How do you steal £6 billion? Get Tory mates!

As we already reported, yesterday SSY was instrumental in setting up a totally successful day long piece of direct action against the cuts.

Across the entire UK yesterday groups of people came together to shut down Vodafone stores. For an idea of what was going on elsewhere, check the site that set the whole ball rolling. This was in protest at the fact that Dave Hartnett, the government’s permanent secretary for tax, decided that in this country there is one law for massive mobile companies and another for the rest of us.

Glasgow was the first city in the UK to mobilise on Saturday, with over 30 of us assembling on Buchanan Street at 8.30 (a good 2 1/2 hours before most other cities!) We had every intention of actually occupying the shop itself, but when at 9 we walked over to the door we discovered staff and security guards had gone through the back (having an occasional peep through a strange wee porthole), and locked up the doors. Our protest had won before it even began – we had shut the shop down, and they didn’t open all day.

Those that were there first thing included ourselves, independent activists, other socialist groups and anarchists. It was a really exciting display of left unity in action against the cuts. However, it’s not blowing our own trumpet or trying to hijack what happened too much to say SSY was central to it, and we should be proud that we made Glasgow be part of the day of action. Back on Wednesday this site blogged straight away about the first occupation down in London. In that we asked if it would be possible to make something similar happen in Glasgow.

The next day, TheWorstWitch and I called an assembly point, with the news going out to radical networks of all kinds in our city. On Friday, Liam T designed leaflets and A3 posters for us to hold, and then he, WaveJumper and I stayed up until 3am making a banner. A couple of hours later we then got up and marched on Vodafone. We were careful however to try and keep all the material non-specific, focusing on the issue rather than promoting SSY, meaning everyone at the protest felt comfortable about using it.

Vodafone may have been trying to make a clever calculation that if we met at 8.30 our stamina wouldn’t last that long, eventually we would go away and they would be able to open for at least some of Saturday. They were wrong. We had a continuous presence on Buchanan for around 9 hours, leaving about 5ish, with most of us ready to drop from the effort of standing on a cold street so long, and with voices hoarse from a day long session of chanting and singing.

Off the top of the head creativity was at a high as well, with some absolutely classic chants come up with on the day:

“There’ll be no selling phones here today (tune of ‘She’ll be coming round the mountains’)

Why’s that? Cos they owe 6 billion in back taxes!”

“How do you steal 6 billion? Get Tory mates!”

“Nurses and teachers face the axe/cos Vodafone won’t pay their tax.”

“We closed it we, we shut it down/chase tax dodgers out of town.”

Special mention for the anti-cuts Undead

“We’re all in this together/We’re all in this together/Unless you’re rich/Unless you’re rich.”

Although our numbers varied throughout the day as some had to go, and others dropped by to do a wee shift, we kept a pretty constant number picketing outside the store, leafletting and talking to those going by. In some ways it was better we were on the outside because the shop had mad giant advertising blinds that would have obscured us from public view, whereas on the street we could see just how many hundreds of people stopped during the day to watch what we were doing, hear our songs, take our pictures, and shake our hands and congratulate us. Our protest was met with near universal support, and Vodafone’s behaviour with total disgust by everyone we told about it. We even attracted a bit of media interest, such as the BBC and the Herald (even if most of both the short pieces were given over to Vodafone and HMRC’s bullshit responses to the protest!)

Vodafone and Revenue and Customs have of course seen this as a PR disaster, which they are desperately trying to counter. Against the power of social networking and websites like ukuncut and SSY, which have been spreading the message about their behaviour, they have dedicated their efforts to trying to get the mainstream media to repeat the message that the £6 billion figure was an “urban myth”.

Of course, the people who have been caught out cheating all the people of the UK would say that – don’t fall for their self serving lies. What they’re saying is that they don’t know where the £6 billion figure came from and it was never part of discussions between them. But the reason for that is that Revenue and Customs were never interested in seriously pursuing Vodafone for what they owed. Once Vodafone were caught out breaking the law, Dave Hartnett, the permanent secretary for tax, decided to bypass his own experts and procedures to produce an absolutely arbitrary amount that Vodafone would have to pay. Our figures however, are based at looking at the facts.

The facts are that Vodafone dodged UK tax law by setting up a Luxembourg subsidiary which it used to dump money in a country where it would only be taxed at 1%. The accounts of this company show it as having revenue of up to £15.5 billion up to March 2009 – so it’s based on these figures the unpaid bill has been calculated, something the “experts” at HMRC should have done long ago.

This woman was so impressed by our protest she came and join us specifically to get her picture took

The real myth is the one that Vodafone have obeyed the law and that the government have enforced it. As what people time and again repeated to on the streets yesterday, this shows that there’s one law for the rich and another for the rest of us. The idea that the government has “no choice” but to make cuts is a total lie. The government is doing what the Tories have dreamed of doing for decades, and now see the chance. They have made a choice, and that is to penalise the poor while letting Vodafone keep £6 billion of what should be all of our money.

What we achieved yesterday, with just two days notice was amazing. Obviously we don’t want to be doing stuff against Vodafone forever, but it was agreed participants yesterday that we’d like to build up to doing something bigger next weekend. With a week’s lead in time, we could conceivably shut down Vodafone across Glasgow City Centre. We don’t know exactly what we’ll do or how it will work yet, but we agreed to meet at 10am at St Enoch’s underground next Sat (Nov 6th) to take some action. Be there!

Bonus: Check out the original Private Eye investigation that uncovered all this.

Double bonus: Check out the Venture Capitalist website that Lovebug posted in the comments previously, a sign like action like this can get the corporate bosses spooked.