sutton038

Several hundred years back, the City of London was protected by a great stone wall, and access was controlled via several key gates . Aldersgate was in the north, Ludgate was to the west, Aldgate was in the east, and on the south end of London Bridge there was Bridge Gate. Later, others were added, like Bishopsgate, Moorgate, Cripplegate, and Newgate. Nowadays, the physical wall and gates have slipped out of popular memory. To many modern commuters into the City, the Moorgate is nothing but a station on the Northern Line of the London Underground. Recently, a wing of the Occupy movement set up camp just up the road from Moorgate, in Finsbury Square. Another wing set up in an old building in Sun Street . Like the original St. Paul’s Camp, the new camps seem  like incongruous outposts amidst the black sheet glass and metal frames of buildings housing financial giants. The protesters have managed to take temporary control of small areas of physical space, and yet, do they really hav...

COMING TO A CINEMA NEAR YOU Last week I got published in The Ecologist. The article was called A four-step guide to bypassing high street banks . This is my second article for the magazine (my first was on food speculation ), and this time the aim was to sketch out how people might engage in financial protest, not by waving placards, but by changing debit cards. Many people agree in principle that major high-street banks have too much power, and that they frequently abuse that power. Nevertheless, many individuals don't necessarily have the time, or inclination, to protest about it directly in the manner of the Occupy protesters. There's been a lot of discussion about how to make financial protest more inclusive (including this piece by Kenth Gustaffson on a type of ‘ virtual occupy movement ’), but perhaps one of the most profound (and often overlooked) forms of protest is to distance yourself from mainstream finance by withdrawing deposits and avoiding using the services. The...