On Saturday, demonstrations were held across the country targeting the businesses of Philip Green in order to highlight the massive amounts of tax he’s avoiding paying into the treasury. I decided to attend the one at Topshop on Oxford Street in London.
The demo was arranged for 11.02am. I entered Topshop around twenty minutes beforehand and immediately felt like I was in an episode of Hustle; the hired security looked edgy and poised and I had fun spotting other ‘shoppers’ who were plainly there for purposes other than the purchase of skinny jeans. There was a lot of cursory browsing going on in the half-hour leading up to 11 o’clock!
At 11.02am, some people started blowing whistles. There was a brief suspended moment as everyone stopped – shoppers bemused, demonstrators looking for a lead – and then someone started up a chant of “Pay your tax!”. By this point, the security guards, not needing to be asked twice, had grabbed someone and started to pull them towards the main entrance, which was now barred by a line of police.
Someone was grabbed in front of me, with what I considered to be excessive zeal, and I shouted at the guard to leave him alone. I approached him and said again “Oi, leave him alone!”, touching his arm to attract his attention. “Why are you pulling me?” he asked, which was a bit rich, given that, in typing this sentence, I’m using more force on the keyboard than I was on his arm. “I’m not pulling you!” I said, by which point a second guard appeared. “Why are you assaulting a security guard?” he demanded. This was beyond ridiculous. “I’m not assaulting anyone!” I exclaimed – but the question had been rhetorical as I found myself being dragged by the two of them towards the door. I let myself go limp; within seconds two more appeared and, with one on each arm and leg, I was carried towards the police line and dumped on the floor. A moment later someone else was pushed on top of me, with another to follow, given the shouts of people around me. I scrambled to my feet: directly in front of me was a group of protestors sat on the ground, immediately in front of them was a bank of photographers and cameras. Behind me was the line of police officers. Having just been on the floor, I didn’t want to sit down and, instead, grabbed a sign from someone and held it up. I was one of the first to be thrown out, which, I suspect, is why I later found myself occupying such a prominent position on the websites of many of the major newspapers (one, below, by way of illustration).
There were a few more people ejected before a sizeable group managed to stage a sit-in in the body of the store. This next half-hour was probably the optimum point of the action: the entrances were blocked by police and protestors and, with the sit-in in progress, the store was closed for business.
Eventually, the group inside was bundled out. We stayed, directly outside the main entrances, for about an hour and a half. During this time the police were talking among themselves, joking about the whole thing, as I imagine you might. At one point I turned to two of them who were being disparaging and told them that, as they were paid from the public purse, this was an issue that affects them as well. “Yeah,” one replied. It had been a pleasant conversation, if a trifle concise, but that about wrapped it up.
As efforts were being made to breach one of the blockades to allow shoppers in, a decision was made by someone to move down the road to BHS, another of Green’s Arcadia empire. And therein began a series of moves up and down Oxford Street, trying to stay one step ahead of the police and, in the process, disrupting business at BHS, and causing a temporary closure of Miss Selfridge, Boots and Vodafone (the latter two, not owned by Green, but also notable tax avoiders).
What was marked, for me, about the protest was the upbeat and peaceable nature of it; and you could feel that we were emboldened and cheered by the effect of our collective action.
And when I say “we” you shouldn’t take that to mean either that we were a homogenous group or that I have any affiliations hitherto undisclosed. I’d only been on one demonstration before – outside Parliament for the Age of Consent vote in 1994. I felt compelled to attend then because it was an issue of identity; what was being debated directly affected me. But it strikes me that this is also an issue of identity: my identity as a citizen of this country*. The cuts currently being made to public services, and within the public sector, and the increase in tuition fees, are nothing less than an assault on those of us who believe “we’re all in this together” to be a quotidian reality rather than a chokingly-offensive smear of disingenuous expediency.
I’ve been working full-time since I was 21, paying tax all the while, and happy to do so. As we live in the same country it makes sense to me – more, I think it’s a wonderful and civilised thing – that we all put a bit of money in a pot, according to our means, and that money is used for the good of everyone; I include within that the support of those unable or less able, for whatever reason, to contribute. To live among my neighbours and not do this would diminish my identity as a compassionate human being. This current swathe of cuts diminishes us. It makes our society weaker because it imposes, concomitantly, an ideology that is self-interested and mercenary. The Conservatives (it makes no sense to talk of a ‘coalition’ when the Lib Dems have been so thoroughly assimilated**), never a party that projects an understanding of empathy and community, are attempting to remould the country in their own image; what matters is to be moneyed and influential. What doesn’t matter – more, what is to be despised – is to be poor and, well, ordinary. The way this is being sold to us, as both a “difficult” thing which impacts upon everyone and simultaneously a necessary corrective to a hastily-commodified sub-culture of feckless abuse, is contemptuous and cynical.
I didn’t want to attend a demonstration yesterday. I’ve got a cold and I’d have happily stayed in bed, read the paper and listened to the radio. But, with each day, those of us who believe that there is such a thing as society – a continually undulating network of actions, from the smallest courtesy to the largest sacrifice, that, reaffirmed daily, distinguishes us from animals – are being provoked to prove it. To defend it. Or, in a formulation the Government might choose, to put our money where our mouth is.
When he first proposed the chimera that is the “Big Society”, David Cameron said “obligation and duty are in danger of becoming dead concepts instead of living value systems”. What brought me – no seasoned marcher – onto the streets yesterday was obligation and duty. The abuse of greatness is when it disjoins remorse from power. I’ve no great desire to attend another demonstration. But I will. It continues to be my duty to oppose, in whatever way I can, this callous and severe brutalisation of our country.
*I know that technically we’re ‘subjects’, but… more honoured in the breach and all that.
**Oh, Nick, it profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world… but for a house-share with William Hague?
