06.16.08
the aftermath of bush
No, not the aftermath of George W Bush’s presidency - I’m not sure my webhosting plan, generous and economical as it may be, comes with enough storage for an in-depth discussion of all the issues arising from that particularly dark eight years in our recent history. (Eight years - can you believe it? I’ve lived in Britain for the vast majority of my adult life, and for all of that time, Dubya has been US president. I can distinctly recall, in my last year in Dublin, being told by a friend that Dubya was likely to be the next US president, and reading some of his quotes online. We both laughed. I think my laughter was a little more naive.)
Rather, the aftermath of George W Bush’s visit to London, from whence he departed today. Did you know he was here? Or rather, did you know that he was coming? Today’s press conference - and yesterday’s dinner at No.10 - were fairly high profile events, but compared to the incredible level of hype and pomp over the visit of French president Nicolas Sarkozy earlier this year, Bush’s arrival was preceded by a deathly silence.
Today, the only sign that the “Leader of the Free World” has been in London is a mess of metal barricades, police tape and left-over traffic diversions. Whitehall is covered in barricades that have yet to be collected, and the whole area around the U.S. Embassy at Grosvenor Square is a disaster of traffic diversions, heavy-handed police cordons and yet more metal barricades.
Over the weekend, Londoners were not only denied access to one of the city’s major thoroughfares (Whitehall, which is an artery for many extremely heavily used bus routes), but were also treated to a constant barrage of noise pollution thanks to the helicopters that circled over the centre of the city. Worse, however, is the fact that Londoners were also denied, once again, the basic right to protest and be heard.
Ostensibly, the blocking off of vast sections of the city was for security purposes; and certainly, one can see why putting Bush within bomb-blast radius of the crowds wouldn’t be a great idea (although I’d be more worried about the security of the innocents in the crowd than I would be about the man himself, a security concern I rather suspect the authorities don’t share). This, however, does not justify placing the man and his excessive entourage not only out of reach, but also out of sight and out of earshot. This was not security, it was a PR exercise - an attempt either to shield Bush from the proof of his deep unpopularity with the British people, or perhaps more likely, to prevent the world’s press from having a chance to point their cameras at a juxtaposition of the reviled leader’s “Farewell Tour”, and the crowds for whom his farewell can’t come soon enough.
Never mind the deep inconvenience that this trip caused for the people of London (especially compared to the visits of other national leaders, which are usually a cause for celebration and a festive atmosphere in the city centre) - the way in which the whole trip was handled by the police and security forces smacked of the American idea of “Free Speech Zones”, one of the most appalling additions to the lexicon of the neo-conservative movement in recent years. The right to peaceful protest is, I believe, absolute - it can be restricted for extremely clear and well-elucidated reasons of security, but to restrict that right simply for the purposes of PR and image-control is a shocking abuse of the powers this Government has gathered to itself.
Sorry - another shocking abuse. I suppose we should be getting used to them by now.
Technorati Tags: Bush, George W Bush, London, politics, policing, security
