G8 Report: A View from Below A diary of an activist at Gleneagles lan Drummond t the opening rally of the G8 Alternatives A • Counter Summit, I wondered how radica •the tone would be and how much we would distinguish ourselves from ultra-respectable Maxe Poverty History. who had invited Brown to lead te march. I was blown away. Eamonn Mi:Carn sad 'the reason the poor are poor is that the him. a's rich... the great only seem great because it a e on our knees and even compassion witer rot Denis translated into political acton is use ess Brutus. a South African who had tsen Nelson Mandela's cellmate sad life tiad got worse for South Africans since the end of apartheid because of privatisation. On behalf of the global south he demanded full debt cancellation and reparations for the centuries of pillage while rejecting the Brown plan. At the Counter Summit the next day. in the War and Imperialism session. Galloway demolished Geldofism. in the way he demolished the Senate. He said that African countries should refuse to pay the debt. as the loans were taken out by dictators. had never helped the poor people, were used on militarism and had been paid back many times in interest. He also called for reparations. He dealt well with two questions on 9/11 and population growth respectively, saying that Bin Laden done it and to allege otherwise would be to let America off the hook for creating the swamp of hate out of which Al Qaeda came: he also said that there is enough food for everyone and we cannot blame the poor for daring to breed. I then went to a Respect fringe meeting, which was packed, and resolved to join Respect as well as the SSP - particularly when I heard of Respect's American and worldwide membership. I also went on a Stop the War march, carrying the Respect banner. I listened to a 'naming of the dead'on Calton Hill read out by some of the day's speakers. ordinary activists and the likes of Billy Bragg and Julie Christie. Faslane and Dungavel The next two days were spent protesting at Faslane and Dungavel. The Faslane demo shut down all entrances to the base for a day, which was a victory. Back in Edinburgh there was an anti-capitalist demo: the press had a field day over the 'Battle of Edinburgh' but all the reports I heard said the police struck first. We were forced to go to Dungavel, which holds many asylum seekers, by an extremely circuitous 4 route. The prison had been temporarily emptied in an act of sickening cruelty as the government feared that if the prisoners knew they had support they might not be suitably depressed and demoralised. When we finally arrived we were all searched for offensive weapons. Caroline Leckie. SSP MSP, refused to be searched, and was eventually let through. It was a fairly large demo. but was outnumbered by police, who had also brought horses and dogs. As we were leaving people from Glasgow were just getting in. It was a dress rehearsal for the next day. Demos on July 6 On July 6 1 arrived at Waterloo Place in time for the 10 o'clock bus only to find earlier buses not being allowed out and people waiting for later buses penned into a small piece of pavement nexito them Eventually the police said we were fist to go as the demo had been cancelled'. We dani ge anyatere tut instead blocked the roads and te pace conceded that the demo was still an danever the buses took an age to come and i hen t was reported that the police had turned the buses away again. about 700 protesters marched eight abreast towards the start of Princes Street, Edınburgh's main street. The march swelled to over 1.000 and they won the right to demonstrate, but twenty-nine people, including the key organisers. were arrested. A defence campaign is calling for all charges to be dropped. Eventually the first bus got out at 2:30pm and we finally arrived at Gleneagles after 4.00 pm, having missed the rally and catching only the tail end of the march (the first time the movement got within earshot of our enemies since Genoa). but we were greeted like conquering heroes by a roll call of the left. We had achieved our right to protest. Marxism The next day on the way to 'Marxism' we heard closed following a terrorist that London was attack. At the postponed opening rally the next day George Galloway reiterated the message that had landed him in trouble with the consensus mongers in parliament the previous day: that the terrorists bore the primary responsibility and it was indeed an unjustifiable crime but the war and all our actions in the Middle East made Britain a target. The conference went pretty much as scheduled We had a very successful Stop the War vigil to remember the dead of London and Iraq called at almost no notice. The Respect meeting with John Rees and George Galloway took on new meaning and importance, and at that meeting I joined Respect at last. My final words have to be for the Muslims and the Left' meeting. As usual, Salma Yaqoob gave a fantastic speech. When she said that the difference between 7/7 and 9/11 is that while four years ago she and her friends felt under siege with no one to turn to in the sea of Islamophobia, she now knows thousands of non-Muslims to whom she and her community can turn in times of need, it was my proudest moment of this whole political odyssey to know that I was one of those thousands. Now that the G8 leaders have crawled back under their stone we must increase rather than decrease our campaigning to defeat the redoubled threat. THE Dave Packer looks at the malign role of the media in reporting the London bombings. n the immediate aftermath of the London bombing we were faced with the extraordinary spectacle of a media conspiracy. Across the board there was an attempt to decouple the bombing from events in the Middle East, especially the war in Iraq. Stories abounded of brainwashed (probably mad) suicide bombers and extreme Muslim fundamentalists who hated Western civilisation. Only a few journalists, along with George Galloway MP, stood out against this consensus: principally Robert Fisk, Gary Younge, Tariq Ali and Mary Riddel, while others like Jon Snow, presenter of Channel 4 News, attempted to subvert the government line, but for two or three weeks they were voices in the wilderness. Nor was there much scrutiny of the official police story. Their 'hunt' for "home-grown' suicide bombers and their accomplices was carefully media-managed, the political purpose being to separate events herefrom those in Iraq. Even the brutal execution of Jean Charles de Menezes only created a ripple of discomfort, although a shoot-to- kill policy had never before been officially admitted, and had in fact been secretly introduced as early as 2002. Socialists must ask how the media/political