Saint Paul Protests Protesters

You are thinking of coming to London, are you? I’m sure that there are a number of highlights on your itinerary: Buck House, Trafalgar Square, Piccadilly Circus and Westminster Abbey, all there among the more compelling draws. And then there is Saint Paul’s Cathedral, Sir Christopher Wren’s seventeenth century Baroque masterpiece, a symbol of the new London that emerged from the Great Fire of 1666.

Hold on; you can't go there. Yes, I’m sorry to have to tell you that you are going to have to score this off the list because it’s closed, for the first time since London was under attack by German bombers during World War Two. Then it was for only four days in September, 1940, when an unexploded bomb was found near the south-west tower.

This time it’s been closed not by the Luftwaffe but by anti-capitalist protestors, Bedouins who have pitched their unsightly tent city in the Cathedral’s precincts, copycatting those other Bedouins presently disfiguring New York. How long it will remain closed this time is uncertain, perhaps until Christmas, which is as long as the happy campers say they intend to remain.

The Arabs have been asked to strike camp by the Rt. Reverend Graeme Knowles, Dean of Saint Paul’s. He was originally full of trendy sympathy for the cause. But, alas, the alliance between the protest and the pulpit has not endured, hardly surprising in view of the unsightly mess outside one of London’s most beguiling monuments.

“The decision to close Saint Paul’s Cathedral”, Reverend Knowles told a press conference, “is unprecedented in modern times. We have done this with a very heavy heart, but it’s simply not possible to fulfil our day-to-day obligations to worshipers, visitors and pilgrims.”

With visitor numbers already reduced by half, and parishioners and City workers feeling threatened by the growing occupation, the clergyman saw the light, or rather he saw the rubbish, changing his laudatory tone. 'Go, please go', he says. 'No', say the campers, having done the decent thing and taken a vote.

You may wonder just exactly what these people are doing there in the first place, Saint Paul’s not being noted as one of the Bastilles of global capitalism. That’s because they weren’t allowed to camp on the private land adjacent to the London Stock Exchange. Instead they squatted by the church, an ally against mammon. Not any longer, not after it saw the kind of people it was obliged to play host to, and the disruption they brought along in their trail.

Who are these people, these Bedouins? Really just the usual suspects, the Dave Spart crowd, moaning about the injustices of hegemonic capitalism, chattering inanely into their iPhones while queuing up outside Starbucks. Yes, it’s the usual toy town Trots, one of the features of the growing contagion of global idiocy; those peasants, artisans and others enrolled among the dependants of the state; those parasites who depend on the taxes of others, for their doles or for their make-believe public sector sinecures.

There is Sam Mack-Poole (yes, that really is his name), who wants to see “a state of the people, for the people”, Abraham Lincoln-style, rather than the people in a state. “We don’t live in a democracy”, he announced to reporters, “I was radicalised by the cuts.” What particular cuts was Mr. Mack-Poole radicalised by, I wonder? I don’t suppose it matters because apparently we are soon to see the Mack-Poole back. He has converted to Islam and has announced his decision to go and work in Saudi Arabia, that well-known state for the people.

There is Julian Assange, Wiki leaker, self-publicist and alleged sex offender, present to lend support, hiding his silly face behind one of those even sillier V for Vendetta masks. Oh, how I hate those bally awful masks and everything they represent, the badge of a new mediocrity, the symbol of the second-rate. When I look at these inanely grinning faces, these people and those ugly little tents I can only echo the comments of an anonymous New Zealander, who wrote;

Capitalism may not be perfect; yet even the greediest of today’s greedy money grubbers would be saints compared with the money-hating anti-capitalists of the past, like Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao Zedong and Pol Pot, who in less than three decades killed or maimed nearly a hundred million men, women and children, and brought untold suffering to a large portion of mankind. Why don’t these dissatisfied, anti-City protesters pack up their iPhones and designer tents, and hoof it over to the ‘trade-free’, socialist paradise of North Korea, where I’m sure the Dear Leader will welcome them with open arms. In North Korea, there are no evil corporations or banks to ruin Occupiers' lives, because Kim Il-sung and his creepy son Kim Jong-il got rid of them long ago.

Yes, why don’t they? I don’t want them; most Londoners don’t want them. Now even the church doesn’t want them.