Even Alec Baldwin declared “We do not want [our country] to go down the tube, like England,” in a video encapsulating the ‘Occupy Wall Street’ demonstrations. For a rather ambiguous personality, it still sadly rings true for the nations involved in the “restoration of democracy” movement.
September 17th marked the first day of the New York protests, with an estimated 15,000 protesters turning up on the first day. And it seems that Occupy Wall Street is in a small way, an extension of the Arab Spring revolution with an approximate 1,610,591 demonstrators from 951 cities around the world already rallying against “corporate greed and corrupt politics.”
So it seemed only appropriate that the UK should occupy the Wall Street equivalent. A general assembly formed together to occupy the London Stock Exchange, emblematic of the existing social and wealth divide in the UK. With a hot-pot of high unemployment, austerity measures, rises in student tuition fee and privatisation; it comes as no surprise that all that is left is the bitter social aftertaste.
The UK’s August riots may just symbolise a frenzied act of despondency or insatiability depending on how the actions were perceived by the beholder. However, it is far from the first protests that the Conservative coalition have encountered since their sovereignty in May 2010. It certainly has set the worker’s wheels in motion as seen through the global domino effect.
Anti-Box Democracy 