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Ian Lacey | 12:28 UK time, Wednesday, 1 April 2009

Justin Rowlatt and Paul Mason on TwitterToday Newsnight is on the ground covering the on .

(our Ethical Man reporter) is out on the streets with the protesters providing a live feed of pictures and updates on what's happening. He's already met police, masses of protesters and has made it to the Bank of England.

Meanwhile, our is on the inside. So far this morning he's been posting his thoughts on President Obama's news conference.

You can follow and on Twitter (or follow both on this ) and leave your own G20 thoughts below.

Comments

  • Comment number 1.

    THE CRÈME DE LA CRÈME SAY CHEESE
    (I put the accents in to confirm a previous post about this blog's limitations.)

    I have pointed out before that what floats to the top in politics, while related to the nature of the 'medium', may not be the most acceptable component of the pool. The Westminster bubble is, in fact, Marsh Gas; this tells us that the highest expression of the Westminster swamp, is something other than cream. I cannot help but suspect that other G 20 countries are also lead by unappealing floaters.

    Thus, the G 20 is a gathering of self-serving, power and legacy obsessives, orating, posturing, and jostling for position in the photo-opportunities; far from the competent managers we need. Meanwhile the fat cats and crooks will already be in close agreement on how to get round any pathetic new rules these wannabes might cobble together.

  • Comment number 2.

    barrie (#1) Which is why, I believe, in Democratic-Centralist one-party states, they have a) a party and b) period purges of party membership (where purge means people are 'sacked' and new members brought in). The fact that once a decision is made all have to comply is what gives it the appearance of dictatorship.

    At a time when China is looking ever stronger and the USA weaker, it's time for Newsnight to look at what's good in its political system, as it looks remarkably like what Old Labour once aspired to deliver through reform. Such systems do not subscribe to a naive conception of equality but to make provison according to the diversity of needs and abilities. What we have now is permanent turmoil fit only for the Attention Defict and Personality Disordered.

  • Comment number 3.

    I had really hoped that Newsnight would not become YET another part of the ´óÏó´«Ã½ obsessed with Facebook and Twitter. You have dashed my hopes.

    Surely the irony of any Broadcaster, let alone the ´óÏó´«Ã½, promoting a rival form of mass media communication is not lost on the Newsnight team even if it is lost on others in the ´óÏó´«Ã½? I wonder how many members of their traditional audience ´óÏó´«Ã½ programmes alienate when they go after the Facebookers and the Twitters, etc.? Is it possible that having X thousand on your Facebook site, and twittering about it endlessly, means that you actually lose tens of thousands from your mainstream audience? For every twitter who turns onto a TV programme today I wonder how many non-twitters and non-Facebookers switch over and turn-off?

    Anyhow, enough of that.

    Both the ´óÏó´«Ã½ News24 and Sky News seem desperate at the moment to ramp these demonstrations in London. Looking at the images from Traflagar Square it looks only slightly more packed than a normal day and, if you removed all the tourists, the people having their lunch on the museum steps, the photographers and the news crews, it looks as if the demonstrators are only a few hundred at most. Let's be blunt, the place is more packed on New Year's Eve than on, supposedly, this huge anti-Capitalist demonstration.

    Watching shots of others, near the BOE, having a go at the Police I now have to wonder just how many protestors there are? Judging from the ´óÏó´«Ã½ TV images the protestors attacking the Police seem to be outnumbered by photo-journalists, who appear to have trapped the protestors between themselves and the Police, and a small army of what I can only assume are video-enabled bloggers. I know darling, let's have a day out in London video-blogging a protest! Maybe we can stop by Buckingham Palace later on and see the changing of the Guard!

    I would love to see a wide-shot from a helicopter of these so-called mass protests - I suspect such a shot would show far less than the Media is reporting and, as I have pointed out, once you remove all the Media themselves probably just a few thousand of protestors at most. Certainly not even 0.01% of the UK population!



  • Comment number 4.

    Having just checked



    Traflager Square looks less crowded than on a normal Saturday.

    Isn't the real story here whether or not the News Channels are trying to make something out of these protests that actually is not happening? Democracy is not best served by Media organisations trying to create stories of mass unrest in their appetite for 24-hour rolling news pictures!

    If this was a Saturday night in most UK towns the small numbers of protestors causing toruble outside the BOE would have been nicked and in the back of Police vans by now.

  • Comment number 5.

    When Obama has finished pretending his is empowered to make decisions without Congressional approval (some people misguidedly think the USA, UK, France etc are dictatorships) he's going to have to cope with this

    This G20 business is just theatrics, even more silly than the protesting man in blood make-up in The City, and silly 'anarchists' with protest banners. If one wants to bring down a government there has to be a state and government in the first place you ninnies. The anarchists are already actively 'running' the country (down).

  • Comment number 6.

    THEATRICS

    tawse57 (#3) Good description. Most of the remaining population with any brains is probably fed up to the back teeth with all these theatrics.

    I don't believe most of what I hear about the banks. I don't believe what I'm hearing about improved regulation in the future either as these were the people who peddled deregulation as policy.

    I do want to know who the banks' clients were who defaulted (which is why they have toxic assets) and I want to know what the big commercial clients used as collateral.

    Without that sort of 'transparency' (a new word for honesty in our ever more opaque, dishonest, dysgenic and corrupt times, such faux 'protests' could well be more of the same hired hands that we've seen paraded out in the past for all we know.

    Emily on News24 is behaving as if she's working for HELLO! She and her production team seem to think that ´óÏó´«Ã½ News is the new Hollywood gossip channel.

  • Comment number 7.

    A SOLUTION THAT'S FINAL (#5 link)

    Not for the first time, The cerebral owners of Palestine square up to the visceral owners. There was only ever going to be one solution to such a tragic impasse: the expulsion/extermination of one or other of the groups. As things stand, the Jews hold the upper hand, but we live in an uncertain world. We know whose side God is on, but Chaos is in the wings, and might see things differently.

  • Comment number 8.

    #7 Which is, I sadly conclude, what all the PC talk of anti-racism, anti-sexism and especially anti-semitism is surreptitiously really all about - i.e an egregious ruse to deter the majority of decent people from becoming outraged by the hypocrisy, exploitation, and expropriation which is actually going on all about us in te name of 'business', but especially, alas, in Israel where one might have expected far more humanity to be displayed towards their neighbours, or more accurately, their hosts.

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