In the run up to the G8 meeting in the mountains of canada next week a sunny london saw the streets filled with people with banners and props, costumes and balloons. Events started in the morning and by 3pm people were spread out from outside the front of the Parliament all the way down to lambeth bridge, over the river, past the millennium wheel and all along the opposite side of the bank to parliament right back to westminster bridge!

With all the banners and flyers, leaflets and stickers a pretty wide area got full exposure to the issues for a whole afternoon.

With great PR stunts and press conferences rammed full, corp media groups BBC, Carlton, CNN, Radio 4, Xfm, Sky News, et all descended on the main press events jostling for interviews. The band Radiohead were on hand to add the showbiz angle and start a Mexican wave of noise along with Anita Roddick down the lobby queue of 12,000 people spread out across the bridges - organisers estimated the wave lasted 6 minutes and 37 seconds, but that included a few restarts and pauses :)

A giant poster of Blair dressed as a third-world basket-weaver, under the slogan "Would you still say world trade works for everyone, Tony?" was towed down the Thames on a boat, as lorries with shipping containers on their back labelled FAIR TRADE NOW passed around parliament square.

There was a great atmosphere with street theatre performances from the serious to the spoof, fatcats lurking, corporate bugs flying, and elvis, a sane voice, wandering about with a sign saying "Less conversation. More Action".

Throughout the afternoon the streets were also graced by a multitude of politicians (even the odd tory) who came out to meet constituants from all over the country. A bizare sight indeed along the river with about 18 clusters of people all surrounding their MPs and engaging in debate. It was interesting to see the different styles, some listened well and made the right noises, others seemed to just make speeches, all however were happy to pose at the end of their visits for the photoshoots, surrounded by fair trade banners and campaigners - but that said many people were saying about the politicians - "we've got them agreeing with us on almost everything, so we just have to keep pushing them harder and harder".

All the while the queue moved forward as people entered parliament to continue lobbying their MPs, with a grand total of around 300 of them having been seen by the end of the day.

While the crowd seemed to have the older generations as the largest age bracket, there were also lots of young people, universtity and college groups, church groups and local NGO groups present. The issues people were into varied considerably but all were untited in the agreement that trade in its current form is just exploiting people all over the world and that it needs to change to make the world fairer for everyone.

The organisers also ran an SMS service to keep people up to date with the different events and news as well as a special FM radio station broadcast all day, although just like most demonstrations where radio is used, very few people actualy brought one along to listen with - which was a shame because there was some good content (if they do it again it should also be webstreamed).

All in all a great day, and a really well thought out and executed publicity campaign by the groups involved - there should be good press coverage of the event tomorrow (there's already been good coverage on tv).

There were no arrests ;)

congratulations on what is hopefully a successful demo. shame about how if organisers are poorer they get slagged off. if you guys didn't have the finances for PR behind you like that you'd just get flat out marginalised regardless of numbers. oh well. congrats anyway

MPs and politicans never listen to the people or care about the suffering caused by big business. The only thing they understand is violence! We need a mass uprising against capitalism to achieve anything, riots on the streets, strikes and mass militant demonstrations.

It's not as if there's any imminent liklihood of the people who turned up (as many as we got out for J18) joining your 'mass uprising against capitalism' including 'riots on the streets, strikes and mass militant demonstrations'.

I'm glad that these people are interested in the issues. People generally don't take time off work and travel long distances for no reason, so I'm pretty sure that they will keep an eye on what the politicians get up to.

I doubt whether you were born with the same ideas you have now and I'd hope you'd accept that people's politics develop. If (when) the politicians don't act, then these people will be more likely to listen to those of us who put forwards an intelligent critique of the NGO strategy and the case for direct action as a more effective way of getting things done. At the very least, they will be more likely to understand why we do what we do even if it's not their thing and maybe be less likely to believe the lies they read in the media.

Before the DSEi protest last september we worked with CAAT, local CND groups and the Quakers. I think that this sort of working together whilst recognising differences should happen a lot more in the UK. (The UK bit of the ESF could have provided a forum for this sort of thing but the SWP seem to have got hold of it)

(Michael Albert has written some interesting stuff on dealing with difference in the strategy section of znet  http://www.zmag.org/ZNET.htm)

For what it's worth , my politics are basically anarchist (with some doubts) so I don't think that the trade justice campaign will succeed. I think that the tactic of lobbying parliament will be inneffective and I've never heard anyone from the NGOs/Monbiot etc explain why even if they get what they want corporations and capital won't immediately work to undermine and ultimately work to abolish trade rules (in much the same way they did the post war welfare state/bretton woods system). I think that you need to go to the source of their power - ownership and control of land and capital (but that's a whole other discussion)

There was a good post a few days ago which set out the case for direct action as opposed to lobbying parliament followed by some argument
see  http://uk.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=34078&group=webcas