Occupy Toronto began on Saturday 15 October, with a 2,000 person march (a pretty impressive size for Canada) through the financial district before setting up camp in a downtown park.

For weeks we’d been following with interest the news coming out of Occupy Wall Street: from the initial Adbusters callout, to the police pepper-spraying that sparked widespread outrage, to – most excitingly – its endurance. Despite the ever colder weather, this movement was growing – both in size and in coherence, with a “people’s declaration” recently issued. And then came the email: “meeting to plan for Occupy Bay Street”. The movement was coming to Toronto.

The rumour is that a couple of friends from Toronto were holidaying in Spain, and stumbled onto the tent city protests in Madrid. Feeling empowered by what they saw, and inspired by New York’s movement they wrote up the first call-out and set up the first website calling for an occupation in Toronto. In the run up to Saturday, Occupy Wall Street was being characterized in our media as a wholly American phenomenon that would never catch on in Canada because the protesters’ concerns were not relevant here. It’s clear that they couldn’t have been more wrong: the movement is now in over 1,500 cities around the world, including 29 in Canada – and it continues to grow.

The initial organizers of Occupy Toronto were, for the most part, new to activism. They had energy, ambition, and a great sense of “seizing the moment” – but they also had a lot of skepticism to deal with. From the very first call-out, it was clear that many of Toronto’s long-term community organizers would be keeping their distance. In part, this was due to the ever-relevant fear of diverting important activist energy away from on the ground organizing to a perhaps fleeting gathering. But there were also important critiques emerging, most noticeably on the radical blogosphere where radicals have been vocally denouncing both the New York and Toronto Occupy movements as hipster, white and blind to colonialism. In particular, many are unhappy about the use of the word “occupy”, believing that it shows a failure to recognize that we are already on occupied land – stolen native land.

Such grievances have been exacerbated by sound-bites in the media from various people involved in the occupation, in particular on the topics of police relations and the black bloc. In a city still reeling from the largest mass arrest in Canadian history and extreme police brutality at last year’s G20 protest summits, many are angered by the extreme politeness, praise even, that some parts of the occupation movement have been showing for the police. They may be keeping their distance for now, but we cannot forget that the police are not our friends. Similarly, it seems like every day so far someone at the occupation will talk to the media about how great it is that there is no black bloc present – hopelessly unaware that much of the infrastructure, support, bottom-up process, and on-the-ground work being done both here and in New York comes from those same anarchists, just unblocked for the time being.

Many of these grievances and critiques are fair. It’s true that about 80% of the occupiers are white, while only 50% of the city is. It’s also true that any resistance movement in Turtle Island (aka Canada) worthy of the respect of radicals has to root itself in a recognition that this is stolen land, yet so far it hasn’t really done so. However, it’s incredibly disheartening to see so many radicals so quick to denounce this new movement – and it’s noticeable that on the first day of the occupation, walking around this new and emerging site, the only people we met all day who were at all negative were two activists that saw themselves as hardcore community organizers, the “real” activists in the city.

If the long-term committed community organizers in the city only ever organize with people who already understand colonization, who already identify as anti-capitalist, who already have an analysis of police repression; and can only handle being around people who already talk the activist talk and walk the activist walk, well, shit, our revolution will consist of a hundred people. Of course new organizers are going to make mistakes. Of course mainstream people drawn into the park for one reason or another are going to have mainstream ideas. But it’s crazy to see that as a problem, when in fact it’s something entirely different: a golden opportunity.

One week in, the excitement is palpable and the air is thick with potential. Not only that, but it seems that more and more of the city’s more experienced organizers – while still wary – are being drawn to the site, not just to criticize, but to do so constructively and to add their energy and experience to the mix. The park is now a remarkably well-run self-governing little village. There are meals prepared by volunteers, accessible toilets, medics, legal defence workers, a people’s library, an alternatives-to-capitalism book club, and a free school where people sign themselves up to facilitate workshops on topics ranging from Nature Comes First to hip hop, sign language and silk screening to an anarchist Q&A and black bloc discussion.

The spirit of autonomy and self-determination is thrilling. Some people want something to happen in the park? There are no leaders to ask (though there’s lots of informal support). Just gather some friends and make it happen. As the signs all over the park say: “You want a leader? Look in the mirror. Participate and get involved!” And indeed people are. One of the things that’s working best is the constant decentralization. When people want to do different things that others might not like or understand they’re just doing them in different places, which means that different things are able to grow side by side without dissolving into acrimony. This ability to decentralize but stay connected under the loose “occupy” banner is part of what’s responsible for the fact that this movement has a momentum that hasn’t been felt in the city in a long time. Maybe never.

And it isn’t just confined to the dedicated people in the park. A few nights ago, in a trendy tapas bar downtown, we overheard the suit-wearing, martini-drinking, young professionals at the table next to us discussing the occupation. It’s rare that movements like this capture the public’s attention to the extent that wherever you go, whoever you’re with, someone is talking about it. Comments like ““no wonder people are pissed off – the bankers are making so much” are espoused by the mainstream. Even the Financial Times was moved to recognize the inequality that now characterizes our societies.

The media has been covering the occupation closely. And here, like elsewhere, the common refrain being one that the protestors “don’t have any clear demands”. On the one hand this is a knee-jerk reaction from an establishment media so steeped in hierarchy that they can’t conceive of a decision-making process that values the process itself just as much as the outcome. And the process, so far, is a victory in itself. There are General Assemblies twice a day. There are workshops on every topic under the sun. Without a doubt decision-making is slow and the organizing is still cumbersome, but as the activist dictum says: this is what democracy looks like! It’s hard not to see the people most perplexed by the lack of clear goals as those most deeply habituated to having their orders emailed down to them on a daily basis from their bosses and managers.

Yet the question of “demands” or “goals” is an important if delicate one. Trying to codify a set of demands too quickly risks fragmenting the movement and turning the discussions into acrimonious squabbles. On the other hand, if the movement goes too long without any broad demands being put forward, the momentum will surely dissipate, and as the weather turns colder, people will leave the park, and we will have nothing to show for this historic moment except a few good memories of chilling with our new friends in a bunch of tents in the rain.

Our hope is that in the next several weeks we see some coalescing around a couple of broad principles (such as, “there is too much inequality in our societies” and “we want more participation in economic decision-making”), as has happened on Wall Street. Crucially, these principles should then be boiled down and concretized into a small handful of demands that are winnable in the short-term, such as a Financial Transaction Tax (which the Europeans are calling a Robin Hood Tax), limits on CEO salaries, and increases in inheritance taxes and taxes on the highest earners. If any of these short-term goals are won, momentum will build, the movement will spread, and bigger goals can take their place. From financial taxes we can start talking about capital controls; from CEO salaries we can start talking about democratizing the banks; and then, while we may have more to lose than chains, we still have a world to win.

More on Occupy Toronto: http://occupyto.org/

And, it’s not just that I like sex. It’s not just that I think people should be allowed to do whatever they please in the privacy of their own bedrooms. I also think we don’t talk in public about sex enough. Our sex education fails to equip people for the lives they are likely to lead. We turn it into a forbidden topic, and in doing so, we endanger our children and each other. There are many reasons the Netherlands has a fifth of our teenage pregnancy rate, and that the average person loses their virginity a year later than the average British person. But proper, informative sex education – including ‘cartoon masturbation on video, condom demos for 11 year olds and youth-club sex quizzes’ as well as in depth discussion of emotions and desires must surely have something to do with it?

I should specify: I like sex with women.

So, why would a 25 year old bloke who likes sex with women and who thinks we should be much less prudish object to the opening of a new Playboy ‘mansion’ in London?

Well, the obvious reason is that I object to the way that Playboy promotes the idea that men like me should see women as objects – not as people, but as bums, or as legs or as pairs of breasts. I don’t know what it’s like to walk down a street and feel as though half the people that you pass are assessing you based on how a particular part of your body looks. I’ve never felt like I’m being judged in that way. I don’t imagine it’s much fun. Playboy promotes an idea that women exist for the titillation of men, that women are sexual beings first, human beings second.

I object to this. It’s offensive and it’s degrading and men should stand in solidarity with women who stand up to it.

But there is another impact of the Playboy culture too. Playboy is the exact opposite of the Dutch sex education system. Both are, in a sense, explicit. But in the Netherlands, they teach an explicit truth. What Playboy teaches is a blatant lie. Playboy tells teenage boys (who are surely one of the main audiences for their magazines) that sex is something that happens in far away mansions with women who look little like most who they know – women who have undergone huge amounts of plastic surgery. It teaches that sex sits in a realm of millionaires and money. And by teaching boys that sex is something so alien, it alienates them from their real sexuality, and it ties desire for sex to a desire for wealth and a desire to have power over women. Just as Hugh Heffner’s empire creates the culture of the bunny girl, it helps create the culture of the playboy. And what that tells boys is that they ought to aspire to be rich and to treat women like objects. And because we as a society don’t properly help them to confront and understand their sexual desires, teenage boys are drawn to the lies of the Playboy culture, and all that is tied in with that.

And those teenage boys become young men. At that point, many join one of the two audiences for Playboy. The first is the audience for the clubs where, according to Reuters, a ‘single “Sazerac*” cocktail will set a member back a cool 2,000 pounds’. The second is the audience for the magazine, websites, and the various porn channels Heffner now apparently owns (and similar porn mags/websites).

That Playboy are opening a new ‘mansion’ in London for the first time in years should come as no surprise. The growing size of each of these audiences is, surely, a product of our times. We now have the most unequal society since Victoria was on the throne. The first group – men who can afford to spend £2000 on a cocktail – simply didn’t used to exist to this extent. There have always been richer people and poorer people, but not on this scale. And, as well documented in the now famous book ‘the Spirit Level’, this inequality makes us all more stressed. If you work as a banker, you will earn millions. But you will also know that you have a huge way to fall down the wealth ladder if you make only one or two mistakes. This is hugely stressful. If you go home and try to relax after work, your mind is likely to be left back at the office. And so to banish these worries people drink heavily, and take drugs. And, it seems, they go to escapist night clubs where they enact the fantasies created for them when they were teenage boys. What a sad, lonely life in a land of make believe.

The second audience too is very much a product of our times. As Shiv Malik and Ed Howker document in the excellent ‘Jilted Generation’, 29% of men under the age of 34 now live at home – they can’t afford to leave. Many more can’t settle down – they have to move regularly around the country in search of work in our increasingly ‘flexible’ labour market. The reason young people don’t ‘settle down’ in the way our parents did is pretty simple – we can’t.

More broadly, as the New Economics Foundation have studied in detail, happiness in Britain peaked in 1976. Since then, things have gone downhill for most people. We’ve become much less economically equal. The number and membership of community clubs or groups has dropped dramatically as we’ve worked longer hours and been increasingly severed from those around us: Mrs Thatcher smashed society. And now, a generation who were told we could do anything we put our minds to are being thrown onto the scrapheap of mass youth unemployment.

And one result of all of this seems to be that the dominant emotions in the lives of huge numbers of young men** are feelings of failure, and feelings of loneliness. And so they too – or many of them – revert to the escapist fantasies of wealth and sex created for them in their teenage years.

Our economic strategy as a nation is the same as it has been since Thatcher: rely on a small number of bankers to make fictitious millions, and hope that the wealth trickles down. This leaves huge amounts of pressure on the shoulders of both the bankers, and the unemployed/underemployed. Whilst increased ‘pornification’ is partly a product of the rise of the internet, surely it is also in part a response to the stress generated by this segregation of and loneliness in our communities?

And for both of these groups of men, it is ultimately damaging. Because the sexuality and the masculinity that Playboy tell us we ought to have are not the masculinities and the sexualities that I see in my friends. And the implicit message is that this is why our lives are not what they were cracked up to be – young men are unemployed and single not because of an economy that has left a generation lonely and jobless, but because they aren’t playboys – they aren’t ‘real’ men.

The most grotesque and the most offensive thing that Playboy does is objectify and oppress women. But it also oppresses men. It tells us that we ought to be Playboys. It exploits the failure of our parents and our teachers to encourage us to understand our sexuality, and ties this sexuality into the false dreams and false desires of our age. It ties an abstract desire to be rich to the much more sensual desire for sex. And then it tells men who have achieved neither that this is not because of an economic system which has failed us all. It is because of our failure to be Playboys. We all dream about sex. But Playboy takes those dreams, and makes them about power and money. And when we complain, they tell us that we are prudish. Well, I’m not prudish. I love sex. But I’m not a Playboy. So Hugh Heffner can fuck off, and take his mansion with him.

*Nope, I have no idea what that is either

** women clearly suffer from these problems too, but they don’t seem as likely to play out their frustrations and stress in the same set of ways

The Sunday Times Rich List is strangely addictive. The longer you look at it the more active your imagination becomes. What would I buy with Lakshmi Mittals billions? How many penny sweets would the Duke of Westminster’s seven thousand million pounds buy? It’s almost impossible for any ordinary person to imagine life with the vast amounts of money that these people own. The proportion of our nation’s income earned by the top 0.1% is set to rise to 14% by 2030. Similarly the lives and wealth of the people who run Britain’s biggest companies is set to become increasingly separated from ours. By 2020 the ratio between executive pay and national median wage is set to be 214:1.

At almost every AGM that FairPensions staff attend we hear executives defend the huge sums that they are paid. It’s a competitive world, we are told, and companies must provide competitive remuneration to their hard working staff. Lloyds, which is nearly half owned by the British taxpayer, is set to pay their new CEO up to £10 million this year. The pay packets of executives are particularly highlighted by the fact that the vast majority of them employ people who earn significantly less in a year then they do in a week.

Britain is very good at being angry about high pay. The Daily Mail are happy to channel their rage towards ‘Fat Cats’ and Guardianistas are more than happy to moan about the excesses of the rich at the breakfast table. We are less good, however, at focussing our anger at the fact that millions of people languish on low wages. These are the people who clean our offices and universities, who serve us in shops and who provide essential services to the corporations upon whom many in Britain rely. FairPensions are demanding that Britain’s biggest companies pay their staff and on site contracted workers Living Wages.

Some companies, such as Standard Life, have responded to FairPensions’ Living campaign with enthusiasm but the unfortunate fact is that many CEOs, who have very little notion of what life on £5.93 an hour is like, are not taking working poverty seriously as an issue that affects their staff. With increasing amounts of people being forced to accept pay packets which do not rise in line with the cost of living, the timeliness of a national Living Wage campaign could not be more distinct.

In Britain many people who survive on low wages have their incomes ‘boosted’ through government tax credits. These tax credits are, in principal, a good idea. People should generally be encouraged to work but should not be forced to work for wages which offer them no financial advantages to unemployment. One problem with tax credits however is that they act as a subsidy, extracted from the pockets of British Taxpayers, which enable corporations to continue to pay their workers poverty wages. Tax credits must remain to protect those on the lowest wages but the time has surely come for corporations, who continue to make millions and even billions of pounds in profits, to pay their workers high enough wages so that they don’t rely on what are effectively government subsidies.

If the Sunday Times published a ‘Poor List’ it would feature over 3.5 million working people whose share of the nation’s wealth is getting smaller. Our consternation at the huge amounts of wealth floating around in Britain must be channelled into pressing for the lowest paid workers in this country to be paid Living Wages.

Take action and ask your bank to pay their workers living wages: www.activateyourmoney.org

Over the last couple of decades, we have got used to these records being broken, and then re-broken, and then smashed again, as if a younger Boris Johnson and David Cameron had set about them on a drunken night out.

But one significant thing has changed. Now, they are actively claiming that there ‘isn’t any money’, that we ‘just can’t afford’ the public services on which most people depend. It is true that Britain’s GDP took a bit of a battering during the credit crunch. We must re-build our economy to make up for the hole left by the finance sector. And that means that we must invest.

But if anyone, anyone is seriously saying that we need to sack care workers and end all youth work (As Oxfordshire did yesterday), because there simply isn’t enough money in the country, then perhaps we can refer them to One Hyde Park where flats are for sale for £100m+. And perhaps we can point out that last year, the richest 1000 people in Britain saw their wealth increase by nearly 1/3. If there is anything we can’t afford, it is these ludicrous excesses of wealth. What civilised country is at once too poor to provide basic care for disabled people and yet rich enough for some to have a spare £100m to spend on a single flat?

For too long, a tiny elite has enriched itself on the back of the work of people in this country. They told us that they were earning these wages beacuse they were the risk takers, they were the people who would feel the pain if things went belly up. Well, over the last three years things have gone belly up.  Yet who is it that is feeling the pain? It is not these ‘risk takers’. It is the old and the young and the sick, and those who care for them; and the ordinary people in this country whose work creates true wealth.

For too long, we have had to carry this tiny elite. But I’m sorry, we can’t afford them any more. These people haven’t created jobs – unemployment is much higher than it was in the much more equal 50′s and 60′s and 70′s. They haven’t made us happier. They have just trashed the county and then refused to pay the bill.

So, next time someone tells you there’s no money left, I suggest you ask this: Who got it? Where did they take it? And next time someone tells me that we can’t afford a basic public services, I will reply that it is not nurses we can’t afford. It is billionaires.

This almost certainly forms a spectrum. Some people believe politics must be about preventing people from harming one another. Others believe politics is the place where we can create a better future. This is the defining difference between progressives and conservatives. And it’s almost impossible to prove to an optimistic person that there is no potential for human goodness. Conversely it’s very difficult to prove to a pessimistic person that human actions are anything other than self-serving.

From a progressive view of the world:

Chad McCail’s “No one charges no one pays” from food shelter clothing fuel

To a conservative view of the world:

William Hogarth’s Gin Lane

These beliefs are known by philosophers as axioms. An axiom is a rule that is assumed to be true because they can neither be proven nor disproven, but is necessary for making decisions about more complex issues.

But occasionally there comes a point where the internal contradictions of a particular world view bring it down. I think we’re now at that point with the Thatcherite economic experiment. After 30 years we can now see that the outcomes of this worldview are doing severe damage to those it was claimed would benefit most.

At the heart of the Thatcherite revolution was the axiom that making the rich richer would make the poor richer too. Setting the power of enterprise free would mean well paying jobs for all. The rich would have to be much richer, and keep getting much richer than the poor, but the poor would still be wealthier. Of course, many rejected this axiom. But it’s now becoming clear that this has never happened and never will happen. In fact the reverse is true. The rich getting richer makes the lives of the poor substantially worse.

In 1990 Thatcher expounded this position to Simon Hughes, as seen in the video below:

Thatcher tells Simon Hughes that making the rich richer is good.

I first came across the work of Richard Wilkinson at University. For 5 or 6 years I suggested to others that it was inequality more than behaviour that determined how healthy people were – not an idea that I got much traction with. Then last year, Wilkinson released a book, published with Kate Pickett, which made the breakthrough to the mainstream.

The Spirit Level demonstrates that in advanced industrial countries inequality drives ill health and other undesirable outcomes across a wide range of indicators. These include infant mortality, life expectancy, violence, trust, social capital and school bullying. It does this using cold, hard statistical modelling. It’s not an ideological book. It merely makes the case that the inequality demonstrably ruins people’s lives.

Further than that, it makes the case that an unequal society is worse for everyone to live in. Higher levels of crime, less trust, and lower levels of social capital are worse for everyone. The obvious policy response is to reject Thatcherism and move toward a more compassionate system that would create a better society for everyone. This evidence undermines the right’s axiom that inequality is good for everyone.

So what was the response from the right? Well, to try to rubbish the evidence, of course. Peter Saunders at right-wing think tank, Policy Exchange published a report suggesting that the research by Wilkinson and Pickett could be “fatally undermined”. Wilkinson and Pickett being serious academics published a step by step rebuttal of how Policy Exchange had misunderstood their ideas. With sheer weight of argument the Policy Exchange’s work is easily dismissed.

Last week Sheffield University’s Professor Danny Dorling published more evidence of the impact of inequality. The damning report suggests that inequality is now greater than it was during the Great Depression. The report suggests that while between 1999 to 2007, for every 100 deaths before the age of 65 in the richest 10th of areas, there were 212 in the poorest. This clear injustice is a damning indictment of the Thatcherite economic experiment. It adds to the overwhelming evidence that increasing inequality creates a worse society for everyone.

Sadly we have a government utterly committed to deepening and widening exactly the policies that have proved so disastrous for our country. The current cuts agenda, championed by the Conservatives, and supported by the Liberal Democrats will make our country a much worse place for everyone to live in. The cuts fly in the face of the evidence about what makes a good society. The only way to ensure greater levels of equality is to protect spending on the most vulnerable. That’s the opposite of what our government is doing.

It’s time for us to fundamentally challenge the assumptions of the radical right, and stop the ideologically motivated plunder of our country. You can help do that by supporting the Equality Trust, and by signing up for the anti-cuts campaign at “No Shock Doctrine for Britain”.

First of all, science. This is one area where, as has been well pointed out, a lot of people who might otherwise support us have a real problem, myself included. Fortunately, it looks like this might soon be changing. This conference we’ll be voting to begin a full review of our science policy and, in a separate motion, to remove the embarrassing and patronising policy we currently have requiring all scientists and technologists to take an oath to respect the Earth.

As was pointed out during the workshop before the vote, we don’t require bankers to pledge not to ruin the economy, or politicians, or, indeed, any other profession. Singling our scientists and technologists in this way, which would not, in fact, have any real effect in reducing harmful practices, makes us look anti-science, it undermines our efforts to promote understanding of and defend climate science and it puts people off. At a time when the other parties are attacking academic research, through cuts and the IMPACT agenda, when the top ten Tory bloggers don’t believe in man made climate change, we should be the natural home of scientists. But one or two policies put people off, they give a misleading impression of our attitude to science and offer the media and our opponents an easy stick with which to beat us.

Fortunately, as I write this, we’ve just voted overwhelmingly to remove that pledge. It’s a good start. We voted without any opposition to begin the review of science policy too and hopefully we’ll bring something more consistent, more sensible and more appealing to the science community to conference in the Autumn or next Spring. And hopefully it’ll pass just as easily as the two motions this conference.

Of course, science isn’t the only area of policy we’re looking at this year. Yesterday we also voted to pass a maximum wage. No person could earn more than ten times that of the lowest paid employee (pro rata) in any company. We’d also ban bonuses larger than the yearly pay of the lowest paid in the company. A factor of 10 seems a reasonable differential to me. One concern, however, raised during the debate as a reason to refer the motion back for further work, might be that if implemented at a company level lower paid workers could simply be contracted out, or a company even split into two, one for the workers and one for the management. A national maximum wage, calculated against the national median or mean wage, might, therefore, be more sensible. That view didn’t prevail though. Darren Johnson, London AM, told us he hadn’t supported previous proposals for a national 100% income tax rate at some level but did, enthusiastically, support this motion. He told us we don’t need all the technical details in the MFSS (the English and Welsh party’s policy reference document), just broad principles. And, as Caroline Lucus told us in her speech this morning, the top 10% of the country are now have 100x the wealth of the bottom 10%. A maximum wage could go someway to reducing this inequality and might well prove popular in the current climate.

Emergency Motions!
Just the two emergency motions yesterday. Conference unanimously backed Billy Bragg’s campaign against bonuses at state-owned bank RBS and the BMA’s campaign against the commercialisation of our health service. As an amendment to that it was also noted that the RCN (Royal College of Nursing) have a similar campaign too.

So an exciting day one. Lots more motions today. I’ll try to keep you all up-to-date with what’s going on with those.