I’m sitting in a field near Watford on a glorious summer evening. Just visible across several rolling acres of exquisitely landscaped parkland, nestled discreetly among the trees, is the Grove Hotel, where up to 150 of the world’s most powerful and influential people, including George Osborne, Henry Kissinger and Google’s Eric Schmidt, are holding confidential talks. Ed Balls is there as well. Over here, cordoned off in a heavily-guarded “protest area”, are at least ten times that number, the majority of whom believe that the guests in the Grove (aka the Bilderberg group) are up to no good, although the precise nature of their 60 year old conspiracy varies according to who you ask.
It’s a relaxed, even cheerful event, despite the crush of numbers (by mid-afternoon, the venue was full and hundreds have reportedly been turned away) and despite the serious implications of the global conspiracy being hatched half a mile away. There are provocative tee-shirts (the best slogan being “Kissinger my ass”), protest banners denouncing the New World Order, a man holding a ventriloquist’s dummy and a rap artist wearing stick-on pointed ears. There’s some security theatre, but the police and G4S are on their best behaviour, with the result that only rhetorical anger is on display. People are here to expose the Bilderberg group, even to laugh at it, not to destroy it.
Right now (it’s shortly after 6pm) Alex Jones, the rabble-rousing Texan radio host now notorious for his outburst on Andrew Neil’s Sunday Politics show yesterday, is leading the crowd in a chant of “We know you are killers” aimed in the general direction of the Grove. Jones’s belief, which he has just outlined with much conviction though no discernible evidence, is that the shadow world government (as represented and perhaps constituted by the assembled Bilderbergers) is in the advanced stages of a strategy to halve and then enslave the world’s population. “They are literally putting cancer into your children’s food,” he warns the crowd, who seem to be receptive to the message. Many of them will have heard it before: Jones’s Infowars broadcast claims an audience of five million listeners. But if Jones’s audience really believed what he was telling them one might expect them to be more visibly disturbed.
(Jones’s subsequent meltdown on Sunday Politics divided opinion among Bilderberg-watchers. For some, he had blown a precious opportunity and given respectable conspiracy theorists a bad name. Others, however, saw it as a clever stratagem to gain maximum publicity – an aim in which it undoubtedly succeeded, although publicity is far from being the same as credibility.)
If Jones and his fellow headliner David Icke represent one extreme of the anti-Bilderberg tendency, the presence of Labour MP Michael Meacher suggests that concern isn’t confined entirely to UFO believers and people who smoked too much dope in the 1960s. Meacher’s beef was with the intrinsic lack of accountability involved with what he calls “leaders of Western finance capitalism” meeting in secret. “They want to have complete frankness, serious policy making, they want to concert their plans – which are pretty brutal,” he complained, to wild applause.
And here, for me, lies the paradox of this event. Billed by the organisers as the “first ever Bilderberg Fringe festival”, it is in many ways indeed fairly fringe (“Tinfoil-hatsonbury,” one wag calls it). Speaker after speaker earns cheers for denouncing 9/11 as in inside job, calling global warming a scam and warning about plans to microchip the entire population. People I speak to are eager to discuss pyramid power, satanic ritual sacrifice and the global elite’s dependence on something called “monatomic gold”. Easy pickings for mainstream journalists after a dismissive vignette, as is the presence of Jones and Icke. In the absence of information from the actual conference, and with no pictures of arriving delegates beyond a procession of cars with blacked-out windows, it’s difficult to portray Bilderberg in a serious light.
Yet newsworthy it surely is. Claims of global conspiracy seem far-fetched, (Kissinger, yes. Mandelson, even. But Ed Balls?) but Bilderberg does represent an immense networking and lobbying opportunity, three days in which top bankers and corporate executives are holed up with influential politicians and international civil servants including the IMF’s Christine Lagarde. Alex Jones’s concerns may be risible but Meacher’s are not. Even if the Bilderbergers aren’t secretly running the world, or for that matter deciding anything of substance, there is symbolism in their gathering, and in David Cameron’s acceptance on Friday of an invitation to join them.
Beyond the conspiracy pantomime lurk very real concerns. Concern over the way the international financial system, post crash, seems to have been rigged in favour of the banks and the plutocrats. Concern over the increasing possibilities of state surveillance of individuals, as shown this very weekend with the news about the US authorities’ PRISM programme, not to mention the ongoing debate over the Home Office’s proposed Communications Data Bill. Concern about the impact of globalisation. Concern above all about the growing chasm that seems to separate a feather-bedded elite from a mass of the population whose jobs and incomes seem ever less secure.
That this year’s Bilderberg conference has attracted so much media attention and so many protesters is testament to decades of obsessional pursuit by Alex Jones and fellow conspiracy theorists. For decades, even during the postwar years when they were genuinely influential, the meetings received no publicity at all. But it also suggests that their ideas are becoming mainstream. Icke had the air of a man vindicated after years as a lone voice in the wilderness, as well he might: last week he announced a plan to launch his own internet TV station and public donations poured in.
Even the conference organisers are much less secretive than they used to be. Where once those involved would deny very existence of the event, these days an agenda and a list of delegates is released on an official website. And if this new openness comes in part from exasperation at the crazy claims that have been made down the years about Bilderberg, it must also reflect an understanding that in the 21st century secret meetings of highly influential people are bound to attract suspicion and deserve to attract scrutiny. If Bilderberg and similar gatherings have up to now been of interest only to an eccentric fringe of conspiracy theorists and “researchers”, that is a media failure and not the fault of Alex Jones.
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