OccupyLSX vs the British Establishment

I was in the High Court on Wednesday to witness the judgement handed down to the occupiers as to whether they had the right to keep camping outside St. Paul’s Cathedral.  The court room was standing room only, sweating with protesters, bored-looking journalists and a handful of City of London Corporation bods who resembled such a cliched embodiment of cynical malice I began to wonder whether looking “generally evil” was a prerequisite in the City’s interview process.

Judge Lindblom made us all wait rather a long time for his entrance but Occupiers filled the minutes with impromptu “Mic Checks” and gallows humour: no-one was in any doubt that the verdict would go against us.  Lindblom enthusiastically reeled off the many strengths he found in the City of London’s case against the camp and then added a patronising addendum praising the undoubted “passion” of the protesters, which was met with sarcastic tuts from the packed public galleries. The Judge and the Lawyer for the City dovetailed so well with each other they were almost finishing each other’s sentences. They went through the motions in tandem as if enacting a role-play in order to, on the one hand, convince the laymen Occupiers in court that this was “all very normal practice, you see” and on the other, sprinkle proceedings with not-too-veiled warnings of the consequences of even peaceful resistance to an eviction.  The disdain and class prejudice  was palpable.

So what is the end result of it all? Barring a successful appeal, the prospect of which is slim at best, bailiffs will be sent in next Friday, just a few days after Occupy LSX’s 100th day anniversary, to remove all of the tents and anyone who tries to remain in them.  It will be up to individuals to decide how they will react to events on the eviction day but there is no doubt that for many it will be traumatic, none more so than some of the homeless contingent among the Occupy community. During the General Assembly on the steps of St. Paul’s that night, a homeless Irish girl named Shamrock spoke on the microphone for the very first time. Visibly emotional, she explained how much the camp meant to her, how people had helped her and how beneficial it was for her to feel a part of something. There is something intangibly special about Occupy. It has also worked its magic on me too. I’ve felt welcome every time I’ve been to St. Paul’s and have found the open discussion and pervasive, angry yearning for social and economic justice inspirational.

By the letter of the law I presume that Lindblom’s judgement was correct but the judicial system has merely shown itself, like the legislature, the mainstream media and the UK’s other creaking, inert institutions to be incapable of dealing with, or even confronting, the existential and systemic crises of our age.  The High Court, like the Houses of Parliament, is cloaked in archaic language and anachronistic convention and tradition which serve to obscure the workings of government from the majority of the British people.  What is abundantly clear is that the political and economic elite of this country want Occupy gone and with that as the decided aim, they can then mould ways of achieving it. The majority of the media have enjoyed the initial spectacle and the great copy that Occupy provides but eventually they’ve grown tired of looking for new ‘angles’ to sell papers or get hits from and instead of confronting the big questions Occupy raises decide often to focus on petty symptoms of problems while ignoring causes. The signs outside the Stock Exchange in Paternoster Square have for some weeks now proclaimed “we are open for business as usual.”  And ultimately that is what the establishment wants. The laws, the power balance, the current way in which society is constituted has been designed to know only ‘business as usual’ and they reflexively want to return to their safety blanket of credit-fuelled delusion. But Occupy and many others around the world know that this crisis is no normal crisis or the ‘business cycle.’ It is eating away at all of the old assumptions as to how an economy and polity can function.

The moment in court when I could not help but laugh to myself was when the Judge announced that one of his considerations in his decision was the City’s argument that they worried about the “damage being done to the local environment” around St. Paul’s by the Occupiers.  What sick irony do we have when the City of London Corporation can use environmental damage as a pretext to evict a few hundred tents and the authorities legitimate their claims? This is the City that acts as the engine room for the most rapacious, resource-hungry, and ecologically damaging form of globalised capitalism in the history of the planet. A City who are the proudest and most powerful lobbyists and promoters of failed neoliberal policies at home and abroad. It was they who laid the foundations for the reckless greed, cynical lending and tax avoidance and evasion on an industrial scale that have put us in the position we are in today. And yet the establishment sides with them because it is unable to look at the bigger picture and instead retreats into quibbling over detail and minutiae, putting off the major questions with symptoms and side issues, fiddling while the planet burns.

Occupy is chaotic, it’s beyond simple labels, it’s flawed but it is honest, and heartfelt. People involved in Occupy care about the big issues that have been absent from political and media discourse because that discourse has been brought to you by big business for decades. Occupiers passionately care about social justice and inequality, they care that the planet is headed towards runaway climate change and that a continuation of the status quo is a death warrant for bio-diversity, thousands of unique species, pristine rainforest and eventually the basis for human life on this planet.  These issues are going nowhere and so I can only hope and believe that the global Occupy movement is going nowhere either.

“It is dangerous to be right in matters where established men are wrong”    ~  Voltaire

By Michael Richmond