The Recession Part II - St Paul's Cathedral Protest

You may not want to read my blogs any more as according to the Daily Mail I am apparently now a member of a 'pot-smoking rabble'!

This is the term used by the paper to denigrate those who protested at St Paul's cathedral against the crazy system that I described last month, conveniently labelling the wide spectrum of views as 'anti-capitalist'. I would use less emotive terms such as 'anti-greed', 'anti-poverty', 'anti-corruption', etc. myself.

I was impressed by those members of St Paul's clergy who supported the protest, and disappointed in equal measure by those who didn't. After all, the Christian faith is supposed to be against amassing riches while others suffer (nb: FSTE directors give themselves a 49% rise while it's more cuts for the rest of us!).

So, as the only people currently respresenting my view are the protesters, I turned up at the Bank of England with a friend of mine to add our support. We soon discovered that the protest had already been moved on, presumably as St Paul's cathedral was a less sacred place to have a protest than the financial district!

Upon arriving at Sir Christopher Wren's most famous building (I visited the Westcountry village of East Knoyle, where he lived, during one of my cycling trips earlier this year), we found the protest to be hemmed in by a ring of officers. They said that there had been violence and that we may not get out again. The 'violence' turned out to be one minor skirmish. In the same way that football hooligans have nothing to do with football, I imagine a similar thing was true here.

Once inside the ring, all I observed was a crowd of clued-up, generally quite intelligent people peacefully waving their banners. There was not a fight or a 'jazz cigarette' in sight. We stayed for around five hours and then left without any aggravation whatsoever.

I was only present for the first day of the protest, but I admire those who gave of their time to stay at the site (cue comments about people not having jobs, but then just who is it that is cutting the jobs?).

So, did the papers take any interest in what anybody there had to say? Er... no! The Express was busy having a rant against the French (xenophobic headline guaranteed every day or your money back!) and the rest were trying to denigrate the protest any way they could, most notably by stating that a thermal image revealed all but one tent to be empty. I later heard that this kind of imaging isn't reliable anyway, and panellists on 'Have I Got News For You' even joked that poking the tents with a large stick would have been more decisive. My friend actually went back for several more visits to find the protesters to be anything but 'skulking indoors'.

Now, has anybody been watching TV illusionist, Derren Brown's latest series?
In one episode he demonstrated how a crowd of ordinary people can be whipped up into a crazed frenzy against an individual (or 'individuals'). Whilst being very uncomfortable viewing, it proved a salient point. Many people shape their opinions from the media/papers, but when reading the headlines I often think that they are trying to stir us into this kind of thinking every day, misdirecting our thoughts away from the real cause of the recession and associated problems and onto other targets of their choosing.

With the emergence of results of a recent survey showing that British people now blame the poor rather than the disgusting behaviour of bankers (watch the documentary 'Inside Job', recently shown on BBC TV, if in any doubt), it seems that these papers are achieving their goals.

We often pride ourselves on being democratic in The West, yet how could anybody say that what it happening in Greece is democratic? The country is now being controlled by more powerful nations and ultimately banks. Quite where the wishes of the people come into things, I have no idea. As ever, money is power, and votes seem to change very little.

We all know how a game of monopoly always ends, so crazy as it may seem, it might even be possible to statistically calculate a date by which point one corporation and ultimately one person will own the whole world. That's unless we can put the brakes on the way things are going. All the while we continue to go down this road, politicians randomly clutch at straws as to how to get out of this mess, never once questioning the very system itself that makes recessions inevitable.

Well, while several people I know struggle to keep their houses and many more complain about not being able to afford basic provisions, I for one am glad to have at least done something, however futile, to challenge things.