20.17 Blog #37: 2012, Starbucks, Cuts, Tax and debating the facts

5 years ago I took part in one of the most successful pieces of protest I think I’ve ever been part of.

Cast your mind back to those early days of the Coalition.  The message being transmitted from Tory Towers with little Lib Dem liars giving little Lib Dem thumbs up was:  The country is broken.  It’s bust.  It’s cashless.  So we can’t afford apparent luxuries like the NHS, welfare and housing.  Soz.  #toughchoices

The immediate argument in response was:  There is loads of money out there.

One of the loudest arguments was to close the tax loopholes, redefine the definitions between tax ‘evasion’ and tax ‘avoidance’. Or just tax massive companies more.  Amazon, Google and Boots were all seen as huge profit-making companies that refused to pay their tax.  You can read about it here.  Starbucks had paid no corporation tax whatsoever in 2011.  None.

This all feels a little bit like treading water, so apologies if you all know.  But at the time, it was news to me.  It felt like it wasn’t just ideologically hating the Tories, the Party I had been warned about throughout my life, but that there was a very decent argument to oppose their austerity.  We were right.  We had good reasons.  We were not being represented by the media.

UK Uncut had been holding occupations and sit-ins to raise awareness of this situation.  They called for a day of action on the 8^th December, arguably one of the busiest shopping days in the calendar. A in York group organised to stand outside Starbucks with free tea, coffee and cake and discourage people from giving their cash to the business, whilst raising money for a York women’s refugee shelter.  Also because food is political, and food should be free.  And food and coffee should not be a tool for a massive corporation to make money while cuts will affect everyone at the very bottom.  Starbucks even tried a divide-and-rule tactic warning staff if they were forced to pay taxes it could affect their staff’s rights.  Nonsense, of course.

Firstly, this little action felt a very novel idea, despite it not being particularly large.  But until then a lot of focus had been around waiting for Trade Unions to call massive strikes, or funnelling people into London demos.  This was before the Occupy movement, and giving out free food on the street (through York Food Not Bombs) felt novel.

So the Police came to keep an eye on us, and the Manager of Starbucks came to keep an eye on us.  And people took our grub and went elsewhere.  And at one point Jimmy Carr (who had a gig that night) nipped past our protest to grab a coffee.  He’d recently been embroiled in a tax scandal, so goodness knows why he decided to risk more media attention for choosing a tax-dodging business.

Now an 'alternative' to austerity is part of the political conversation.  There are other pots of money, other opportunities, other streams to explore is part of a new conversation.  Closing tax loopholes, taxing the very, very rich and finding an alternative to austerity are all part of Labour’s recent manifesto.  And even the Tories seem to be rebranding as Nice Tories with slightly less cuts and the offer of Millennial Railcards in their recent budgets.

And I think it’s because groups like UK Uncut and little local pockets of activism started to change the conversation, raising awareness, keeping it in the public eye.  I’m going to talk more about it in another blog,  but I just wanted to reflect on 5 years ago when we were building a momentum (but not that kind) to open these discussions in the freezing cold, outside Starbucks.