Coffee House interview: “We hope Speccie readers have some sympathy”

The Occupy movement – or #Occupy if you follow it on Twitter – started as an anti-banking protest in New York a month ago, and has since spread from Madrid to Tokyo to Sydney.

Today at noon, Occupy London Stock Exchange will kick off, though it’s doubtful if activists will actually, well, occupy the London Stock Exchange. Occupy LSX has a website, and an email address for press enquiries. So, in the interests of spectatorship, Coffee House got in touch with Naomi Colvin, who wants to be known as a “supporter”:

Coffee House: It seems really official now. Do you guys have an office or something?

Naomi Colvin: We don’t have an office. I don’t think it’s that unusual for activist organisations to have a fairly professional press presence. Everyone is genned-up on social media, you really can’t exist if you don’t have a good social media presence. Things can be misrepresented if you are not trying to handle the message – there was an attempt to conflate UK Uncut with Black Bloc, that kind of stuff. The intention is that we will be in a position to push our story, to get our message through to the outside world even if crazy things happen on the ground.

CH: Why are you doing this?

NC: The final impetus to starting up the Facebook group was the exciting things happening in New York, especially the media coverage it has had over the past 10 days. That sense of international solidarity has been very important, because the movement really started, I guess, at the beginning of the year in Tunisia and Egypt. London is very cosmopolitan … from where we are, Spain is really important to us and the experience gathered in Spain has been really crucial in our planning.

CH: And why are you doing this, in the sense of – what are you against, what exactly are you protesting against?

NC: There is the international solidarity aspect, and there is also the fact that we are all very concerned about what the financial services industry does, and the importance it has in the economic and political life of this country. We’re concerned about how things got so wrong, and were allowed to get so wrong, and the amount of public debt that has been taken on and who is bearing the brunt of paying for that, whether it’s the right people. We are also concerned that things shouldn’t be allowed to get like that again. We are now three years on and it would be more comforting to get a sense that it really couldn’t happen again. But I personally don’t feel that, and I don’t think a lot of people feel that.

We wouldn’t allow medicines to be sold with the wrong labels. If that were happening, we would expect governments to pass laws to stop that happening for the good of everybody. Yet regulation is a word nobody likes to use.

I have to be careful – the things I say are my opinions rather than the movement’s. The way the movement works is that there is a General Assembly which is made up of everybody who’s there and who wants to be there. Opinions like this are my own.

CH: Do you have a specific target?

NC: It’s not a target, it’s a critique. It’s a critique of a system. We talk about the 99 per cent, that doesn’t mean we’re demonstrating against the 1 per cent. There may be some people there tomorrow who feel that way, but I think we want people to come to share their grievances. We can talk about people who are members of the 1 per cent, although I think it’s intuitively obvious to most people who we’re talking about. But the top people at Goldman Sachs – we’d love it if they came down and joined us.

CH: You said the government hasn’t done enough. What about the Vickers Report, things like that?

NC: I think we clearly do need to make sure that the consumer arms of banks are separated from the investment arms. Why we are giving them until 2019 to do that, I have no idea. The crash happened in 2008 and they are getting until 2019 to put this quite basic thing in, this is what I mean.

CH: And the rich should be taxed more?

NC: I think there is a sense that people who work very hard, have pretty decent jobs, who have always obeyed all the rules, are finding that life is suddenly really expensive. The situation for young people is really grim in this country, it’s incredibly competitive to get to university. Then you work really hard at university and you get a really good degree and you come out into the highest youth unemployment that we have now since records began, I think youth unemployment is just about top a million. That’s one in five of our young people out of work.

You are coming into a situation, particularly if you want to work in the creative industries in London, where you have to work for free for a year before you can get a job. There is absolutely no chance of you getting on the housing ladder.

We have sort of a social contract in this country where if you obey the rules, work hard, obey the law, you’ll be OK. And people aren’t OK at the moment, and are getting less OK.

CH: How many people are you expecting?

NC: It’s difficult to say. At last glance, we had 4,500 people on our Facebook event page saying they were definitely going to come. The rule of thumb with Facebook events is that half of those will come. Even so, we’re making plans for it to be potentially quite big.

CH: Are you directing this against a certain sector of banking in particular?

NC: We’re talking about the financial system in general. Talking about the bankers doesn’t make sense unless you talk about government as well. The banks exist within a certain incentive and regulatory structure and if they were prevented from doing certain things by government, they wouldn’t be able to do them. And it’s not even one government, it’s a succession of governments over the past 25 years, from the Big Bang onwards.

CH: Would you say you’re an anti-capitalist movement?

NC: I was having a conversation on this with a financial journalist earlier this week. He goes, ‘Will any of you be proposing a Tobin Tax?’ I was like, ‘The Tobin Tax? You mean a tax which is a micro-payment on financial transactions? I don’t see how that can be anti-Capitalist.’ So your definition of anti-Capitalist may vary.

I have no doubt that some people who come tomorrow will think that the appropriate response to systemic failure, which is what we’re seeing, is a change of the entire system. Personally that is not my position, but the important thing about the movement is it brings together people like me, with people who think that the whole system is rotten. And we are going to talk to each other and we’re going to try and find common ground.

That’s why the movement is really important and I hope that Speccie readers can have some sympathy with this. I guess there is a temptation that Spectator readers may think, oh this is something which is aimed against us. I don’t know if your readers do think that, but that is emphatically not the case and I would invite them to come down and speak to us, and I think that they may well find that a lot of people are basically saying the same things that they would say.

CH: Why are you holding Occupy on a Saturday? The City is pretty empty of bankers during the weekend.

NC: Whether the City will be full of those who usually work there isn’t really a factor in our planning. I suspect that, if we had issued our call for the Monday, we might well be getting questions about why we had chosen a day on which the City would already be full of people.