Living near a G8 summit and limited aims of talks

G8 impacts transport links

Moving to a new house recently was pretty disruptive - added to that, attending conferences close after simply added to that. Now I have the added bonus of living around the corner from this week’s G8 summit in Gleneagles.

Which in itself should be a relatively non-invasive experience - but the protest movement associated with G8 this year is causing all sorts of complications.

With 250,000 people marching in Edinburgh, and Edinburgh also being the focus of Live8 on Wednesday, the result is that transport links between central, north, and eastern Scotland are close to being crippled.

The G8 summit is currently being held in Gleneagles, which sits beside the A9 - a main road link from the motorways crossing central scotland between Edinburgh and Glasgow, which travels east towards Perth, before heading north towards Inverness.

With speed restrictions put in place along the A9, in addition to various Perthshire roads being closed, there’s a real threat that Gleneagles will create a transport bottleneck, impacting Perth and Edinburgh due to the sheer volume of people in the general area.

I had hoped to maybe travel by train to Edinburgh - my business banking is with the HSBC, but the only HSBC branch in Scotland is in Edinburgh, and I have cheques to cash there. However, Scotrail has a warning that services are stretched - which means that I’m going to have to put that travel off for at least a week.

An additional complication is the regular T in the Park music festical in Perth at the end of the week, adding further strain to the Scottish transport infrastructure in the region.

Overall things are pretty quiet at the moment at the Stirlingshire/Clackmannanshire end - excluding the various fleets of police vans, helicopter flyovers, and various extended police convoys escorting a miscellany of dark cars along the roads around the A9.

However, with violence already having broken out in Edinburgh, there’s a concern as to how trouble will impact the general area.

The G8 summit area

The general area around which the G8 summit is being held is within a narrow valley north among the Ochil Hills, an expanse of wild elevated countryside that stretches all the way between Stirling and Perth.

I’m currently living in the small village of Menstrie in Clackmannanshire, which encompasses the majority of the Ochil area. Clackmannshire itself is the smallest county in Scotland - and also has the longest name - and almost certainly would have been unable to cope with such a high profile event. The north-western extent of the Ochil hills comes under the authority of Perthshire, which is a far bigger authority.

Luckily, for us most of the protesting movement will be headed towards Auchterarder. However, as the summit is taking place literally around the corner, there’s a sense of unease of people entering the area to cause general disturbance.

Overall, though, it’s worth considering what the extent of change the protests can achieve.

G8: The realities of change

For a start, the move towards poverty relief is a two-edged sword, with debt relief provided sometimes at the cost of other relief projects. Nowhere is this clearer than in the sugar industry.

The US and Europe have begun a process of tit-for-tat removal of agricultural subsidies, to help prevent an open trade war between both blocks. The first stage is the removal of subsidies to the sugar industry - which although will benefit South American countries, it will kill £22 million from the revenues of Caribbean countries. Suddenly the £8 million in debt relief doesn’t seem such a win, does it?

Now what about making the US agree to accepting environmental change? Well, the US already does - you can guarrantee that. However, the US is currentlyinvolved with a more important priority, and that is of securing the world’s main oil centres for US control and consumption. Aside from protecting US consumers, it also serves as a front against China, the only other country who can possibly stand against the US - and this has come to a head recently with the Chevron attempt to politically block CNOOC’s bid for Unilocal.

So, what can the protesters expect to see from G8? Warm words of accomplishments, but the truth of the matter is likely more unpalatable - money for debt relief is merely removed from elsewhere, and getting George W Bush to sacrifice the interests of the US political and consumer centers for well-intentioned idealism is always going to be unlikely.

The big problem, really, is that the protestors are making a huge mistake by expecting that the G8 leaders address issues of poverty and the environment - the people who can make the biggest changes to these are ourselves.

The Western economy is a consumer economy, and many of the problems of the world - conflict, war, malnutrition, and poverty - exist because we as western consumers expect the best for less, and our greed for the widest variety of consumer goods at the lowest prices - is the actual engine behind the capitalist market that ravages the developed world.

We can look towards the G8 summit and appeal for them to lead us into change. But the harsh truth that most people will fail to address is that the only way we can implement such changes is through our own actions, as empowered consumers, and start making decisions made on a proper awareness of the consequences of them.

In the meantime, while you ponder that, you may wish to avoid the roads of central, eastern and northern Scotland this week.