The End Of The Beginning For Occupy

In the small hours last night the agents of the City of London Corporation moved in to sweep any remaining traces of Occupy from the steps of St Pauls. The event itself was barely newsworthy, at least from the mainstream media’s perspective, quite a different scene from the thousands of people swarming Zucotti Park in response to their eviction last year and nothing like the apocalyptic violence some expected. Instead the Occupiers acted with grace and decorum, proving to their detractors that they were always what they said they were, reasonable people who are unhappy with our current economic and social regime.

The City of London decided to ignore the Justice Department’s guidelines for a safe eviction and conduct the clearing of the camp at night. The call came after midnight and the protesters were given five minutes grace to grab what they could and get away from the tents. The City’s nervousness is perhaps understandable. Risking a day time eviction, and the hoards of supporters it might have attracted was never going to be an option. Neutering the camp at St Pauls was always going to be a question of how to arouse the least attention possible. Especially for an institution that has managed to shape our country for hundreds of years, largely out of view.

It seems that at least in that respect the City have been successful. After four months Occupy had fallen entirely off of the news agenda, the cold had driven away all but the hardiest new recruits and had yet to make significant progress on a strategy to garner popular support. The City’s original offer of allowing the camp to remain until the 31st December follows broadly the same plan.

The dissolution of the camp occurred with barely a whimper but that isn’t to say that Occupy is dead and finished. It will be difficult though, now the movement has now been pushed back to only a single site at Finsbury Square. The third occupation, a disused primary school in Islington dubbed the “School of Ideas” was also evicted late last night. The building was demolished this morning.

Despite the eviction, General Assemblies will continue to be held on the steps of St Pauls. The City’s injunction applies only to tents and structures, our civil liberties will need another decade or so of erosion before anyone can remove the right of protesters to gather and discuss further tactics. St Pauls has long been a site of community organising, and Occupy are all to happy to carry on that noble tradition.

If Occupy are going to rise from the ashes they will need a coordinated strategy for doing so. I can’t help but feel that this is what has let them down in the last few months. There is so much energy at the camp, so many dedicated, talented people giving up their time to drive the movement forwards, but one person’s forwards is another’s backwards. It seems like Occupy have spread themselves too thin to maintain a sustained assault sufficient to build up a head of steam.

There is so much public support for the mission of taking apart the finance sector, exposing their greed and corruption. Support for attacking globalised businesses that damage the environment and the lives of faraway people. Support for calling to account the politicians wedded to power and money. Support for a non-mainstream critique of neo-liberal capitalism. The Occupiers knew this when they set up, but it was assumed (by myself included) that that would be enough, that if you build it, they will come. Occupy started a hundred small fires to try and ignite public opinion and win them over to the cause, in fact they only ever needed one.

The organising structure is also severely flawed, it may allow everyone to have their say in the progress of the movement, but it is unsuited to the fast changing, dynamic environment it is trying to operate in. The working groups too are rather ineffective. Most only meet once a week and can spend hours upon hours just deciding what to do, productive work is done alone and then brought back to be dissected by the group.

Spreading their attentions so thin has meant that significant progress has not been made on most of the 10 initial statements, I can’t help but feel if Occupy had made more progress on these aims then the Court might have looked more favourably on the future of the camp itself. There may have been a rather radical shift in the mainstream media narrative towards equality, tax-justice and the rest, but I honestly can’t ascribe these gains to Occupy. More that Occupy was an obvious symptom that made editors wake up to the anger festering in so many people in this country.

The real challenge to Occupy will be whether it can overcome these problems and regenerate itself into a more effective challenge to the staus-quo. I think Occupy has accomplished it’s most important task already, it has come to terms with itself. Now if only it can come to terms with its place in the rest of the world it can start changing things.

The Legacy Of OLSX: Where They Can Go

Occupy has just entered its fourth month here in the UK, despite the cold weather, a hostile press and attracting the attention of the oldest and one of the most unaccountable democratic systems in the world in the form of the City of London Corporation. I’ve spent the last week around St Pauls and the reclaimed building dubbed the “Bank of Ideas” to get a sense of how the movement is progressing. I’ve reported my findings in a two part feature analysing how far OccupyLSX has come and today’s piece on where they can go in the future.

Occupy has seen limited success in the past few months as the the movement has learnt how to utilise the skills of its members and run both the camps themselves and the larger campaign for social and economic justice. The success of Occupy in the years to come will rest on how effectively they can manage their affairs on the level of internal politics and organisation, at the level of the local community, nationally and most importantly globally.

I’ve already written on some of the internal problems that Occupy faces, and how at times that can impede the progress of the movement, but it is important to recognise some of the strengths of the consensus process too. Although Occupy’s brand of direct democracy may be rather slow, and may not always come to the best decision it is essential in holding the movement together.

Occupy is made up of ordinary, fallible people who have little in common except for their dedication to a cause that falls under the loose umbrella of Occupy. With so much divergent opinion on where to take the movement and how to do it, it is inevitable that personality clashes will occur, especially in a stressful environment, with little sleep and with a real threat of infiltration and co-option from agents unknown driving up the paranoia levels. Consensus may not be a perfect decision making tool, but it is excellent for conflict resolution and by allowing everyone to be heard will give a result that ensures that people are willing to give huge amounts of their time for the good of the cause.

Once Occupy has its working groups experienced in their roles, supported by affinity groups and insiders and going at full pace they can start getting out more of the work that wins them public support. It will be the work that occupy does in outreach, promotion and policy that will drive the movement into mainstream discussion, and in the next year we’ll see that happening. Look at UKUncut, who were mocked last year but are now widely recognised for their valuable contributions to the British protest movement.

Another area for Occupy to expand into is work with communities and the local area. Margaret Thatcher famously said “there is no such thing as society”, and looking around today it might seem like she’s right. Occupy is working to build social cohesion by setting up democratic people’s forums for people to re-engage with issues in their local area. By bringing together members of local churches, GP’s surgeries, youth groups, charities, schools and businesses and giving them a place to debate and be heard Occupy is hoping that people will find they have causes in common, and that they are more effective in achieving them when they join together.

Occupy is essentially building the systems that will make their protests unnecessary. When you have a society that is interlinked, in tune with eachother’s needs and active in a community then protest is self organising and the injustices that led us to where we are today could never have happened. A fractured society made it easy for our government to control us, if Occupy can provide a model for communities to resist that pressure it will be their greatest legacy.

On a national level, if Occupy can co-opt the media and manage to get their message across without it being garbled by intermediaries then they can begin truly influencing discussion in politics and the press. For this to happen however I think Occupy needs to get over an image problem and build the broad base of support it needs to effectively apply pressure. During stage one Occupy have been effective in convincing a lot of talented, like minded people to give up lots of their time for the cause, but have not managed to gain respect from the working class majority of this country or many of the middle classes.

Working more in communities will go a long way in building support, but Occupy needs to consider tailoring its message to certain groups and occasionally focus on pressing local issues rather that the wider picture of the “crisis of capitalism”. This public support will come with time, and when it does anything Occupy is talking about, the decision makers of this country will need to be talking about it too.

Occupy is also a global movement, resistance in a single country is not going to be enough to address the worldwide problems we face, from environmental change to corrupt multinational corporations. As more Occupations spring up and coordinate with each other the more people will begin to look beyond their own national self-interest and see themselves as part of a global village.

There have been innumerable challenges that Occupy has had to deal with, both internal and external, but with each obstacle the group learns how best to deal with it. Whatever the judgement on their eviction from St Pauls tomorrow it will not be the end of the movement. Occupy taps into a vein of dissent that has been largely forgotten in this country, and the issues that brought Occupy into existence are far from resolved.

We may see a brief incubation period if Occupy loses its symbolic heart outside St Pauls, but the summer will see it return, fitter, healthier and alongside many other organisations inspired by their example.

The Legacy Of OLSX: What They’ve Done

Today Occupy enters its fourth month here in the UK, despite the cold weather, a hostile press and attracting the attention of the oldest and one of the most unaccountable democratic systems in the world in the form of the City of London Corporation. I’ve spent the last week around St Pauls and the reclaimed building dubbed the “Bank of Ideas” to get a sense of how the movement is progressing. I’ll be reporting my findings in a two part feature analysing how far OccupyLSX has come and where they can go in the future.

Occupy will likely be studied by sociologists for years to come, nothing quite like it has occurred at any point in the history of protest. OccupyLSX was born on the 15th October when a few hundred strangers turned up to try and camp in Paternoster Square outside the London stock exchange. The demonstrators ended up kettled outside St Pauls and when Giles Fraser asked the Police to disperse, and implied his approval, tents were set up and the Occupation began in earnest.

I wasn’t present for those first few scrabbling nights, days and weeks, but after arriving with little more than some camping equipment and a template for a direct democracy model for organisation after a remarkably short time the Occupiers had forged a library, a kitchen, an information point, hired toilets, printed hundreds of fliers, organised into groups to tackle press, finance, outreach, security and all the rest. Before that first day Occupy was just a few hundred disparate individuals, but afterwards they were a movement.

Holding all these different people with different ideas together hasn’t been at all easy, it has cost the movement time and energy, but it makes their successes all the more impressive. Exactly how you measure their success depends on your expectations. I’m sure most critical commentators will have expected the Occupiers gone within a week so the very fact that the movement remains is an achievement of sorts.

But planting a protest flag in the ground and keeping it there isn’t success. To see what Occupy is achieving you need to look into the working groups, who take a single issue or aim out of the diffuse morass of the movement as a whole and try and break it down, publicise it and with a little perseverance, solve it. Working Groups are learning how to perform their roles better each day they keep at it and over the past few months there has been some interesting and provocative action coming out of the camp.

Occupy’s presence outside St Pauls has drawn the City of London Corporation back into the public eye, this ancient tool of the finance industry hasn’t felt so threatened in centuries. Occupy have shown solidarity with their disgruntled staff, have challenged their legitimacy in court and are conducting painstaking research to get to the heart of their web of power. The City are on the back foot, publicly admitting they are discussing publishing the city cash fund to draw attention away from the more serious issue of their exemption from Freedom of Information Requests, the whole house of cards comes falling down if that is revoked.

Occupy has gathered a huge list of supporters, musicians Jarvis Cocker, Thom Yorke and Billy Bragg, economists David Harvey and Ha-Joon Chang, politicians Lord Glasman and Steve Baker, journalists Laurie Penny, George Monbiot and Polly Toynbee, campaigners for social justice Jesse Jackson and Tony Benn, not to mention many others. Occupy has provided a platform and an umbrella to all those speaking about inequality and injustice.

Occupy has contributed to the Leveson inquiry, talked with MPs, to select committees, met up with insiders and whistle blowers, taken control of two abandoned buildings, drawn attention to the obscene salaries of people like mick Davis CEO of Xstrata, have organised national meetings, participated in direct action for a number of issues and released several statements for change.

The reason that despite this many people feel that Occupy has been a complete failure, is because the media haven’t allowed them to succeed. Except for the first few weeks there has been very little attention, where it did exist it was focused on the spectacle of the camp rather than the message. Occupy have failed to make their impression on the media and win either their support or even their respect.

But that doesn’t mean Occupy hasn’t had an effect, newspaper and television owners aren’t stupid, they’ve realised that Occupy is tapping into wider anger at austerity, high executive pay and political incompetence, and the papers have run with it. The media may not be crediting Occupy, or even using Occupy as a starting point, but they certainly get the Occupy message and are spreading it in their own way.

One of the more unexpected successes of Occupy has been in giving a new lease of life to the Church of England. The blunders surrounding their support or lack of for the movement caused a lot of soul searching for members of the clergy. For many the experience made them realise how the blinkers of growth had blinded them to the immorality of our economics. I know some within the Church see a critique of the wider issues Occupy has raised as a way to become relevant in the new millennium.

I think the greatest achievement of Occupy won’t be accomplished by Occupy itself. Their role is to prime the country for future dissent, Occupy is just a small step on a long road of change. All forms of dissent are self reinforcing, Occupy, the riots, student protests and the public sector strikes all draw strength from eachother and give it to the people who feel disenfranchised. It won’t be this year or probably even the next, but with enough education, training and encouragement eventually enough people will be against with the system that it can no-longer tolerate the strain.

Occupy has had an intensely stressful few months and has made great progress along the way. Over its three months the movement has gone from nothing into something, and it learns how to achieve its goals better every day. Given more time and the support of sister organisations, Occupy could pupate into a truly formidable force.

OccupyLSX Court Case Looms

Occupations of public space sprung up around the country on the 15th of October, nearly three months later many still remain. The highest profile Occupation has without a doubt has been on the steps of St Pauls cathedral in London. As the camp with the largest number of people they have had the most success in releasing statements, performing direct action and provoking the unaccountable power-elites like the City of London Corporation into revealing their true nature. But with the results of their eviction court case to be released any day now the camp’s future hangs in the balance.

Legal proceedings were brought against the camp in November after the meagre dialogue between the City of London and the camp broke down. The City of London proposed that the camp be allowed to stay until the 31st of December, although appearing initially reasonable, when the City sent through the conditions of their deal the occupiers found that there were a number of extra clauses and conditions that they had not been made aware of. The camp took the decision to decline the offer to stay, and implicitly leave within a two months and made some demands of their own.

Delegates from the camp took three statements to the City of London, to ask that they behave as any other city council in the country does and provide a transparent service for the good of the people living there. The statement asked that the City publish year by year breakdowns of the City cash fund, a bank account and property portfolio that has been built up over centuries and is estimated to be at the very least over £1bn, that the City end its special exemption from freedom of information requests and that any lobbying of government on behalf of the financial sector be revealed.

The City never responded to these requests and instead launched legal action against the camp. Although the land on which the camp lies is owned partly by the Cathedral and the City of London the City acting as a council took charge of the case and applied for an injunction against the tents as they were an obstruction of the highway.

Two well respected barristers Michael Paget and John Cooper alongside the solicitors Kaimtodner took up Occupy’s cause and prepared a case free of charge. A four day hearing in the High Court began on the 19th of December with Mr Justice Lindblom acting as judge. Although before the hearing the judge had suggested that he might be willing to give a quick response as to the fate of the camp, considering the seriousness of the case and the precedent to be set for the right to free speech and protest he decided to delay the judgement until after the winter recess.

The City are pushing for eviction based on the inconvenience of the camp. David Forsdick, counsel for the corporation said eviction of the camp “It is a pressing social need in order to protect the rights and freedoms of others. The City’s position is: Peaceful protest? Yes. Permanent encampment? No.” The Corporation also cite an increase in crime on site, drug taking, litter, dog fouling and aggressive behavior of Occupiers to those passing by, the defence says the camp is a “magnet” for disorder.

In some respects the City are right, the camp has been a magnet for some social problems, but the defence quite rightly state that these are issues that occur all over London regardless of the presence of the camp, it is simply that these issues have been collected onto a single site. The defence also denies that the camp in any way impedes upon the rights or freedoms of any other citizens.

Much of Occupy’s case rests on the seriousness of the issues that they are trying to tackle. They should be allowed to cause some amount of nuisance in order to expose the much greater “nuisance” of corporate corruption, a bloated and immoral finance sector and the wider damage that austerity will cause. The defence also criticised the Church for taking action “by the back door” by not listing itself as a defendant, but sending a witness to criticise the camp.

As Occupy gave a strong moral case for them to stay, and presented the Judge with a lot of reading to go over to cement their right to protest the verdict is expected next week. Although many are not hopeful of Occupy’s chances of remaining onsite the fact that the case is taking so long to resolve itself is a source of hope. There is also a chance for Occupy to appeal against the judgement first in the UK and then in the European courts, whether the camp will be allowed to remain during the appeals process depends on the judgement.

If the court does decide to dissolve the camp the occupiers are dedicated to non-violence, that does not mean however that they will leave of their own accord. As we’ve seen in New York the loss of the heart of the Occupation raises a lot of problems for the movement, without the geographical base the ties holding the individuals of the movement together get weaker, but that doesn’t mean an end to Occupy. The valuable work being done by the camp’s working groups can continue, it will be their efforts that form Occupy’s legacy rather than tents on the street.

Whatever the court does decide at least Occupy can be happy that they have been given a fair hearing, something that American Occupations have not enjoyed. I for one hope they win, the precedent set by their eviction will damage the right to protest for decades to come.

Guardian CiF: Eviction is the best thing that could happen to Occupy London

The camp at St Paul’s cathedral was a beacon: it drew people from all over London together and united them in a common cause, it gave the movement unprecedented media coverage and provided a focus for the thousands of sympathisers that have visited the camp. But now the camp itself has achieved all it needs to, and the trials of day to day life at St Paul’s are drawing too much energy from the bigger picture.

I cannot speak for Occupy. But at least I have been more involved in it than many commentators. The camp is divided into two broad ideologies, the reformists who want to expose the harsh realities of life under neoliberal capitalism, and the revolutionaries seeking a fundamental shift in society. Realistically, Occupy can achieve only one of these aims without the grassroots support of the public and neither is best served by sleeping on the steps of St Paul’s. In fact, continuing to stay will more than likely damage its chances of success, attracting a lot of negative publicity and undermining its important work highlighting economic and social injustice.

Occupy has become too wrapped up in openness and inclusion, and although these are noble goals it means the camp is plagued with problems of self-policing. The occupations have drawn revellers and the homeless from across the capital, and with them they have brought issues of alcohol and substance abuse and violence. Occupy has tried to help these people, offering food, shelter, counselling and companionship, the vast majority are grateful for this kindness, but a few consistently cause trouble.

There have been some serious incidents at the camp in the last few months including: thefts, tents being slashed and minor assaults. These problems are not of Occupy’s making, but they’re happening on its watch. When anyone is challenged about people’s behaviour they’re quick to cry “persecution” and appeal to the founding principles of inclusion. If Occupy can’t solve the problem of behaviour on-site, a hostile media and the police will end the movement before it gets going.

Even people who aren’t aggressive or violent can derail the movement. The very nature of the general assembly (GA), whereby everyone can wield a veto, makes it inevitable. A block should be used only if the blocker feels so strongly that they would rather leave the movement than see it carried through, but it is rarely used as such and rarely with a full understanding of the issues at stake. Occupy proudly states that the GA is “real democracy”, in fact it is a tyranny that makes it possible to drown out a hundred rational voices with a single irrational one. A simple 10% threshold on a block as used in Occupy Wall Street would greatly reduce the disruption any individual could cause.

The largest stumbling block for Occupy is the obsession with horizontal organisation – there is a difference between having a leader and allowing leadership. The leaderless structure caused enough problems when activity was just focused on St Paul’s, but with three other loosely tied occupations just in London, in places the organisation has broken down almost entirely.

The current consensus model is workable, but at a great cost of time and energy, both of which are in short supply among occupiers and could be more productively spent elsewhere. This is fact recognised by many within the movement. If the legitimacy of the general assembly and the consensus process breaks down further then Occupy risks a total rupture as clans within the movement begin to act independently. Only a form of hierarchy can hold all the disparate groups and individuals together as the movement grows.

There needs to be a reassessment of what the campaign is trying to achieve and how best to do it, and what the aftermath of the eviction will be when these questions are answered. A presence at St Paul’s certainly needs to remain as the symbolic heart of the movement, but for it to be more than a space for GAs and lectures is superfluous. Legally the City of London can have no objection to people congregating in the square for general assemblies and the church has considered letting Occupy keep a non-residential presence. Loss of the campsite would also go a long way to shake off the strong counter-culture vibe around the movement that tends to galvanise more people against it than for it. If Occupy is working towards revolution it will need far more public support than it commands today.

Without a doubt there is great work going on at the camp, to name a few the recent talk against high executive pay by Lord Glasman and others outside the FSA building, corporate criminals being put on trial at Occupy Justice and meetings with the treasury select committee. There is a lot more for Occupy to achieve but currently the movement has neither the organisation to get large groups to work towards a common goal nor the autonomy to attract new talent and skills and allow people to use them as best they can.

There may be many challenges that Occupy faces, but none are insurmountable. Only if the movement can pull together and address its own failings can it legitimately address the failings of the rest of the world. At the moment it’s not in the right shape to do that.

OccupyLSX: What Next?

This concludes my five part feature on OccupyLSX, asking the question: what is the next step for Occupy?

With the City of London pursuing legal action and the original Occupation in Zucotti Park near Wall Street being broken up, the future for Occupy looks rather bleak, or at least at first glance it does. The eviction from St Pauls could take weeks to get through court and even then it is not certain whether the City will get its way. Regardless of whether the Occupation is moved on from their first site the spirit of the movement will live on: “You can’t destroy an idea who’s time has come.”

The attempts of the City of London Corporation to evict the demonstrators have been renewed after the City broke dialogue with the camp. Legal action against the camp, on the basis of health and safety and obstruction of a highway, was paused by the city a few weeks ago after it became clear that the Church of England wasn’t going to sit back and let the right to protest against greed and corruption be crushed on its doorstep.

The City proposed that the Occupiers be allowed to stay until the 31st of December if they would scale back the size of the camp slightly. As it appeared reasonable the Occupiers reduced the size of the camp, but when the full legal documents came through they were riddled with extra clauses and looked more like demands than amicable discussion as to how both their needs could be accommodated.

The camp hit back and demanded that the City do as all other local councils do and allow its operations to become subject to the Freedom of Information Act, to publish records of the City Cash Fund that it holds in trust for the area and to reveal its lobbying on behalf of the finance industry. The City never even acknowledged these demands and a few days after the new Lord Mayor David Wooton took office, eviction notices were being pinned to the tents around St Pauls.

The basis for the eviction is rather shaky. Stuart Fraser, the corporation’s Policy Chair said “We are getting reports about vulnerable people, cases of late-night drinking and other worrying trends, so it’s time to act.” Interesting that the late night drinking is by the homeless people that have been residents of St Pauls churchyard and the surrounding area for many years. Occupy has welcomed them but mental health and addiction problems have caused some trouble. To claim that “acting now”, and removing the free food and shelter the vulnerable receive, will solve a problem the City has ignored for years is farcical.

The claim of highway obstruction is also a tricky one, Solicitor Giles Peaker told the Guardian “As set out by the judge in [Brian Haw’s case defending his protest outside parliament], the case law means that there is a public right of peaceful assembly on the highway, so long as it does not unreasonably impede people passing. The obstruction must be wilful, without lawful excuse and unreasonable.” Focus will be on the balance between the right to protest and willful obstruction, both sides have an excellent legal team so the decision will likely come down to the Judge’s discretion. Some have also suggested that if the camp was such an obstruction then the City’s original offer shouldn’t have allowed them stay for two months.

Even if St Pauls is disbanded, over 25 other occupations around the country will remain, the fate of these outlier camps is rather uncertain. This week Bristol City Council informed me that my Freedom of Information request into minutes of the meetings where the camp was discussed was rejected on the grounds that revealing what our elected representatives are proposing would “inhibit the free and frank exchange of ideas, opinions and views”. The implication being that transparency would make the councillors irrational, or that knowing they are about to be evicted might be unfair to the occupiers.

One likely scenario is that Occupations will become rolling affairs, hopping around cities and the country as evictions come and go. Now the Occupiers have been united they will not easily give up to be ineffectual individuals again. It has been seen in New York that the break up of the camp has led to even more people flooding Zucotti park and it’s surroundings in the aftermath. Even the horrific violence inflicted upon the Oakland demonstrators hasn’t driven them away. If anything it only exposes how desperately afraid the establishment is of this movement.

The councils and corporations may remove the camps that have been set up over the last month, but the spirit that spawned them will be harder to eradicate. For a generation Britain has not seen the kind of dissent that we’re seeing today. Thatcher’s excesses turned off half the population to politics, a decade of New labour destroyed the faith of the rest, the result is that now people are taking politics into their own hands.

The last few years have seen a growing unrest, increasingly people are coming to terms with how thoroughly they have been cheated, that their homes and their gadgets came at the price of economic slavery. Falling wages were masked behind the trend for two working parents, the invention of the credit card, ravaging of the earth’s natural resources and blatant exploitation of the third world. The whole system relied on constant growth and now that is stalling the world appears to collapse around us, those in power are unable or unwilling to drive the change we require.

My generation is just waking up to the power that they can exert through protest, supported by their peers and their elders we might just have a chance at breaking free from an economic, democratic and social system designed for a long dead, 19th century world. In one short month the Occupy agenda, of inequality and injustice, caused by the unaccountable elites of this world, has been given the kind of publicity that activists can only dream of. What will follow from that exposure is a platform to attempt to re-structure the whole system.

I’ll end this feature with a warning. Occupy is a peaceful movement, who want to accomplish their goals through debate and discussion. If Occupy is obliterated and they are driven from the steps of St Pauls and elsewhere, what then? What is the message to all the others who are unhappy with our current socio-economic situation? That peaceful protest will get you no-where and that more militant action is needed. The government may end up finding that their efforts to hold the lid on the pressure cooker only make the eventual explosion that bit bigger, let’s try and make sure that doesn’t happen shall we?

OccupyLSX: The Reaction To Them

Part four of my feature on OccupyLSX, on how people and the media have reacted to the movement.

As with any movement, the reaction to the Occupation has been mixed. Polls conducted by YouGov in late October revealed that 44% of the 1676 respondents agreed with the aims of the Occupation, compared to 30% opposed and 25% not sure. I think the 25% not sure is the most telling statistic, the furore surrounding St Pauls has given the hostile media a club with which to beat the camp and has forced the camp into a defensive position.

But that is changing now the camp has found its feet, the City of London have been put on the retreat by their refusal to respond to the camps reasonable demands for transparency and statements to be released by the end of the week should solidify the camp’s attacking stance. Let us hope that those don’t knows can be persuaded to become agrees as the camp continues to battle injustice, who knows we might just convert a few of the opposition.

It is rather unfortunate that Occupy are so beholden to the media and whatever slant they decide to put on a story. Although those that are interested can go directly to the OccupyLSX website to get information directly, the majority of people will absorb whatever they are told about Occupy by newspapers and TV.

For the first few weeks of occupation the main response to the camp was confusion, it was a feeling largely mirrored in the occupiers themselves. Most campaigns are spawned amongst groups of like-minded individuals, planned over months, grown over years until they reach a stage where they can project themselves to into the world. Occupy had no such advantage. They had to collect their members and organise themselves directly in view of the entire country and its media organisations.

It made life very difficult for newspapers and TV, they couldn’t craft a story out of their demands because there were none, at least not at first. Even the initial statement gave little meat in terms of concrete aims. So the story became “OccupyLSX has no aims” rather than the fairer “OccupyLSX is working towards focusing it’s aims into workable demands and solutions”. It is unfortunate that the coverage in those first few weeks will likely brand the movement forever, at at least make its stereotype very hard to break.

During my time at St Pauls I interviewed passers by and some members of the camp, to see what they thought about Occupy. Although my selection process wasn’t exactly representative of the people I talked to the well-wishers and detractors were in equal measure. I’ve published the transcripts of some the interviews below.

A photographer who was visiting for the day and would rather remain unnamed said “The banking crisis was caused by the public and businesses having who have the philosopy of spend today pay tomorrow, no matter what the banks do it’s going to happen. So what do you do? Stop lending people money so all the businesses go bust? They want jobs so that means there’s got to be employers, employers need to have cash flow, where do they get this money from? For new equipment, for new premises to pay their staff wages. From the banks. So if the banks stop lending money all these people complaining about the banks wouldn’t have a job anyway. Unfortunately its a group of people that think they have a right to protest about everything. They’re lucky that in this country they do have a right to protest they’re not being washed off the streets with a water cannon as they would be in every other major city in the world. After the first week they’ve made their protest and they could have gone away. “

Another who would rather not give his name was rather worried about the imact on his job if he was known to be around the camp. “I actually work not too far from here, I’m on my lunch-break. I just thought I’d have a wander and read some of the articles here. Certainly I agree with some parts of the agenda, obviously it’s primarily an attack on wealth, de-regulation, privatisation all the other neo-liberal policies that got everyone into this mess. I have a lot of sympathy with them, I suppose one of the reasons I’m not pitched up with a tent is that I’m fearful that these kinds of protests don’t often change the long term discourse. I think eventually, sad for me to say it but the tents will disappear and in 12 months time no one will remember it. The main issue is that they haven’t been able to resonate with any large section of the population or the media, if you read a lot of commentary there might be some sympathy for the motives but actually it’s dismissed out of hand. I think that’s a wider problem of the basic neo-liberal consensus in the press and the wider world.”

Gail Partridge aged 71 and her husband said “We’re out in London today for Remembrance day, and I really wanted to see the occupation and lend our support. Capitalism has been proved not to work, its boom and bust all the time and all we’re doing is propping it up. I haven’t got a clever solution but I know this is the wrong one. I think they’re having success already, I think they’re making people think. We might need a complete U-turn but I’m not sure how we can do that. I think these demonstrations do have a natural life, I think there will be a gradual fading away as people need to get back to work and it gets cold. I don’t think they should be murdered but they should be allowed to naturally die.”

At the end of the day people will believe what they want about Occupy, the reaction in the long term will depend on how well the camp can get their agenda across in a rational way. It’s slow but it is coming, we’ll see whether what is to be released will have the content and the popular support to provoke the mainstream media into catapulting OccupyLSX’s agenda into the public discussion. Only then will they achieve the change they desire.

OccupyLSX: What They Want

Part three of my OccupyLSX feature based on my week long involvement with the movement. This time its about what they want.

Ask anyone at OccupyLSX what they want to achieve and you’ll get a different answer, but what unites the people there is the sense that the system we live under no-longer works for the majority of the country. The world has become filled with institutions from the IMF, to corporations, to think-tanks, to our own government that are non-transparent, unaccountable and whose motivations are unclear. The Middle East is crying out for democracy, their struggles have only highlighted the fact that we need it in this country too.

When talking about what OccupyLSX want it is impossible not to conflate my own hopes for what they will achieve with theirs. Although in many aspects they may overlap I am not an official spokesperson for the Camp, my thoughts have not passed through the General Assembly, but I think I have a pretty clear idea.

Lets begin with corporations and big business, although they may provide us with many of the goods and services we need their immense power completely subverts the democratic process. Corporations began when governments granted charters for companies to perform a specific task, like provide water supplies for a city they could do only that and were acting for the benefit of the public. Since then the legal checks on their power have been corrupted so that they have grown in size to influence all aspects of our lives.

The main problems as I see them are the profit motive and limited liability, all the rest stem from that. CEOs of major corporations are legally obliged, first and foremost, to provide profit for the shareholders. Even if a CEO is a very nice and caring person if he can’t pay to safely dispose of waste and still make money and he won’t dumping chemical waste into a nearby river then he faces lawsuit from his shareholders as he has failed in his responsibility.

If someone discovers how badly polluted that river has gotten they can file a lawsuit against the corporation. Not the person that authorised the pollution, but the corporation as a whole. Of course the people against the corporation still have to raise the vast legal fees required to take them to court and will still be outgunned by the team of corporate lawyers, this means that only the largest and most horrific corporate crimes are even challenged, let alone won.

A corporation cannot be jailed or otherwise punished, only fined. This means that damage to the environment or abuse of the workforce simply becomes an operating cost to be calculated. Multiply the chance of getting caught by the cost of the fine, if it is less than the cost of safe practice then the corporation is obliged to its shareholders to damage the environment.

Corporations operating costs are made external, at all turns they seek pay as little as they can. Releasing CO2 into the atmosphere, repair of roads from damaged by their trucks, costs of their workers poor health and the destruction of the earth in mining and extracting, none of these are paid by the corporations, others are left to pick up the bill.

I’m not saying that all corporations are bad or that they will always seek to cause harm, but the current legal framework means that it is inevitable that abuses happen now and will continue to in the future. If people were held personally responsible for their actions they might think twice about causing harm, if corporations were made to be responsible for their stakeholders, the workers, the areas they operate in and their shareholders they might act more responsibly.

OccupyLSX also realises there are problems with the economy, when we’re talking about the British economy thanks to 25 years of deregulation we’re talking largely about banks. The entire country has been saddled with the debts of Banks, their trading may have been legal(ish) but it was certainly irresponsible, short-sighted and has not been seriously challenged.

At every stage of their passage through the finance system traders greenlighted the toxic Colleateralised Debt Obligations and Mortgage Backed Securities. Whether through stupidity, or willful ignorance traders took the chance to secure their bonus and pass on these dangerous goods, engaging in a game of musical chairs where whoever was left holding the assets when the music stopped got ruined. No one understood the implications of CDOs because no one can read the 1bn pages of text that fully detail the contents of a CDO yet they are still assumed to be safe. There wasn’t a regulator with the power or foresight to prevent banks from making big enough bets to shatter an entire economy, there still isn’t.

The UK’s overreliance on banks now means that we will languish in this recession for even longer. Industry is less sensitive to market fluctuations and can still continue to operate in times of low growth, driving us out of a recession. Now we’re stuck with the vampire banking institutions, who sap our wealth and still refuse to comply with the shamefully weak Project Merlin that suggests maybe they should put some of their £850bn bailout back into the british economy.

Our tax legislation also allows those with the greatest capacity to pay it to be those most able to avoid it. How on earth can it be fair that many banks and corporations pay percentage wise less tax than those on the average wage?

These are just a smattering of the problems that OccupyLSX has identified, sure they may just be complaints at this point, but for most it’s not hard to right the wrong with a small change. Others may slate the aims for being too big to ever accomplish, but why aim lower than what would actually make a difference? Surely that’s what the Labour party is for?

Neither government is able to challenge these fundamental problems, they’re both funded by both the banks and businesses, once they get into power they become even more beholden to lobbying and pressure groups. It’s up to us to drive the change we require, no one else will do it for us.

Help Occupy London write a statement on corporations and big business

Published in The Guardian: Comment Is Free.

We believe that corporations and big business now wield more power over our day-to-day lives than our government. Of the top 100 economic entities only 49 are nation states, the rest are corporations. They are relentless in their pursuit of profit and have caused widespread damage to the environment, their workers and society as a whole. We want to live in a system that has the entire population’s wellbeing at heart, rather than just the shareholders.

The corporations working group had its first meeting last Friday, with seven people in attendance. Our priorities were to quickly draft an initial statement highlighting the problems caused by corporations and big business to solidify OccupyLSX’s position on the issue.

These points have not been ratified by the general assembly, and so they do not represent the views of Occupy London, but they give some idea of what our main concerns are:

• The large wage gap between the highest and lowest paid within many corporations

• The subversion of democracy through lobbying, which reduces the say of the people in politics

• The legal protections that corporations are given to prevent accountability

• The unsustainability of companies that seek constant growth in a world of finite resources

• The manipulation of companies’ image through the media and PR to obscure wrongdoing

Although we have drafted the initial statement it will need to pass the general assembly before it can be released in full. If you would like to contribute to the process simply write out your annotations in a comment on this post, clearly indicating which point in the statement you are referring to. You can also let us know on Twitter @commentisfree or on our Guardian Facebook page. All input will be considered in future draftings.

In the coming weeks we hope to challenge specific companies and their business practices, and we ask your help to do so.

OccupyLSX: How They Operate

In an effort to more fairly represent the Occupy movement I’m writing a 5 part feature on my week at OccupyLSX. Part 2 is how they work.

The occupy movement is a leaderless one, there is no mastermind overseeing the whole operation and coordinating it as a whole. This has led most of the rightwing press to assume that OccupyLSX and others around the globe are simply groups of malcontents flinging their wacky ideas around at eachother “sitting around smoking joints and knocking back lager.” (thank you, Tom Rawstorne ) This is far from the truth, but to be fair not much further than the Daily Mail usually get.

Although there may not be a leader, it doesn’t mean there aren’t any. The beauty of Occupy is that anyone with the time, energy and expertise can step up to the plate and help out wherever they can. It allows anyone and everyone to become a leader.

At the camp Process rules. By adhering to it a group of people with little in common can be brought together to work towards a common goal, without the inherent upsets that are caused by people telling you what to do. Essentially the Process goes like this. If you have an idea on how to make the camp better you go to one of the General Assemblies at 1pm or 7pm and propose it. You get in front of the mic and state your case and maybe others at the GA will challenge you on any issues they might have with it.

Then the proposal will be put to the GA to vote on, all those for wave their hands, those against cross their arms across their chest, anyone violently opposed to the idea on the grounds that it fundamentally undermines the whole camp can block by raising their fist into the air. If your proposal reaches consensus without being blocked then you can set up a Working Group to get going on your task.

Anyone with an interest can join the Working Group, generally they’re 4 to 12 people. They’re round table debates conducted with the same process as the GA, with the addition of one finger pointed to put yourself in line to speak and two if you want to make a direct point to the current speaker. Strictly one person talking at a time, and the whole affair is kept peaceable by a facilitator. It may sound (and occasionally look) silly, but after a while you get used to it and it becomes apparent that it is actually a rather effective. You get feedback on your ideas while you speak so don’t spend hours laboring the same point, you don’t need to shout to get heard and everyone gets a turn.

Once your working group has come up with it’s proposal and is ready to put it into action you go back to the General Assembly and get it passed, and you’re done. Congratulations. It may be slow, but it is the only way to drive the camp forward towards a shared goal, you might not necessarily agree, but hell, everyone else does so get to it. The working group model means that although the few reporters that wander down to the site may bump into the people that aren’t up to much, they miss out on the real workings of the camp.

Believe me there are people working themselves to the bone for the camp. The kitchen provides free food to all-comers, all day. The tranquility team patrols the site at night to keep the site safe and move on the drunk city-folk who like to harass the camp as they stagger back home. The outreach group supports the homeless, some of whom are long time residents of St Pauls Churchyard others drawn from elsewhere by the food, counselling for mental health issues or simply companionship. The tent city university schedules lectures and talks which run all day. The media team gets the camp’s message across to the major broadcasters, and newspapers. The tech team runs the website and other projects. The environment working group have procured several solar panels to eliminate the need to use petrol generators. And several policy groups work on drafting statements on The City of London Corporation, Economics, International issues and Corporations.

There are obvious downsides to this method of organisation, but ultimately it is the one best suited to the movement. Gathering so many people with different ideas there will always be conflicts of interest, all of us can identify the problems with the system we live under, but proposing solutions that everyone is happy with is rather more difficult, it’ll come, just give it time.

Progress rather depends on the group you join. Some devolve into circular discussions of topics that are rather unworkable and tangential to the aims of Occupy, but with a small group of focused individuals working towards a clear goal progress can be very rapid.

The other issue with horizontal organisation is that it is difficult to coordinate between groups, and even between Occupations in other cities. But already progress is being made in this area, there is a coordinated drive towards transparency, meetings are minuted to allow all the members of the camp to contribute even if they are absent from the meetings.

Many have been quick to criticise OccupyLSX for not getting out their message fast enough, but you have to appreciate that the camp was hurled into a hostile environment, attacked on all sides by the church, the City and the media. Frankly the camp had enough on its plate just getting things up and running. The process in place may be slow but it is robust.

It is certainly a process that has taken it’s toll on some of the key Occupiers, behind the scenes it’s a stressful place to be. On the bad days, the pressure, the lack of sleep, the long hours, the cold and the fact that many are working “real” jobs, really get to people. But on the good days there’s nothing more beautiful than seeing people working towards something they truly believe in. So if you think you could help the camp run better, feel free to pop down.