THE CLEARANCE OF OLSX

So the St.Paul’s camp was removed without a great deal of attention or incident. At the same time the squatted building in Shoreditch that was staging meetings as the Bank of Ideas was emptied, and, according to some reports demolished. This was done without due process, as was the immediate clearing of a disused bank near Leadenhall Market. The St.Paul’s clergy allowed this forcible clearance involving Police and bailiffs to take place right on their doorstep.

Immediately this was done various gainsayers spouting unsubstantiated and malicious garbage about how it had not achieved anything sprung to the front and were given much time to air their views and assure everyone that it was back to politics as usual, that is entrenched and divisive, party based and linked in directly to vested interests and tame journalism that likes to present everything in the same highly conventionalised packages and refuses to attempt to really engage with a profoundly different type of social and political practice. The whole point that 99% of the coverage is missing and the established political class are failing to understand, or pretending not to understand, is that this is not a theoretical exercise, it is actual political activity with no hidden agenda. It is accepting nothing about our dominant social and economic system as a given. It is not making demands because it refuses to accept that the present system can tweaked here and there and be gradually improved through the present form of so-called representative democracy. This is an entirely different animal, and this is why the established politicians of both the so-called right and left cannot bring themselves to utter a single word in support : because it renders them irrelevant. It also renders the cult of the leader, the paternal figurehead, obsolete.

This again was one of the things the big media just failed to get, there was no leader, no posturing, no use of the conventional jargon of political debate. This is simply people getting together in solidarity and trying, with considerable courage and patience, to reach a better way of conducting a society from the very basics with nothing as a given. It takes a degree of imagination to enter into such an area, and many have either not enough intelligence or information to see beyond the physical manifestation of a makeshift group of tents. Arguing against what took place in the precincts of St. Paul’s on the grounds of public convenience or aesthetics is absurd and was clearly used as an excuse to dismantle a real expression of heartfelt disgust at what our society has become and the lies and falsehoods at its centre which enable certain powerful elites to prosper at the expense and to the detriment of the majority.

The current economic system and the social organisation that it requires is no longer justifiable. No more enquiries, no tampering around the edges of the financial system, no more rearrangement of chairs and changing of hats amongst the same groups of players in the same self-selected elites, none of this is good enough anymore. There must be fundamental changes made based on principles of the common good, fair distribution of wealth, the right to shelter and a basic income and the dismantling of the existing obscene and unfit for purpose banking system. The financial system must be overhauled root and branch to put economics at the service of people not people at the service of economics.

No -isms need be applied, all the scary words like Marxism or Socialism, Keynesism which get bandied about as soon as such a subject is raised but the best ideas and concepts from these theorists must be given full attention and seen as the progressive analyses that they were and which can be built upon. To imply as many do that our present economic system is somehow inevitable and cannot be changed is simply no longer tenable. It is a man made system based on certain ideas and concepts from a certain period of history which have become set in stone over the last fifty years and are been tested to destruction, that is to our societies and our environment’s destruction. To blindly hang onto the classical economic theories of the liberal free market which are no longer justified will only exacerbate all the problems and inequities that have become increasingly obvious and are causing myriad social and personal disasters.

Remember Barings Bank which collapsed and we were supposed to believe it was one rogue trader ? More recently News International and the police told us that it was one rogue reporter that was engaged in criminal activity and corruption. These were lies and the lies continue to be made in a last gasp attempt to prop up and maintain the private corporate financial giants and their apologists in the political and social elites. The city and its bedfellow the Corporation of London must become fully transparent and their arcane machinations in blind pursuit of paper profit and rampant materialism be checked and the wealth that they sit on and distribute only to their own or as loans to others must be used for the purpose of the common good and the widest distribution of resources. Banks must respond to social needs and operate for the good of the society not as speculative traders playing with vast sums of money that they have been gifted by the Government.

There should be an absolute cap on pay for all those in the financial sector, if it is to be done for those on benefits it certainly must be done for bankers, they have proven that they will not do anything to change their iniquitous ways and disgraceful pay levels unless it is imposed. Barclays continue to devise elaborate ways to evade paying tax on their ill gotten gains and should be nationalised, they may have been founded by a Quaker but I suggest they are now run by Satanists.

 Malcom Maclaren was not my favourite person but he had one good idea and that was to use the acres of empty space in Canary Wharf to house the homeless and convert it into social housing. A parting thought.