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March on the City 2008

March on the City: On Friday 10 October 2008 several hundred anti-capitalist protesters, mainly students, took to the streets of the City of London to say “We Won’t Bail Out the Bankers’.

The financial crisis had started in 2007, but reached a climax with the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers on September 15 2008 which precipitated an international banking crisis.

Wikipedia sets out the causes of the crisis in some detail, but essentially US banks had been allowed to make more risky loans by changes in US laws which loosened regulations and allowed banks to take part in high risk operations such as proprietary trading and investment banking.

In the US one result of this was the proliferation of mortgage loans to people on low incomes who could really not afford the repayments and eventually defaulted. The problems with ‘subprime mortgages‘ particularly given to many in minority communities in the USA came to a head as a boom in US house prices in the early 2000s was followed by a sharp drop in the value of properties which were the security for the loans.

As Wikipedia comments, “governments deployed massive bail-outs of financial institutions and other palliative monetary and fiscal policies to prevent a collapse of the global financial system.” This resulted in the widespread feeling that those who had created the crisis were being rewarded for their failures.

In the UK, the New Labour government under George Brown made a massive financial intervention, paying £137 billion to the banks in loans and new capital, some of which was later recouped, but leaving a cost of £33 billion. While some support was necessary to avoid a total breakdown of the financial system, many felt that the government should have taken a firmer line and that those responsible should have had to pay for their mistakes and not to seem to have kept their highly paid jobs.

Both Northern Rock – the first UK bank to fail in July 2007 and Bradford & Bingley were taken into public ownership, and RBS/Nat West into majority public ownership. But RBS still ended up costing us £35.5 billion – and the leading bankers still ended up getting huge salaries and big bonuses. The Royal Bank of Scotland seemed to be getting off scot free.

Part of the problems we still see in financial markets came from changes worldwide in the way that trading now takes place. In the UK Margaret Thatcher had brought in the ‘Big Bang’ which abolished traditional practices and introduced electronic trading, greatly increasing volatility.

On My London Diary I give a fairly full account of the actual protest which started at Bank where some protesters tried to storm into the Royal Exchange – long just a prestige shopping centre – and the Bank of England but were easily stopped by police.

There then followed a slow march around parts of the City, with police attempting to stop them at various points and the marchers pushing their way through police lines.

As my pictures show, there was some rather forceful policing at times and some of the press also suffered with the protesters. As I write, “I got a few bruises and my glasses were damaged when police rushed in as I was taking pictures in Lombard St.” But there was none of the confrontational use of trained riot squads that have led to extreme violence at some protests policed by the Met. Policing here was by the City of London Police – along with a guest appearance by one French cop.

Eventually there was a short rally with a few speeches on the corner of Bishopsgate and London Wall after which the demonstrators dispersed. Police seemed fairly relaxed at the end of the protest and I saw no arrests.

I don’t think the protest got much if any coverage in the mass media and most accounts I read on-line were confused, with many suggesting it went to the Stock Exchange. While that might have been a logical place to protest, the marchers actually went in the opposite direction.

March on the City.

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Bonuses are Back Pig Party – 2009

Bonuses are Back Pig Party: I’ve never understood why people who are already paid obscenely high salaries get awarded huge bonuses for the work of people lower down in the organisations they lead. Even less that they still get them when these organisations are obviously failing – as with the water companies. So it was a small piece of good news in February 2024 when the then government announced they would block further bonuses to the water company after they had received £26 million since 2019 despite sewage spills.

Of course many of us felt that they should have been made to repay those bonuses and that the companies that have racked up huge debts while paying out billions to shareholders should be taken into administration to be run to serve the public.

Back in 2008 it was the predatory activities of the banks that led to the financial crash, but in 2009, “Despite everything that has happened over the past year, bankers are still getting bonuses, often at quite obscene levels, far in excess of most people’s annual incomes.”

And on Friday 17th July 2009 ‘The Government of the Dead‘ came to the heart of the City of London to ‘celebrate’ that “City pigs are truly back with their snouts in the trough” with “a ‘Bonuses are Back Pig Party’, wearing pig masks and setting up a trough with ‘Pig Pounds’ mixed with pig swill and getting snouts down and bottoms up to wallow in it.“

The ‘Pig Pounds’ – were deliberately low-tech paper copies of fivers with a pig over the bottom half of the Queen and the pig swill was possibly the real thing but looked like some rather unpleasant and lumpy porridge with cornflakes mixed in.

Some of the protesters had come in fancy dress – city suits – with Chris Knight with his usual top hat and Camilla as Miss Piggy. Many put on latex pig masks and got their heads down in the trough in front of the Royal Exchange, scooping up the swill and the fivers.

More or less together they sang a number of cleverly reworded pig songs “including a number of hits by Miss Piggy, Pinky and Perky, The Simpsons and Piggy Pie“, as will as singing, dancing and miming along with some of the originals between sessions at the trough.

‘Lets Twist Again’, once recorded by Pinky and Perky became
“Come on let’s scam again
Like we did last summer
Come on let’s scam again
Like we did last year
Come on let’s scam again
Scamming time is here.“

“Bonuses Are Back” Chris Knight and the others shouted at City workers on their way home, inviting them to “come and swill in the trough, all provided at the taxpayers expense thanks to Gordon Brown.“

Tourists were bemused, but some stopped to enjoy and photograph the scene, with a few putting on the latex pig masks on offer and joining in.

Even the City of London Police seemed amused rather than worried by the protest, standing back and watching – and without their intervention there was no threat to public order.

After around an hour and a half of watching and taking pictures I decided it was time to go home. I’d taken too many pictures and the fun was wearing off.

Of course the bankers – and other bosses – continued to do well, while the rest of us had to suffer fourteen years of Tory austerity with public services being starved of cash and the NHS, prisons and more deteriorating at pace.

The Labour Party deliberately threw away the chance of getting into government in 2017, when the party under Corbyn got many more votes than in 2024. Starmer didn’t win the election, it was lost by the Tories who were poleaxed by Reform and had become clearly unable to run their own party let alone the country. I have no confidence that our new Labour government will be more than a very slight improvement over their predecessors, though it would be good to be proved wrong.

More at Bonuses are Back Pig Party

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Against Worldwide Government Corruption – Free Asange – 2014

Against Worldwide Government Corruption – Saturday 1st March 2014, ten years ago, saw a small but lively protest “organised, attended and led by people who are appalled at the present state of the UK and the world, and who are convinced that a better world is possible if we got rid of the greedy and corrupt who currently are in change – the party politicians and their governments, the bankers and the corporations, the warmongers and the spies.“

Of course the world is dominated by the rich and powerful and the organisations they have set up and the laws they have established to maintain there domination, though these at least in some places also offer some protection for the poor and powerless. But I don’t really believe that protests like this offer any real hope of changing the situation.

But they perhaps do show us that another world is possible one with “justice and a fairer society, one that doesn’t oppress the poor and disabled, that doesn’t spy on everyone and doesn’t use the media and the whole cultural apparatus as a way of keeping blind to what is really happening.“

It’s the kind of spirit that led to the emergence of the Labour Party and inspired many of its leaders even into my youth – and was in part rekindled by the rise of Jeremy Corbyn, propelled into the leadership of the Labour Party in 2015 by huge support from the ordinary membership. But Labour had long lost its way, its organisation and many MPs sponsored and supported by companies and wealthy individuals inherently opposed to its ideals and dedicated to the maintenance of the status quo.

The protest was a wide-ranging one, and on My London Diary I quoted at some length from the speech before the march by one of the organisers, Mitch Antony of Aspire Worldwide (Accountable System Project for International Redevelopment and Evolution.)
At the end of it he gave a long list of things the march was against:

We march against Global Government Corruption
We march against ideological austerity
We march against privatisation for profit
We march against the bedroom tax
We march against bankers bonuses
We march against the corrupt MPs
We march against state spying on the people
We march against state controlled media
We march against government misrepresentation
We march against warmongering
We march against global tyranny
We march against state sponsored terrorism
We march against the military industrial complex
We march against the militarisation of the police
We march against the suppression of alternative energies
Against Worldwide Government Corruption

The march got off to a poor start, as the advertised meeting point in Trafalgar Square was closed to the public that day, being got ready for a commercial event the following day. Not everybody who came found the new location – and there were aggrieved posts on Facebook from some who failed, though I think they cannot have tried very hard.

Police often find reasons to delay the start of marches, but these protesters were definitely not taking advice from them and set off on the dot at 2pm to march west to the Ecuadorian Embassy where Julian Assange was still confined despite being given political asylum.

On the way the several hundred marchers caused no problems and aroused some interest among those on the streets, mainly tourists. A misguided attempt by officers to stop the march on Piccadilly led to a sit down and was soon abandoned.

When they came to Harvey Nicholls in Knightsbridge some joined in the protest against the store by the Campaign Against the Fur Trade for a few minutes, and a crowd gathered around the main door shouting at this company that still deals in fur and fur-trimmed garments.

But soon people moved on to the Ecuadorian Embassy where Assange was still trapped. Police filled the steps to the building, guarding the door and stopping anyone from entering.

There were far too many people to fit inside the small penned area for protesters on the pavement opposite the Embassy. The protest here in support of of Julian Assange and Edward Snowden and other whistle blowers and over the continued refusal to grant Assange safe passage to Ecuador, continued for around an hour. Many of the protesters then saw the refusal as a personal vendetta against him by then home secretary Theresa May, but it is driven by a continual British failure to stand up to the USA.

Since then we have seen the continued persecution of Assange by successive Tory governments and his arrest and incarceration in the maximum security Belmarsh prison after a changed Ecuadorian government withdrew its protection. Attempts to extradite him to the US where he could be executed or given a 170 year prison sentence are continuing, and it seems likely he will die in prison either here or in the US for publishing material that made clear to the world the war crimes being committed by the US.

At the end of their protest in front of the Ecuadorian Embassy (it occupies only a few rooms on an upper floor of the building) marchers were leaving to go back to Westminster for another rally in Parliament Square, but I’d had enough and took the tube to make my way home.

More about the protest and many more pictures on My London Diary: Against Worldwide Government Corruption.

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Against Worldwide Government Corruption – 2014

The march from Trafalgar Square to the Ecuadorian Embassy on Saturday March 1st 2014 wasn’t a huge event, although its aims were all-embracing. Those attending were appalled at the state of the UK and the world and believed that a better world is possible if only we could get rid of the greedy and corrupt who currently are in change – the party politicians and their governments, the bankers and the corporations, the warmongers and the spies.

If only. While I share many of their views and aspirations, those in charge are in charge because they have the power, the money, the control of the media, the armies and more and are not about to give them up willingly.

Politically the only real challenge to them has come from people like Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Saunders and the establishment made mincemeat of them with no-holds barred dirty tricks, false claims, lies and misrepresentation. And even if Corbyn had been elected – despite many in his party conspiring against him to throw the 2017 election it was a close-run thing and a united party would have won easily – he would have found it impossible to implement many of his policies.

Those coming for this protest want things that many want – and which would – like Corbyn – have wide popular support. As I wrote “they want justice and a fairer society, one that doesn’t oppress the poor and disabled, that doesn’t spy on everyone and doesn’t use the media and the whole cultural apparatus as a way of keeping blind to what is really happening.“

On My London Diary I unusually report quite a large chunk of a speech at the event by one of the organisers, Mitch Antony of Aspire Worldwide, which I seldom do. Usually I’m too busy taking photographs to pay a great deal of attention to the speeches at events, and at most just jot down in longhand a few significant phrases, never having managed to learn shorthand. I did use to carry a small voice recorder, and nowadays could do it on my phone, but listening and transcribing often hard to hear speeches is too time-consuming.

The ‘Mike-Check’ of many Occupy-inspired protests where short phrases are repeated by the crowd, often as an alternative where amplification is either not available or prohibited – as in much of the area around Parliament – does make it easier to follow and report, as does the repetition in Antony’s speech, which concluded with the series of statements below.

We march against Global Government Corruption
We march against ideological austerity
We march against privatisation for profit
We march against the bedroom tax
We march against bankers bonuses
We march against the corrupt MPs
We march against state spying on the people
We march against state controlled media
We march against government misrepresentation
We march against warmongering
We march against global tyranny
We march against state sponsored terrorism
We march against the military industrial complex
We march against the militarisation of the police
We march against the suppression of alternative energies

Unfortunately since 2014, we’ve seen almost all of these things on the increase, and Julian Assange, then inside the Ecuadorian Embassy is still imprisoned, now in our maximum security jail, Belmarsh, awaiting the Home Secretary’s decision on whether to extradite him to the USA where he faces a 175 year sentence for the ‘crime’ of publishing the truth about war crimes, corruption and climate policy.

Trafalgar Square, once a public square, has increasingly beeen hired out for commercial events, and was being got ready for one the following day, which meant that the advertised meeting point for this march was unavailable, but there was room just across the road in the island at the top of Whitehall. Some trying to attend gave up looking for it, but others persisted and slowly the numbers grew – and after some speeches set off.

It was a very visual event, with many interesting characters taking part, some well-known to me from earlier protests. Its route took it down Pall Mall and on to Harvey Nicholls in Knightsbridge where for a short while they joined a protest outside the store by the Campaign Against the Fur Trade.

At the Ecuadorian Embassy where Assange was holed up in a small flat (the embassy itself is only a few rooms in a larger building) there were too many for the small pen opposite, but they refused in any case to keep to this, soon swarming across the road. The march had attracted an over-large police presence, and this was perhaps the only place some of them were needed to occupy the steps in front of the crowd.

The protest continued here for around an hour in support of of Julian Assange and Edward Snowden and other whistle blowers and over the continued refusal to grant Assange safe passage to Ecuador, something that seems to be an personal vendetta by Home Secretary Theresa May. Policing this has been an expensive business and by the end of 2013 had cost the UK taxpayer around £5.3 million. Perhaps May should have been made to pay.

The protesters hadn’t finished and were marching back to Parliament Square for yet another rally, but I needed to leave and file my report and pictures from the protest – and to get some dinner.

Much more on My London Diary at Against Worldwide Government Corruption.