Occupy London Tours: City Tour Script

1. St Paul’s (both)

2. Temple Bar (Paul)

3. St Paul’s Cross (Dan)

4. St Mary Le Bow (Dan)

5. Royal Exchange (Paul)

6. Lloyds (Paul)

7. Bank of England (Paul)

8. City of London Corporation (Dan)

9. University of Chicago (Paul)

10. TheCityUK (Dan)

11. Deutsche Bank (Dan)

12. City/Tower Hamlets border (both)

+ Extra Fact sheet

Remember:

chalk stock cube Bible masking tape quotes hats umbrellas mics pipe/cigar

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1. Steps of St Paul’s (D & P)

[D]

Welcome to the Occupy London Tour of the City of London – England’s smallest city. My name’s Daniel, and I’m Paul – and we’re your tour guides today. Occupy London Tours is a non­profit group run by volunteers, aiming to demystify the

world of finance with three tours that show London’s major role in creating it and shaping what it looks like today.

Disclaimer ­ As you might notice along the way, we’re not professional tour guides, so all our tours are free and we don’t accept donations.The tour lasts just over two hours and ends up by Liverpool St station.

Feel free to take pictures or film any bits of the tours you like, and to tweet if you like ­ on Twitter we’re @OccupyTours.And if you can’t hear at any point during the tour, just hold up the fist of struggle!

If you have anyquestions, or feel we’ve left something important out by all means butt in, but if it’s probably better to catch us between stops as there’s a lot to cram in!

We’re looking for new guides so we can do more tours. If you feel inspired by the end of the tour and think you might like to try your hand as a tour guide come and speak to us after the tour, when we’ll be heading to the pub!

[P]

So here we are at our first stop – and what better place to start than the steps of St Paul’s Cathedral, home to the Occupy London camp in 2011 and 2012, when people from across the country and even further came together to protest against the economic destruction that was harming ordinary people, but had been caused by the few at the top, many of whom work in the buildings that surround around us here.

And while the Cathedral authorities decided that the camp had to go, perhaps the words of St Paul himself might have helped them decide where their sympathies should lie – this is from St Paul’s First Letter to Timothy, chapter 6, verses 7­10 of the New Testament:

[D] 7For we brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out. 8And having food and raiment let us be therewith content. 9But they that will be rich fall into temptation and a snare, and into many foolish and hurtful lusts, which drown men in destruction and perdition. 10For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows.

[P]

And on today’s tour we’re going to be hearing all about the love of money ­ and the problems it has caused. It’s the story of financial capitalism, from the Middle Ages to the present day, and there’s no better place to tell it than where we’re standing right now ­ the Square Mile of the City of London. Because the story of the Square Mile is as much a story about financial wizardry as

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it is about the replacement of popular democracy with a tightly knit network of extremely powerful and unaccountable institutions. Some of you may have noticed in the media this week that the Church of England has called for a ‘new kind of politics’ in the wake of austerity atrocities and repeated financial scandals. But they haven’t always been so attentive to St Paul’s words as we know. As our friends at that radical rag the Financial Times wrote last summer, ‘For a man of God, [Archbishop Justin] Welby is remarkably knowledgeable about Mammon...The archbishop is at pains not to demonise the industry. Biblical quotations damning moneychangers are not for him. “You’d be an idiot to stand in judgment on the banks,” he explains.’

For the next two hours, we will show you round the film set of ‘Capitalism: the movie’ – and leave you to decide whether it’s a Disney story or a disaster film…(and perhaps round up a few idiots along the way!)

But before we move off, here’s a Medieval map of the City for you to hand around between stops ­ you’ll notice many of the sites you see today were there in those times as well.

2. Temple Bar [P] So here we are standing at Temple Bar, originally a grand entrance to the Square Mile, and now

the entrance to Paternoster Square, home of the London Stock Exchange, founded in 1801 and moved here in 2004.

The Stock Exchange was the Occupy movement’s original target, but the decision was out of their hands. Paternoster square was the property of the Mitsubishi corporation, who got a court order banning the protest.

And, lovely people that they are, the owners have left us a reminder from that day, the 14th of October 2011: this is the court’s decision to ban protesters from the site; but it also serves as a sign that the land is private ­ like more and more land in the Square Mile, but also the whole of Canary Wharf, London’s second banking hub.

But back to this structure: Temple bar stands as a monument to the power of the city. This rather magnificent Portland stone structure was built by Christopher Wren in 1672 and moved to this spot in 2004, after spending over 100 years in a wood somewhere near Enfield. It came to rest in that wood as a gatehouse and party venue, installed by a young barmaid of ill repute, who had married into the wealthy Meax dynasty, and was desperate for a veneer of respectability.

[Here she is, painted by Whistler.] When Dickens wrote ‘A Tale of Two Cities’ he told of the heads of criminals being displayed on

pikes above Temple Bar. And from Lady Meax’s experience to today, ‘A Tale of Two Cities’ is a fitting way to think about the Square Mile’s place in London.

Before it was moved to that wood in Enfield, Temple Bar it was originally built at Fleet Street and marked the entrance to the ‘City of London’ from the City of Westminster to its west. But while the City of Westminster ­ like the rest of England and later Britain ­ was ruled by the monarchy, the City of London was the domain of the City of London Corporation, a local

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government body with laws, and even has a police force separate from those that lie outside its borders to this day.

And it was the City of London, and only the city, that William the Conqueror failed to … conquer ... in 1067.

Even now in a ceremony to recognise that independence, when the Queen arrives at the edge city, she stops at the point where this arch used to stand and waits for the Lord Mayor ­ the head of the City of London ­ to welcome her into his realm by giving her the City’s pearl encrusted Sword of State as a token of loyalty.

Before we move onto our next stop it’s worth hearing what one of Britain’s most celebrated prime ministers, Clement Attlee, had to say about the City:

[D]

“Over and over again we have seen that there is in this country another power than that which has its seat at Westminster. The City of London, a convenient term for a collection of financial interests, is able to assert itself against the Government of the country. Those who control money can pursue a policy at home and abroad contrary to that which has been decided by the people.”

[P]

And as we’re going to see it’s a place whose power hasn’t been seriously challenged since Atlee spoke those words over half a century ago.

3. St Paul’s Cross [D] Now it’s time to use our imaginations as we’re going to do a bit of time travel... Picture us

standing here in the 13th century. Down many of these streets you would’ve been able to see out into the countryside. Behind you on Cheapside would’ve been a sprawling market area, which has left its mark in the

form of the side streets there today ­ so when we walk down it look out for Friday St, where the fishmongers traded, as well as Milk St, Bread St and Wood St.

And behind me would’ve been St Paul’s cathedral ­ not the one we see today, but its predecessor, a towering medieval church with a spire stretching 149m into the sky – taller than the current building – and at the time the tallest building anywhere in the world, ever. Here’s what it looked like:

[Sketch of Medieval St Paul’s] Unfortunately like most of London at the time it was made of wood, and so burned down in the

Great Fire of London. And where I’m standing now stood a giant stone cross and a pulpit called St Paul’s Cross,

where speakers would debate the great issues of the day – the latest news from foreign wars, proclamations of the king, and the denunciation of frauds and impostors.

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But the spot also marked the beginning of a kind of democratic tradition for the City. Three times a year – at Michaelmas, Christmas and Midsummer – the cathedral bell would be rung to announce a ‘folkmoot’ – a general assembly of all the people of London to decide on important matters for the city – a tradition, according to local legend, that went back to the time of King Arthur.

In 1215, the year of the Magna Carta, they gathered here to demand that the Mayor of London be elected annually at the folkmoot; later in the century they supported the rebel baron Simon de Montfort in his demand for England’s first elected parliament.

But already, by this time, power was seeping away from the folkmoot. The most powerful men in the city had started holding regular, private meetings, called ‘hustings’ – literally ‘house things’ ­ where they’d make the big decisions amongst themselves. These meetings saw the folkmoot lose most of its authority – the Midsummer meeting, for instance, literally became a reading out of fire regulations.

By the end of the 13th century, King Edward I declared that the folkmoot site had been taken over by slackers, drunkards and ne’er­do­wells, and promptly handed the land over to the cathedral, which wasted no time building on it. It’s interesting that these are some of the exact same excuses the government used to justify evicting the Occupy campers from their own open­air democratic assembly on the same spot 700 years later. And as we’ll be seeing later on, this wasn’t to be the last time democracy in the City was to be undermined by the rich and powerful interests that govern it.

It’s a bit of a walk to our next stop down Cheapside, which is an appropriate name as it’s one of the best spots in the City to play one of our favourite games ­ ‘spot the tax­dodger’. So put your memories and smartphones to good use ­ the first person who hands me a piece of paper with your name on it and the top three UK tax­dodgers you’ve managed to spot on the route, gets the Occupy Tours Revenue & Customs Cup, full of sweets…

4. St Mary­le­Bow [D] Welcome to St Mary­le­bow. The current incarnation of the church was built to the designs of Sir

Christopher Wren in the 1670s when it became the latest in a long line of churches here, the first of which was built in or around 1080 as a London HQ for the archbishop of Canterbury.

But it’s from the church bells rather than the church itself that St Mary­le­Bow earned its fame. So we’ve got some Bow Bells trivia to begin with…

Does anyone know the pantomime character, who served as a Lord Mayor of London, who was called back to London by the bells? [Dick Whittington picture]

Can anyone guess what the bells are known for in East London folklore? [Cockney picture] And finally can anybody name the famous nursery rhyme which mentions the church? That’s right…and would anyone like to sing it/shall we all say it?

Oranges and lemons, Say the bells of St. Clement's.

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You owe me five farthings,Say the bells of St. Martin's.

When will you pay me?Say the bells of Old Bailey.

When I grow rich,Say the bells of Shoreditch.

When will that be?Say the bells of Stepney.

I do not know,Says the great bell of Bow.

Here comes a candle to light you to bed,And here comes a chopper to chop off your head…

Chop, chop, chop, chop, the last man’s dead!

And does anyone know what that Nursery Rhyme is about? Debt! [Go through the lyrics again…]

The last line about chopping off a head is apparently a more recent addition, and nobody knows where it comes from. But the reference to the Old Bailey is because it’s on the site of Newgate prison, where the punishment for serial indebtedness, bankruptcy and defaulting on payment was execution.

And before we leave I’d like to quickly tell you about one the City’s lesser known Rebels who found his fate here at St Mary Le Bow. His name was William Longbeard – there are no pictures of him, but you can guess what he looked like – and he was famous in 12th Century London for whipping up support for his growing intolerance of the city’s wealthy residents.

And it was in 1196 that Longbeard gathered over 50,000 supporters and armed them ready to take on the establishment of the City. But, unfortunately for Longbeard, he had enemies in high places. For it was the then Archbishop of Canterbury who conspired to murder Longbeard to stop the rebellion.

And it was here, in this very building, where Longbeard fled to after the Archbishop of Canterbury’s men had tried to kill him, barricading himself in.

When he Archbishop’s men arrived they couldn’t break down the barricade. So the Archbishop proceeded to do what any self­respecting man of the Church would do in this situation. He burned the place to the ground.

And, it was on this spot right here, where Longbeard eventually fell, his stomach sliced open by the Archbishop’s men and his insides spilling onto the paving stones. But, according to reports from the time, Longbeard did not die immediately for Within days he was convicted and "first drawn asunder by horses, and then hanged on a gibbet with nine of his accomplices who refused to desert him.”

Thankfully our archbishops these days are above killing people to safeguard their financial interests. But it seems that those interests haven’t gone away.

The current Archbishop of Canterbury is a former oil executive calledJustin Welby. As part of his job Welby presides over the Church investment fund. But he’s attracted criticism for the

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church’s investments in the payday loan company ‘Wonga’, which loans money to poor people at thousands of percent interest, and in SOCO, a British oil company neck­deep in a corruption scandal in the Democratic Republic of Congo What would old St Paul have thought, eh?

(Bonus info:

When Tessa Munt MP asked the Church Estates Commissioner how investing in SOCO aligned with its ‘Christian values’ and ethical investment mandate, the Commissioner’s response was simply ‘I know nothing of the facts of the investment’ (30 Oct 2014)

Inside that building behind you ­ One New Change or the ‘Stealth Bomber’, are the plush offices of Panmure Gordon, the firm where our beloved Prime Minister’s father Ian Cameron learnt the skills he would need to set up Blairmore Holdings, the Panamanian investment fund that bragged to clients ‘The affairs of the fund should be managed and conducted so that it does not become resident in the United Kingdom for UK taxation purposes.’ Of course, we wouldn’t dare to question the sincerity of David Cameron’s apparent commitment to cutting down on tax avoidance, or wish to do anything as crass as highlight the 100s of 1000s of pounds made through selling offshore investments that his father left him…

5. Royal Exchange [P]

We are now going to talk about the building behind me, the Royal Exchange. Remember One New Change, the STealth Bomber, next to Bow? Well as you can see the Royal exchange is now home to luxury boutiques ­ and to quote from Architectural Critic Ian Ritchie, “What the Royal Exchange did for the bonused, One New Change will do nicely for the salaried.” But this is really a story about the origins of London’s financial sector.

London hasn’t always been such a centre of global finance. In fact the origins of modern banking can be found in Medieval Italy: and you may have

noticed that we’re now standing in an area that has long been influenced by Italy. If you look behind you across the street you can see the words Lombard Street above the

London Underground sign. Lombard Street was originally a piece of land granted by King Edward I (remember him?) to merchants from Lombardy who were in London to collect taxes for the Pope.

And some of the terms we use in banking today can be traced back to Italian roots. Does anyone here speak Italian? What is the Italian for bank? And does that mean anything else in Italia?

Bench or counter. And that is what bankers used to use to put their money on. Bank is derived from the Italian for bench, banca, as in a counter; the term bankrupt is a corruption of the Italian banca rotta, or broken bench, which is what happened to someone when he lost

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his traders' deposits. Being "broke" has the same connotation. (Remember from St Mary­le­Bow what used to happen to men who went serially bankrupt? Not so for banks however!)

And so it was the Italians who, in 1338, Edward III went to for financing his wars against France and it was Florentine bankers whose debts he ended up defaulting on.

The next part of the story of modern financial capitalism can be told through the life of one of the City’s most famous men:

Thomas Gresham was born in 1519. His father was a powerful London merchant, who sold velvets and satins to Henry VIII and served for a time as Lord Mayor.

But that wasn’t enough for Thomas. So he walked from here, down to the river – and got on a boat for the richest city in Europe – Antwerp, now in Belgium, but then in the Spanish Netherlands.

Antwerp had grown rich from a new kind of economy based on colonial plunder, and when Thomas arrived in Antwerp he would have found a port bustling with Spanish ships.

Alongside the huge amounts of trade passing through its ports ­ much of it in goods stolen from the New World of the Americas ­ Antwerp was also refining lessons from Italy and expanding a new kind of industry: finance. Traders met in Antwerp’s Bourse, where debt fuelled finance had begun.

So Thomas Gresham had seen the future. And he liked what he saw. So after he made good money smuggling arms and raising loans in Antwerp for the English Queen Elizabeth – he decided to bring this new economy to England. He proposed the construction of a new centre of commerce, modelled on the bourse in Antwerp. And here it stands.

Queen Elizabeth liked it so much she gave it the royal seal of approval, and opened it in 1571 as the ‘Royal Exchange’ and became the commercial heart of London.The exchange gave birth to many important companies, including the news agency Reuters. But more importantly for our story, it was the precursor to the London Stock Exchange.

Thomas Gresham for his part has since been described as ‘the father of British banking’, and became world­famous. In fact has anyone here heard of something called ‘Gresham’s Law’ ­ well it’s named after Thomas, and which states that ‘bad money drives good money out’ (in other words, people tend to offload dodgy money, and keep the clean stuff for themselves. We’ll leave it up to you to decide whether bad money has driven the good out of the City!

But we’ll end with an old story about Gresham which may or may not be true: that to win a bet with the Spanish ambassador, Thomas took a pearl that was worth £15,000, ground it to dust, and drank it in a glass of wine.

Today – at the Movida nightclub near Oxford Circus – you can buy a ‘Flawless’ cocktail for £35,000 – contains flakes of 24­carat edible gold leaf and an 11­carat white diamond ring at the bottom of the glass.

6. Lloyd’s of London [P]

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This stop is all about how a certain type of financial ‘innovation’ ­ an insurance contract ­ made the slave trade possible. And it was after all profits from the slave trade that built a great many European fortunes ­ including that of the Baring brothers, who used it to found the bank that Nick Leeson would eventually sink in 1995. But this stop is also a lesson in how financial instruments that masquerade as a way to reduce ‘risk’ can end up incentivizing truly despicable behaviour.

So, now we stand across from a water­pump built for the people of the City by the Stock Exchange (when it was found here behind us, rather than at Paternoster Square where we started), and the East India Company. The East India Company was one of the first transnational corporations. Backed up by its own private army, it became the governing body of British India, and its headquarters used to be on the site where that inside­out building stands, on the corner of Lime Street and Leadenhall Street.

But back to that rather impressive inside­out building in the distance. It was designed by celebrity architect Richard Rogers, who was also the co­designer of that other famous inside­out building, the Pompidou Centre in Paris. And while it stands on the site of the East India Company headquarters, it was built as the home for Lloyd’s of London ­ the Lloyd’s Insurance Market.

This Lloyd’s is not the bank, it is a market for insurance brokers – which grew out of a coffee shop run by Edward Lloyd, over on Tower Street in the 1680s. Later, it made a home for itself in the Royal Exchange here, before finally ending up in the inside­out building. And during its stay at the Royal Exchange, it set the absolute standard for all shipping insurance contracts.

Now, I hear you cry, ‘shipping insurance ­ tell me more?’ Well, among the standard items developed by Lloyd’s of London was a set of products for your aspirant slave­trader on the rise. After the Royal Africa Company lost its monopoly on slaving in 1698, the many small traders who moved in needed a way to deal with the risk that a voyage ­ which they might have invested all their money in ­ might go badly. Lloyd’s stepped in and by 1779 their contract ­ the de facto legal standard ­ insured against loss ‘arising by Death and Insurrection of Negroes’ ­ but only, mind, if more than 10% of your ‘cargo’ perished. (A little insurrection and any natural death ­ including suicide from desperation ­ was so likely in these conditions that brokers would not take the risk of insuring against it! Suffering and despair was quite literally written in to the insurance industry from the start).

Now this contract became the centre of a court case in 1781, when 132 slaves of the ship Zong where cast overboard by the captain. The Zong may be familiar to some of you from JMW Turner’s painting, ‘Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying’. The captain, not being a superb navigator, had missed his target (the island of Jamaica) and was running out of water. Because the insurance did not cover death by ‘natural causes’ such as starvation, he determined that the only way he could make a profit for himself and his backers,was to cast the slaves overboard, and claim the £30 each for which they were insured.

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Despite protests from the insurers, the captain and his backers won their court case –which was tried in the Court of Exchequer in the Guildhall, which we will visit soon.But the case of the Zong became a rallying point for the abolitionist movement. One prominent and eccentric abolitionist, Granville Sharp, was not shy of calling out those whom he termed the:

[D] immoral and grasping traders of the City, Bristol and Liverpool, who were willing to betray both

nation and God for the sake of profit.

[P] Phew! Thank God nothing like that happens today eh? And Sharp wasn’t the only one. Some

of you no doubt have heard of Adam Smith, often claimed as a guruby free marketers. But that is not the true Smith! Here he is, echoing Granville Sharp by noting that the interest of commercial men

[D] is always in some respects different from, and even opposite to, that of the publick...the proposal of

any new law or regulation of commerce...comes from an order of men...who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the publick.

[P]

Well! There you have it! And Dan will be telling you a little more about the interest of men of commerce running opposite to those of the publick a little later.

And now, please join us as we walk to the Bank of England! As we walk, I would encourage you to take note of the newly opened…East India Company! This is, ladies and gentleman, the reborn East India Company, which now celebrates its trading heritage with traditional tea­tastings, but is less vocal about celebrating the history of looting, plunder (and the occasional massacre) of which some less commercially­oriented historians might remind us!

Their vision, they say is “a simple one – to establish The East India Company as a luxury brand for the modern commercial world.” And in doing so, they celebrate their predecessors as “individuals, living by the rules of their times – determined, entrepreneurial and human – who were driven by their passion and enthusiasm”. Just like the the Captain of the Zong!

7. Bank of England [P]

I now stand before you on the site of the world’s oldest public toilet! But that is not what we are here to talk about, I’m afraid. Instead, may I direct your attention to the building to my left – the Bank of England! Like so many Great British traditions – including those underpinning the Royal Exchange – its origins can be traced abroad.

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In 1688 William of Orange, King of the Orange province of Holland, came over to England and launched a coup d’etat known as ‘the Glorious Revolution’, which saw him become king of England, Scotland and Ireland.

William wasn’t too impressed when England lost to France at the Battle of Beachy Head in 1690 – so to fund a build­up of the navy, he set up the Bank of England.

The Bank was put in charge of the government’s finances and given the right to print money. And we’ll get back to that in a bit. But it was the Bank’s ability to raise huge amounts of money through debt to fund the government’s wars that allowed Britain, in contrast to France, to become the world’s dominant power for the next 250 years.

This is something that man behind the horse’s arse up there, the Duke of Wellington, was grateful for as his troops beat the French in the famous Battle of Waterloo in 1815.

For this reason the Bank of England has always been a major player behind the scenes in British politics – and one that’s usually been on the side of the City’s banking elite.

Until the 1980s, the Bank of England was at the heart of the City’s ‘Gentlemanly Capitalism.’ It got to define where banks could build their offices (they had to be within walking distance), and was governed by a tightly knit, heavily intermarried network of families, most of whom represented the great merchant banking families – like the Barings, and the Rothschilds ­ and who usually had an MP or two amongst their brothers and cousins.

And at the centre of these gentlemanly networks, during the twentieth century, you could find a man by the name of Montagu Norman, a man who sat at the top table of the Bank of England for a quarter of a century ­ longer than anyone else.

[D]

‘Monty’, as he was known in the City, was a bit of a character. He was known for his raffish appearance and eccentric behaviour – he dabbled in spiritualism, used a false identity everywhere he travelled, and according to a colleague, he even believed he had superpowers that included the ability to walk through walls.

However, documents released last year revealed that Monty may also have been a Nazi sympathiser.

In March 1939, on the eve of World War Two, Governor Norman authorised the transfer of Czech gold to Hitler’s Reichsbank from the Bank of England. He then tried it againafterBritain had officially declared war with the Germans, and it took a special intervention from Churchill himself to stop the transfer going through.

Whether or not Monty was a traitor as such is debatable, as he would’ve been breaking the law by refusing to the transfer.

But the new governor Mark Carney took his portrait down out of the governor’s office this year is telling.

[P]

Things have changed, though, and in the 1980s, the old family merchant banks were absorbed by giant American and European corporations that moved in after the ‘Big Bang’, and the days

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of Monty and Chums have in many ways ended. The Bank no longer controls the CIty’s social and spatial borders so tightly ­ and Canary Wharf further East has opened up as a huge financial centre. And our colleagues Max and Beth can tell you all about what goes on there in their own tour!

. And as well as the site of the world’s first public toilet, we are also standing above the world’s biggest gold vault, which contains somewhere in the region of 4600 tons! Though little of it – only around 7% ­ now belongs to the Bank itself

‘Now does anyone have a bank note? Now some of you will have suitcases of cash under your bed, but most will have a bank account and do a lot of your transactions and payments digitally. What do you reckon is the relationship between these notes and the numbers on your online banking screen?

Since 1844, only the BoE has been able to issue sterling notes. But any bank can issue loans by simply writing a number in the ‘deposits’ column for your account.In the 1970s the ratio of deposits to cash was pretty even, but now, less than 3% of pound sterling in circulation is even in the form of currency issued by the Bank of England! Most of it is created by private commercial banks. And how do they create it? As debt, by issuing loans and mortgages, to people like us. And of course, who ever gets to issue the loan, gets the profit or interest payment on it, which debtors like you and me pay from our salaries for work done in the real economy. In other words, the power to create money by issuing loans is essentially like having a magic boomerang that you chuck out into the general population, and which comes back with all their jewellry and watches hanging off of it.

After years of campaigning by a group called Positive Money, the bank finally fessed up and admitted that most money isissued as debt by private, profit oriented commercial banks. In early 2014, they published a briefing stating that:

[D]

bank deposits make up the vast majority [of money] — 97% of the amount currently in circulation...rather than banks lending out deposits that are placed with them, the act of lending

creates deposits — the reverse of the sequence typically described in textbooks.... [P]

So the economics textbooks got it wrong! Well, at least someone knows what’s going on. I mean the bank does.And surely people like,

say HM Treasury or the majority of MPs do too right? Well, no. A survey by Positive Money

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in July of this year showed that 71% of MPs thought only the government or the Bank of England could create money! When MPs finally debated money creation in the House of Commons for the first time in 170 years last November, Steve Baker MP – a committed free marketer from the Conservative backbench – stated that:

[D]

“Money is not neutral. It redistributes real income from later to earlier owners—that is, from the poor to the rich, on the whole.”

[P]

SO we have endorsement for my ‘magical pickpocket boomerang’ theory of money creation and its negative effects on social justice even from the most vocal proponent of free market economics in the House of Parliament!

But before we move on, I’d just like to bring this from the dizzy heights of high finance back down to the mean streets of London. Because, you see, when banks are free to create money as debt, things like mortgage lending go up. The housing crisis and rising house prices are not an accident ­ they are products on an unjust system of debt­based money creation. The folks at Positive Money have also shown that from 1997­2010, the amount of money created as mortgage lending quadrupled!

The incentive to create debt on which you can turn a profit, plus speculation on housing, has made the housing price rise incredibly profitable for those at the top, and devastating for many closer to the bottom.

So folks, I would encourage you all to learn to speak money, and not allow yourself to be bamboozled and befuddled like our MPs! Look up Positive Money or Move Your Money and see how you can get involved in monetary reform.

9. City of London Corporation [D]

This building here is the headquarters of the City of London Corporation, the body that runs the Square Mile, apparently inspired by some of the architecture in Star Wars ­ not really, although it could’ve been… But it’s futuristic appearance is deceptive, as it houses a literally ancient institution.

The first thing to be said about the City of London Corporation is that nobody knows how old it is ­ there’s simply no record of it coming into existence. All we know is that it was here when William the Conqueror arrived in 1066, and was already powerful enough then to cut a deal with him allowing the Corporation to keep control of the City of London.

This means the Corporation is the oldest continuous government body on earth.

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Today it’s counted as one of London’s local council authorities ­ but one with a few differences… the Corporation its own laws, a separate police force, its own court and prison cells where they detained the Suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst, its own Mayor ­ the Lord Mayor.

But what does the Lord Mayor actually do? Here’s a job description from the Corporation website:

[P]

“The Lord Mayor of London's principal role today is as ambassador for all UK­based financial and professional services... The position is unpaid and apolitical. The Lord Mayor spends some 90 days promoting the City abroad … [and] addresses in the region of 10,000 people each month, making around 700 speeches a year...The Lord Mayor also hosts a large number of visits by important foreign political and business figures. Another key aspect of the Lord Mayor's role is to advise the Government on the views of City businesses.”

As I said completely apolitical... But it doesn’t stop there, because as we’re going to see now the City of London also has its own

elections.

The Occupy London Tours Guide to the City elections: How to Become Lord Mayor

So… to beLord Mayor there are several requirements: you have to be rich enough to constantly travel around the world, finance your own banquets and receive no salary. But in addition to that, you have to already be a Sherriff.

But to be a Sherriff, first you need to become an Alderman. And how do you become an Alderman? Well, you need to be elected onto the Court of

Aldermen… but to run for election, you need to be granted Freeman status – which you can only get from none other than the Court of Alderman you want to get elected to… alternatively, you have to be a member of one of the Worshipful Livery Companies, which are the remnants of medieval guilds, and include the Fletchers, the Armourers & Brasiers, the Hackney Carriage Drivers and the Worshipful Company of tax advisers – and these are pretty hard to get into.

But supposing you do manage to get Freeman status, you still have to get yourself elected onto the Court of Aldermen. And this is where it gets even weirder. Most of the votes in City of London elections go not to ordinary people, but to corporations – the bigger the corporation, the more votes it gets. Just ¼ of the votes go to the 11,000 people who live here. So every year companies such as Goldman Sachs, the Bank of China and Moscow Narodny Bank actually get to vote in British elections.

But the Lord Mayor is not even voted for by this electorate – presumably that would be taking the democracy too far. Instead he’s chosen by a show of hands by the heads of those medieval Guilds, the Livery companies, on Michaelmas on 29 September every year.

Now does anyone think this all sounds a bit odd? Well, that’s because there’s actually no system like it in the world. When Maurice Glasman, an expert on the Corporation, looked for

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historical parallels, the closest he could find was the system of voting rights given to slave owners in the pre­Independence American South.

For much of its history the Labour Party had promised to abolish the Corporation ­ you might remember Clement Attlee’s quote at the beginning? But Tony Blair ­ Labour’s spokesperson on the City of London before becoming Prime Minister ­ quietly dropped the pledge in 1996, and by 2002 passed a law expanding the business vote by a third.

But despite all of this, you might still be thinking: well, so what? How does this affect the rest of us?

Well, it’s important because of the Corporation’s role as a major lobby for the City’s multinationals.

The elitist voting systems mean that the Corporation makes sure the people in charge of it will always lobby on behalf of the interests of big business ­ partly done by the Lord Mayor schmoozing his or her way around the world.

Now how many among you have heard of the City Remembrancer? The Remembrancer is a representative of the City of London Corporation who has enjoyed pride of place opposite the Speaker in the House of Commons since 1571 ­ not the same bloke (it’s always been a man), but there has always been one there. And the Remembrancer’s a bit like a messenger ­ he’s not allowed to speak in Parliament but keeps his ears peeled for anything being put forward by those pesky elected officials which might threaten the power of City’s financial services industry and relays them back to his masters at the Corporation ­ things like increased transparency in banking, a bit more regulation, progressive tax laws…

So, that’s the City of London Corporation, and we’re going to look at some of the things it lobbies for when we visit its lobbying arm in a couple of stops’ time.

10. University of Chicago [P]

So we’ve just heard a little more about an ancient institution of the City of London. Now we’re going to fast forward to the financial crash of 2008 and learn a bit about the dominant theories upon which capitalism has relied.

Mainstream twentieth century economic thinking was dominated by two men and two major schools of thought…I just want to say though – this isn’t meant as a hardcore economics lesson, and for anyone who wants to really get into the nitty gritty, feel free to grab us in between stops or after the tour!

So the first of our famous twentieth century economists was John Maynard Keynes. Keynes was a bursar of King’s College, Cambridge, married to a Russian ballerina, and he hung around with Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Set. He was also the world’s leading economist, of whom it was said that ‘no one in our age was cleverer nor made less attempt to conceal it.’

Keynes was not against capitalism. He felt that our animal spirits could drive us, through capitalism, toward a utopia in which we would all work a 15h week, and be free to recognise that the love of money was a

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disgusting morbidity, one of those semi­criminal, semi­pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease.

So Keynes was convinced that active government intervention in the marketplace could be absolutely necessary when our ‘animal spirits’ take over the economy and steer it away from his utopian dream.

But it was the other famous economist of the 20th century that, arguably, had an even greater impact. And he’s the reason we’re standing here: his name was Milton Friedman. In 1933, same year that Keynes was denouncing a ‘decadent international individualistic capitalism’, Friedman was graduating with an MA in Economics from the University of Chicago – and in 1946, the same year that Keynes died, he was offered a professorship at the University of Chicago’s Economics department.

Milton Friedman believed in the power of the market to manage itself. Friedman’s theories were hugely influential in creating what is now known as ‘Chicago School’ economics. And that explains why we’re standing here today in front of the European outpost of the University of Chicago, which has been exporting Friedmanite theories across the world for decades, gaining fans including the American President Ronald Reagan, Britain’s only female Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and Chile’s vicious dictator Augusto Pinochet.

Milton Friedman saw the pursuit of freedom and the pursuit of equality as enemies. To quote from Friedman:

A society that puts equality—in the sense of equality of outcome—ahead of freedom will end up with neither equality nor freedom.…

But the policies Friedman influenced, while fostering so­called ‘freedom’, relied upon certain levels of unemployment and inequality. And there is an important relationship between inequality and financial crisis. Take a look at the chart Dan has drawn:Can anyone tell what it is?

Now the two peaks here are the 1929 and 2008 financial crises. What this shows is that rising inequality often precedes financial crisis. As unemployment rises and wages flatline – both of which are likely under Friedmanite policies – poorer households come to rely more on debt in order to pursue that ‘freedom’ through the market so beloved of Friedman. And if it produces inequality? No problem, because remember, equality is the enemy of freedom. But the flipside of course, is that when everyone pursues freedom, only a few of them get it.

In the lead up to the crisis in 2008 many poor families in the USA were offered access to mortgages they wouuld be unlikely to pay back, known as sub­prime mortgages. This allowed them to enjoy the illusion of home ownership without their incomes ever increasing enough to

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make it a viable option. Unsurprisingly, with average wages failing to rise, many families couldn’t afford the repayments on their mortgages.

This tragic situation become a global crisis because, unbeknown to most of us, these sub prime mortgages had been sold by the banks to be traded for profit. Traders were gambling on mortgages that could never be paid back ­ but they didn’t care because there was profit to be made in the meantime! But when ordinary families began struggling with paying their mortgages, the whole financial system began to grind to a halt.

You’re going to here a bit more about these dodgy financial products and the people who got rich off them in a couple of stops time. First though, we’re going to go and learn a little more about lobbying in the City. But before we move on it’s worth observing one more creepy connection between the Chicago School and the City of London Corporation that has outlived both Friedman and his buddy Thatcher (who announced the Big Bang in the Guildhall). In 2012, to celebrate Friedman’s centennial, the City of London Corporation hosted an event in honour of the economist. John Redwood MP, a member of parliament since 1987 and a current employee of NM Rothschild and Sons, the old family merchant bank, closed his speech with the following appeal:

[D] Milton Friedman...is much needed...we need to carry his torch, to remember that when we last did

it, it ended very well, that we need to do it on a bigger scale.

[P]

Having had our fingers burnt the last time we were asked to carry Milton’s torch, I wonder how many of us would be willing to do it again!

10. TheCityUK

Welcome to Finsbury Circus, the site of London’s first public park, opened in 1606 ­ but this is no place to get nostalgic about public ownership. Oh no…

Somewhere in this building ­ although we don’t know exactly because there’s no sign ­ is home to the City of London Corporation’s in­house lobbyist, TheCityUK.

In the wake of the financial crisis, with the banks bailed out and government austerity about to begin, the Corporation panicked about the reputation of finance among the British public. According to the Lord Mayor at the time:

[P]

The financial services industry needs one trade body shouting off one hymn sheet.

And so TheCityUK was born. According to its website at the time, UK Trade and Industry ­ a UK government department ­ helped create it.

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But all mention of UKTI was quickly removed from the website. So they got off to a cracker of a start as far as transparency’s concerned!

According to their PR advisers: [P] TheCityUK’s purpose is to help restore the reputation of the financial services sector within the UK.

[D] And last but not least from the website:

[P]

We are independent and politically neutral.

[D] Since then TheCityUK has been using its £3m a year budget on a charm offensive, aimed partly

at the mainstream media. So in 2012 for instance it played host to a well­known BBC senior reporter at ‘London’s Country

Estate’, the Grove hotel in Hertfordshire, which the following year hosted the annual Bilderberg conference. They also targeted an influential ITV journalist, inviting her to be a guest at one of its PR dinners

But at that dinner TheCityUK lobbyists are on record asking the journalist for “guidance” on how TheCityUK might help the journalist go about the job of rehabilitating bankers’ reputations in the media.

You can find out more about this world of lobbying in SpinWatch’s book A Quiet Word. But it seems that rehabilitating the reputation of the banks is just one aspect of TheCityUK’s

role. It turns out that, quite like the Corporation that funds them, they’re pretty interested in policymaking around the world too.

How many of you have heard of TTIP? Well you can be forgiven for not knowing because the media have barely discussed it. But it’s something everyone should know about.

It stands for the Trans­Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership. Sounds great on the surface ­ trade… investment… partnership. On the face of it it’s a trade deal between the US and the EU. It’s also been called the biggest transfer of power from people to corporations in a generation.

Reducing barriers to trade ­ for instance standards on food hygiene and environmental protection ­ is just one part of it.

A major component of TTIP is the Investor State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) clause, which allows multinationals to sue governments directly for the loss of any future profits resulting from any government action, at any level, such as new legislation.

ISDS is already included in some trade deals between countries, and under it at the moment the tobacco company Phillip Morris is suing the Uruguayan government for $2bn for increasing the

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size of health warnings on cigarette packaging, and Veolia is suing Egypt for increasing its minimum wage since the revolution.

A consequence of this is known as the ‘chill’ effect ­ governments will shy away from taking decisions in the public interest for fear of being sued, or reverse their policies like the New Zealand government did over plain tobacco packaging when Australia was sued.

And if you’re wondering why you’ve never heard of it that’s because the drafting process and negotiations have all taken place in secret.

Oh and the other thing is that once it’s signed it becomes permanent and practically impossible to change.

The City of London Corporation love this deal ­ not only because it conforms to their general philosophy ­ but also because of what it says about financial services.

TTIP threatens to reduce regulation around certain kinds of financial products such as derivatives, which we’ll be talking about at the next stop, allow European banks to operate in the more highly­regulated US under European rules and restrict the possibility for further regulation.

So unsurprisingly TheCityUK are raving about it. Its website is full of articles promoting TTIP. Here’s a sample:

[P]

TheCityUK strongly supports the efforts being made in the US and the EU towards a Transatlantic Trade & Investment Partnership… We believe that negotiations towards it should cover all aspects of the transatlantic economy, and that nothing should be excluded from discussion.

[D]

And they also have an article entitled:

Without Financial Services, the TTIP could be made to look a Monkey

But all around Europe the fightback against TTIP has been much stronger than they expected, and there’s a real chance it’ll be stopped.

If you want to know more I’ve got some literature on it so ask me at the end! Bonus TTIP info:

when even supportive Members of the European Parliament such as Maria Eleni Koppa complained that they were ‘totally in the dark’ about the negotiations, there were calls for the negotiating mandate to be declassified – precipitating UK Trade Minister Lord Livingston’s curious claim that this was ‘unnecessary’ since the document had already been ‘leaked’ online.

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ISDS: the LSE’s Robert Wade recently described it as an instrument that ‘fundamentally tends to undermine national sovereignty and the accountability of governments to citizens’ by enabling ‘foreign companies to sue governments directly – before secret, extrajudicial tribunals – for cash compensation over earnings lost because of national social, health or environmental legislation, and even for loss of “expected future profits”’

Attention is frequently drawn to Canada’s experience under NAFTA, where 63 claims (largely over environmental regulations that restrict the chemical and mining industries, but also over failures to grant patents for medicines of no proven value) have led to payouts of over $170m so far.

Key Claim: the model used to make the foundational claim that the Partnership would provide annual GDP gains of 0.3­0.5% for the EU, and 0.2­0.4% for the US up to 2027 is a computable general equilibrium model. As that other radical rag The Economist wrote of CGE models: Most empirical exercises confront theory with numbers—they test theories against the data; sometimes they even reject them. CGE models, by contrast, put numbers to theory. If the modeller believes that trade raises productivity and growth, for example, then the model’s results will mechanically confirm this.

11. Deutsche Bank (D)

So back at the University of Chicago Paul explained a bit about free market economics and the sub­prime mortgage crisis in 2007­08. This stop is about how a type of financial product called derivatives played a key role.

But first we need to take a look at some of the University of Chicago economists’ homework. Does anybody recognise this equation? It’s known as the Black­Scholes formula for pricing

options, published in 1973 by the economists Fisher Black and Myron Scholes who were both working at the University of Chicago at the time. Let’s go through it quickly…

The rate of change of the derivative price with respect to time, plus half the product of the volatility, squared, the stock price, squared, and the second derivative of the derivative price with respect to the stock price, plus the interest rate, the stock price and the rate of change of the derivative price with respect to the stock price, minus the product of the interest rate and the derivative price…

Can anyone guess what that equals? Basically this formula is a model of a financial market that contains derivatives, and is a guide to

pricing a type of derivatives called options – options are contracts that give companies the right to buy financial assets or products at an agreed price in the future.

The zero at the end refers to stability ­ meaning that a financial market that contains such derivatives can still be stable overall.

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One of the derivatives that caused so much damage to the banking system in the crash was the CDO, or Collateralised Debt Obligation.

Now, most people think that when you buy a house you take out amortgage and pay it back to the bank.

But this isn't really what happens any more. Because your mortgage contract might have been sold on by the bank to somebody else. And they might have sold it on to somebody else and so on and so forth.

Then some banks realised they could put together thousands of these mortgage contracts at one time, and roll them up like a Swiss roll, then slice them into different 'tranches' depending on how risky they were.

These new products were called Collateralised Debt Obligations, or CDOs. Then some banks realised they could put together different CDOs and create new products called things like 'CDOs squared' and 'CDOs cubed', which they received millions of pounds for in fees.

But there were two major problems with this. Firstly these products were too complex. Andrew Haldane, senior economist at the Bank of England, has estimated that in order to understand everything you were buying when you bought one of these CDOs squared, you'd need to read through one billion pages of data.

Secondly, the institutions meant to be assessing the risk of these products and the mortgages behind them had a clear conflict of interest: they were funded by the banks who had become reliant on selling them for a lot of their profit, and so by the time the crisis hit, they were rating 90 per cent of all CDOs as ‘extremely safe.’

And as we now know a lot of these CDOs were jam­packed with sub­prime mortgages, mortgages lent to people who were very unlikely to pay back. And it’s when these people started defaulting in America back in 2007 that the whole thing came crashing down.

The 2011 US Senate Report on Financial Crisis actually used Deutsche Bank as a case study. Greg Lippmann, Deutsche Bank’s top global CDO trader, was by 2006 describing some of the

underlying assets as “crap” and “pigs”. Referred to CDO marketing effort as a “ponzi scheme.” But because banks could make as much as $10 million per CDO, bankers like Lippmann had

strong incentives to keep the ball rolling, even though they knew it was a risky business. But to really understand what derivatives meant to bankers before the crisis, we need to hear it

from one of their own. One of Lippmann’s Deutschebank employees, a man named Rocky, loved these CDO cash cows so much that he actually wrote a song about them – to be more precise, it was a rap called CDO Oh Baby, to the tune of Ice Ice baby by Vanilla Ice? But seeing as Rocky isn’t here today, we’re going to have to improvise...

"CDO Oh Baby" by Vanilla Ice (to the tune of 1989 hip­hop hit by Vanilla Ice and DJ Earthquake, Ice Ice Baby)

All right, stop, collaborate and listen

Spreads are wide with a technical invasion

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Home Eq Subs were trading so tightly

Until Hedge Funds Bot Protection daily and nightly

Will they ever stop?

Yo, I don't know

Turn up the ARB and let's go

To the extreme Macro Funds do damage like a vandal

Now, BBBs are trading with a new handle

Print, even if the housing bubble looms

There are never ends to real estate booms

If there is a problem, yo, we'll solve it

Check out the spreads while my structurer revolves it

C D O oh baby, C D O oh baby"

Before we move on I want to draw your attention to a key line in Rocky’s rap. He says “Even if the housing bubble looms, there are never ends to real estate booms.”

It really sums up the attitude before the crisis and the feeling of invincibility that these traders had – even though the warning signs were there in the form of a housing bubble, these traders really believed that it would basically just keep on going – and that they had the power, knowledge and technology to solve any glitch that came up in the system.

You’d hope that banks like DeutscheBank learned their lessons from the huge losses that hit them in 2008. Far, far far far far from the case. It was found earlier this year that they are still exposed to 56 trillion Euros of Derivative risk. To put that number in perspective, all the wealth in the world was valued in October last year at 178.7tn Euros – so the value of the derivatives Deutsche Bank are exposed to is equivalent to nearly a third of all the money in the world…

Additional Deutsche Info:

Black­Scholes option pricing model. Donald MacKenzie suggests that the model, while initially rather poor at pricing options in the 1970s, came to be so widely used as a prosthetic pricing tool at the Chicago Board of Exchange that pretty soon, market prices were close to the model’s predictions even when the necessary assumptions did not hold. In other words, over the last few decades, ‘the typical assumptions of finance theory have become empirically more realistic.

Here is Pablo Triana on ‘the mathematical insanity of Black­Scholes’ in 1987

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Many “insured” parties ended up with no protection from the ensuing mayhem. The crash (which could well be seen as Black­Scholes­inspired) thus unequivocably showed that the model is built on shaky foundations. In the real world, perfectly­replicating dynamic hedging is merely an illusion.

After witnessing the massacre, it became clear to options pros that markets cannot be assumed to behave “normally” (as the mathematics behind Black­Scholes assume) and that rare events do happen and can be truly criminal.

1987 was an ‘event that highlighted the untrustworthiness of the model (which internal mechanics, arguably, contributed to the event taking place in the first place)’

12. Royal Bank of Scotland (D and P)

[D]

Now on this tour our aim is to demystify finance rather than vilify the people who control it. But occasionally their behaviour make it very, very hard for us to resist a bit of banker­bashing. And in the case of this building here ­ the global HQ of the Royal Bank of Scotland, they’ve made it quite frankly impossible.

Six years ago the reckless behaviour of RBS’s millionaire executives impacted upon the lives of pretty much every person in Britain.

On the eve of the crisis in 2007 they pulled off the biggest and riskiest bank takeover in world history.

They were buying the Dutch bank ABN Amro, for a cool £45 billion – a sum bigger than the entire economy of Tunisia – leaving RBS’s cash reserves too low to guarantee the bank’s existence, let alone their customers’ deposits, in the case of a rainy day.

And as we know too well, that rainy day followed soon after – in the 2008 crash, RBS lost more money than any company has ever lost in the entire history of these British Isles, and had to be bailed out by us to the tune of just over... £45 billion. And for a comparison closer to home this time, they government spent £28bn on primary, secondary and higher education for the whole country the same year.

Since the bailout RBS has lost billions of pounds every year, totalling £46 billion all in all ­ that’s £1,500 per British taxpayer. Over £4.5bn of that has gone in bonuses to its management.

And to top it off, despite now being government­owned, RBS is still involved in tax avoidance on a colossal scale.

But for some of the people working here, that wasn’t damage enough. In November 2014 it was revealed that RBS had been part of a criminal cartel of banks caught

rigging the Foreign Exchange, or FOREX, market to make a profit. Because they were defrauding their own customers this was a serious crime.

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Here’s what Channel 4’s Economics Editor Paul Mason said of the very spot we’re standing after its latest scandal:

[P]

‘I’m just sick of it, why, after 6 years, do we have to keep coming to do it? I’ve sat in their rooms where they’re pleading in the most genteel tones ... 'please don’t make a criminal offence

possible to commit in the boardroom, don’t make it possible for us to go to jail… And yet they’ve even got transcripts of the chatroom discussions where the rigging of the market took place.”

[D] And luckily for us these transcripts are available online, so let’s take a look.Volunteers to play

bankers? Betty = Pound sterling: US Dollar exchange rate; quid = million pounds ­ ‘im getting ab[ou]t 80 quid now … fixing’ ­ ‘Getting more than you now betty’ ­ ‘1.6218..nice’ ­ ‘I don my hat’ ­ ‘Nice job gents’ And we’ll leave some of the incriminating evidence with RBS as a reminder in case they’re

thinking of pulling something like this again… As Paul Mason said at the end of his speech, ‘we really deserve a better banking system,’

which is what we and a lot of campaign groups, which you can find on our website, are calling for. [P]

Spot the Tax­dodger competition ­ the winner is … The reason we end the tour here is that it marks the edge of the City within the greater city, and

the contrast between the two – on the other side of these posts is the London Borough of Tower Hamlets ­ London’s poorest borough, and a place where, according to the government, half of all children are now born into poverty. And on top of this it has been drastically affected by the government’s cuts to local government.

Tower Hamlets really is a world apart from the City, and if one happened to be arrested here, it would be the Metropolitan police that would nick you, while on that side you’d be dealing with the City of London’s own constabulary. Not only that, but our tour has taken you today across the section of the Central Line ­ St Paul’s to Liverpool St. ­ with some of the highest life expectancies for local residents (around 86y if you’re wondering). Walk past those bollards and it drops to 78, then 77 by the time you are in Mile End. Carry on to Leyton and its 76.

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Here in Tower Hamlets, and across the rest of the UK, the services upon which we all rely are being slashed, benefits for the poorest are no longer keeping up with the cost of living and there simply aren't enough jobs to go to all those looking for work. The austerity we're facing today, despite what the government keeps telling us, isn't because we were frivolous in the past, it's because the government was forced to bail out failed banks and now we're all having to pay the price.

But do we, the public, actually have to pay? Or are there ways of resisting? [D]

Well, we want to end with an example of successful resistance from this part of London. It’s the story of the New Era Estate just over a mile away from the Square Mile in Hoxton. The estate had been taken over by the American private equity firm Westbrook Partners, who announced a rent hike in some cases triple the previous rent. 93 families living there were facing eviction before Christmas. But a campaign led by three mums on the estate created such a PR nightmare for Westbrook that they had to sell it to a charity that provides affordable housing.

Ironically, they couldn’t have done it without the support of certain comedian who the same week was described as nothing more than a narcissistic, prancing millionaire by our media for coming here to cover the crimes of RBS for a new documentary about the banking sector.

I’ll leave it up to you to decide which is doing more to challenge inequality in our society... [P] Thanks for coming everyone, hope you enjoyed it. As we said at the start the tour is free and we don’t accept donations, but feel free to give to a

good cause instead. But have a look at the Links and Resources page on our website, occupytours.org for some banking­related campaigns you can donate to or get involved in.

Also please leave us a review on TripAdvisor! [Hand out flyers and TTIP material].

Extra info TTIP financial services reform:

Restrict governments' ability to introduce financial reforms. Exclude certain types of transactions from regulation, especially those involving hedge funds

and derivatives. Drop a ban on swap desk pushouts, which are described by the analysts as "risky bets with

federally insured money for their own profit." Limit capital holding requirements for banks. Allow European banks to operate in the more highly­regulated US under European rules.

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In­work poverty:

Real pay has fallen by 6­8% since 2008. Over half of 13m people living below the poverty line are IN WORK (6.7 ­ increase of 500,000

on year before). If you're poor in 2014 you’re probably in work.

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