WikiProtests

The new Conservative-led government in Britain is imposing the most extreme cuts to public spending the country has seen since the 1920s. The fees for going to university are set to triple. Children’s hospitals like Great Ormond Street are facing 20 percent cuts in their budgets. In London alone, more than 200,000 people are being forced out of their homes and out of the city as the government takes away their housing subsidies.

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All the cuts in housing subsidies, driving all those people out of their homes, are part of a package of cuts to the poor, adding up to £7 billion. Yet the magazine Private Eye reported that one company alone—Vodafone, one of Britain’s leading cellphone firms—owed an outstanding bill of £6 billion to the British taxpayers.

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“It was clear to us that if this one company had been made to pay its taxes, almost all these people could have been kept from being forced out of their homes,” says Sam Greene[...] “We keep being told there’s no alternative to cutting services. This just showed it was rubbish. So we decided we had to do something.”

[Greene and a few friends] resolved to set up an initial protest that would prick people’s attention. They called themselves UK Uncut and asked several liberal-left journalists, on Twitter [...], to announce a time and place where people could meet “to take direct action protest against the cuts and show there’s an alternative.” People were urged to gather at 9:30 am on a Wednesday morning outside the Ritz hotel in central London and look for an orange umbrella. More than sixty people arrived, and they went to one of the busiest Vodafone stores—on Oxford Street, the city’s biggest shopping area—and sat down in front of it so nobody could get in.

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That first protest grabbed a little media attention—and then the next day, in a different city, three other Vodafone stores were shut down in the northern city of Leeds, by unconnected protests. UK Uncut [...] set up a Twitter account and a website, where members announced there would be a national day of protest the following Saturday. They urged anybody who wanted to organize a protest to e-mail them so it could be added to a Google map. Britain’s most prominent tweeters, such as actor Stephen Fry, joined in.

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Prime Minister David Cameron wants axed government services to be replaced by a “Big Society,” in which volunteers do the jobs instead. So UK Uncut announced it was the Big Society Tax Collection Agency.

  Nation

Good one.

Uncut decided to expose and protest one of the most egregious alleged tax dodgers: Sir Philip Green. He is the ninth-richest man in the country, running some of the leading High Street chain stores [...] Although he lives and works in Britain, and his companies all operate on British streets, he avoids British taxes by claiming his income is “really” earned by his wife, who lives in the tax haven of Monaco

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Far from objecting, Cameron’s government appointed Green as an official adviser, with special responsibility for “cutting waste.”

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At the London protests against Green, everybody was asked to turn up at the largest branch of Topshop—again on Oxford Street—and mill around like ordinary shoppers. Once a whistle was blown, they were to start chanting, put on sports clothing to dramatize what was being taken away from schoolchildren and sit down by the counters to stop sales. It was the Saturday before Christmas. There was a strange frisson as everyone turned up and looked around. It was impossible to tell who was a shopper and who was a protester: they looked the same. The whistle blew—and they shut down one of the largest retail stores in Europe.

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Polly Toynbee is one of Britain’s most influential columnists: imagine Maureen Dowd with principles instead of snark. Toynbee attended the London protests and was manhandled out of Topshop by security guards. She reported later that the protests were being watched very nervously on Downing Street. “It is no coincidence that the government immediately hurried out a ‘clampdown’ on tax avoidance, collecting £2 billion,” she tells me, “or that [its coalition partners] the Liberal Democrats suddenly remembered this was one of their big commitments. Of course, that sum is only a drop in the ocean. But this really was a jolt to the political system. It was hugely important.”

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There has been an obsessive hunt by the media to discover who UK Uncut “really are.” They assume there must be secretive leaders pulling the strings somewhere. But the more I dug into the movement, the more I realized this is a misunderstanding. The old protest movements were modeled like businesses, with a CEO and a managing board. This protest movement, however, is shaped like a hive of bees, or like Twitter itself. There is no center. There is no leadership. There is just a shared determination not to be bilked, connected by tweets. Every decision made by UK Uncut is open and driven by the will of its participants.

And that, my fellow Americans, is how it’s done. Although in our country, the government would probably call out the National Guard to bop heads.

UK Uncut

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.