It’s cold in the Occupation Records office in a UBS-owned building on Sun Street, now occupied by the activities of Occupy London. I drag myself out of the warmth of my bed – a half deflated air mattress and a bundle of sleeping bags – and reach for my phone, […]
This government is about to destroy the lives of hundreds of thousands – possibly even millions – of disabled people, and hardly anyone is fighting to stop it, because they believe the government when they say, “the most vulnerable will be protected.” It is simply not true. Most of the […]
The New Year had scarcely begun before politicians of all parties were bickering over who could provide the toughest clinical assessment of those claiming jobseekers. Their proposed treatment: welfare cuts and a massive dose of workfare. What does this have to do with the Occupy movement? Everything. Workfare is another […]
Nick Pickles, head of the pressure group Big Brother Watch, counts the cost of the UK’s surveillance cameras. Back in 2010, Big Brother Watch conducted the first study of the true cost burden of CCTV to local councils in the United Kingdom. The 342 local councils who disclosed figures had […]
“I think the poorest he that is in England has a life to live as the greatest he…and I do think that the poorest man in England is not bound in a strict sense to the government that he has not put himself under.” These words of the republican Leveller, […]
Workers’ co-operatives are an anomaly. They exist within the current system while embodying its antithesis. Maybe that’s why governments have ignored them. Despite a history dating back to the Industrial Revolution and the existence of over 2,000 UK-based workers’ co-operatives, there is no legal definition of a co-op in Britain. […]
For years, it seemed like news from across the pond was going from bad to worse, but as protests began springing up in the US, it became clear that the Americans were out-doing us. We caught up soon enough, and the movement went global, but many of our tactics (such […]
CONNECT <-> Occupy began as an original, direct, popular and spontaneous response to a world crisis that is destroying individual lives and the natural environment. Occupy challenges the inequality and the division by which unfathomable wealth is accumulated by a few and untold miseries are faced by the many. Occupy […]
If it is true that wars begin in the minds of men then Iran and Western powers have been at a state of war for some time. Martial rhetoric has been accompanied by steady military build-up and unprecedented diplomatic shut-down as each side throws away their steering wheel in this […]
At a recent meeting at the Bank of Ideas I overheard one keen contributor hailing the ‘death of capitalism’ – a worthy aspiration perhaps, even if capitalism might have answered back, to borrow Mark Twain’s quip, that ‘reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.’ We need to be a […]