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.

Eric Cantona and Veteran Socialist Ken Loach

OOH AHH CANTONA -- just when banks worldwide thought they were safe, Eric Cantona came flying out of the blue with a gallic karate kick to the very basis of international finance. Eric’s idea was simple, if everyone withdraws their money from banks, the banks won’t have any money or power, and if banks don’t have any power or money they won’t be able to influence politics, economics or society. Back of the net.

He outlined his thoughts here in the Guardian -

“We don’t pick up weapons to kill people to start the revolution. The revolution is really easy to do these days. What’s the system? The system is built on the power of the banks. So it must be destroyed through the banks.

“This means that the three million people with their placards on the streets, they go to the bank and they withdraw their money and the banks collapse. Three million, 10 million people, and the banks collapse and there is no real threat. A real revolution.

“We must go to the bank. In this case there would be a real revolution. It’s not complicated; instead of going on the streets and driving kilometres by car you simply go to the bank in your country and withdraw your money, and if there are a lot of people withdrawing their money the system collapses. No weapons, no blood, or anything like that.”

Unfortunately it was a bit shite and didn’t really work for some obvious reasons. People have money in their banks so it’s not at risk of theft, so it’s convenient to access, because almost all employers pay money direct to a bank and because they can get some interest on it. Also withdrawing cash might undermine banks but a) it won’t destroy them, they will still have money from commercial investments alongside punters money and b) if banks collapse what replaces them? Money to invest in the real economy like manufacturing would drastically fall and result in massive unemployment and chaos.

Eric Cantona executes his god given right of no platform.

It’s a shame because Eric Cantona is still a pretty cool guy -- he worked wi veteran Socialist Ken Loach in Looking For Eric, and has been supportive of various other lefty causes. His crowning achievement has to be his Ryu-style karate kick of a racist football fan, backed up with setting a press conference full of eejit journalists expecting him to apologise/make some halfway sensible attempt at justifying himself but actually making a cryptic riddle and leaving. Class.

If Cantona wants to take out the power of international capitalism he needs a new strategy -- support the SSP’s call to take all the banks into public ownership, and instead of withdrawing all the cash invest it in a planned economy which puts social need and environmental protection before greed and pollution. Or just find Fred Goodwin and roundhouse kick him into the pavement repeatedly.

Just in case you missed it.

Your riot cops are no match for our RHINO SIEGE ENGINE

I’ve just returned from 5 days of occupying the land of the Royal Bank of Scotland, a piece of direct action that yesterday successfully achieved its objective of shutting down RBS’ headquarters. On Monday when we looked across at the building we could see there was nobody working there apart from cops and security guards.

Context

A quick recap: for the past few days hundreds of activists affiliated with Climate Camp have targetted the Royal Bank of Scotland. Having previously taken direct action against projects like Kingsnorth coal fired power station and the (now cancelled) third runway at Heathrow, they’ve moved on to a target that’s slightly less obvious.

But for people concerned about climate change, RBS is in fact at the heart of the problem. As a financial institution, they are the biggest UK investors in fossil fuels, styling themselves “the oil and gas bank.” In an economy that is now kept firmly in the stranglehold of financial capitalism, banks and other investors must be held responsible for their leadership role in a socio-economic system that is destroying the ecological basis for civilisation.

This system is now in the early stages of falling apart at the seams, due to the interrelated crises of the environment, the economy and social collapse. In the UK, RBS is at the heart of this process.

The current economic crisis was caused by the fact that the dominant financial institutions, like RBS, had used debt and self-delusion to try and keep the economy going. This bubble lasted for a while, until the myths that underpinned it began to unravel. The UK government then gave RBS and other massive banks huge injections of our money. RBS is now 84% owned by the British state. However, they refused to take any control over the banks in return for this money, leaving RBS under the command of its previous owners.

The people that run RBS have one priority: finding ways to invest their money (which you and I gave them) that will generate them more profits and then more money to invest. That’s what they exist to do as an institution. One of the main ways they can do that is to put our money into energy projects. As the world’s supplies of fossil fuels dwindle, the ones that remain will become more profitable to extract, at least for a while.

So RBS has poured our money into projects and companies like the Alberta Tar Sands, ConocoPhilips who are destroying the Amazon rainforest, and E.ON, the energy corporation looking to cover Europe with new coal fired power stations. They do this not because they’re evil, but because they are designed as an institution to do a specific job, and they’re doing that job.

As it is currently structured, it would be impossible to make RBS act otherwise, which is why we should demand that instead of being controlled by private capitalists the wealth of RBS is used collectively and socially to solve problems in the world, instead of being used to create huge problems that will make the world a less habitable place for humanity in the coming decades.

This is all the more appalling when you remember that the working class is about to face one of the greatest austerity blitzkriegs of all time, after the government chose to facilitate RBS and its chums taking the money that should have been spent on public services, jobs and wages for the people who actually keep our society running – public sector workers. In this context, it’s clearly time for radical action against an institution which is poisoning our society.

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Some of SSY’s roving reporters are back to civilisation to give YOU all the latest news from climate camp…

After an epic amount of pushing, we stormed RBS headquarters this afternoon. Delicious molasses bombs were thrown, windows were smashed and there was a lot of scuffling with the police. Bear in mind that today was Sunday, and the bank wasn’t even open…! Who knows what’s on the agenda for the rest of the working week…

Most of the SSY delegation are still pitched up in the RBS back garden and will be until the end of the camp – stay tuned for a full climate camp analysis and review in a few days…

A few of us SSYers are about to head over to head over to Edinburgh to take part in the camp for climate action. If you’re reading this and can make it, get there! The camp took their site last night, at Gogar Station Road, right next to the Royal Bank of Scotland global headquarters!

Information for those of us outside just now is limited, but we’ll be trying to bring you updates during the day as we find out more. SSY will be part of the swoop today, from 12 a group will be heading from St Andrews square (where the bus station is) to the site. Come along and join us. If you can’t make it, just get to the site whenever you can. See the map on the climate camp site for where to go.

UPDATE: Me, Liam T and Liam M are at the camp now, and it’s fantastic! There’s a couple of hundred folk, and more arriving all the time. Tonight and tomorrow we’ll just be setting up the site, as much help as possible is needed. The grounds of the RBS complex are actually really nice, and it’s a great place to hang out.

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This weekend, Climate Camp is coming to Edinburgh.

Anything up to 1000 people are expected to descend on the capital for five days of discussions, workshops, training and direct action, in the fifth camp of its kind in the UK. Following past camps which have targeted airport expansion and coal power stations, this year the main target will be the ‘oil and gas bank’, the Royal Bank of Scotland, who handily have their huge, James Bond baddie style centre of operations on a site just outside of Edinburgh. RBS have come in for a huge amount of ire recently due to their direct funding of mineral extraction projects that’re hugely damaging to the environment, like the Alberta Tar Sands in Canada. And these are, of course, being funded with our money, given that RBS is now majority owned by the taxpayer following the billions poured into the banks by the Treasury.

The camp kicks off on Thursday, with a ’swoop’ on the site of the camp from four different locations in the city. The site will then be set up and made ready for the Saturday, when most climate campers are expected to arrive, and when the week’s activities properly begin. Over Saturday and Sunday, there’ll be a wide-ranging discussion on the way forward for the radical environmental movement, and how we can halt the onset of devastating climate change across the globe. Much of the debate will focus on the link between capitalism and climate change, posing such questions as whether we need destroy capitalism to destroy climate change, and whether we should ‘green the banks’ or ’smash the banks’. There’s also going to be workshops on stuff like fuel poverty, last year’s radical climate change conference in Bolivia, and the role of workers in fighting climate change. It’s not all talk though – there’s also going to be lots of legal training and direct action training in preparation for Monday’s mass day of action against the RBS HQ. With the RBS-sponsored Edinburgh Festival in full-swing at the moment too, the camp also promises a ‘greenwashing guerillas mission’, deep into the heart of the festival!

System Change not Climate Change!

The camp operates on a non-hierarchical basis of mass participation and consensus decision making. Based on geographical location, it’ll be divided into different ‘neighbourhoods’, each with its own kitchen and other facilities. The whole camp is free, but obviously does incur pretty big costs for the organisers – for young people going they’re recommending a donation of £10/15 for the camp, and a small donation for each meal you have.

SSY are planning on fully participating in the camp this weekend – and you should come too! We’ve heard a rumour that this might be the last really big, national climate camp in the UK, at least for a few years anyway,  and seeing as it’s in Scotland, it’s really too good a chance to miss.

The 2010 Camp for Climate Action handbook, containing a full programme of everything that’s happening over the weekend, plus anything else you need to know, is available here.