However, I did feel disappointed with aspects of the protest.

The amount of drinking and week smoking was just too much. I do not really have a problem with either of them; but when you are trying to make a political point, and lots of the people around you are drinking and smoking mid-day, it ruins your message. It makes me reluctant to go to the protests because I question the motivation of some of the participants. It’s not like it was just a couple of people either; it was many.

Secondly, by the end of the night it looked like a scene from outside a cheap night club. There was a totally drunk girl running around dry humping her boyfriend. Many were lying down drunk and stoned. To anyone walking past they would not believe it was a serious political movement, and frankly, I felt a great deal of it wasn’t.

There are some wonderful, brave, and insightful people in the occupy movement, and I really admire what they are doing. But it strikes me that there are a large faction for who the difference between sticking it to authority, and genuinely wanting to alleviate the suffering in the world, is not clearly distinguished.

I do not mind what people do in their spare time, but I think when people are out in the political field, drink and drugs are banned. Either occupy gets on top of this and stops tolerating it, or the movement loses its credibility.

To me, it comes down to this: if you do not have the self-control and discipline to be sober in the field, you do not have what it takes to change society for the better.

The best thing occupy can do is to get right on top of this fast.

However I would like to re-iterate here that what was billed as ‘visiting the 1%’ on the ground turned into a police baiting run around with aggressive hotheads making the running and later making self-justifying self-righteous comments about how brutal the police were. What the hell do you expect? They are a police FORCE. They will use FORCE to defend space against what they perceive as disorder, especially in the City of London.

Instead of whinging about how you got hit by a copper can’t you do some serious tactical thinking about what impact you wish to make? The media ignored it because it was small scale stuff (compared to Madrid for example). Occupying space has some symbolic importance, granted, but then what do you do? You did it at St Pauls and it had its impact, but it’s clear that doing it over and over again in itself is not going to move things very much further.

Also this is not ‘what democracy looks like’. It may be what freedom of speech and assembly look like, but democracy itself is slow, bureaucratic and rather boring. Festive street action is all very well but there is the risk of self satisfied inward looking pride in saying ‘look what we did, look how horrible the police were’ while you have failed to move the debate or the struggle anywhere substantial.

The lady who spoke at St Pauls on behalf of the NHS was more relevant in a way than anyone – the most pressing issue at the moment as far as I can see is the unvoted for undemocratic privatisation of every public service going in the service of corporate profit rather than social need – and they only way to address that is to forge alliances and do some hard traditional politics – with occupation as only one tactic among many.