Ben Quinn
Guardian
November 2, 2011
While the pause button has been pressed on moves by the powerful City of London Corporation to evict protesters from outside St Paul’s, the smoke is clearing on what many expected would be the real conflict after the “phoney war” between activists and the cathedral.
Following the cathedral’s suspension of its legal action against the protest camp, the dispute is rapidly crystallising into a stand-off between opponents of Britain’s corporate elite on one side and, on the other, the Corporation, which is committed to backing the interests of “the City”.
Symbolically, the Corporation’s planning and transportation committee, which took the decision to go ahead with court action to clear 200 or more tents, has a high number of past and present employees of some of the interests that the camp was set up to challenge.
In terms of bankers, notable members include Roger Gifford, chairman of the Association of Foreign Banks, which represents all foreign banks based in London, and John White, an international banker who previously held a senior position at Lehman Brothers and recently retired as a senior executive at one of the US’s largest banking groups, the Toronto-Dominion Bank Financial Group.
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