The Friday Caption Competition!

OK

As it’s Friday and we’re all looking forward to the weekend (or conference, if you’re me), I thought we should do something deliciously rebellious like not talking about politics. What a saucy girl I am!

So, here’s the first ever Ellie Mae Caption Competition! <cue streamers>

This week’s picture is chosen in honour of our friends at Art Uncut, who will be embarrassing Bono at Glastonbury tomorrow. Go them!

The winner will get… well, I don’t know actually. A postcard from London, if you like?

Here’s the picture. Go make fun!

 

For UK Uncut: Before and After an NHS

My nan is 95 years old. She was 32 when the NHS was founded. I asked her to tell me about her experiences of Britain before and after a National Health Service, and what she thinks of the government. This is what she told me.

When we were little, you had to pay to see the doctor. He’d give you a treatment, then a bill. Lots of people didn’t go because they couldn’t afford it – you only really used the doctor if it was something serious. I remember my twin sister, Gladys, had a bad leg and she didn’t go to school for a year. She never saw a doctor – it was too expensive. We’d try and cure ourselves instead. Everybody had a home remedy for something. Doctors were different too: they didn’t care for you like they do now. Our doctor was a mean and snappy man. I had to get some medicine for my grandmother when she was ill once. He told me, ‘it’s not a doctor you need. It’s a vicar.’ I dreaded going to see him after that. My granddad didn’t have teeth or glasses, even though he had bad eyesight. He just couldn’t afford it. It was the same for everyone who was poor: if you couldn’t afford it, you didn’t get it.

When I was 11, my brother was born. A neighbour delivered him, and she had to walk for two miles to get to us. He died after four hours. We called him Arthur, after my other brother’s friend. There was no ambulance or anything; the neighbours laid him out instead. I remember them carrying his little coffin to Hadley cemetery. That was normal then: everybody had a friend or relative that dealt with those things. There wasn’t any fuss; we just had to look after ourselves.

When the NHS was formed, everyone was relieved. I think it’s one of the best things that’s ever happened. When your mum was born, I was in hospital for 11 days until they knew everything was ok. Your uncle was born at home and a district nurse rode to my house on her bike with a case of medical equipment. I felt looked after. There was a clinic in Oakengates I’d take the children to. They’d give them National Health Milk and orange juice. They’d weigh the baby. Children were cared for. Your mum had her jabs: scarlet fever, diphtheria, TB, polio. When I was little, children died – a boy on my road died of scarlet fever – but that didn’t happen anymore. Everyone was pleased because essential things were provided for.

I haven’t got any fault to find with the NHS. It’s looked after me. Now I have 5 tablets every morning, and the other day I was thinking, ‘well, fancy that. There was a time when you couldn’t have a tablet, and here I am having five for free.’ It’s a jolly good thing. I’ve had everything from the NHS – things to walk with, things to help me go to the toilet, things to help me see. I wouldn’t want to go back to the days of struggling.

David Cameron says he loves the NHS, but the question is: does he mean it? I think he loves it because he knows he can make money out of it. There would be uproar if the government tried to get rid of it. Everybody knows it’s a good thing. Even David Cameron talked about how much the NHS helped his son. Well, that’s the good thing about it. It’s for everybody, rich or poor. It’s even more important now there are no jobs about. Plenty of poor people can barely afford aspirin, but David Cameron probably doesn’t know the price of a bottle of cough mixture. He doesn’t have to worry about things, but he should care about those that do – people who can’t rub to ha’pennies to a penny.

I’d like to see cuts. I’d like to see the bankers get their money cut. There’s too many folks taking money off the poor, and not giving anything back. People with rent and bills – they need national health. I think we should live in a society that’s fairer, not one where the rich keep all the money for themselves. I’d like to see everyone share and share alike.

Bleurgh to AV

This morning I made the enormous mistake of using Twitter to announce the fact that I had some sympathy with arguments against AV. I was immediately inundated with replies from people, apparently betrayed by my 140 character faux pas. So as I’ve got a spare few moments at work, I thought I’d write a little piece about my feelings towards AV.

For the first time in my life, I’m ambivalent about a political issue. Those of you who read my work will know how unusual this is; those of you who know me personally have probably gone into shock. But yes, it’s true: my name is Ellie Mae O’Hagan and I am a fence-sitter.

So here’s why.

When it comes to politics, there are two types of people in this country: those who are engaged, and those who aren’t. As a card-carrying member of the ‘engaged’ category, I see it as my responsibility to get other people to be engaged too. I’ve always seen political involvement as inherently important: it’s how everything fits together, it gives people agency over their own fates, it forces the government to be more accountable.

But I’m afraid that what has unfolded over the last week can’t be described as political engagement. It’s been more like a messy break-up: mud has been slung, insults have been traded, reputations have been damaged. At times, I half expected to see footage of Nick Clegg emptying Cameron’s clothes out on the back lawn in a tear-stained fit of defiance. As the arguments have raged, I have been standing by like a weary best friend who feels duty-bound to provide tea and sympathy, knowing full well that it’ll be all hearts and flowers again in a week or so.

This referendum was a great chance to encourage people to understand, as Owen Jones put it, the ‘nuts and bolts’ of politics. Pardon the kitsch analogy, but if politics is a landscape painting, then voting reform is the frame: it might not be the main event but it has a massive effect on how the thing looks in the end. We – as engaged political types – could have persuaded others of that. We could used the referendum as a chance to convince the swathes of people alienated by politics that it’s about more than some twat in a suit bleating in a palace in London. That instead, ordinary people can and do have influence.

The fact that my housemate, an intelligent person who works for a food security charity, asked me last week, ‘what’s AV?’ shows how successful that cause has been.  Unlike a tiny Twitter clique, my housemate isn’t interested in daft adverts about babies, and the subsequent ‘I’m telling the ASA on you’ response from the other side. She doesn’t care whether you’ve got Eddie Izzard or Peter Stringfellow on your side, and she has little sympathy for Godwin’s Law themed arguments about Nick Griffin. Like many others, my housemate just wants to understand the issue and the impact it will have on her life and the things she cares about, in a way that doesn’t involve swiping at some people she probably couldn’t give a shit about anyway.

But after however many months, thousands of leaflets, dozens of campaigns, and celebrity endorsements, my housemate still doesn’t know. Why? Because instead of debating the issue, both sides have just bitched and moaned at one another like impotent dicks. It’s been futile and dull.

So I’m sorry if my lack of enthusiasm for or against AV has denied me the opportunity to sew another badge into my lefty uniform, but to be honest, I’m just looking forward until it’s all over. It’s been a farce; it’s been a joke. I’ve been embarrassed. And frankly, if this is the best we can do to win hearts and minds, we’ve got bigger problems than a dodgy voting system.

Thoughts on Hillsborough

For one of my eight years in Liverpool, I lived opposite the Anglican Cathedral. On 15th April 2009, the twentieth anniversary of the Hillsborough disaster, I watched the memorial service at Anfield as people gathered outside my front window to hear the cathedral chime. Meanwhile, on TV, Andy Burnham was getting drowned out by the mourners at Anfield, chanting their twenty-two year demand for justice.

Everyone who is connected to Liverpool has a memory of Hillsborough – whether it’s being at the crushed against the gates, queuing up at a phone box outside the stadium to call loved ones, or (as in my case) remembering your mum watching the images on TV and trying to find some way to explain to a four-year-old the horror unfolding.

On one level, Hillsborough is a terrible tragedy: it is ninety six stories of unused return train tickets and empty car seats – the unimaginable horror of a journey home that was so different to the journey there. On another, it is a damning indictment of the establishment, and the way its upper echelons close ranks at the first sight of trouble.

It’s the unequivocal truth that Liverpool fans were helping the injured; using advertising boards as makeshift stretchers to carry people, risking their own lives to pull people out of the crush. With Liverpool’s soaring unemployment rate at the time, it’s likely that these life-saving men were probably those that society had deemed no good – those on Thatcher’s scrap heap. Yet in the aftermath of the tragedy, the bravery of these people wasn’t celebrated, it was twisted, by the Sun newspaper in particular, to reflect a lazy class stereotype of fecklessness and petty theft, designed to distract the general public from the reality of police incompetence. Those people, who were already on the receiving end of an unsympathetic government, were forced to endure the humiliating experience of their social status being used against them. They were so deservedly poor, said the Sun, that they robbed the bodies of their fellow fans – some of whom were still fighting for their lives as the paper went to print.

But the injustice of Hillsborough extends beyond one newspaper. It is also an unwelcome reflection of the authorities’ behaviour when faced with their own culpability. The police were undoubtedly to blame for the disaster, but as one member of the Hillsborough Justice Campaign put it, ‘they spent so much money on the inquiry, but the inquiry was so they could cover up the truth, not expose it.’  That we should be marking the Hillsborough anniversary at the same time as the Tomlinson inquest seems cathartic. Human life is apparently disposable if it saves the police looking a bit red-faced; and if that human life happens to be working class, or an alcoholic, all the better. I remember asking the question on the anniversary last year: ‘if 96 police officers had died at the hands of scousers, would justice have taken twenty years then?’

As we fight against police tactics against the media-friendly backdrop of Parliament Square, we should remember those who struggled with the police before us; those who weren’t fighting a political battle, but fighting for the memories of their loved ones. Because, in a way, securing justice for the 96 is a responsibility that falls on all of us: for it is only when battles like Hillsborough are won that we can be confident that justice will be done for us too, if it is ever our turn to be betrayed by those who are supposed to help.

Comic Relief and Liberal Dilemmas

Brazilian archbishop, Dom Helder Camara, famously said, ‘when I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist.’ It’s an interesting quote, and one that I am often reminded of when watching Comic Relief: a phenomenon that is astoundingly good at doing the former, without doing the latter.

Camara’s statement reveals something that Comic Relief is also aware of: helping the impoverished is an act of generosity; asking why there is poverty is an act of politics. Comic Relief is certainly under no obligation to interrogate the global economy (in fact doing so would require it to leave the BBC altogether), but can it fulfil its aim to create ‘a just world free from poverty,’ without asking political questions?

Take, for example, its current supporting partner, Ernst & Young: a company which was recently in court for its complicity in the 2008 financial collapse. Auditors at Ernst & Young reportedly turned a blind eye to the misdemeanours of the banking system, figuring that if it all came crashing down, the taxpayer would step in anyway. Organisers of Comic Relief would no doubt argue that such an issue is none of their business; that their role is to accept donations, not to regulate corporations.

It’s a fair point, of course. And as always in life, the issue is not a simple one. The side of Comic Relief we see: the glittered-up, celebrity-friendly funfest, is an impressive media front for a dedicated grants team that does give to political organisations. War on Want, for example, is a benefactor of the money Comic Relief raises. The organisers are probably aware that Comic Relief’s lack of any visible politics is one of the reasons for its remarkable success: charity is something we can all unite under; global macroeconomics is a tad more divisive.  If eschewing politics raises more money to help the needy, why not?

Such arch-pragmatism comes with its problems though. Returning to Ernst & Young, a company whose record on facilitating tax avoidance has, according to Professor Prem Sikka, deprived millions of ‘education, healthcare and pensions.’ Isn’t Comic Relief’s statement that it ‘couldn’t imagine doing it without them’ a political statement in itself? And how far does praise for such companies beguile the public into not questioning them more thoroughly? To suggest that Ernst & Young is part of the cure for poverty, rather than one of the causes, seems to me more inaccurate than pragmatic. Presumably, we give to Comic Relief in the hope that one day we won’t need to anymore, and yet I can’t see how that will ever be possible unless we take  the activities of corporations like Ernst & Young head on. Indeed, despite twenty years of Comic Relief, the world is still failing to meet international poverty targets.

Then again, how many human lives, here and now, would slip through the net if Comic Relief favoured political campaigning over straightforward fundraising? It’s easy for those of us who don’t have to worry about starvation, disease, and isolation to sit in our liberal ivory towers and wax lyrical about moral purity.  As we do, others are out in the world, raising money and helping those blighted by real, live poverty.

So which is it? Do we condemn Comic Relief for avoiding the causes of poverty, or do we laud it for actually doing something? The answer, anticlimactically, is that I honestly don’t know. I suspect the conclusion lies in your levels of idealism: in order to alleviate poverty Comic Relief style, you must accept that opposing its causes may not actually change lead to worthwhile change. That’s probably true. But if it is, it seems a shame that the best we can do for poverty is to support an incredible and extraordinary cure, and not its prevention.

Tales from the Private Sector: Initial, Cleaners, and NHS Outsourcing

This is a response to Owen Jones’ recent blog post, in which he asks people to share horror stories from the private sector.

When I was a student, I worked in a hospital ward as a cleaner for a few months. I was employed by a company called Initial (whose logo you might recognise from hand dryers in public toilets) at a hospital in Wales. I won’t lie to you: it was hell. Every morning I’d go to work wondering how people had stuck it out for decades.

Later I’d find out the answer: they hadn’t stuck it out for decades. Cleaners used to be employed by the NHS, were paid £8 an hour, and enjoyed the same benefits as every other NHS worker. They were part of the team then, I was told. In fact, when one of the cleaners retired in the 1970s, the doctors clubbed together and bought her a colour TV – a luxury back then. When Initial took over, it all changed. Cleaners were rehired on a new contract and were faced with a choice: either you accept national minimum wage (half of their original hourly rate), or look for another job. For some cleaners who had never worked anywhere else, they were left with only one demoralising option.

From then on, working conditions were fraught for the cleaners. They were expected to take on more and more duties in the same amount time for the same amount of money. When I was there, there were repeated strikes in protest at having to clean hospital beds: a duty formerly carried out by nurses. Unsurprisingly, the relationship between the cleaners, clinical staff and Initial management, who were unmoved by protestations, took a nosedive.

What I saw were a group of employees who had lost pride in their work. They no longer felt valued, and as a result, no longer valued the work they did. Cleaners would carry the water used to clean infected bays through the ward instead of disposing of it properly – with their ever-increasing duties they didn’t have time. They didn’t talk to clinical staff or patients: if they did, they’d be reprimanded by a sour-faced Initial manager, and anyway, they didn’t have the inclination. They weren’t part of the NHS anymore, but hired help from a company that couldn’t have made its indifference clearer.

With horror stories in the media about superbugs, it’s easy to condemn hospital cleaners as lazy. Having done the job myself, I know how wrong that is. It’s gruelling, physical work – the lazy need not apply. These cleaners were hard-working, but they were alienated, undervalued, and unhappy. As GMB Union pointed out in an industrial dispute with Initial in another hospital last year, cleaners are ‘underpaid to the tune of 80p per hour, they have no sick pay scheme, they get less paid holidays [than other NHS workers] and have inferior premium pay arrangement for overtime and unsocial hours.’ How do you suppose it feels to see others around you getting more benefits and pay for jobs that rely on your hard work?

Four years after I left, the Royal College of Nurses called for cleaning to be brought back in-house. One nurse said this was because ‘private cleaning firms did not have the public sector ethos of in-house teams and there was higher staff turnover which contributed to poorer performance.’ Another agreed, pointing out that privately-hired cleaning staff were not even allowed to attend hospital Christmas parties.

Owen and I recently talked about the social value of jobs. He mentioned some NEF research which stated that for every £1 hospital cleaners are paid, they contribute £10 to the economy in social value. And that’s the rub – private companies like Initial don’t care about social value, only private profit. That’s the only responsibility they have.

A couple of years ago, I heard that the hospital I worked in had reverted to employing cleaners in-house. Maybe the management there had cottoned onto what I realised: that some jobs are too important to be left to the single-minded interests of private businesses like Initial.

Vodafone, CSR, and UK Uncut – again

As part of my illustrious life as a temp, I worked at a corporate law firm for a short time last month. ‘This office,’ announced the Operations Manager, ‘is exceptionally green.’ Later I would watch a lawyer oversee a multi-million pound oil deal in Russia – on recycled paper, naturally.

Welcome to the strange and contradictory world of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR): a phenomenon in which businesses attempt to paper over the cracks they create as they strive for a more unequal society. You may already be familiar with the contrary sins of CSR: Starbucks lauding fair-trade whilst denying coffee farmers the rights to their own beans, Marks and Spencer using free-range eggs while taking advantage of sweatshop labour, to name a few. The list is seemingly endless.

Contrary to what you might think, the pitfalls of CSR aren’t a new phenomenon. Oil tycoon JD Rockefeller, largely celebrated as the world’s first philanthropist, was responsible for a monopoly of the American oil industry that drove others out of business, and laid the oil futures market that has since caused us so many economic problems. In 1880, The New York World described his oil company as ‘the most cruel, impudent, pitiless, and grasping monopoly that ever fastened upon a country.’ Whilst pushing his competitors into poverty, Rockefeller funded services for the poor and needy, and was celebrated for it. Back in the 1800s, Rockefeller was the earliest example of major CSR in action.

UK Uncut’s hijacking of Vodafone’s CSR website, World of Difference, highlights a particularly salient example of CSR at its most rank. The site, complete with photo of happy traveler and obligatory poor person, offers people the chance to do paid work with a charity for two months. Or as Vodafone puts it, ‘the opportunity [for people] to change their own world and make a difference to someone else’s for much longer.’

As UK Uncut points out, this would be a charming pledge if it weren’t for the fact that Vodafone is also guilty of gargantuan tax-dodging: tax-dodging that, if it were eliminated, could prevent all cuts to charities in the UK. It is grossly hypocritical of Vodafone to willingly acknowledge the virtues of charity in order to polish its corporate image, as it employs armies of accountants to avoid the tax that could pay for them.

Once again this comes down to fairness. The fact is; it is simply not fair that a company is avoiding billions of pounds’ worth of tax whilst extolling the virtues of charity. It is equally unfair that people should be denied homes, access to healthcare and free education in one of the richest countries in the world.

UK Uncut is not criticizing businesses for facilitating good in the world: it is pointing out the hypocrisy of advocating a charitable cure for hardship, whilst denying the tax revenue that would provide prevention. To suggest that sending a few well-meaning people off to a developing country is any substitute for billions of pounds’ worth of tax is disingenuous and frankly unacceptable.

That Vodafone would use charitable giving, a genuinely altruistic act for most, as a figleaf for their contempt for tax law is a very bitter thing indeed. If more companies were held to account and forced to pay their fair share of taxes, there would be no need for CSR to exist in the first place. Taxation isn’t just about money: it’s about fairness, democracy and civility. No CSR project can compensate for denying us those things. As Augustine once so rightly put it, ‘charity is no substitute for justice withheld.’

Orange Umbrella

As the tube pulls up at Tottenham Court Road to whisk me home from the latest UK Uncut protest, I catch my own reflection in the window. I’m holding an orange umbrella, or should I say, the orange umbrella: the one that was used as a meeting point outside the Ritz the first time a group of pissed-off activists decided to shut down a Vodafone shop.

It looks luminous against the Perspex, like a glowstick. I’m not sure if its prominence is because of its colour, or because it’s so potent with meaning for me. It’s like a gaudy little piece of UK Uncut history.

I get on the tube, slump down, and audibly exhale. A man opposite spots the sound system I’m also carrying, the one that was used for Josie Long’s set during the protest, and asks whether I’ve been busking. I say no, and tell him I just turned Barclays into a comedy club as part of a protest. The carriage falls silent. I can tell people are eavesdropping whilst feigning nonchalance. ‘Ah!’ he exclaims, ‘So you’re an anarchist then!’ The woman next to him, his wife I think, tuts, ‘she’s not an anarchist,’ she says impatiently, ‘it’s because they’re not paying their taxes.’ I mumble a bit, too tired to get into a debate. Turns out I don’t have to; she goes on a pro-UK Uncut diatribe on my behalf. ‘It’s like that Philip Green,’ she continues, ‘giving all that money to his wife in Monaco.’

It’s the first time something like this has happened to me: an apparent member of the mythical squeezed middle, at least not your average protester, knowing all about us and pronouncing on our behalf. Maybe I was being arrogant, but I couldn’t help thinking that she wouldn’t immediately have thought of Philip Green if it wasn’t for UK Uncut. The experience was a timely indication, I thought, that UK Uncut is gaining significant traction.

I had the same feeling during the protest itself. As Josie Long talked, I looked around. People were sitting on Barclays’ chairs, leaning against the glass offices. We had turned it into a people space. It was the first protest that wasn’t about shutting down; saying no. We were creating a microcosmic version of the society we want to live in: a society that values people and services, not corporations. We were starting to dictate conditions.

The atmosphere was different too: the staff at Barclays (save one security guard who was desperate for a punch-up) seemed oddly resigned to the protest. Even the police wearily acquiesced; milling around disinterestedly until we left. I don’t know what was going on outside, but inside we were in charge. When we eventually marched out – I was allowed to lead the way with the orange umbrella – it was because we had decided it was time to leave. We discussed our options and took a vote on it, as the staff stood aside powerlessly.

UK Uncut is a fragile and new phenomenon in a relatively young anti-cuts movement. It’s not the ultimate resistance to austerity fetishism, nor does it claim to be. But beyond the arguments of tax avoidance and the banking system lies a bigger message: there is an alternative to cuts. This message, I believe, is where UK Uncut is making its mark. The truth is people don’t want to lose their local library, access to a GP, or their children’s education, no matter how much the government talks up a bloated public sector.

As the Tories press ahead with their economic experiment; one which, in the words of Johann Hari, has failed ‘whenever and wherever it has been tried;’ none of us can really claim to know what the future holds. But right now, something is changing. People are listening. The cuts are moving from the headlines to our doorsteps, and I can’t see the interest in UK Uncut abating.

The next time that orange umbrella leads a group of people down the high street, I suspect the government will be listening too.

Kettles, Eggs and Aaron Porter

Let’s remind ourselves of the catalogue of disappointments commonly known as Aaron Porter’s career. He failed to support to union members facing legal action, he did not adequately condemn the police for beating union members (though he very adequately condemned the members themselves), he opposed pretty much every demonstration his members wanted to hold, and yesterday it transpired that he apparently praised the tuition fees hike as ‘progressive.’

So far, so contemptible. It’s little wonder a motion of no-confidence was raised against the NUS’s El Presidente, and quite right too. Union leaders that fail in even their most basic duties should be held to account. The NUS should do more than simply arrange student discounts at HMV, and if it takes Porter’s unceremonious departure to make that happen, I’m all for it.

But here’s the rub. The NUS’s fondness for impotent bureaucracy over real action is a long-standing problem, not one that has been initiated by Aaron Porter. Of course Porter has risibly embraced this tradition, but the NUS doesn’t begin and end with him. So it’s a huge shame to see some protesters transforming him into some sort of hate-figure; pelting him with eggs, chanting (non-racist) abuse, and kettling him when he arrives at university campuses. This sort of behaviour, directed so narrowly at one person, is unconstructive at best; bullying at worst.

I’m not a wallflower who would like direct action to be eschewed in favour of a strongly-worded note in the parish newsletter, but there are limits. Even if accusations of careerism, right-wingery or, in his own words, dithering spinelessness are accurate, Aaron Porter is nevertheless a human being. Intimidating and degrading him is unwarranted, unpleasant, and in my opinion, is a worse reflection upon the perpetrators than on Porter himself.

This is particularly the case for those students that decided to kettle Porter. Students are rightfully condemning of kettling as being of dubious legality, dangerous, even an abuse of human rights. Yet Glasgow University Occupation sent a tweet to various figures last week, apparently proud of the fact that they kettled Porter when he arrived on campus. To me, the message of this action is that kettling is acceptable in some circumstances, i.e. when it’s done to someone we don’t like. Are these really the moral undertones students should be carving out for their movement?

Sage and fellow blogger Adam Ramsay once said to me ‘sometimes politics isn’t complicated; sometimes politics is simple.’ And so I am reminded of Ghandi, who said ‘be the change you want to see in the world.’ If students really do want to see a world free of aggression and defined by compassion, then the best place to start is with themselves.

Hold onto your hat, Bob Diamond

When the government told us there was no alternative to biting austerity, UK Uncut shut down several multi-billion pound companies on Britain’s high streets for avoiding billions of pounds’ worth of tax; tax which could pay for thousands of nurses,  millions of children’s books, and cover the entire EMA budget. Through the sheer tenacity of grassroots activism, UK Uncut brought tax avoidance to the forefront of the political agenda, made an unlikely friend in the Daily Mail, and prompted the National Audit Office to investigate Vodafone’s scandalous tax deal with HMRC.

Following these achievements, UK Uncut will once again bite its collective thumb at those institutions that refuse to play fair, by doing as they do – expanding its service offer. This spring, UK Uncut will be taking on the banks: appropriately, deliciously, during bonus season. But just as Vodafone can introduce a new tariff without abandoning the old ones, we don’t intend to forget tax avoidance either. Think of this as UK Uncut’s new range of protests: we’re just adding some extra items to the bill.

An explanation for targeting banks is hardly needed: it was the banks,  bailed out in 2008 to the tune of £850bn, that caused the financial crash that caused the UK’s deficit to skyrocket. It was their reckless greed which caused this crisis, not excessive public spending on services that ordinary people rely on. Let’s remind ourselves of Goldman Sachs banker Fabrice ‘Fabulous Fab’ Tourre’s words less than a year before the crash: ‘the entire system is about to crumble any moment…the only potential survivor the fabulous Fab standing in the middle of all these complex, highly levered, exotic trades he created without necessarily understanding all the implications of those monstrosities.’

It would be reasonable to assume that the banks would be punished for their actions, or at least made to clean up the mess they created. But they weren’t. Instead, we were told the ‘bloated public sector’ was to blame for the deficit, and the banks – many of them now propped up by the taxpayer – escaped with a gentle slap on the wrist. In the face of economic reality, and the testimony of one Nobel prize-winning economist after another, deficit hysteria and the fable of public sector overspend persisted, topped off neatly by David Cameron’s New Year Message, in which he repeatedly mentioned the deficit, but did not once mention the banks.

The Tory-led government’s policies have so comprehensively avoided the root cause of Britain’s economic problems, that by January of this year, we were faced with headlines such as this in the Guardian : ‘Bankers gave staff £10bn as Britain’s young struggled for work.’ Such headlines must be the clearest sign yet that we are most certainly not all in this together.

That said, I personally have never been clear on what ‘this’ is anyway. Is ‘this’ investing in shaky mortgages I knew would collapse? Is ‘this’ deciding to cut services for the poor and vulnerable, whilst the mega-rich hide their money in offshore tax havens? Is ‘this’ creating the biggest financial crisis in decades? Because if it is, I’m pretty sure I’m not in ‘this’ at all. ‘This’ is something that a few powerful people are doing to the rest of us, and without our consent.

It’s time the British public fought for its right not to be in this together. We didn’t create this crisis, and we sure as hell shouldn’t pay for it. David Cameron has meticulously woven a narrative of responsible belt-tightening, of austerity fetishism; all the while belying the fact that the financial sector – from which the Tories get half their donations – is getting very rich indeed. This isn’t just patently unfair, it’s a damning indictment of our supposedly civil, democratic society.

So, this month, I will be joining UK Uncut to transform banks into the services the government has decided to sacrifice to them. The protests will be fun and heady, as always, but the message will be serious. For the last six months we’ve been living under skewed logic; we’ve got things back-to-front. It’s not the banks, but society, that is too big to fail.

(This post is dedicated to Steve, who inspires me)