As the global Occupy Movement enters its next phase, U‑Know proudly presents the personal reflections of an individual participant from Occupy Bath and Bristol — including an overview of the movement’s origins, actions and future intentions. 

“Listen, the next revolution is gonna be a revolution of ideas.” — Bill Hicks

The Republican Party’s war against American women’s healthcare and contraceptive rights is an all-out war against women. Birth control freed females at last from the age-old tyranny of enforced, non-stop childbearing. But the Republicans have made their aim clear: to catapult women’s rights back by decades – and keep women enslaved as second-class citizens. 

The Conservatives roll out plans to force benefit claimants to work for what was previously their right, but it was devised by Labour, and the same thing has been happening in prisons for fifteen years. To make people work for the minimum needed to survive with no hope of improvement or ability to leave is simply slavery. As has always been the case, it’s a state of affairs that suits the slave owners very well.

After the 10th November student demonstration against rasing the price of education trashed Conservative Party headquarters, the police — aided by right wing media — were searching for people who were recognisable in the footage. Many of the students were new to protest and had joined in spontaneously, and so were unaware of how the police work. The FITwatch blog, that campaigns against the police Forward Intelligence Team intimidation, published advice. The police had the FITwatch site taken down. 

The advice is republished here as part of it going viral on sites all around the world. It remain pertinent for anybody who is ever invoved in any action that the police may want to come and get you for.

The over-riding desire to boost economic growth and perpetuate our economy is not only impossible, it is undesirable. If we are to live sustainably, to take what we need without ruining things for those elsewhere and those who come after, we have to stop the obsession with growth and realise that, like any growing youth, we have reached maturity.

As the new coalition government starts its clampdown on benefit claimants, it is apparent that this is a cruel and absurd exercise in blaming the victim. Meanwhile tax evaders, who cost the state many times the amount that benefit fraudsters do, are left relatively unhindered.

Even though gay sex is fully legalised in the UK, men convicted are still recorded as sex offenders. A gay man who had a confession beaten out of him 50 years ago is still prevented from doing volunteer work with children or vulnerable adults. Tens of thousands of men’s lives are impeded like this, losing job prospects and living with the threat of vigilante violence. The state has deleted some records when individually applied for, but it cannot be fair that we can aoplogise for persecuting gay men yet refuse to erase their convictions as a matter of course.

The Copenhagen climate talks were supposed to deliver a successor to the Kyoto treaty. This was the time and place when the world was meant to come together to make a legally binding agreement to cut CO2 and prevent catastrophic climate change. It failed so badly that many observers believe it would have been better if the talks and their resulting deal hadn’t happened at all. 

So what went wrong and why? Jess Worth, editor of New Internationalist, was inside the talks and explains what happened and what it means for us all.

Carbon trading — where high emitters buy and sell permits awarded to them under rules they had a large part in designing themselves — is based on the idea that solving climate change can best be done by trusting the same systems that caused the problem to come up with solutions.

Sandbag, a new environmental organisation, thinks we can accept the paramount profit motive of industry. All we need to do, they say, is make the market a bit more effective.

But the market’s belief that we can have infinite economic growth on a finite planet is not only self-evidently insane, it can only be an obstacle to tackling climate change. Sandbag are making themselves apologists for the climate criminals.

The presence of security cameras is meant to make us feel safe, but it actually contributes to fear. We feel that the cameras are there because danger is lurking. 

As privatisation has shifted the public mind, we now accept that private companies watch over public spaces, storing the data and we never quite know where or why. This creeping authoritarian approach makes us feel more unsafe, so that although crime is falling our fear of it is rising. The answer we’re given is to hand out more contracts to install the very things that undermine our security. 

But, just as we rapidly binned the 60s utopian vision of urban motorways and tower blocks, so we can choose to halt the advance of corporate control and build new models of shared public space.