Anti-cuts group holds bank sit-in
Last updated 4 Nov 2010 - 7:10 pm
Members of community campaign group Citizens United occupy a branch of the Royal Bank of Scotland in Glasgow
Campaigners outside a branch of the Royal Bank of Scotland in Glasgow following an occupation of the bank
A group of protesters have occupied a city bank to protest at Government spending cuts.
Campaigners from the Citizens United group walked into a branch of the Royal Bank of Scotland in Glasgow's Gordon Street and announced they would be holding a peaceful sit-in.
Around a dozen people waved placards and handed out leaflets to customers using the bank.
The group, which included pensioners and public sector workers, chanted: "No cuts, no cuts, no cuts" as they held up messages including "Unite against this unnecessary enforced austerity" and "RBS: Robbing Scotland Blind".
They also waved caricatures of Prime Minister David Cameron and Chancellor George Osborne wielding axes.
Some of the bank's staff stood near the doors of the branch and helped customers through the protesters and press while others watched quietly from the sides of the room.
One customer, Campbell Johnstone, a support worker from Glasgow, joined in with the protesters after listening to what they had to say. The 54 year-old said he felt the banks "weren't accountable" to the Government or their customers.
He said he felt they were "fleecing off millions of pounds and not putting anything back into the economy". He said: "I was just passing by and thought this a a good idea. I think the banks got away with it for too long. They don't seem to be accountable to anyone."
A crowd of supporters and curious bystanders gathered outside the branch, some waving placards and carrying leaflets. The protest, which did not disrupt the bank's daily business, ended when police asked the group to leave.
Citizens United organiser Sean Clerkin said the public sector "are paying with their P45s to help the rich get richer".
© Press Association 2010
http://breakingnews.heraldscotland.com/breaking-news/?mode=article&site=hs&id=N0167591288891042857A
Relates to this brilliant article by John Pilger
http://www.newstatesman.com/uk-politics/2010/11/pilger-britain-british
The party game is over. Stand and fight
John Pilger
Published 04 November 2010
The lesson of the French anti-government protests is that “normal” politics exists only to promote corporate interests. Britain must prepare for a rebirth of the only thing that works — direct action.
"Rise like lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number!
Shake your chains to earth, like dew
Which in sleep had fall'n on you:
Ye are many - they are few."
These days, the stirring lines of Percy Shelley's "Mask of Anarchy" may seem unattainable. I don't think so. Shelley was both a Romantic and political truth-teller. His words resonate now because only one political course is left to those who are disenfranchised and whose ruin is announced on a government spreadsheet.
Born of the "never again" spirit of 1945, social democracy has surrendered to an extreme political cult of money worship. This reached its apogee when £1trn of public money was handed unconditionally to corrupt banks by a Labour government whose leader, Gordon Brown, had previously described "financiers" as the nation's "great example" and his personal "inspiration".
This is not to say parliamentary politics is meaningless. It has one meaning now: the replacement of democracy with a business plan for every human activity, every dream, every decency, every hope, every child born.
No rationale
The old myths of British rectitude, imperial in origin, provided false comfort while the Blair gang built the foundation of the present "coalition". This is led by a former PR man for an asset stripper and by a bagman who will inherit his knighthood and the tax-shielded fortune of his father, the 17th Baronet of Ballintaylor. David Cameron and George Osborne are essentially fossilised spivs who, in colonial times, would have been sent by their daddies to claim foreign terrain and plunder.
Today, they are claiming 21st-century Britain and imposing their vicious, antique ideology, albeit served as economic snake oil. Their designs have nothing to do with a "deficit crisis". A deficit of 10 per cent is not remotely a crisis. When Britain was officially bankrupt at the end of the Second World War, the government built its greatest public institutions, such as the National Health Service and the arts edifices of London's South Bank.
There is no economic rationale for the assault described cravenly by the BBC as a "public spending review". The debt is exclusively the responsibility of those who incurred it, the super-rich and the gamblers. However, that's beside the point. What is happening in Britain is the seizure of an opportunity to destroy the tenuous humanity of the modern state. It is a coup, a "shock doctrine" as applied to Pinochet's Chile and Yeltsin's Russia.
In Britain, there is no need for tanks in the streets. In its managerial indifference to the freedoms it is said to hold dear, bourgeois Britain has allowed parliament to create a surveillance state with 3,000 new criminal offences and laws: more than for the whole of the previous century. Powers of arrest and detention have never been greater. The police have the impunity to kill; and asylum-seekers can be "restrained" to death on commercial flights.
Athol Fugard is right. With Harold Pinter gone, no acclaimed writer or artist dare depart from their well-remunerated vanity. With so much in need of saying, they have nothing to say. Liberalism, the vainest ideology, has hauled up its ladder. The chief opportunist, Nick Clegg, gave no electoral hint of his odious faction's compliance with the dismantling of much of British postwar society. The theft of £83bn in jobs and services matches almost exactly the amount of tax legally avoided by piratical corporations. Without fanfare, the super-rich have been assured they can dodge up to £40bn in tax payments in the secrecy of Swiss banks. The day this was sewn up, Osborne attacked those who "cheat" the welfare system. He omitted the real amount lost, a minuscule £0.5bn, and that £10.5bn in benefit payments was not claimed at all. Labour is his silent partner.
The propaganda arm in the press and broadcasting dutifully presents this as unfortunate but necessary. Mark how the firefighters' action is "covered". On Channel 4 News, following an item that portrayed modest, courageous people as basically reckless, Jon Snow demanded that the leaders of the London Fire Authority and the Fire Brigades Union go straight from the studio and "mediate" now, this minute. "I'll get the taxis!" he declared. Forget the thousands of jobs that are to be eliminated from the fire service and the public danger beyond Bonfire Night; knock their jolly heads together. "Good stuff!" said the presenter.
To the barricades
Ken Loach's 1983 documentary series Questions of Leadership opens with a sequence of earnest young trade unionists on platforms, exhorting the masses. They are then shown older, florid, self-satisfied and finally adorned in the ermine of the House of Lords. Once, at a Durham Miners' Gala, I asked Tony Woodley, now joint general secretary of Unite, "Isn't the problem the clockwork collaboration of the union leadership?" He almost agreed, implying that the rise of bloods like himself would change that. The British Airways cabin crew strike, over which Woodley presides, is said to have made gains. Has it? And why haven't the unions risen against totalitarian laws that place free trade unionism in a vice?
The BA workers, the firefighters, the council workers, the post office workers, the NHS workers, the London Underground staff, the teachers, the lecturers, the students can more than match the French if they are resolute and imaginative, forging, with the wider social justice movement, potentially the greatest popular resistance ever. Look at the web; listen to the public's support at fire stations. There is no other way now. Direct action. Civil disobedience. Unerring. Read Shelley and do it.
