29 November 2005
More meetings, more chauffeured limos, more five-course dinners: once again a bunch of powerful people get into planes and fly halfway round the world in order to work out how to stop climate change. This week, Montreal hosts the "MOP" ("Meeting of Parties"). Activists will not be airborne, however. Instead a chain of demonstrations has been planned around the planet for Saturday in Australia, Bangladesh, Bulgaria, Brazil, Congo and 30 other countries. Interestingly more organisations have signed up for the march here in the UK (starting at 12pm at Lincoln's Inn Fields in central London) than in any other country, perhaps because of increasing dissatisfaction with the to-ing and fro-ing of Tony "Climate Change" Blair. Thus we see a strange and wonderful coalition building on these shores which includes beneath its extremely wide canopy the Islamic Foundation for Ecology and the Environmental Sciences, Christian Ecology, the student People and Planet body, RMT's London transport regional body, the Socialist Worker's party, Dundee Trades Union Council and the Green party.
Chuck in a couple of small groups of activists such as the poetically named Traffic Lights for Peace ("Stop War and Change to a Green Planet" - geddit?) and Globalise Resistance, who are the modern-day equivalent of the flying pickets (favourite issues include sweatshops, Zapatistas and corporate involvement in education - please send us the missing link on a postcard to win world peace and a packet of frozen peas) and you have what sounds like a great day out. See you Saturday.
