A two hour occupation of Royal Bank of Scotland offices in central Glasgow took place earlier today, in protest at fatcat bankers taking billions in bonuses while the rest of us suffer the cuts and austerity of the economic crisis they caused.

Around twenty people – including climate change activists, students, 80 year old pensioners, anarchists and SSY members – gathered in the city centre at 11am, before walking to the building on Cadogan Street and quietly entering it. Once inside, banners and placards were unfurled, while a megaphone was passed round with most people there getting the chance to speak and explain why they’d come to occupy RBS.

The police arrived within 20 minutes of the occupation starting, but they made little attempt to remove us, saying that they were merely there to ‘facilitate’ the protests, not to take sides. While that was very nice of them to do so today, it’s a shame that the same can’t be said about previous protests which have targeted the bank, like Climate Camp and the G20 demonstrations in London.

Today’s protest was organised under the banner of ‘Citizens United’, a group who’ve organised a number of similar actions over the past few months, managing to get themselves – and the anti-cuts message – a fair amount of media coverage in the process. The demo this morning mostly focused on bankers’ bonuses, a particularly contentious issue at the moment, with Barclay’s chief Bob Diamond recently telling MPs that the “time for remorse” for bankers was over, ahead of next month’s bonus bonanza which will see the banks, including those under public ownership, start paying out an expected £7 billion in perks.

RBS falls among these state-owned banks – with the multibillion bail-outs it received in 2008/9 making it 84 percent owned by the government. However, rather than fully nationalising – or indeed, reigning them in at all – RBS has been allowed to continue with the kind of reckless behaviour that caused the crisis in the first place. On top of this, they’re one of the main sources of capital behind the Alberta Tar Sands, perhaps the most environmentally destructive project on the planet – and among the reasons why last year’s Climate Camp targeted the bank.

Today’s protest is an important part of keeping up the pressure on the bank, with similar action to take place in Edinburgh tomorrow. Our occupation ended under our own volition after about two hours, during which time loads of journalists, film crews and photographers had dropped by. As the bank’s workers filed out for lunch, we made it clear that we had no issue with them – and that we wanted to speak a senior manager. Indeed, while RBS will hand their top bosses multi-million bonuses, they’ve recently laid off more than 20,000 of their own staff in the UK. So it probably shouldn’t come as a great surprise that no one in the building was willing to come down and defend the obscene bonus culture, the bailouts or the forced austerity we’re now undergoing.

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