Bail-In check list
Posted on Thu 17th Feb 2011, 3:14pmCongratulations on posting up a Big Society Bail-In. There are just a couple of days left before the day of action!
Some tips to make sure your action is as good as it can be:
Some tips to make sure your action is as good as it can be:
- Put a time and meeting place registered on our website
- Set-up a twitter account and tweeted about your action
- Set-up a Facebook event and invited everyone you know
- Emailed your local anti-cuts group, or any other group that might be interested. www.falseeconomy.org.uk has a good directory of contacts.
- Contacted your local media (important!). Call up the local paper and the local radio station, have a quick chat, give them your phone number and invite them along. Email ukuncut@gmail.com if you have any media queries.
- Printed off flyers from http://www.ukuncut.org.uk/targets/banks/barclays
- Made any additional banners and signs
- Felt proud!
Video: How To Do Your Own Bail-In
Posted on Wed 16th Feb 2011, 1:42amThese Cuts Are Personal A report from the Islington Bail-In by Molly Solomons
I’m not a hardened activist and to be honest, it would have been a much better start to this morning wrapped up in my duvet, ignoring the world and the cuts, but enough is enough. Yes, I’m wildly pissed off about the cuts in general and the whole big society sham. But for me this is personal. It’s a personal attack on my family. So, I grabbed my book and headed out to join all the other pissed off protesters, then I got a text from my mum, ‘Stay safe, very proud of you’. And that is why I bothered getting out of bed – for my family and all the other families whose lives are being ripped apart by these cuts.
My mum works for a University and organises research grants and general management. It was inevitable really, but I was still shocked got when I got the call a few weeks ago, ‘Sweetheart, my jobs been cut’. At first I was sad for my mum, who has worked so hard for the last ten years, and has single-handedly raised me and my brother who has severe autism. But then the sadness became anger when the realisation hit that she has to fight off about 300 people to get a job. If she’s unemployed that’s one thing but the worry that my brother’s disability living allowance might be cut is overwhelming my mum and me. He’s 21 and lives in a house with 5 other disabled adults. He has a full time carer and loves living there. It’s expensive but he needs it. And if this support is axed, I really don’t know what we’ll do. He can’t read or write and has the mental age of a 2 year old but he still has to be taken to the local Job Centre to prove that our family is not ‘scamming the system’.
I didn’t do politics at University and admittedly I would struggle to explain the details of macro-economics and how it relates to the financial crisis (who can!). But what I might lack in detailed knowledge of political and economic theory, I compensate with the feelings inside that what this government is doing is just wrong. It’s wrong to cut disability living allowance to those that need it to survive. It’s wrong to make people with disabilities feel like they are criminals and cheats. And it’s wrong to smash our society into a million pieces, whilst the bankers’ pockets are filled with fat bonuses and companies are allowed to evade taxes in off-shore accounts.
Sometimes I feel disheartened to the extent I just don’t know what to do. This is what I’ve done so far: I’ve written to my MP, I’ve moaned in pubs, I’ve cried, I’ve signed petitions and I’ve thought about running away from it all. But after despair, all that is left is action. And there is loads of action out there. So see you on the streets, I’ll be there this weekend, and the next, and the next, standing up for what’s right for my family and yours.
Guest post: Report on the UfSO Inaugural Bank Flash
Posted on Tue 15th Feb 2011, 1:47pmThis is a guest post by The University of Strategic Optimism.
On the morning of 24th November 2010 the University for Strategic Optimism held its inaugural lecture at a branch of Lloyds TSB bank near London Bridge station. The operation had been planned with an almost theatrical precision: watches were synchronised, the reconnaissance was unveiled, a location was revealed and at precisely 12 noon a secret crowd of around fifty people suddenly materialised out of the nearby streets and shops and began to flow swiftly and excitedly into the small bank.
They had come from many directions to listen to UfSO professor Étienne Lantier kick off the university's winter (of discontent) term, giving the first instalment of a collectively written course entitled Higher Education, Neo-Liberalism and the State. It seemed this was to be a practical workshop. As Lantier began to address the assembled body of citizens, a general bemusement from the bank's customers gave way to a largely supportive reaction as they too stopped to listen to the important truths that were being conveyed. This was a truth that has been spoken in many different ways, at many different times and in many different contexts, but it is one that needs to be spoken again and again, so that we do not come to forget it or begin to disbelieve in its urgent power. Indeed it often seems as though it could not be true, its facts are seemingly incredible, but it is ultimately the stark and unavoidable truth of an almost inconceivable injustice. It is the simple fact that the majority of ordinary people in the UK, indeed people in many countries across the world; the poor, the hard-working, often some of the most vulnerable in society; are being shamelessly robbed of their livelihoods, their essential public services and their futures in order to pay for the greed of a tiny, ultra-wealthy elite who continue to make huge profits at the expense of those numberless masses which they so remorselessly exploit.
Despite brief and ineffectual protestations from the branch manager, stripped of his authority in the face of the message that stood so plainly in front of his eyes, the bank was momentarily transformed into a truly public space, the living lecture theatre of this new university. This gesture, set on reclaiming the hushed and shady architecture of the bank, returning it to the public, by whom it was after all was owned, seemed to speak that truth to people. That day, November the 24th, was the day of a large student demonstration in London against fees, cuts and the wholesale introduction of a neoliberal marketplace into higher education. After leaving the bank that lunchtime, many amongst the audience headed down to Whitehall to swell the ranks of those crowds that had earlier gathered in Trafalgar Square. After reaching Whitehall and joining the main march they were lawlessly detained, 'kettled' like countless others, by a shamelessly political police operation of entrapment, violence and intimidation. This was a reminder, if any were needed, of those the government is eager to see punished for this crisis of capitalism: namely the young, the vulnerable, those least able to speak out, those least able to pay.
In its actions parliamentary democracy has been reduced to a performance of representation where public dissent is managed and enclosed by a government whose only response to the crisis is to proceed with, and intensify, the zombie logic of global capitalism. This is why it continues to be essential to speak the truth to those in power, those who are really to blame, in the banks, the multinational corporations and in government, a government without democratic legitimacy and bankrolled by those very financiers who caused the crisis in the first place. We must make plain that we will not be condemned and that we understand the systemic barriers to our wellbeing can be challenged. This is not a plea to morality that imagines a more benign economic-state that cares for its subjects, nor is it a plea to the super-rich to share their wealth. Recent social uprisings across the world are about more than austerity cuts. They stand against the eviction of democracy from politics and simultaneous loss of public space to the domain of private property. We can act, take back our agency, and map our own future.
On the morning of 24th November 2010 the University for Strategic Optimism held its inaugural lecture at a branch of Lloyds TSB bank near London Bridge station. The operation had been planned with an almost theatrical precision: watches were synchronised, the reconnaissance was unveiled, a location was revealed and at precisely 12 noon a secret crowd of around fifty people suddenly materialised out of the nearby streets and shops and began to flow swiftly and excitedly into the small bank.
They had come from many directions to listen to UfSO professor Étienne Lantier kick off the university's winter (of discontent) term, giving the first instalment of a collectively written course entitled Higher Education, Neo-Liberalism and the State. It seemed this was to be a practical workshop. As Lantier began to address the assembled body of citizens, a general bemusement from the bank's customers gave way to a largely supportive reaction as they too stopped to listen to the important truths that were being conveyed. This was a truth that has been spoken in many different ways, at many different times and in many different contexts, but it is one that needs to be spoken again and again, so that we do not come to forget it or begin to disbelieve in its urgent power. Indeed it often seems as though it could not be true, its facts are seemingly incredible, but it is ultimately the stark and unavoidable truth of an almost inconceivable injustice. It is the simple fact that the majority of ordinary people in the UK, indeed people in many countries across the world; the poor, the hard-working, often some of the most vulnerable in society; are being shamelessly robbed of their livelihoods, their essential public services and their futures in order to pay for the greed of a tiny, ultra-wealthy elite who continue to make huge profits at the expense of those numberless masses which they so remorselessly exploit.
Despite brief and ineffectual protestations from the branch manager, stripped of his authority in the face of the message that stood so plainly in front of his eyes, the bank was momentarily transformed into a truly public space, the living lecture theatre of this new university. This gesture, set on reclaiming the hushed and shady architecture of the bank, returning it to the public, by whom it was after all was owned, seemed to speak that truth to people. That day, November the 24th, was the day of a large student demonstration in London against fees, cuts and the wholesale introduction of a neoliberal marketplace into higher education. After leaving the bank that lunchtime, many amongst the audience headed down to Whitehall to swell the ranks of those crowds that had earlier gathered in Trafalgar Square. After reaching Whitehall and joining the main march they were lawlessly detained, 'kettled' like countless others, by a shamelessly political police operation of entrapment, violence and intimidation. This was a reminder, if any were needed, of those the government is eager to see punished for this crisis of capitalism: namely the young, the vulnerable, those least able to speak out, those least able to pay.
In its actions parliamentary democracy has been reduced to a performance of representation where public dissent is managed and enclosed by a government whose only response to the crisis is to proceed with, and intensify, the zombie logic of global capitalism. This is why it continues to be essential to speak the truth to those in power, those who are really to blame, in the banks, the multinational corporations and in government, a government without democratic legitimacy and bankrolled by those very financiers who caused the crisis in the first place. We must make plain that we will not be condemned and that we understand the systemic barriers to our wellbeing can be challenged. This is not a plea to morality that imagines a more benign economic-state that cares for its subjects, nor is it a plea to the super-rich to share their wealth. Recent social uprisings across the world are about more than austerity cuts. They stand against the eviction of democracy from politics and simultaneous loss of public space to the domain of private property. We can act, take back our agency, and map our own future.