Interview with Sam Duckworth

Just before Christmas a special kind of GA was held at St Paul’s with musical interludes between discussion points. Sam Duckworth of ‘Get Cape. Wear Cape. Fly’ was one of the headlining acts. We caught up with him to get his thoughts on Occupy.

The Occupied Times: What first got you interested in Occupy?

Sam Duckworth: I’d been following Occupy from images and tweets that came from New York and quite a few of my friends have spent time out there.

We’ve had a lot of political and social movements, but the one thing that separates this is the one thing we’ve needed for a while, and that’s legs. Globalisation got us in this mess and the fact that the movement is global has sparked me up a little bit. The more I find out, the more people I speak to, the more involved I want to become.

OT: You performed at the Unite Against Fascism protest in Tower Hamlets back in August, do you see that cause and Occupy as part of the same picture?

Sam: I think anything from homelessness to racism is all symptomatic of an age where we don’t really understand the significance of us all being on the same plot of land together. I think it all stems from this idea that [some] people are superior. The thing that’s exciting about Occupy is this idea of consensus and the kind of almost painstaking approach to democracy that unifies people. It says that actually these barriers, you know: sex, creed, race, sexual preference, religious beliefs, whatever… these things unify us because we’re all different.

OT: People here at Occupy have various different skills or resources that they can contribute to the movement, how do you see your own involvement?

Sam: I see my involvement as a sort of mobilisation through social media. What’s been interesting about twitter in particular is people being able to follow things from hash-tags and I guess that having spent a lot of time using social media because of my music, events like today, speaking into the GA, the primary role was to bring people here that haven’t been here before.

Regretfully it’s hard to try and balance every element of my life at once… but then again, I think that’s not really something that’s been looked down upon by anybody here. My first worry was “Oh I haven’t been camping here, or I haven’t been here as much as I would like to be here, is it a problem?” and I think as long as you work within the confines of including everybody then everybody understands that not everyone can be here all the time, but it doesn’t mean that you don’t have things to offer. To see youngsters come down for the first time and see direct democracy in action run by passionate intelligent people is something special.

OT: In today’s GA we focussed on 3 different questions. One of them was “what do you think Occupy should be focussing on?” Where would you like to see it go?

Sam: There’s a lot of focus on the eviction but sometimes there needs to be focus on the legal precedent. We’ve got four occupations in London, if we’re allowed to stay because of the court case; it changes the whole face of protest politics in London. It reopens Parliament Square; it allows people to be able to protest in tents on the land that they pay for through taxes and after eight weeks of being here that would be a massive victory.

It’s a real step forward for challenging frontline politics. Look at the legal action by UKUncut taking the HRMC to court, it was the front page of the Daily Mail yesterday! It’s not often you can start something in the left and a year later it’ll be on the front page of the Daily Mail. What I’d like to see is the same passion and joy and integrity from this place to continue. It would be nice to see another yurt for a women’s safe space too.

OT: If St Paul’s were to get shut down then another occupation could pop up elsewhere. Do you think keeping this site is paramount?

Sam: I think it’s important because the sad thing would be the public perception; this is what we’re battling with. People love to see things fail, and I think the perception of the tents going will be taken as a failure. I think that would take a bit of steam out of the fringe element to people who haven’t been here regularly to understand what’s going on and I think it will deflate some of the people that are here, but I don’t think it’s paramount. It’s way bigger than tents, if it was just about tents then we’d all go to Glastonbury.  I think it will continue regardless of where it is. It’s about making sure the radical nature of the inception of this camp is kept all the way though.

By Natalia Sanchez-Bell