12 October 2008
capital falls out of love with the city
This image of the 'March on the City' Protest on Friday accompanied this article in yesterday's Financial Times. The article is entitled 'Capital falls out of love with the City', and far from being the usual 'look at these crazy lefties', the photo is captioned 'Sympathy in short supply: protesters at the Bank of England yesterday said they wouldn't 'bail out the bankers', who have fallen out of favour'. 'Fallen out of favour is very funny', as if last week we'd all been sending them roses, but the most interesting part of the way in which the FT have used this picture is the way in which they link (legitimately, of course, but very surprisingly) the concerns of other city workers, and random interviewees, to the concerns of the protest:
Even on the streets of the City, sympathy was in short supply. Gary Williams, who works for a software company, blamed "a massive bonus culture in a deregulated industry".
"They aren't working for the common good," he said. "They're working purely for their own ends."
I take the appearance of this picture, and its legitimation by the article, as a sign of opportunity, of how much widespread discontent there is with the system as a whole, and how we could capture this in future weeks and months. The picture also features, on a blog note, a certain person who is neither sitting down nor being a bloody tragedy (on the lower right edge). Probably the only time he'll ever be in the FT, but who knows at this point. If we manage to take over the BBC, we could probably manage the rest of the fourth estate, woah ha ha ha.
