Radiohead back the Trade Justice Movement's lobby of Parliament

Radiohead joined the Trade Justice Movement's mass lobby of Parliament at Westminster today, with Thom Yorke and Ed O'Brien in the crowd, hoping to see their own MP, the Liberal Democrat Evan Harris of Oxford West. Around 10,000 people were expected to queue to meet their MPs, in one line meant to run along the south bank of the Thames; NME bills it as the largest mass lobby Parliament has seen.

The movement is a coalition of charities, aid agencies and campaign groups, CAFOD and Christian Aid included, and it wants the rules of world trade rewritten. Yorke and O'Brien, who are at work on a new album due next year, gave their reasons in today's Financial Times. Yorke calls trade justice the next step, and the part he finds exciting. Of poor countries he says these countries are going to stay on their knees until western people are made aware that these tariffs are being put on these countries' exports.¹

O'Brien's example is grain. The European Union grows more than it needs with the help of public money and sends the surplus to poor countries, which are not allowed to tax it to protect their own farmers. Looked at rationally, he says, the whole arrangement is ludicrous.

Yorke expects MPs to take notice. Politicians are always interested when you've got a reasonably strong movement, and they think they can get something out of it.¹