For the past weekand more the Metropolitan Police have been making predictions that the protest against the G20 summit will be violent and that militant ‘anarchists and environmentalists’ will be using the opportunity to cause trouble. Take this report from the BBC for example, which was published on March 20.

It strikes me that this tactic is being used to try and warn away the hundreds of thousands of, let’s call them ‘ordinary people’, who are angry about how governments are scrambling to save the banks, and the banking establishment. You don’t need to hold a radical political position to think this. Yet the police are trying to discourage ordinary people from protest, by suggesting that you too are a nutter if you want to take to the streets to express your point of view. And their hard-headed attitude may actually create a greater likelihood of violence taking place, as reported in the Guardian under the headline: ‘Fears police tactics at G20 protests will lead to violence’.

According to the article, ‘David Howarth, a Liberal Democrat MP who is leading a parliamentary group of observers at the protests next week, said: “I am increasingly worried that what the police are saying about the protests will end up in a self-fulfilling prophecy. By talking up the prospect of violence they will put off peaceful demonstrators and start to attract other sorts.”‘

According to weather forecasters Wednesday is meant to be a lovely day, so it strikes me that a walk through the streets of London could be a fine option. Check here to find out what’s happening.

In the packed and sweaty atmosphere of the London School of Economics (LSE) lecture theatre last night it felt that there was something rather medieval taking place – a public dissection ‘by royal command’. 500 people had crowded in to hear a stellar cast of three prominent financial journalists, an MP and an academic pick through the rotting flesh of the banks and discuss why the media in particular had not forecast the spectacular economic crash that has been unfolding over the past few months. The event was prompted by the queen’s visit to LSE in November. When confronted with information about what was happening in the economy she commented: ‘it’s awful: why did nobody see it coming?’

Chaired by the director of LSE, Sir Howard Davies, the panel consisted of Liberal Democrat shadow chancellor Vince Cable MP, BBC Today presenter Evan Davies, city editor for the Daily Mail, Alex Brummer, assistant editor of the Financial Times Gillian Tett and Professor Willem Buiter of LSE, who also blogs for the FT.

‘If there’s one person that did see it coming, it was Vince Cable’, said Evan Davies, but Cable himself was circumspect and sober. ‘For politicians to complain about the media is as foolish as fishermen complaining about the sea’, he said, reassuring them that he had not come to ‘launch some great criticism’ of the media.

Evan Davies was economics editor for the BBC before he became a presenter on Today (‘You wait all that time for one story to come along,’ he said of his departure from the role in April 2008, ‘and then 1.2 trillion come along at once’). He was also philosophical about the role of the media in predicting the economic events that have taken place. ‘The press did not in any meaningful way warn the world that this was coming,’ he said, ‘but I think this is entirely forgivable, though there are also lessons to be learnt.’

Why is it forgivable? Davies gave a number of reasons, the first of which was human folly. ‘Human beings are a very flawed species,’ he said; ‘we’re not immune to natural biases, hopes, optimism, all sorts of baggage that human beings have.’ He also suggested that ‘the media tends to operate in a single dimension – good news or bad news; sunny or rainy, but not anything in between.’ And he made the point that although it is easy to look back now and say that warnings were made, warnings are always being made, all the time, about all kinds of things. The journalist’s role, according to Davies, is to try and assess how plausible those warnings are and that’s not always something they’re able to do.

‘The last reason the media didn’t get it,’ said Davies, is because ‘it’s not the job of the media to take a view that no one else is taking.’ In other words: if politicians, bankers and economists did not see it coming, then why should the media?

Both Alex Brummer and Gillian Tett said that financial journalists’ jobs were made harder by the mighty PR machines of the banking world. ‘Banks have a whole array of weapons to put journalists off track’, said Brummer. But Brummer, one of the most experienced financial journalists in Britain, also said that warnings that financial journalists had made in the past few years had not been given as much prominence as it now appears they should have. ‘Most of us have actually written about elements of what has been going on,’ he said, giving the example of an article he wrote in 2002 about concerns he had about Northern Rock’s securitisation business model. ‘It only made it to page 86 of the Daily Mail; the stories were not properly projected in the well-read areas of the paper.’

The constant theme among all of the panel members was that none of them saw what Willem Buiter called the ‘full shock and horror’ of what was about to happen; ‘the media didn’t see it coming; nobody saw it coming.’ But whereas the journalists seemed understandably to eschew any sense of blame or responsibility for not accurately predicting what was going to happen, Buiter was far more cynical about the role of journalism as a whole. ‘Most news is entertainment,’ he said, ‘the media don’t do complexity because their readers don’t.’ So it was easy, he suggests, for the media to be complicit in what he called the ‘immense example of collective delusion’ that risk had entirely vanished from the financial system.

‘I have spent the last 5 years wading through alphabet soup,’ said Gillian Tett, who told her story exploring what she calls the ‘murky’ side of banking, with all of its impenetrable jargon and acronyms, something that she agrees contributed to the ability of the financial system to delude everyone about its activities – even itself. ‘It was seen as being technical, boring and geeky to report on [derivatives], but it suited the banks to maintain this image,’ she said.

Her mission started when she used her anthropological training (she has a PhD in it) to map out what parts of the financial world the FT and other media were covering. She realised that there were huge gaps, so she resolved to try and fill at least some of these in. She moved to the highly unfashionable capital markets team (‘many people in the FT thought I was mad’) and ‘we started writing about what we saw and became more and more alarmed.’

In fact she was accused in 2007 of scaremongering, something which can now be seen as a great plaudit, of course, and Tett has certainly been one of the ‘stars’ of the credit crunch according to the Guardian. Her new book Fool’s Gold: How an Ingenious Tribe of Bankers Rewrote the Rules of Finance, Made a Fortune and Survived a Catastrophe is being published in March.
But even Tett did not anticipate the scale of what was about to happen and she agreed with Evan Davies when he said that ‘there’s no room for the I-told-you-so school in journalism.’

‘The coverage of the economy was an area of glaring silence,’ according to Tett, ‘the question going forward is not just about how the media goes about playing catch up, but what other areas of social silence are there that the media is ignoring.’

I love this bit of jargon which literally means ‘printing money’, which apparently is what the Bank of England is thinking about doing in order to ‘help economic recovery’. But it would be too simple just to call it that, wouldn’t it?

As the world of banking crumbles it seems clear that the language of finance, which was previously more generally accepted as being unfeasibly complicated to the layman, is actually just part of the whole project of concealment. To call a thing by its proper name would expose the financial system for what it is: a crude and inglorious scam.