because some of the protest cyclists are lawyers. Whilst we on the subject of fields, I am sure you all want to know why there are so many fields in London. The answer is the very early massive population explosion of London happened well before refrigeration, so cows were brought right into the city to supply the dairies. Many of London’s parkland are remnants of the early agricultural infrastructure.

Back to bikes. Critical mass protesters are a funny lot. We got 300 involved, many stragglers came late, but there wasn’t a mood to hang around in the rain. This was a shame, as the stragglers were by far the more interesting, young students out for a bit of urban mayhem. I think we should recruit more in the skate board parks!

The 300 were your worthy professional types, who sadly refuse to think spontaneously, so there was a lot less opportunity to cause the mayhem cyclists were famous for in the 2000 Mayday protest.

Next time I might be tempted to stay on the coach have an interesting conversation.

The march itself was a fantastic celebration of resistance. Noisy, funky and fun. I never get bored of watching rich shoppers on the Piccadilly pavement looking at us with their faces dripping with jealousy as it obvious where joyful life exists. Certainly not in the drudgery of Christmas shopping…but in the pleasure of Protest.

This spirit was taken up by Seize the Day a band dedicated to boogie protest, developing a deepening reputation through the festival circuit. They started us with a spoof western ho-down which got the weary marchers dowsey-doeing their neighbours.

Speeches were patchy. Good to see Tim Helweg-Larsen on the platform he was one of the lead authors of the zerocarbonbritain report (an alternative energy strategy) that Kevin Ellis and I contributed towards.

Monbiot’s emphasis on the financial crisis in the system was excellent and well worth critical listening. His points on the irreconcilable stretch between our current economic system and the planet’s finite resources were very well made. Essentially capitalism can only survive as a system if there is confidence that the system can grow. The critical sensitivity to “creative accounting” is affecting financial confidence to a level not seen since the slump in the 1930’s. Issues in the US “sub-prime” markets that have affected Northern Rock is only the tip of the iceburg. Many of the big US banks and some London based banks are exposed, including Barclays.

What has this got to do with climate change? Our economic system is umbilically attached to fossil fuels. The industrial revolution is popularly celebrated by great engineers like James Watt, from where we get the SI unit for power. These cheerful chappies stare back at us through the science and history books that explain how we got to the state we are in today. Breaking the link between carbon and money goes right to the heart of what we are up against. The happy band of 6000 soggy marchers are the nucleus of a necessary transformational force that must insist that rationality returns to human kind a bunks the current political system in the dustbin of history where it belongs.

Alan Burgess