HOT TOPICS

HANG ON TO YOUR HATS, HERE’S A BLAST AT THE RICH AND THE REST

Idealism, engagement, experiment: the Occupy protest was a nursery for the mind says CIWEM executive director, Nick Reeves

President John F. Kennedy observed that those who try to prevent a quiet revolution are in danger of creating a violent one. Too few politicians have heeded this perfect piece of wisdom. Even fewer have learned the lessons of history. As I write the Corporation of London has served an eviction notice on the Occupy protesters outside St. Paul's Cathedral. What will happen next is anyone's guess.  

You have to look back to the Great Reform Act of 1832 to see how the then prime minister, the Duke of Wellington, (reluctantly - but wisely - and at the third time of asking), capitulated to protesters in Birmingham, Bristol, Nottingham and Derby about widening the franchise and putting an end to 60 rotten, and largely unpopulated, boroughs. This is how there was no imitation of the French Revolution. Britain's political community, however aloof, proved sufficiently supple to read the mood of the nation: 1832, not 1688, was the 'glorious revolution'.

Some tried to present the Occupy protests as a storm in a tea-cup or at least a wiz in a blender. In the end it became a global phenomenon affecting 2,000 cities and a perfect storm for the Bishop of London. By common consent the Church was caught off guard and missed a God-given opportunity to shape the zeitgeist.    

Despite what you might think, and apart from occasional hell-in-a-handcart outrage, there wasn't much difference in media coverage of the Occupy protest outside St Paul's Cathedral. The Times suggested the St Paul's campers 'were on to something'. The pink pages of the Financial Times, the City's own organ, called 'for moralised markets'. And the newspaper's brain-box-in-chief asked, 'why the arrival of Occupy London had taken so long'. Even the doggedly pro-globalisation Economist questioned the rocketing share of prosperity being snatched by the top one per cent.

The only problem with much of the media coverage was the narrative of conflict between the protesters and senior churchmen as the bankers went about their business, unmolested. Lest we forget, St Paul's Cathedral was never the protesters' intended target, it was the Stock Exchange. Yet it was three senior clerics who resigned from their posts at St Paul's. The Archbishop of Canterbury said: 'The events of the last couple of weeks have shown very clearly how decisions made in good faith by people under unusual pressure can have utterly unforeseen and unwelcome consequences.'

But didn't men and women of faith see the rising tide of discontent? Didn't they note that more and more people are being left without a voice? When such a wide and eclectic mix of people are singing a tune - discordant to a City worker's ears - but seemingly in harmony with the global view that the market economy has failed to deliver growth, jobs, hope, and failed to launch a green revolution for low-carbon living, everybody needs to listen. The cure is to connect the financial with the ethical and the sustainable.        

Social scientists and economists, alike, have long warned about a widening wealth gap - ever since the big bang of City regulation a quarter of a century ago.  They also spoke of the need to invest in a green revolution and new green jobs. Sometimes the warnings came in the form of an official report, and yet the establishment regarded growing inequalities as a mere statistical curiosity, worthy of the same sort of passing attention as the annual hit parade of baby's names. Until now, that is.

The elite are suddenly running to keep clear of a rising tide of public resentment. The government is trying to prevent it. When some fraction of the wealth waterfall was trickling down to the masses below, those masses would perhaps acquiesce to Lord Mandelson's intense relaxation about 'the filthy rich'. But all of that changes now that typical real wages are not rising but falling, whilst FTSE 100 bosses have seen their pay increase by double percentage figures.

A survey conducted by the Resolution Foundation found that economic anxiety is gripping the nation and public concerns about the environment and climate change are drifting away. Slowly but surely, since the great bank bailouts of 2008, the realisation has dawned that the telephone number salaries that regularly pop up in the news are salaries paid by the rest of us. An ICM poll last October suggested that far more voters are inclined to endorse protesters' slogans than to dismiss their naivety, and news about directors' pay going up by half during the past year has further increased the impression of a plutocracy comprising serial tax-avoiders.

The first political challenge is to grasp the shift in sentiment and engage with people's concerns - real or perceived. In the US, after prolonged deliberation, President Obama is doing just that. As he plans re-election to office, he is dusting down Roosevelt speeches, and preparing to campaign against tax cuts for the wealthy. At home, the ruling Tories simply cannot compute. Boris Johnson's ravings about protests 'erupting like boils' is a colourful hyperbolic variant of a shared reactionary impulse, evident in David Cameron's own interventions, as well as in reports to introduce new laws to prevent political encampments. A rush to legislate would put tidy streets ahead of the many more pressing issues being raised and this would be a mistake. Meanwhile Ed Miliband's attempt to distinguish predatory from productive forms of capitalism looks more prescient by the day. Just falling short of wholehearted backing for the St. Paul's campers he has, at least, urged the world to listen to protesters' concerns.

The next and far tougher challenge is to translate ubiquitous indignation at the old economic and financial order into a practical programme for its overhaul. Some of this might be about technical tweaks or a more radical economic model based on nature, nurture and replenishment. But the more fundamental task is to develop a new model and conception of corporate social responsibility and figure out how to apply it in company law - a point well made, and enthusiastically received, by John Edmonds in his speech to delegates at CIWEM's 2011 national conference.

The St Paul's campers' admirable decision to ban alcohol and to apply restraint at least ensures they can grapple with all of this sober, but much of the brain work will have to be done far away from the Cathedral. The protesters have nonetheless already (as I write) achieved more than they could have hoped, by forcing politicians, journalists and churchmen alike to turn their minds to the neglected question of the undeserving rich who consume far more than the rest of us, and far more than they need. The late Sir Jimmy Savile earned £250,000 per year. He gave away 90 per cent of it and kept just enough to maintain his independence.         

The Occupy campers have been attacked for being impractical dreamers. In fact, it is the established political classes of the west wedded to utopian thinking, while the protesters are recalling us to the actualities of human experience. Based on economic theories that left out human beings and natural capital, the global free market was supposed to be self-regulating. Now a process of disintegration is underway, in which structures set up in the post-cold-war period are visibly fragmenting.

Anyone with a smattering of history - or has read the ecologist's bible Silent Spring - can see that the hubristic capitalism of the last 20 years was programmed to self-destruct. The idea that the world's disparate societies and cultures could be kettled into a worldwide free market without a thought to diminishing natural resources was always a dangerous fantasy.    

The demands of the Occupy movement may be inchoate. But it is not the protesters who threaten the global economy or the world's fragile ecosystems. The folk camped outside St. Paul's may have no clear solution, yet. But it is they, not ruling elites in thrall to a defunct market utopia, who are engaging in reality. It doesn't matter if it goes on to become a long term political force or disappears in a few weeks; it has put the old issues of inequality, economic injustice and the environmental deficiencies of capitalism back at the heart of the public debate. This is a stunning achievement.      

By, wrongly, labelling the Occupy movement 'anti-capitalist', those who do not want reforms have been able to avoid the real debate. This has to stop. It is time to use the Occupy movement as a catalyst for a serious public debate on alternative institutional arrangements that will make capitalism better for everyone, better for the environment and for ecosystems services. It is also an opportunity for the Church, and all faiths groups, to reclaim their role as a voice for the poor, for those without a voice and for those without hope.