-Caveat Lector-
Published on Thursday, February 1, 2001 in the Guardian of London
It's Official: I'm a Menace to Society
by George Monbiot
I'm beginning to feel unwelcome. On Monday a letter in the Guardian
revealed
that staff from the Bookmarks bookshop trying to reach the World
Economic Forum
were refused entry to Switzerland. Their offence? Carrying copies of my
book,
Captive State, and Naomi Klein's book, No Logo, which were deemed too
dangerous
to be allowed into the country at such a sensitive time. Now I discover
that,
alongside such threats to civilisation as the World Development
Movement,
Jubilee Plus, Friends of the Earth and the human rights lawyer Louise
Christian,
my presence has become a "security risk", which major venues around the
country
have been asked to forestall.
On Friday, a speaking tour called Globalise Resistance begins in
Glasgow.
Organised by greens, socialists and student activists, it brings
together
liberal and radical critics of globalisation. It involves no
demonstrations, no
rallies, no riots: it is simply a series of conferences. Yet almost
everywhere
we're going, people have called for the tour to be restricted or banned.
On Friday, the Scottish Conservative party asked the Home Office to
review its
decision to grant a visa to a speaker from the US. The SNP warned that
our
conference in Glasgow "must be closely monitored". In Manchester, we
were booked
to speak at the university. A few weeks ago, it cancelled the booking.
Having
spoken to the police, it had decided that we were "a potential security
risk".
So the organisers hired a hall in the Co-op's headquarters instead. A
fortnight
ago, the security company running the hall annulled the contract on the
advice
of the police. After some discussion, the firm, to its credit, reversed
its
decision.
The tour's organisers encountered similar problems when they tried to
hire a
venue in London. They had agreed a price with Imperial College, but it
backed
away just as the contract was about to be signed. So instead they booked
the
conference facilities at Goldsmiths College, whose principal is the
Labour
historian Ben Pimlott. On January 22, Goldsmiths wrote to confirm a
booking for
1,000 guests. Soon afterwards, the college pulled out.
I have spent much of the past week trying to find out why. When, after
days of
trying, I managed to raise Ben Pimlott, he insisted that I shouldn't
quote him.
This wasn't hard, as he refused to answer most of my questions, such as
whether
the event had been cancelled because of its political complexion. An
administrator told me that the conference was too big for the college,
and had
been booked in error. But Goldsmiths' brochure reveals that the two main
auditoria alone seat 1,040 people, and "over 50 additional rooms" are
available
for hire. The organisers offered to restrict the number of guests; but
the
college refused to negotiate. The conference had to find another venue.
So what on earth is going on? Nobody knows, but when the Socialist
Alliance,
which is one of the groups involved in the current tour, booked rooms
from
Brighton and Hove Council for a meeting coinciding with the Labour party
conference last September, the council tried to cancel on the grounds
that it
would "offend our major customer": namely the Labour party. It backed
down only
when the press began phoning.
It is certainly becoming harder to challenge the neo-liberal consensus
to which
nearly all the world's major political parties now subscribe. The global
deregulation which allows big business both to seize trade from smaller
companies and to dump its costs on to people and the environment can
proceed
only if it is accompanied by the reregulation of the people it
threatens. All
over the world, governments are trying to stamp out peaceful protest and
dissent.
In Britain, the new terrorism and investigatory powers acts enable the
security
services both to characterise protesters as terrorists and to ransack
their
communications without a warrant. In the US, peaceful demonstrators are
now
being arrested en masse before their protests begin. After the
demonstrations in
Seattle in 1999, some of us took bets as to where the next world trade
talks
would be held. Someone suggested Burma, another Bahrain. Someone else
hazarded
Qatar. Sure enough, last week we heard that November's trade talks will
be held
in Qatar. New market "freedoms" will be implemented with the help of
old-fashioned authoritarianism.
Institutions behave like this when they are frightened. The more the
politics
and economics of globalisation are exposed to public scrutiny, the more
they are
found wanting. When power has to hide from the people, you know it's
illegitimate.
Ê Guardian Newspapers Limited 2001
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