Alternative G20 Summit to consider Gaza carnage

What is the Alternative London Summit?

[update - one of the academics at the University of East London, Chris Knight, professor of anthropology, has been suspended from his post for speaking out on bankers and for implying that if the police use violence against demonstrators they will be repaid in kind. Pretty senseless bravado on his part but it is hardly cause for being suspended from your post. Such are the limits to democracy in Britain in the age of the war on terror.]

On April 2nd 2009, Barack Obama and the G20 ministers including World Bank and IMF governors will be arriving at a conference centre some 500 yards from the Docklands Campus of the University of East London. Lecturing staff and students at UEL have responded by hosting the ‘G20 Alternative Summit’.

The G20 Alternative Summit will be a popular assembly or ‘teach-in’ in a densely populated, working class area of London. It is being hosted at the national level by Britain’s University and College Lecturers’ Union (UCU). At 4.00 pm on April 1st, our first speaker will be welcomed and introduced by UCU General Secretary, Sally Hunt. In addition to comedians, poets, artists, musicians, scientists and academics, we will be inviting shop stewards and activists engaged in current struggles. We intend to make our summit an assembly of the East London working class and of the labour movement as a whole.

John McDonnell MP will be coming to explain to us the Parliamentary uses of the Mace. BBC Newsnight editor Paul Mason will be telling us about his new book, ‘Meltdown: the End of the Age of Greed’. Economist Jan Toporowski will be explaining why the world financial system has so suddenly collapsed. We are hoping to persuade President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela to come heading a delegation from the developing nations which have been excluded from the top table. We will extend a public debating challenge also to President Barack Obama, the venue for our event being less than a mile distant from the EXCEL centre where he will be in attendance anyway.

In short, this will be an event for everyone who thinks that the bankers and politicians in their pay have been making a mess of things and need to be sacked and replaced.

President Obama has inspired people all over the world with hope for change we can believe in. Can we make capitalism history? YES WE CAN!

Filmmaker, photographer and film studies scholar Haim Bresheeth will be telling us about the Gaza Carnage.

Students at the university recently held a successful occupation for Gaza and won all their demands, including scholarships for Palestinian students and the donation of surplus equipment by the university to educational institutions in Gaza.