6th-10th April 2005
From Wednesday the 6th until Sunday 10th of April 2005, the “Festival of Dissent!” will take place in rural Lanarkshire, near Coalburn, Scotland. Hundreds of people are expected to attend the event, which is one of many aiming to inform people about the issues behind the G8 Summit and what it represents. The Festival is a space in which people can learn new skills, meet others interested in the issues, get inspired and plan actions to be taken around the Summit. People from across Scotland and beyond are invited to attend.
One of the organising collective explained, “For many people, the G8 represents a great deal that is wrong with this world. The G8 exists to secure the continued political, economic and military domination of the world by the richest eight nations- it’s about oppression, exploitation and the pursuit of profit for the few at the expense of everyone else. We want to use the opportunity presented by the Summit to build new spaces, open to everybody, in which we can demonstrate our very real alternatives: of self-management, of non-hierarchical and consensus based decision making and of ecological sustainability. The Festival of Dissent! will provide exactly such a space.”
Workshops at the festival include training sessions on the G8, consensus decision making, hill walking and navigation and direct action training. On the Sunday afternoon there will be bands and entertainment. Sarah, who will give a workshop at the festival said “I don’t believe the G8 are going to do anything about climate change or Africa. Any suggestion otherwise is more of Blair’s public relations nonsense. The G8 Summit is about opening up markets, extracting oil and carrying on business as usual. These type of policies are killing the planet and its people, and we simply can’t afford to do this any more”
Liam Spencer, a resident of Glasgow who will attend the Festival later this week said, “I am going to the Festival of Dissent! to find out more about what people want to do, about direct action politics and how I can get involved. This is an interesting and inspiring time.”
The Festival is being organised by a collective belonging to the Dissent! Network. Dissent! is a loose network of groups and individuals planning to use creative direct action to resist the G8. The Network has grown and successfully spread across Europe. It has no central office, no spokespeople, no membership list and no paid staff. It is simply a mechanism for communication and co-ordination between local groups and working groups involved in building resistance to the G8.
For more about the Dissent! Network, see: www.dissent.org.uk
