Why the protesters are going to win

Tweet

Something very important has shifted.  I realised this when the authorities at St Paul’s Cathedral managed their volte face to allow the Occupy protesters to stay put. 

Rather belatedly, the Church of England has realised which side they are on, what an opportunity this protest is for them – and that nobody has to accept the legal advice they are given (thank goodness). It has been painful for anyone who loves the Anglican Church, as I do, to watch this slow realisation, but at least it has happened.

Occupy itself may be flawed and diverse (what movement isn’t?). Its public relations may be much more effective than your average protest, but I don’t think either of these things are really the deciding factor.

Partly the change of heart has been because of the resonance of similar protests and confrontations all over the world, demanding that we rescue democracy from the tyranny of a financial system that is designed to vacuum up wealth from the world.

There are more than echoes with the Arab Spring, which was also inspired by outrage against the way that their own economies are designed for the ubermensch.

But there is something else even more important. It is the potent idea that the protesters represent the 99%.

This is what has changed, and it is a political shift as important as anything over the past generation or more. 

We have been brought up to believe that the right represents the middle classes and the left represents the working classes. It is now clear that neither right nor left in conventional politics represent the interests of either.

The inhabitants of Westminster are largely now the “slaves of some defunct economist”, as Keynes put it long ago. They are trapped in a world of policy-making that still believes in trickle down economics, unaware of what is really happening, unable to grasp any other way.

Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair rose to power with the support of the middle classes. But the middle classes in the UK, while they may not support the protests, are no longer prepared to put up with the financial status quo.

They have been battered as badly as anyone. They hand over the best years of their lives in indentured servitude to pay off the vast mortgage required to live a middle class life. Then they find up to a third of their pension has been siphoned off in fees.

Experience shows that when the articulate middle classes demand things, sooner or later they get them.

Yet there was David Cameron in the Financial Times, setting out a three-point plan for recovery that really changes nothing.

There was Ed Balls the same day, urging the government to defend the City and veto a financial transaction tax.

Their prescriptions were pathetic gestures in the face of the global economic crisis.

So this is my advice to the protesters. It is immodest of me to suggest advice since I sleep cosily at home at night, but I can’t resist it.

1. Focus. Talk of ‘anti-capitalism’ plays to the critics. Many of us may be anti-capitalist but the label has become a shorthand for muddled. The objective has to be to wrest control of our democracy back from dysfunctional and tyrannical finance.
2. Reach out. You now speak for the middle classes too, not just the poor, and that may mean a different and more authoritative tone of voice.
3. Negotiate. Don’t let the protest peter out. Use your advantage to make this protest culminate in high profile truth and justice hearings, alongside City representatives, inside the cathedral.

The historic symbolism is potent.  For centuries, St Paul’s Cross – approximately where the protesters are camped – was the scene of radical preaching and debate, known originally as the folk moot.

It may be that the radical power of the spot is reaching out in such a way that a real shift in public opinion is now apparent, everywhere but Westminster.