Cashing in on the protest dollar?

Village life goes on tonight at the Occupy London camp in Finsbury Square much as it would in any sleepy English hamlet.

Old Holborn: Jacobite
or agent provocateur? 

The local cafe is a focal point where residents gather and gossip over their teas and coffees. There’s a labour exchange, a newspaper, a housing committee and last night, there was even a celebrity guest giving a talk just down the lane in Sun Street.

Self-styled ‘old time alternative comedian’ Mark Thomas was preaching to the converted at the Bank of Ideas: itself a public repossession of an abandoned office block formerly belonging to UBS bank.

Now, some people might view the Mark Thomas talk as a cynical ploy to sell his most recent published offering ‘Extreme Rambling’. The protest dollar is, after all, the mainstay of the Thomas demographic.

Certainly, the delightfully contrarian blogger Old Holborn was happy to take a pop at the grand old man of situationism-lite. His opening shots went a little like this: “I notice Mark ‘I earn £100K a year’ Thomas is going to talk about poverty today at Occupy London. I'm already laughing”.

A further Twitter exchange gives a flavour of Old Holborn’s sparky banter. When Thomas tweeted in his endearingly self-deprecating way that he would be “showing off at the Bank of Ideas”, Old Holborn enquired, “will you be selling your new book there?” Thomas responded that he had no plans to do so.  Thomas nevertheless did read several excerpts from said tome.

I’ve always been a fan of Thomas; in fact, I’d never have blagged my way into an arms fair had it not been for the inspirational chutzpah of the south London activist and comic. But even Thomas himself would agree that orthodoxy should be questioned, however well-intentioned it is; precisely because it has become received wisdom. 

Thomas: pushing product or lending support?

That’s where Old Holborn comes in. His line of attack is that “crusties and social misfits” have taken over the Occupy London movement for their own agendas and turned it into an anti Capitalism campaign as opposed to the Occupy movement, which he maintains is against Corporate Greed and his self-appointed aim is to oppose this hijacking.

Thomas would probably be a supporter of the Occupy movement whether or not he had a book to promote and besides, as someone in the Twittersphere not unreasonably pointed out, the contrarian Old Holborn is a self-professed libertarian and champion of free enterprise.

Even in the midst of high-minded internationalist idealism you have the would-be profiteers and the seething begrudgers....All the world’s a village and parish pump politics never change.