Kingston students were among the thousands of protesters that swarmed London’s streets ahead of the G20 summit - as the leaders of the word’s largest economies gathered to tackle the growing economic crisis.

Joshua Ogunleye, a second year human geography and economics student and Dan Read, a first year journalism student, both attended the protests separately to express  their views on the problems that the economic situation is causing for students and working people.

Protests in London’s financial areas on the days before and during the summit focused on everything from the Stop the War Coalition, Gaza, anti-capitalism and climate change.

Joshua said: “I went to the protest because I wanted to voice my views with regards to the current economic climate and the problems it causes for me as a student. It also provided me with the opportunity to meet like-minded students.”

“I was in Trafalgar Square and the atmosphere was calm with features of struggles underlining it because from the speeches given it really did show the plight of people affected.”

In the closing months of months of last year, unemployment in the UK soared to almost 2 million and it is young people that have been hit especially hard, with a 21% rise in the number of 18-24-year-olds without work.

Dan Read went as part of a series of organised protests by Socialist Appeal, a group that seeks to bring a Marxist analysis into play in order to win working-class people to socialist ideas.

He said: “So far the attempts to ‘bail out’ leading financial institutions have been met with renewed attacks on welfare, wages and employment conditions in general and I think this really exposes the class nature and profit motive of capitalism itself.”

Police tactics on the days, namely the fencing-in method known as ‘kettling’, have attracted a large amount of criticism, which was heightened after the death of newspaper-seller Ian Tomlinson.

Dan, who was selling the newspaper Socialist Appeal in Trafalgar Square on the same day, said that police tactics were “contemptible” and that the police account of Tomlinson’s death made little sense:

“The police were out to provoke us from day one. Right from the first demonstration they would attempt to split up the march into easily confinable, and beatable, chunks. From the video footage I have seen of the violence at climate camp the police were entirely in the wrong. Even when people were attempting to move back and chanting, “this is not a riot” over and over, the police continued to force their way into the crowd and assault people.”

“Hemming people in is a tried and tested tactic and as far as I can tell is intended to cause tempers to flare, thus giving and easy excuse for people to disperse the demo by force.”

A policeman controlling crowds near Threadneedle Street on 1 April said that the protests were “the biggest we’ve had in a number of years. Every group that wants to protest has turned up, you name it and they’re here. There has been some violence and a number of arrests already. It’s the anarchists that we’re keeping an eye on because they’re the ones that will play up later. It may be still for a while, it always is, and things will start up again.”

Later on in the day, protesters started a fire outside a branch of building society Alliance and Leicester on Gracechurch Street and attacked police vans. There has, however, been a full inquiry launched into the death of Ian Tomlinson.