THE big news surrounding preparations for the G20 summit in London is the palpable sense of insecurity that surrounds it. Officials insist they are not taking any chances. Their press releases and off-the-record communications come across as a new species of top-down rumour mongering about the threat of mass rioting on the streets of England.
.....the scare stories continue to circulate, and bankers have been advised they should dress down and wear ordinary street clothes or, better still, work from home. The obsessive talking-up of a likely siege of London may turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy. But such an occurrence is more likely to be a response to a top-down invitation to riot than to a widespread public appetite for violent protest.
The issuing of a semi-conscious invitation to riot follows a now well-rehearsed script of inciting anger at a coterie of guilty bankers and financiers. Since the credit crunch, the greedy banker has been transformed into a personification of evil. In his Christmas sermon the Archbishop of York laid into the exploitative moneylenders who pursued "ruthless gain" and warned banks not to "enrich themselves at their poor neighbours' expense". Government ministers have been quick to jump on the anti-moneylender bandwagon.
Last year, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said banks that offered high financial incentives to executives would be targeted as part of a broader campaign against "extreme capitalism". In February, Spain's Industry Minister Miguel Sebastian said "the Government is losing its patience with the banks". Brazil's President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva was more specific: he attacked "white, blue-eyed" bankers. When pressed on his racial categorisation, he said: "I am not acquainted with a single black banker." Britain's Prime Minister Gordon Brown also let it be known that he is no friend of the bankers. He told a group of Wall Street financiers that bankers had operated outside normal human values and principle, and suggested that values such as "honesty, integrity and working hard" may have been absent from the world of finance.
The moral condemnation of bankers often serves as a prelude for demanding some form of punishment.
The normally staid British Liberal Democrat Vincent Cable commented that bankers are "lucky the British have no guillotines in stock" as he compared the behaviour of "Britain's financial aristocracy" with Marie Antoinette's haughty attitude towards the people of Paris.
The cumulative effect of such irresponsible remarks is to foster a climate of populist rage against bankers.
After the home of former Royal Bank of Scotland chief executive Fred Goodwin was vandalised, some of his neighbours appeared to be indifferent to his plight. "He got what he deserved" was a widely repeated sentiment. The recent call by a publicity-seeking academic to hang effigies of people such as Goodwin from lampposts captures the dissolute mood of moral disorientation that drives this witch-hunt. The venomous bile directed at Sue Morphet after the announcement that jobs in her company would be relocated from Australia to China is not fuelled only by frustration at the grassroots. These are sentiments influenced by the pronouncements of an elite desperate to avoid the criticism of the public.
Not so long ago, name-and-shame campaigns preyed on the public's exaggerated fears of pedophiles. In many instances such campaigns succeeded in provoking groups of anxious parents into organising vigilante groups. We do not yet have mobs witch-hunting money lenders, but the idea that it is OK to hate and despise them has gained widespread currency.
Unfortunately this new crusade is potentially more destabilising than the previous one targeting child molesters. The target today may be the banker, but tomorrow it will be the successful business executive with an unusually high bonus. A week later it will be the sports superstar. And before too long, anyone enjoying public success will become the object of envy.
Implicitly, the stigmatising of the moneylender or the high-earning executive represents the condemnation of success. The official sanctioning of such attitudes represents not only an invitation to riot but to channel people's understandable anxieties about their future against the 21st century's new folk devils. Who needs professional agitators when those on top encourages a simplistic blame-seeking culture among the public?