City protests of the past

"Last week I heard a story of how last time this sort of protest happened in the May Day riots, £20 notes were photocopied and thrown off the top of a bank. Antagonist perhaps?"

According to the Times, City workers taunted protestors with £10 notes. Story here. Is this a case of the credit crunch even hitting the ancient art of Protestor Tauting'?

I heard a rumour (I think it came from a UK payment company keen to spend shareholder funds on trips to SEPA conferences) that protesters where angry that their banks were not promoting the use of SEPA Direct Debits. Understandable, as most of the protesters were Italian nationals who lived in Spain and who wanted to buy products made in France using their German bank accounts. No wonder the public are angry with the banks - this is the sort of simple, everyday transaction that the EU should be promoting! 

Being somewhat grey of hair and long of tooth, my experience of protests goes back to the Peasants' Revolt (what a night THAT was!) - but more recently, the Stop the City campaigns were actually rather well done, as compared with the confused (and rather disappointing) show of last week.

One favourite STC protest was at Liverpool Street station, where a liveried group of smiley youngsters dispensed orange juice from a stand, in small cups, just like a promotion... the juice was apparently laced with laxative. Another was a small group of unlikely-looking chaps hanging around one of the exits from Bank tube station. Since I was in the broad-shouldered company of a large software salesman I felt empowered to challenge them; "What are you actually doing here?", I asked. "We're stoppin' the City - its City money what finances the unfair treatment of the third world and we're gonna stoppit," replied my new friend.

"No, it isn't," I replied, as kindly as I could.

After a moment's thought, back came the carefully-rehearsed response... "Well - we was told it was"

Such evidence of carefully-synchronised alignment of key messages was woefully and shockingly absent last week. I fear for our future - what happened to good old student activism?