http://www.thenation.com/article/158282/how-build-progressive-tea-party?rel=emailNationAcross Britain, the same thing was happening. Even in Tunbridge Wells—a town synonymous with ultraconservatism—the Vodafone store was blockaded. Again, many people spontaneously joined in. The protests were all over that evening’s TV news. It was the most-read story on the websites of the BBC and the country’s most-read newspaper, the Daily Mail. The prime-time Channel 4 News reported, “A more eloquent and informed group of demonstrators would be hard to come across and one is struck by the wide appeal across ages and incomes, of what they had to say.” The uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt have shown how social media can be used to conduct the unfocused rage of a scattered population and harden it into a weapon. UK Uncut shows the same tactics can be used in a democracy—and there is the same need. Unemployment in the United States is at the same level as in Egypt before the uprising: 9 percent.
The UK Uncut message was simple: if you want to sell in our country, you pay our taxes. They are the membership fee for a civilized society. Most of the protesters I spoke with had never attended a demonstration before, but were driven to act by the rising unemployment, insecurity and austerity that are being outpaced only by rising rewards for the superrich. Ellie Mae O’Hagan, a 25-year-old office worker in Liverpool, one of the most economically depressed places in the country, said she was “absolutely outraged to discover that I was paying more than Philip Green in taxes.” She added, “I could see what all the cuts were doing. My brother had been made redundant, loads of my friends were unemployed and I could see it all getting worse, while these bankers get even bigger bonuses. And I thought, Right, you’ve got to do something. So I e-mailed UK Uncut to ask if there was a protest happening in Liverpool. They said, Not yet, so you organize one. So I spent forty-eight hours arranging one. And a hundred people turned up—an amazing mixture of people, who I had never met, and who didn’t know each other—and we shut down both Vodafone stores. Suddenly, it felt like we weren’t passive anymore. We were standing up for ourselves.”
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