Supermarket Sweep

Frozen Planet Shock New Footage from The Poke on Vimeo.


When I read the other day of supermarket uberchain Tescos £5 billion collapse in its share values, I was unable to sleep...for celebrating. After initially pondering exactly just how much cheese and wine "celebrity" chef Anthony Worrall-Thompson had taken from their shelves, I reckoned that those who live by predatory capitalism will die by it too - apparently over Christmas, marketing initiatives by the other big chains, Sainsburys especially, made big inroads to Tescos customer base. And so now the shareholders are worrying about their dividends following the company issuing a profits warning - coincidentally just after their Chief operating officer sold some £200,000 of shares for "necessary family expenditure"; must be quite a family!

Really? What exactly?

Of course, given just how totally unethical Tesco has been in its rampant takeover and destruction of local high streets, reaching a point now where it has a third of the food trade in the UK and a fifth of the clothes trade - nearly one in every four pounds spent by Britons is handed over in one of its outlets - the prospect of one of the other three big chains (Asda-Walmart, Morrisons and Sainsburys) benefiting from its decline is frankly cold comfort. Between them, these four outlets supply nearly 80% of our food - a dangerously high concentration in anyone's book for a whole variety of reasons.

All the supermarkets behave in questionable ways - undercutting small local shops, hammering suppliers to produce goods at ridiculously low cost (which is passed on in the form of higher profits to shareholders, not lower prices for consumers), paying low wages to marginalised workers on insecure contracts and using production and distribution methods for their "Just-In-Time" delivery systems which are environmentally devastating.

With the focus in the last three years on the corruption and crisis in the banking and financial sector, the retail food sector and the supermarkets have quietly continued their aggressive expansion into every nook and cranny of our lives. With even corner shops and petrol stations now sucked up by the four chains, they have moved online as well with home delivery - so that you buy even more of your needs from the one capitalist supplier. Relentlessly pushing the concept of convenience, they provide everything - food is nearly a byline set next to any household good you might want, books, dvds, clothes, medicines and even banking and insurance.

The result is a super-concentrated and inherently precarious system of supply - as the petrol dispute ten years ago showed, when supermarket bosses warned they had only 3 days supply of food in their stores, any significant disruption to their national distribution arrangements could spell real crisis for ordinary people. Imagine a major dislocation of energy supplies, or severe weather, or a financial crash that bankrupted a couple of these chains - the bailout required by Governments would totally eclipse the banking crisis. With hunger a real prospect within a few days, the potential for riot and chaos predicted in the NEF publication "Nine Meals from Anarchy" would be a direct result. We could face a national emergency of unprecedented proportions.

So, ecosocialists and any others concerned about sustainable and just societies need to ensure that the food retailers and supermarkets are as much a focus of campaigns like Occupy as the banks. The damage they have done is arguably more significant than the financial sector's misdeeds and the continuing risk they pose is massive. We need to legislate to create local, community food initiatives and revive small-scale production and supply of food and other goods. It is not just good for the planet - it is safer for society too.

NYPD Raids OWS Livestream Studio, Arrests Volunteers | AlterNet

Click on the link: NYPD Raids OWS Livestream Studio, Arrests Volunteers | AlterNet 

Freedom of speech is struck another blow in the USA as Republican voters split 2:1 in favour of homophobic racists in Iowa.

Captain Pepper - the last refuge of the ruling class?

Western democracy in action - 84 year old woman pepper-sprayed by the police in Seattle protest.

Remember the London riots? A week of smashed glass and free shopping across the big cities of England (Scotland was notably free of any trouble), coupled with assaults on passersby and the looting of peoples flats and cars. The Guardian has just run a fascinating series of reports into the motives of the rioters, many of whom clearly saw themselves at least justified in their actions by a political environment that permits politicians to survive their great expenses swindle with a handful of token sacrificial lambs, and bankers to be rewarded for greed, failure and deceit. As an earlier blog asked, what separated our rulers and rioters beyond a few shards of broken glass?

Yet how did this all start? Well, you should remember the shooting dead of Mark Duggan. The police failure to inform his family of his death and subsequent refusal to talk to them led to a demonstration which many see as the trigger for the riots.


It is bizarre how this aspect of the riots has become so downplayed. Instead, the riots have passed into the myth that those taking part were all young people involved in gangs - when in truth very few were gang members; there was a wide range of age groups involved; and most who took part did not have previous convictions.

What the statistics do show is that most were from poor backgrounds, many unemployed or in low wage jobs. And as any historian will tell you, throughout history, deprive people of any hope of a genuine stake in society, add grossly excessive inequality, and while your riots will not be spearheaded by the Vanguard of the Revolution, they will be prompted and justified by the ruling class' exploitation of those around them.

We have heard a lot from the Occupy Movement about the 1% and the 99%. And it is very true that a tiny, tiny elite control the bulk of the world's wealth. But while going for the 1% is pretty attractive - after all, by default, hardly anyone is one of them! Hell, we are nearly all part of the 99%. The implication then is that it is all the fault of the 1% - everyone else is clear.

And yet- consider this: to be in the top 10% of the income bracket in the UK, you need to earn slightly over £54,000 p.a. And the top 10% - some six million people- now own twelve times more than the bottom six million, a huge disparity, and around double the ratios to be found in France and Germany, who have a more socially oriented political settlement. British inequality has doubled in the last generation. In the times of plenty under neoliberal New Labour, the rising prosperity of the average person meant that the exponential rise in the wealth of the richest went unnoticed - Peter Mandelson was able to trumpet that Labour were "supremely relaxed about people who get filthy rich" (to be fair to Mandy, he did add "..as long as they pay their taxes" - though of course, New Labour made certain they had fewer and fewer taxes to pay).

But under the neoliberal austerity economics of the Con Dems in recessionary Britain, the excessive disparities in wealth are becoming more and more evident, especially as the richest continue to award themselves massive pay increases in spite of their telling everyone else to tighten their belts. In the USA, similarly with its full-on liberal capitalist ethic, the disparities are even worse - and the response, including the widespread deployment of vicious pepper spray against perfectly peaceful protesters (see the video below and the photo above), does not bear any explanation other than that the authorities are actively suppressing dissent of even the most mildly social democratic type.

And so, without a stake in society, what impulse is there to support and obey the rules of society? And what then is left to protect the rulers but the increasingly brutal force and more and more powers to intrude and intervene in people's lives - new laws, for example, will allow the authorities to enter peoples homes to remove political window posters deemed to be inappropriate if, for example, the leader of China is passing nearby and someone puts up a Free Tibet notice. We wouldn't want to threaten the terms of the trade, after all - the rich might be upset.

The recourse to increasingly militaristic crowd control tactics in pseudo-democratic capitalist states around the world is deeply unwelcome and a warping of good policing. More than that though, it is a real threat to democratic debate and freedom of speech.

The effects of pepper spray:

OCCUPY CONSTANTINOPLE – Back to the future with Byzantine Economics

“The more powerful should not injure the less powerful, but that everything should be weighed by a just measure...”                        
                                   Prologue to the Byzantine “Book of the Prefect”, 912 AD.


Last week came the news that, at the same time as they have been urging wage restraint by their workers and insisting that the “bloated” public sector needs to be slashed, Britain’s bosses have dug their snouts even deeper into the trough. In the last recessionary year, the Chief Executives of the Top 100 Listed Companies in the UK have been awarded 43% increases in their pay packages, while the next level down of Directors has gained even more – 49% increases on average.

There was much awkward wringing of hands by Government Ministers, embarrassed by the extreme extent and blatant arrogance of these people, many of them funders and supporters of the same Tory regime that has assured the suffering public that “we are all in it together” in facing the economic downturn. But none of them undertook to implement any hard and fast action that might change this utter fest of rapacious greed.

Finally breaking the Church of England’s silence over the demands of the Occupy London protesters, the Archbishop of Canterbury last weekend asked “Are economics too important to be left to economists?”, positing the need for some ethical underpinning of the economic framework – including supporting the so-called Robin Hood tax on financial transactions. And yet, is capitalism capable of delivering such a benign outcome at all? So how do we deal with these people? If not capitalism, then what?

Given that the entire raison d’etre of capitalism – the maximising of profit – inevitably drives this grasping process of exploitation of resources to exhaustion coupled with the excessive accumulation of wealth, the long-term answer can only be through adopting a new economic ideology – one embracing sustainable stewardship of resources and a genuine redistribution of both power and wealth. It is a measure of the success of the capitalist media’s propaganda that socialism remains a dirty word even among many progressives, but that makes the need for new solutions and the potential for a new society no less possible, nor any less imperative.

All economic systems have to accommodate choice and exchange in some way – the central question has to be whether this is determined by wealth measured and expressed by monetary power or by human need identified and agreed by a wider social construct. In this, market mechanisms may have a greater or smaller role to play according to the culture of the society in question – and this has as often as not in human history depended on ethics or morality as much as on cash in hand.

For example, ninth century Byzantium, the eastern successor of the Romans and the most successful state of its time, purposefully adopted an economic ideology based on self-sufficiency and just distribution. The Emperors, driven in part by Orthodox Christian theology and in part by political considerations, adopted a series of laws which held “just exchange” to be at the centre of any market transactions. In particular, policy focused on tackling the rapacious excesses of the dynamoi, the powerful nobility, over the poorer citizenry and especially the peasantry.

And so, in a society that was significantly monetised in its exchange process (as opposed to barter which remained a significant component in other contemporary economies), we find a series of edicts which, among other things, forced the free return of land bought from famine-struck peasants by their exploitative lords for less than half the assessed “just value”. We find laws rendering void any contract where the workman had agreed a rate lower than the “just wage” and in the realm of lending, the rich were forced to charge lower rates of interest than less prosperous lenders. In the capital, Constantinople, craft guilds were established to licence producers in such a way that, while competition was permitted within a particular sector, even the most successful producers in one field could not diversify into others and come to dominate the supply of goods to the consumer. The Prefect of the City regulated the production of key goods to ensure sufficiency of supply to the population, with the Government intervening where this was threatened (especially in terms of staple foods like bread and fish), and to prevent “unreasonable profit” – an established principle in Byzantine law.



The Byzantine Economy  - putting the Just into Justinian?

 Perhaps of greatest contemporary relevance, it was the Byzantines establishment of the practice that, while supply and demand might inevitably affect the costs of producing goods and that Government might be limited in its long-term ability to temper this, it was both possible and indeed a moral imperative that there should be a legal limit on profit margins. Consequently, Patriarch Nicephoros in the ninth century set this as no more than 10% of cost, a figure so low that it would have many a modern venture capitalist choking on his swill.

And yet, in the precarious Medieval world, Byzantium’s adoption of an ethical, redistributive economics worked highly effectively. With a million inhabitants by 1100, Constantinople flourished as the wealthiest city in Europe and the Near East, inevitably incurring the envy and desire of predatory neighbours.

Briefly, it is of note that the effective end of the Byzantine Empire did not come through economic ruin. Rather, the death blows fell through a combination of the violent reassertion of power by the military aristocracy, who rolled back many of the laws during the turbulent late eleventh and twelfth centuries, and then through the sacking of Constantinople in 1204 by the Fourth Crusade, led by the avowedly mercantilist Venetian Republic. Although the Empire lingered on in various forms for a further quarter of a millennium, these two forces – the propertied and the moneyed – between them destroyed what had been one of the most successful and long lived civilisations in the Mediterranean world.

Sustainable and ethical economics, and equitable distribution of wealth, were not new even at the height of Byzantium. Aristotle had written of justice in exchange in 360 BC, Roman law incorporated the concept and the 4th century Church Fathers advocated justice as including material equity. And all accepted the role of the State as the “judge” (Aristotle’s concept) in “restoring equality between those who have much and those who have little, by giving to one what he takes from the other”.

Indeed, for most of humanity’s existence, societies have functioned on the basis of a “steady state economy”, where output expanded slowly and in tiny increments, if at all. Consequently, how resources and material wealth were shared inevitably became a central policy issue. It has only been since the early Renaissance that first long distance trade and then the technological and productive potential of the Industrial Revolution led to the fairly recent capitalist construct that wealth can be skewed horrendously disproportionately, yet everyone can be better off.

Plainly, with so many key raw materials near or past peak production while demand rises inexorably, if this nostrum ever contained any truth at all, it no longer holds. With growth rates now facing long term decline, the capitalist system is morally bankrupt and in the coming decades will be practically bust. Even beyond the current recessionary cycle, resource scarcity looms and the need for an Aristotelian Judge has never been greater – we need to re-embrace an economics where, once again, as one economic history has described tenth century Byzantium, “...individual economic action is limited by the needs of society as a whole.”(as succinct a definition of contemporary ecosocialism as I have seen).

The question for our society and our world is whether we wait for our system of economics to collapse in pain, blood and violence, or whether we take control of our contemporary dynamoi now and begin the transition to a happier, more egalitarian, and sustainable future.

Visiting St Paul's

I walked the Occupy London encampment outside St Paul's Cathedral today - a wonderful mix of people, with a huge range of views; but filled with hope. The good citizenship of the protesters was evident in every way - from the orderly nature of the layout, to the solar panels powering some of their gear, the recycling bins in the centre, and the "artistic wall" surrounding the cathedral emergency exit, with its injunction not to post banners as these might create a health and safety hazard.

What was immediately evident was that there was never any need at all for the Cathedral to be closed - there is acres of space for tourists to access the building and there was no need for the wedding a couple of weeks ago to have gone in the side entrance. But that seems to be history now anyway as even the Archbishop of Canterbury has today spoken sympathetically of the demands of the camp and supported the "Robin Hood Tax".

"There are even right wingers here," one man told me as he handed out leaflets. "They support capitalism - but not the nasty sort we've got."

As he spoke, the speculators and bankers were having their lunch breaks around the square, tutting at the riotous visual display, their nearby offices and restaurants neatly cordoned off by the police - presumably to stop the violence that never comes, the riot or damage that the demonstrators do not inflict, do not threaten and do not want. Throughout, they have repeatedly offered to talk - to the St Paul's authorities, to the City of London as well as to the bankers, until now with little response.

Things have changed a little in the last day or two, but it is clear that both Church and State hope that their new tactics will reach the same end of moving the demonstration on without effecting the real, systemic changes we need to end the inequality and poverty that have moved the Occupy movement around the world. Still they are derided as either wasters or dreamers - "St Paul's Mob Wins the Day", the Sun headline proclaimed today.

"Nice" capitalism - now there's a notion if there ever was....

St Pauls' Canon Resigns In Support of Occupy Protesters

Rev Giles Fraser, the Canon Chancellor of St Paul's Cathedral, has resigned as police and the City of London Authority prepare to take action to forcibly remove the tented protest encamped outside the cathedral. Rev Fraser has criticised the plans and refused to collaborate with them. The authorities have insisted on proceeding and, in the absence of any support from his superiors, Rev Fraser has stuck by his principles and given up his job. It is heartening to see him take such a stand, but at a dreadful and unfair cost to himself.

As blogged earlier this week (click here), the Trustees of the Cathedral are drawn heavily from big finance and stockbroking backgrounds and could be expected to be sympathetic to the banks which are the target of the Occupy demonstrations - they ended up at St Paul's after being forced away from the City itself. Rev Fraser would appear to have been surrounded by men and women whose views were alien to his own - none of the Trustees has so far followed him in resigning, so must be deemed to support the police plans.

It is a travesty that big business would appear to be calling the shots over a church which whose founder threw moneylenders out of the temple and warned people that they could not serve both God and Money. The City has repeatedly refused offers to meet and talk from the protesters, while the Cathedral Trustees have provocatively closed the building on highly spurious health and safety grounds, clearly as a ploy to demonise the protesters - notably, on BBC Question Time tonight, two speakers, the odious Nigel Farage of UKIP and Labour's Gloria di Piero, warned that it would be a national disgrace if the protesters are still there on Remembrance Sunday next week - after all, not even the Nazi Blitz closed the Cathedral.

Evidently, we didn't fight the Second World War to preserve freedoms such as being able to protest peacefully against Government policy.

Adolf Hitler, eat your heart out.

Democracy - Time for Starting Over?

"If liberty and equality, as is thought by some, are chiefly found in democracy, they will be best attained when all alike share in Government to the utmost."  - Aristotle, philosopher, Athens (384 to 322 BC).

Democracy come to Westminster in "V for Vendetta"

Tonight, in the British House of Commons, a farce unfolded, the latest of many to besmirch the self-proclaimed Mother of Parliaments (the moniker itself an utter denial of historical reality). Barely two months ago, the Coalition Government, loftily proclaiming its desire for a new, open democracy and keen to show its embracing of the twitterati, created its E-petitions website. Aside from crashing on its first day as a stampede of would-be hangmen rushed to ask Parliament to restore the gallows, the idea of the website was to introduce a direct link between People and Parliament to counter the widespread cynicism and disillusion about the political process. If your petition gets 100,000 signatures, it "could" be debated in the House of Commons.

But today, this would-be return to the Agora (where the Athenian progenitors of democracy gathered in the citizens' assembly to debate and vote on anything they liked) has fallen at the first fence. Although tonight's debate on whether to hold a referendum on Britain's continued membership of the European Union was not a direct result of an epetition, it came just days after one calling for precisely the same thing passed the 100,000 signature mark.

E-petitions: how it doesn't work...

And how did our Masters respond? Why, they huffed that it was entirely the wrong time to discuss membership of the EU. Prime Minister Cameron, referring to the Eurozone crisis, today likened to proposal as akin to walking away from your neighbour's burning house rather than helping to put the fire out - although at least one neighbour would like Dave to keep his sand-buckets to himself. 

Ignoring opinion polls showing that two-thirds of voters want a referendum sometime soon, the three main party leaders imposed a three-line whip to compel MPs to vote down the motion or face serious consequences to their careers. And they duly did so, by 483 to 111 votes, albeit with a very large Tory revolt. So much for direct democracy - you can have it when we say you can. Socrates, a master of procedure himself, would have been given his cup of hemlock years earlier had he tried that out in the Agora.

And yet this doublespeak about reconnecting the rulers with the ruled is far from confined to the epetition scam. Cameron has played a clever game over the bloated cost of our MPs not by clamping down further on their expenses, which are back at pre-scandal levels, but rather by cutting their numbers from 650 to just 600 - approximately one MP for every 100,000 people. These must be in constituencies of nearly identical size, regardless, it seems, of the impact on the integrity of local communities and how their interests are to be represented.

On Saturday, I met with a Green Party colleague from our neighbouring city of Wakefield to look at how the boundary changes will affect us - my home town of Dewsbury, long represented in the Commons by its own MP, is being split up, with one part linked to Wakefield, which is split in three. Numbers count, not communities. And consequently, people will become ever further alienated from our legislators.

One underplayed feature of this supposed numerical rebalancing of representation is that the Government Cabinet is significantly strengthened in its hold over the Commons. The Government has the Payroll Vote - these are the 140 or so MPs who, as well as being MPs, also hold paid jobs in the Government as Ministers at one level or another. In votes like the one on the European referendum, they are considerably more reliable and loyal to the line decided by the Prime Minister as he has them by the money. If the Cabinet can start out with 140 votes it is nearly half way towards a majority in any vote in a Commons of 600 than one of 650. And so a measure presented as increasing democracy in Parliament is, in fact, one which centralises power even more in the hands of the Government elite and party leaderships.

Even more troubling are the Coalition's plans (steered by the oddly self-sacrificing Nick Clegg) to change electoral registration laws, relaxing the legal requirement to register and removing the obligation on local authorities to ensure that people sign up. It creates a situation where British electoral law will be similar to the pre-civil rights era in many American states, with fears that, as happened in the USA, many marginalised people, the poor, the disabled, ethnic minorities and elderly, will disappear from the voters' roll. Up to ten million voters, about 30% of the total, may drop off the register, MPs were warned - and guess which party will be least affected?

Demokratios - the rule of the people in Athens' Agora

The Coalition Agreement promises to extend transparency in political life and devolve power from central government to communities, but unsurprisingly, the political class is ensuring that any light that is shone on its murky hold over the rest of society is well filtered through the most opaque of prisms. The Liam Fox scandal showed how brazenly Ministers collude with fee-paying, contract-seeking lobbyists, yet the vigorous defence of Fox's behaviour by many Tories was matched only by the silence from Labour benches - no one rocked the leaky boat too much.

Of course, our leaders smugly think that all this will work, that people will buy it. Maybe even some politicians buy it in their own heads, reassuring themselves that they are still beloved of the nation. "Hey, what's up, I'm with you guys," a thoroughly deluded Colonel Gaddafi allegedly told his captors this week, moments before they shot him. Maybe he had listened to too many focus groups.

Our politicians may sneer at demonstrations like Occupy London Stock Exchange. They may think if they suggest the tents put off tourists or (as the dreadful Louise Mensche attempted) claim the protesters are hypocrites if they buy a Starbucks latte that somehow the status quo will prevail. Perhaps, for now, it will, but it may be a Pyrrhic success, a hollow victory which will leave the Commons as nothing but a teetering house of cards. Perhaps St Paul's and the open meetings of Occupy show we can yet return to the Agora and leave behind the jaded, gauche Victorian monstrosity that is the Palace of Westminster.

Occupy London - Update on St Paul's Cathedral and its Trustees' links with Big Money

News on Twitter and other websites tonight that St Paul's Cathedral is threatening legal action to evict the Occupy London Stock Exchange protesters encamped outside the building. This comes after a weekend of claims by the Church authorities that the protesters represent a health and safety threat that has forced the building to be closed to the public - although a wedding went ahead uninterrupted. An Observer newspaper informal survey of tourists visiting the area found that nearly 75% felt the tents added to the ambiance of the Cathedral and provided some contemporary meaning to the site.

However, in spite of their claims, the Cathedral authorities have refused to provide Occupy LSX with any information or advice about how they are creating a health and safety threat, although notably they have confirmed that the protest is not affecting their financial or commercial situation.

In addition, and very troubling, is the revelation that the City of London Health and Safety Manager has told Occupy LSX that the Cathedral has had no recent contact with her - a flat contradiction of the claims by the Church that they had been advised to close on safety grounds.

The organisers had previously taken full advice from the Fire Brigade about how to set out the camp, both for their own safety and the Cathedral's, so increasingly, the Church's insistence on being closed becomes more and more mysterious and their explanation increasingly seems to be rather "economical with the verite". But there again, the Cathedral Trustees are in large part a bunch of bankers, brokers and financiers of one sort or another, so their decision to close the House of God may just possibly not be purely based on some risk assessment by a Safety officer.

The Anglican Church may be at a crossroads of its own making - if it ends up using deceitful means to undermine the protesters, it may finally divorce itself from what reduced links it still tenuously holds with the populace of England. As protesters, speakers, bloggers and others have repeatedly cited, the Christian message in large measure talks of social justice and the iniquities of societies where the rich hold sway. If at this time of crisis and this moment of mass awakening, the authorities inside St Paul's throw their lot in with the pro-bankers, pro-finance speculator Government, they will be isolated for good from their former flock, and deservedly so.

THE BANKING CONNECTION: St Paul's Cathedral Foundation - Trustees

Chairman
Sir John Stuttard  - former Lord Mayor of the City of London; Chartered Accountant; former partner of PriceWaterhouse

Trustees
The Right Reverend Graeme Knowles, Dean of St Paul's
Dame Helen Alexander DBE - deputy Chair of the Confederation of British Industry; Chair of the Port of London Authority; adviser to Bain Capital, a global asset management company.
Lord Blair of Boughton - former Chief of the Metropolitan Police
Roger Gifford - UK head of SEB, a major Swedish-based bank
John Harvey - American entrepreneur in the media field; founder of the Personalized Media Communications Group
Joyce Hytner OBE - London Theatre Director & Arts patron
Gavin Ralston -  Head of Product at Schroder's Bank
Carol Sergeant CBE - senior financier; former head of risk at Lloyd's Bank (to 2010)
John Spence OBE - senior banker; has occupied various key roles with Lloyd's Bank; senior member of the British Bankers' Association; Chair of the Audit Committee of HMRC.

Malachi 3:5
The Lord Almighty says "I will appear among you to judge, and I will testify at once against those who give false testimony, those who cheat employees out of their wages, and those who take advantage of widows, orphans, and foreigners - against all who do not respect me...."

Occupy Heaven! Protestors take on the Jesus Business Model

"Don't believe the Church and State

  And everything they tell you.

  Believe in me,

  I'm with the High Command."

St Paul's Cathedral yesterday announced that it was closing down to worshippers allegedly on health and safety grounds owing to the presence of the Occupy London demonstration's tents outside the hallowed place, about as close to a national church as we have. "It's worse than the Blitz," opined one commentator yesterday and the BBC dutifully reported this under the headline -
Occupy London: Demo forces St Paul's Cathedral to close

Good old Auntie, dutifully doing the Establishment's work for it, along with the Church of England, which as the established church, with Bishops sitting as unelected legislators in the House of Lords, is at the core of our ruling elite.

And yet how accurate is this assertion in this headline, almost implying the Cathedral rather than the City was the target of the demonstration?
Firstly, the demonstrators are at St Paul's as they were banned from protesting where they wanted to go - to the financial centre of the City of London. Secondly, the demonstrators themselves have by any account kept the area very tidy, with eyewitnesses phoning Any Answers on Radio 4 yesterday  afternoon to decry as false statements on the BBC that the area was full of trailing cables and badly positioned tents. Occupy co-ordinators had asked the Cathedral to stay open and kept the entrance clear to help.

Thirdly, and perhaps the most telling, although the dean declared the closure to worshippers as unavoidable on safety grounds, it seems he still took the risk of holding a wedding there on Saturday afternoon - and no, the bride did not wear a hard hat. In fact, she told the Observer newspaper that the demonstration had added to the drama of her Big Day and that "I love the drama!"

Sadly, it seems that when people demonstrate peacefully, carefully and creatively, perhaps because of the particularly difficult threat this poses to the Establishment and its dark propaganda about its opponents, our rulers more than ever have to come up with something to make the protesters appear like threatening animals. No shops have been looted, no police injured, no fire extinguishers thrown - so what is left to the elite to come up with? Ah yes, these anti-capitalists are stopping decent civilised people from worshipping. After all, God is a Tory and in some evangelical circles, especially in the USA, the free market is seen as coterminous with Christianity, while socialism held to be inherently and irredeemably evil. Quite seriously, check out the Jesus Business Model here.  Less full-on, but perhaps more disturbing, is this defence of capitalism from a Judeo-Christian perspective (here), suggesting that opposition to the free market is indeed some form of latter-day heresy.

So little wonder that our leaders might like to find some way to literally demonize their opponents, and what better than to portray them as having silenced the prayers of the Tory Faithful? After all, Blessed are poor, as long as they stay that way.

This of course defies the fact that many people of all faiths, including a wide spectrum of Christians, are taking active part in these global demonstrations. This includes many Evangelicals, motivated by their belief in Christian stewardship into calling for social justice in place of the rank capitalism that is damaging our world. And so the assertion by one commentator that Christian religion and capitalism are natural allies is denying the validity of the beliefs of others of his faith. Difficult, even dangerous days indeed.


What, in Heaven or on Earth, would Jesus do?