SA Footy

Quichey wrote:Polyester suit Nazis that rule the world.

rodgerdodger wrote:Can someone please give me a decent explanation for the protests? I'm as left as the next bloke but these Gwhatever number summits just seem like the world cup of protesting for no purpose at all.

rodgerdodger wrote:What are they protesting about?

The G20 summit is lousy value for money. Cancel it.

In spite of the spartan surroundings, the G20 will run up a reported bill of £50 million. A bill of £5 million alone will go to the company organising the staging and sound equipment. The enormous security bill will, in a typical piece of Brownomics, appear off-balance sheet — the police have not been granted a specific budget, so resources will have to be switched from other areas. You can be sure that there won’t be time for much other policing in London on 2 April.

Since the G20 doesn’t have a hope of getting through its ambitious agenda in a day, might it drop an item or two? There is one thing begging to be left off until another time, yet for some reason I have a suspicion it is the item about which Gordon Brown cares most. It is the subject of tax havens. Brown — and this is one subject on which he does find common ground with Angela Merkel — wants to close them down. He wants their banks to be forced to reveal information on their depositors. Fair enough, where the aim is to trace criminal activity. But why try to stitch up the rules at what is supposed to be a crisis meeting for the global economy and to which the tax haven nations have not even been invited? There are no prizes for guessing why: Brown knows full well that the dire state of the public finances will require taxes to be raised sharply after the election — way beyond the new 45 per cent upper rate of income tax which has already been announced — and that it will create a flight of wealthy citizens to tax havens.