The Crude Awakening

This was the name given to the Climate Change demonstration held in London on Saturday October 16th.

On the well funded call out potential demonstrators were told to choose from one of four protest blocs and register their choice with the organisers via a cellphone SMS service weeks in advance. On the day they were told to congregate at one of four major London train stations with an Oyster Card which is a sort of electronic train ticket. From there they would be sent an SMS message with the location of their chosen protest. The expectation being that four, separate large scale demonstrations would take place simultaneously at multiple locations across the city. In reality all four groups were told to make their way via the London Underground to Essex where they blockaded and oil depot with limited success. During the demonstration no arrests were made and the organisers were quick to claim that they'd outwitted the police by getting them to prepare for a demonstration in central London when it actually took place in Essex.

While it's true that they may have outwitted the police for about an hour what really happened was that they allowed the Brits to send the message to the Mexican hosts of the COP16 Summit that protesters were intent on disrupting the summit. Those protesters will fit the profile of reasonably wealthy students or young professionals who will gain access via either media organisations or NGO's attached to delegations from Less Economically Developed Countries. This puts pressure on the Mexicans to increase the security vetting of accredited delegates and boost the level of security searches at the venue. In Copenhagen such a high level of security itself managed to cause massive disruption to the summit with many delegates missing meetings and plenary sessions because they were stuck in seemingly endless queues at security check-points.

I'm not sure how the Mexican's will respond because one thing that clear from the demonstration is that even if the Climate Change demonstrators had the ideological intent to disrupt the summit they lack the capability to do so.