That's right - Occupy Bath is still alive and well, and had a lot of fun today with some street theatre in Bath City Centre.
Three money bags danced around outside the "Big 5" high street banks and also in our spiritual home of Queen Square. We all took turns wearing the bags (which were see-through) and danced around to a selction of folk, indie and rock music, handing out flyers on the Move Your Money campaign and the B&NES Council Move Your Money petition. We generated a lot of interest and were only told to move on once, by Lloyds. We made sure that the bank staff had flyers about our campaign before moving onto Santander, just a few shops up. RBS had closed by the time we got there, so we had plenty of time to dance around outside there and spoke to a lot of members of the public.
A video camera was present throughout the day - the video is here: http://standingstonesblog.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/occupy-bath-move-your-money-street.html
We certainly attracted a lot of attention and hopefully made people think about who they bank with. The "big 5" - RBS (which owns Nat West), Lloyds, HSBC, Barclays and Santander speculate on food prices, avoid tax through tax havens, invest in oil, nuclear and other polluting industries (including tar sands extraction in Canada and Madagascar which has destroyed rare habitats and poisoned drinking water), pay themselves huge bonuses for failure, and of course some - in particular RBS - were a key player in causing the credit crunch. The alternatives? Local Credit Unions and ethical banks and building societies, such as the Co-operative, Triodos and Nationwide. More info on the Move Your Money campaign is here: http://www.moveyourmoney.org.uk/
You can sign the petition to get B&NES Council to Move Their (Our!!!) Money from Nat West to an ethical bank here: http://democracy.bathnes.gov.uk/mgEPetitionDisplay.aspx?id=5
Occupy Bath will next be appearing at the Visions for Change event on 28th April at the Friends' Meeting House, York Street, organised by the Bath People's Assembly. More info on the events tab here: http://www.bathpeoplesassembly.org/
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