Glorious, glorious, Edinburgh. Surely, the most beautiful city in the world. If a little overcast today, but the plus side of climate change is that it still seems like early autumn so it was warm. [Okay, there are no plusses, I know].
Straight to St Andrew’s Square to visit our Occupying forces. I say ‘our’ because they are working for you and me.
Counted about 20-25 tents, and after five pm, when the darkness has arrived seemingly early, there were no lights in them. However there were about 25 people milling around the main tent, and other scattered about. And the whole scene looked fabulous with the fairy lights in the trees of the Square, and, ironically, the windows of Harvey Nicholls, Louis Vuitton, and Rathbones casting their warming glow over the whole occupation.
Inside the main tent there are message boards with many signs on how to conduct yourself in the Square, from security to cleaning. The Square was very clean and tidy, and not at all intrusive as you walked through the Square, on one’s business so to speak.
Also up on the notice board and highlighted is the manifesto that appears to come from the Occupy Wall St team –surprisingly profound and actually true. I was pleasantly surprised.[i]
Soon an ex antipodean introduces himself. All around other people are in deep conversations and I hear wafts of communism [“just means community”], Marxism, and all the “isms’. On the message board is a notice saying “forget the isms, look at the issues”. So someone was there before them.
Also on the board are various notices containing the words “citizen” etc. This is the only thing that gets up my nose. Only semi and permanent fringe people use this word. It is a word that rarely comes up in normal mainstream life [unless in warfare] and is a barrier, a wall, a jargon indicator, that isolates them to some degree from the rest of us.
I have a long conversation, listening, with the ex antipodean and later with a local publican. Both raise Royal Bank Scotland ["RBS"], and both raise Fred Goodwin. Is it in shame? Anger? But they don’t speak heatedly. They speak of the loss of sight by the executives of RBS and all the other banks with their service to the community. Their race to achieve bigger and more more more. As the economy tanks, on the old people who will die this year due to an inability to afford heat, of the kids not getting jobs when they leave school.
However they [bankers] have / had no insight into the effect on the community of what has happened, “mainstream community” they called it. The publican quotes me all the statistics which I later look up and he is right. This is a topic they know well, whether in the Square or at the pub. Fred Goodwin and the RBS's nearly GBP25 billion dollar one year loss; the hundreds of thousands of people who have since lost their jobs in the community; the long road ahead for the economy. The fact that the average wage in the UK is GBP25,000 and Fred Goodwin lost the equivalent of 100,000 job in one year alone[ii]. The waste.
Everyone I spoke to did not appear angry; if anything the impression I walked away with was they just seemed to want someone to listen. They spoke eloquently, and with care, in both terms of the word. As an investment banker I certainly feel shame. After all, who can blame them!!
[i] http://www.dangerousminds.net/comments/first_official_statement_from_the_occupy_wall_street_movement/
[ii] Actually this site has a lot of info on averages http://career-advice.monster.co.uk/salary-benefits/pay-salary-advice/uk-average-salary-graphs/article.aspx.
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