“A Bail-In means marching into our broken banks and building something better. Make your silent, sterile Barclays branch sing, dance, explode with life! “
UK Uncut are planning bail-ins at Barclays branches next weekend. I don’t want to be the continual purveyor of internet take-downs concerning these guys (this is no John Lewis protest), but there are some serious political problems with this kind of action.
Banks are extremely tense, stressful spaces, particularly when you’re skint. We’ve all been there to some extent, routinely avoiding checking our balances until our loan/wages have been paid in, to escape that little panic moment. When I was on benefits I’d avoid having anything to do with my bank where possible, and when cheques, overdraft issues and card thefts made visits necessary I’d have to psyche myself up to go in. Money worries dominate your life when you’re hard-up and the bank, like the benefit office, has the power to arbitrarily withdraw the limited credit you live on. The people in this position already hate bank visits – should we be making them more stressed by disrupting what might very well be necessary, long put-off and difficult business?
Saturday opening hours are also the only time lots of workers can access bank services. If you get paid by cheque, or work longer than 9-5 with an hour for lunch, or in a place miles from highstreet shops and banks, you need weekend banking. Saturday, for many, is cheque-cashing, bill-paying day. The queue at my local Barclays stretches out the door and down the street on a Saturday morning, probably not because people enthusiastically choose to spend their free time this way. Because they have to.
Banks aren’t like Topshop. No one ‘needs’, on a fundamental, day-to-day, life-sustaining level to go buy some jeans in Oxford Street on any particular day. But we’re forced to rely on banks, and, the worse off we are, on the physical spaces of highstreet branches – students and young professionals might find internet and phone banking more convenient, but they’re often not options for those on benefits, the unemployed and pensioners. The bank trip on a Saturday morning, queueing for ages, maybe with kids and shopping, is for some the only way to sort out the anxiety of money problems without another week rolling past. The only way to pay the rent or bills before getting into arrears. The only way to cash a cheque so it’s in your account before your bills are due. The only way to request that overdraft extension that’ll feed you this month.
So perhaps disrupting these places, at this time isn’t such a great idea. The video embedded on the UK Uncut item is interesting. The idea of a ‘University of Strategic Optimism’ is funny and clever. From their site it looks like they’ve hit posh people’s bank Coutts and participated in library teach-ins and anti-Tesco actions. Good. The guy in the video dressed as an academic delivers a good, rabble-rousing speech without too much jargon or posturing. But who is his audience? It looks rather like a group of activists, not customers. When this kind of walk-in, sit-down, ‘bail-in’ occurs, how many of the people using the bank – the very people, I presume, UK Uncut want to appeal to with anti-cuts politics – will stay? And how many will get pissed off at the disruption, or be forced to leave with their money business not complete?
It’s all very well to talk about reclaiming space and set up “libraries, forests, hospitals, schools, playgrounds, leisure centres” in occupied banks, but if we’re not winning people over on the ground we’re only talking to ourselves. That’s just revolutionary posturing, and it isn’t helpful. If your creation of a ‘university’ in Barclays, prevents pensioners, claimants and workers from paying bills, sorting out cash flow or paying in cheques, they’re just going to think you’re middle-class twats. However much they disagree with the cuts.
Maybe the audience isn’t meant to be these people, the bank users who’ll be there when activists arrive. Maybe it’s meant to be channelled through the media, to a bigger audience of readers. But how hard is it going to be for journalists to get a quote from someone prevented from banking, setting up a nifty middle-class kids v. working-class people divide? Not very. That story doesn’t work with the Topshop, Boots or Vodafone shut downs, but it’ll work here. Not least because it’s uncomfortably close to the truth if activists don’t engage with the realities of working-class life before flashmobbing and teaching-in.
This action has been developed off the back of outrage at bankers’ bonuses. But the City being closed on a Saturday isn’t a good enough reason to re-target that outrage at the highstreet, with all the problems that involves. And it’s pretty economically confused too. Unlike Topshop and chums, banks don’t make their profits primarily from highstreet branches. Maybe bail-ins will stop them selling a few savings accounts and high-interest credit cards. But those aren’t the main source of the unimaginable sums that go into bonuses – both the BBC and Telegraph report the majorty of Barclays’ profits coming from the investment banking side. Highstreet branches have little to do with the investment arms of banks, the high-level high-risk trading and betting. I don’t fully understand how banks work – I think few people do – but we should. No one is going to be any the wiser about the workings of capital, the hidden processes behind boom and bust, if we create activism that incoherently confuses bail-outs and bonuses with highstreet banking.
So what’s the alternative? I quite like the idea of invading the dead weekend City, but there’s obvious problems with having no targets around, and no non-bankers to persuade about the cuts. Hitting the highstreet on a Saturday can be a good opportunity to talk to local people, as the tax-avoidance protests have shown. But there has to be a better way of making the point about banking without disrupting the very necessary business of organising money during limited free time. Street stalls, replica bank counters outside branches with street theatre, lectures, leafletting – we don’t have to abandon the highstreet to make our point. But we shouldn’t unnecessarily and counter-productively antagonise it either.
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I really like the description of what banks mean on a Saturday, really good. And the main thrust , that normal poor people will have their lives disrupted: I mean, how long are these bail-ins really going to last? other UkUncut protests have been as short as 10 mins. And this time the aim isn’t even to shut down the branches, but to liven them up.
Yes, dealing with money is stressful, but surely that goes for everywhere: there are always unprivileged people dealing with the shit of capitalism wherever you go. That goes for workplaces, HQs, roads, estates, anywhere. Some people are having a stressful time of it wherever you go. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t protest.
Comment by richard — February 13, 2011 @ 6:31 pm
aarg, that came out all inarticulate. but you get the idea.
Comment by richard — February 13, 2011 @ 6:32 pm
Sure, pretty much all protests are going to disrupt people other than their intended targets. But it’s a question of balance. Industrial action can disrupt the public significantly, but the fact it’s workers’ only weapon, and genuinely does hit bosses hard, matters. This doesn’t seem to me to balance out in the same way. For a start, why would Barclays actually care? Unlike hitting retailers, this doesn’t hurt them anywhere near as hard – the tax and bonuses issues are already public knowledge and stopping their highstreet business doesn’t hurt so much, given they don’t make the bulk of profit from them.
Occupying a bank, for however long, will cause business to stop – it’s naive to suggest otherwise really, with UK Uncut saying these are ‘transformations’ or whatever – in effect they’ll be shut downs as management withdraw workers while the disruption is ongoing. You might judge that doesn’t matter given the importance of the action, but there are numerous other ways to make the point about banks & bonuses, better and less incoherent ways I think.
I don’t think the argument that all protest is disruptive and all areas of life are stressful really cuts it. As activists we all know, consciously or not, that there’s a balance to be struck between hitting your target and alienating your potential allies. There’s a reason we don’t routinely occupy libraries during exam time, but do support lecturers striking over this period where they’ve decided to. Similarly, the balance argument dominated the UCL Occupation at times, when students wanted to use the space we’d taken over for society activities.
UK Uncut has played a really useful educative, propagandistic role in the past, with the tax avoidance stuff showing really clearly how we’re not all in this together. I’d rather see a day of action that focused on developing that into analysis of the banks, and getting anti-cuts arguments out to the public, than one that appears to be more about super-fun times for activists.
Comment by Sofie — February 14, 2011 @ 11:54 pm
So there was a bank bail-in today, and it didn’t close down the store, and the employees had mixed reactions: one took flyers and said she agreed with us, because she didn’t get a bonus. Another was less hospitable. I don’t think this is a simple ‘middle class activists get in the way’ situation.
Yes, you’re absolutely right about balance, but I think a day of action where lots of people target lots of branches actually does start to make a difference to the banks. They rely on their reputations and social capital for their real capital.
As for super-fun times: well, actually it’s quite good if protest is fun. Not for the die-hard activists: they’ll keep coming out whatever the flag-wrenching awfulness is. But for all those people you’re trying to get on board (those who aren’t revelling in the ability to find the liberated moment of the strike), it’s quite good if everything isn’t (a) in London and (b) isn’t more boring than work itself.
I agree that there is some incoherency in the actions, but no more so than ‘tax dodgers go to hell’ a couple of months ago. For anti-capitalists like you and me, it all seems a bit naff, but a lot of people (and, before you say it, they’re not all middle class blah blah) understand that it’s not the perfect but that it’s better than sitting and doing nothing.
Come up with something more coherent that people can do which doesn’t involve them being all in one place or going on strike, and let’s go do it. Until then, #ukuncut me up.
Comment by richard — February 15, 2011 @ 11:27 pm
“it all seems a bit naff”
> might sometimes seem a bit naff. and other times it seems spot on.
(why do I comment so badly on your blog…?)
Comment by richard — February 15, 2011 @ 11:29 pm
I can understand your concern regarding ‘bail ins’ and I’m glad a clear rational not to do them has been made. However, for me it is all about scale and length.
This was one day of action across the nation. It wasn’t action that prevented people using banks, nor was it forcibly stopping banks from opening. Instead it was education delivered to those using services that are assisting a questionable action.
Therefore if the bank shuts that is the banks decision, not the protestors.
To add to earlier comments,it is a logical and targeted ‘next step’ or two as people are forced to face the consequences of corporate tax strategies. I would rather that UK Uncut continued to promote discussion and challenge practices rather than the usual ‘shout at the telly’ or print a pamphlet response which is really all that occurred until now.
People are fearful for their incomes and its time to challenge the spaces in which those who don’t contribute their worth are challenged. Else it’ll be those with least money and least voice who suffer the most. Last centuries lie was ‘it is a great and glorious thing to die for ones country’. This centuries lie is to be ‘we’re all in this together’.
Comment by John Cooper — February 19, 2011 @ 11:44 pm