Four million Britons have financed their Christmas using payday loans. This is not a statistic about greed or a lack of ‘personal responsibility’. On average, people have spent less on festivities this year. Instead, the figures point to an economy built upon debt. Unsecured loans with staggeringly high interest rates […]
As The Occupied Times reaches its first birthday, it is a good time to reflect on the past 12 months. We set out to use print and digital platforms to publish a plurality of views; not simply those of established writers and professional ‘journalists’ invested with credibility by the mainstream […]
Humans are innately inquisitive. Curious about the world around us, we yearn to explore and, by extension, to learn. We now live in an information age, something to be celebrated. Instead, what is spreading isn’t free education and the ideals behind open access for all, but monopoly and privatisation. Academic […]
If any doubt remained, the LIBOR scandal has shown that we’re living through a crisis of capitalism itself. There are many out there who cling to the belief that late capitalism still operates under a set of basic rules. When it is revealed, however, that an interest rate central to […]
In Ancient Greece, power was centred around numerous city-states (poleis) acting as distinct political bodies. These poleis were perpetually at war with one another, but also traded together, made military alliances and integrated culturally, with resources at the centre of both conflict and cooperation. It was in this context that […]
“In a society like ours in which people tend to be very isolated and neighbourhoods are broken down, community structures have broken down, people are kind of alone,” writes Noam Chomsky. Speaking in the run-up to International Workers Day, the renowned academic outlined the root of this isolation as observed […]
Celebration of the international labour movement across the globe has taken on many different moods depending upon the political context of the time, sometimes celebratory, at other times volatile. Today, the stakes are high, and the struggle is of vital importance. May Day originated as a commemoration of the Haymarket […]
Picking up a copy of Rupert Murdoch’s jingoistic tabloid newspaper recently, you could be forgiven for running to a mirror to check that you aren’t, in fact, Bill Murray’s character in Groundhog Day. Since The Sun drafted its infamous “45 Minutes From Doom” headline to scare the UK population into […]
After four and a half months of peaceful, prolonged protest, the authorities finally called time on the St Paul’s occupation in the early hours of Tuesday morning. Riot police and bailiffs, enforcing the will of the 1%, were confronted by peaceful defiance from occupiers who were joined in solidarity outside […]
It’s early February. There’s snowfall on the tarpaulins of the St. Paul’s camp, and chill winds force down the temperatures in the City. An unusual sight – normally, white powder in central London only marks the bankers’ bonus season. We are days away from a Court of Appeal hearing on […]