In St. Andrews Square. When I passed on Friday it seemed to be a collection of tents and a few hand written signs. I doubt that this will change much but good luck to them. It's getting a bit chilly for camping out.

I liked this from Lemony Snicket on the Wall Street protest.

Thirteen Observations made by Lemony Snicket while watching Occupy Wall Street from a Discreet Distance

1. If you work hard, and become successful, it does not necessarily mean you are successful because you worked hard, just as if you are tall with long hair it doesn’t mean you would be a midget if you were bald.

2. “Fortune” is a word for having a lot of money and for having a lot of luck, but that does not mean the word has two definitions.

3. Money is like a child—rarely unaccompanied. When it disappears, look to those who were supposed to be keeping an eye on it while you were at the grocery store. You might also look for someone who has a lot of extra children sitting around, with long, suspicious explanations for how they got there.

4. People who say money doesn’t matter are like people who say cake doesn’t matter—it’s probably because they’ve already had a few slices.

5. There may not be a reason to share your cake. It is, after all, yours. You probably baked it yourself, in an oven of your own construction with ingredients you harvested yourself. It may be possible to keep your entire cake while explaining to any nearby hungry people just how reasonable you are.

6. Nobody wants to fall into a safety net, because it means the structure in which they’ve been living is in a state of collapse and they have no choice but to tumble downwards. However, it beats the alternative.

7. Someone feeling wronged is like someone feeling thirsty. Don’t tell them they aren’t. Sit with them and have a drink.

8. Don’t ask yourself if something is fair. Ask someone else—a stranger in the street, for example.

9. People gathering in the streets feeling wronged tend to be loud, as it is difficult to make oneself heard on the other side of an impressive edifice.

10. It is not always the job of people shouting outside impressive buildings to solve problems. It is often the job of the people inside, who have paper, pens, desks, and an impressive view.

11. Historically, a story about people inside impressive buildings ignoring or even taunting people standing outside shouting at them turns out to be a story with an unhappy ending.

12. If you have a large crowd shouting outside your building, there might not be room for a safety net if you’re the one tumbling down when it collapses.

13. 99 percent is a very large percentage. For instance, easily 99 percent of people want a roof over their heads, food on their tables, and the occasional slice of cake for dessert. Surely an arrangement can be made with that niggling 1 percent who disagree.

The Greenham Common de nos jours?

How do they pay for their tents, food, clothes, heating, etc.? Do they commute from their tent village to jobs in finance, the factory, or the University library? Given the many very pressing problems Glasgow has, this all seems a bit like Marie Antoinette saying "me too". Maybe they should recall the schemes a few miles out, and try charity beginning at home, rather than this posturing nonsense?

... will wreck those schemes even more. If tax is more difficult to avoid, those services may well remain.

You can't legislate for the moment when people just say, 'Oh fek, i've had enough of this.' The Occupy movement, if you can call it a movement, strikes me as the political equivalent of a wail of anguish which in itself is no bad thing i think.
After all, the frequent statement "there is no alternative to capitalism" is looking more & more like "there is no alternative to insecurity, debt, then poverty in old age" to a lot of folk outside the charmed circle of very high earners. The statement "capitalism has brought us an unprecedented standard of living" may be partially true but it's also starting to sound a little hollow, especially since money nearly stopped working in autumn 2008. Communism is effectively dead & discredited, while joining the Ummah is a non-starter from a Western point of view.
So cheesed-off people, no apparent alternatives, and the toughest economic circumstances since the neo-liberal project got off the ground here in the UK under Mrs T, more than 30 years ago.
Rather than worrying about Occupy people, i'm more worried about a lurch to the right where the likes of UKIP and the anti-European wing of the Tories would be at the cuddlier end of the spectrum ("foreigners are to blame... for everything").

i saw Louie Spence by accident in an Edinburgh branch of Waterstone's yesterday ... that was seriously crap camping

Noted Glenbervie and fatmark. Glasgow is an interesting one, as it has been a solidly socialist city for nearly a century, and has been sufficiently problematic to receive an awful lot of subsidies. It thus provides an experiment for what a place may be like when the locals tend to historically support the politics of the city, and the politics of the city know how the money should be spent. It's come a long way, but if you ask me if it could lose the 'booze and blades' (and sectarian) culture it would be a much better place. IMHO, that the policies involving local housing schemes and schools effectively maintain these problems says a lot about the stupidity of the local council.

We are a strange nation, but at least we don't seem to fall for the mass-movement fascism of Europe. I think we were at much more of a risk 3 decades ago. I recall the NF in the 70s (an ugly weird bunch with no genuine ability to inspire though getting 20% of the vote in some locales in 1978), the BNP (sad lumpenproletariat busted flush), and if UKIP are anything to go by in the town square the other day, another bunch of lonely (if slightly better off) reactionary malcontents. Note how despite Europe having plenty of mass anti-immigration parties, it seems to be a vote loser here - though the main parties say vague things, they back off from anything nastier.

I went by the St Paul's camp on Thursday, and though there are banners etc there is no coherent demand for anything. And I guess that is the point. They are currently just expressing outrage, hoping something will happen. Reading the various interviews with some of the activists in the Grauniad this appears to be the strategy. Actually I have a lot of sympathy, I feel pretty annoyed with the way things are myself. However just hoping something happens ain't going to achieve much, I suspect. The people they really need to get to aren't listening. History says the way to achieve change is through the political process, and as long as they remain anti politics they won't get much more than very cold.

Her take on the St Paul's Occupy was that the local Starbucks has enormous queues and isn't it funny that people derive benefits from capitalism and then protest about it! Crikey! Aren't they silly!
This was dealt with quite well by Baker/Hislop/Merton but it did make me think that if i was going to protest about capitalism then plainly the only way to do it credibly is while living up a tree, eating leaves and drinking my own pish. As long as no one actually owns the tree. (All else is humbug.)

"Smash capitalism and replace it with something nice" as they said in Cider-delic.

being screwed as well. I'll concede that the narrative conveyed by the (corporate) media has been distinctly underwhelming. What a surprise. I agree you'd be hard pressed to understand any message beyond 'smash capitalism'. Well, here you go : http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175483/tomgram%3A_rebecca_solnit%2C_occu... . Her piece starts a page or so down. It's the only cogent overview of the message, drivers and objectives that I've come across. I'd love to see more.

So it might not translate cleanly to what's happening in Glasgow, or a Starbucks near you, but it means something to the vast majority of US folks outside every rich bastards' gated community and security-guarded apartment complex. Which in effect means the 99 (.999) % of the population that people are going on about. And if that doesn't explain why there were (plausibly deniable) coordinated police crackdowns on all of the US-based protest locations, and the fear of the powers-that-be, I'll give up.

"Every rich bastards' gated community" is a bit pejorative and reductive.

Why does rich necessarily have to equate to bastard? And what's wrong with a gated community? A great deal of the folk I know who live there got there because they worked hard and were successful and/or lucky. They did not necessarily screw anyone to get there.

Your post smacks of the politics of envy and not social progress

But the main question I have is - did you read the Rebecca Solnit piece ?

From my perspective, no - not all rich people are bastards (I have a friend who's rich....). Nor do they all live in gated communities or have their own security. Hyper-wealthy people probably do though. And no - I don't begrudge anyone getting rich. I may envy them, but I wouldn't suggest they shouldn't be rich. While I tend toward scandinavian-style socialism, I'm nowhere near communism.

- I do expect rich people to pay tax (rather than get rates less than the minimum income earners).
- I do expect corporations to pay tax (rather than none at all as appears to be the norm in the US at present - see GE among others).
- I do expect them to be socially responsible - and that has massively varied connotations, from treatment of their customers (e.g. borrowers being screwed through fraudulant foreclosures by Bank of America among others) through treatment of their employees (e.g. the good folks at FoxConn making your iGadgets), to treatment of the environment (e.g. the chemical output of Intel's fabrication plants).

It depends to a massive degree on how they came by that wealth, ethically and otherwise. The GFC and the toxic assets came about by massive unethical and illegal behaviour of selling as many sub-prime loans as they could as fast as they could and rigging the system of bonuses and objectives so they could cash out before the inevitable collapse came, on-selling the risk in those assets through mis-representation (the ratings agencies) and then betting against the assets they themselves had sold, shorting the value of the 'triple-A rated' assets (try Harry Shearer's interview at http://www.kcrw.com/etc/programs/ls/ls110501le_show_-_may_01_201). Breathtaking. And still no-one has been arrested (apart from Occupy protesters).

I remember working with an Australian financial services company who were quite proud of what they called their 'Nasty fund', a unit trust which had been specially established to invest in assets like tobacco companies, military suppliers, mining companies and so on.

The only really rich person that comes to mind that I wouldn't have obvious criticism for is Warren Buffett (but that may just be my extensive ignorance). Being in the IT industry I would be able to come up with numerous criticisms straight off the top of my head for people like Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison and Bill Gates, and I haven't even read their biographies.

The bottom line for me is that all of this has to be dealt with through *appropriate* regulation (tax, environmental protection, worker protection etc), and the problems we're facing in the GFC and environment pretty much all came about through de-regulation. That would be social progress, but probably anathema to the current political climate.

What was the percentage to population that actually voted in the last election where you live?

The participation of the majority of the minority that bothers to vote or does that include a population in total?

.