12 May: Meet at 1pm, St Paul’s Cathedral.
Bring a tent.
On 12 May, the Occupy, indignados and take the squares movements all over the world have called for a global day of action.
In London we’ll be visiting the ’1%’, those who:
· gambled with our pensions and savings,
· created financial nonsense to make money out of thin air,
· brought the global economy to the brink of ruin and forced ordinary people to pay for their mess,
· paid hundreds of thousands to wine and dine with our ‘elected’ representatives,
· have taken more than £1tn in bailouts from the taxpayer and continue to pay themselves exorbitant bonuses,
· evaded billions in taxes,
· are benefiting by the crisis by grabbing fat privatisation contracts of our public services.
From banks and hedge funds to lobbyists and private equity firms, they’re all in the ‘Map of the 1%’ that has been produced by Occupy London and will be available on the day.
Nowhere in Europe is the unequal distribution of wealth as striking as in the UK. The richest 1,000 persons, just 0.005% of the adult population, increased their wealth by £155bn over the last three years. That is enough for themselves alone to pay off the entire budget deficit and still leave them with £30bn to spare. [1]
We’re all in this together’ never rang so hollow. Whilst the rest of the country is being crippled by war-time austerity, the very same people who caused the crisis are now sitting on wealth even greater than what they had before the crash.
Saturday will start with a teach-out at St. Paul’s at 1pm, organised by the Tent City University, the educational arm of Occupy London. It is aiming at promoting informed political action and exploring viable economic alternatives before we pay a visit to the City institutions that caused and continue to profit by the crisis.
The day will see citizens using peaceful, creative ways to deliver their own messages to the financial and corporate elite of the City.
We will continue to exercise our right to peacefully assemble in public spaces and develop the democratic processes to address the problems we face.
*** Stay in touch ***
- The rules of the game: From your phone text follow @occupymay to 86444 for free SMS notifications on the day.
- Join the Facebook event
- DONATE to help make it bigger, louder and bolder than ever
-Follow on Twitter and Facebook
Interesting that you seemed to have blocked anyone from commenting on your facebook page who disagrees with you. I don’t expect to recieve a reply, but just ask yourselves if you really think that ‘North Korean’ type of democracy is going to win you many friends? It’s a shame really, because if you actually listened to the majority, instead of trying to dictate to them, you just might make a difference.
Don’t think that is the case
There does tend to be a reason for people being blocked – and it won’t be due to disagreement over political ideas. Generally it is for abuse of the safer spaces policy
The reason fo blocking people, is pure and simple. You cannot tolerate any opinion that challenges you. Your actions today have been totally pathetic to the vast majority of the population, but you can’t accept that. You’re just like the dictators that rule North Korea, you will not tolerate opposition, and try to silence it. Guess what? That will not work. Unless you make an effort to engage with ordinary people, stop the pathetic demo stuff, and the feeble atempts to provoke the police, you will achieve nothing, just provoke resentment towards your organisation. I guess I’ll be blocked from here soon, since you cannot respect opposing views, or debate with those that hold them.
Yeah sure, the majority of workers thinks that it’s good to be exploited by the ruling class, who force you to work for barely being able to live (or survive), while they’re making profit on your back because they own the means of production.
Where do you see democracy in UK?
You must be in your own world, surrounded by other capitalists, and totally disconnected with how the majority of people live.
Who is this ruling class? I have worked at major banks, and many of the top earners came from working class backgrounds and had worked their way up through sheer hard work. Many top earners also work in parts of the bank that did not contribute at all to the crisis and should not therefore be blamed. Much of the confusion around all this comes from the belief that there is some small clique of self serving ‘posh people’ running the banks in their own interests. Look at the boards of the uk banks and you don’t see a bunch of old Etonians etc at all. They are from mixed backgrounds (rarely privileged). Bank profits go to shareholders, mainly insurance and pension companies whose assets are owned by the millions of policy holders.
David, interesting that you feel able to make certain assumptions about me, based on one post. To suggest that I am “totally disconnected with how the majority of people live”, is funny,but insulting, but also typical of the attitude of occupy supporters. For your info, I was born in a world of real poverty. Thanks to the love and guidance of my parents, I was able to make a reasonable life for myself. I’ve always lived within my means, and now I live comfortably. I could only achieve that in the capatilist world that you seem to despise. The world that you wish on us would punish anyone with ambition, and reduce all to a level of poverty that you cannot even begin to understand.
I really don’t understand why you still claim that £1.3tr was “spent” bailing out the banks. You know that over 90% of that figure was made up of theoretical guarantees and facilities (like the SLS and APS schemes) which the banks never drew on at all and subsequently lapsed without costing a penny. Of the remaining <10% much has been repaid. Why do you need to lie to generate support? Why not just remove that £1.3tr altogether? The c£20bn that it has really cost the taxpayer is a pretty big number so why not stick with that? Is it because much of that will be recouped eventually, because it's much less than the tax paid annually by banks etc or because it's a small number compared to the amount taxpayers contribute military spending, benefits, health service etc?
What I thought was a reasonable comment about seeking confrontation with the police on one of the pics posted on facebook was removed yesterday. Well it’s your facebook page and you can do what you like with it, I understand you don’t like anything looking like negativity appearing there.
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.