Introduction

Over the last few years my involvement in UK Uncut has taken several different forms. For example, I have regularly participated in its actions and protests, written articles and blogs about the campaign, given interviews to the media as a spokesperson and was a director of UK Uncut Legal Action, whose work I discuss below. I thought it would be worthwhile to write this chapter to reflect on what Uncut has achieved so far, and the strengths and weaknesses of its model of activism. This model has mainly involved people taking direct action in their local communities against the Coalition's public spending cuts by occupying branches of tax-dodging companies and demanding that the government make these companies pay their fair share. Such grassroots action not only motivated many more people across the country to organise their own protests, but connected strongly with the public at large by presenting a clear and strong message about why the government's reckless austerity agenda had to be stopped and how this could be done.

I begin by discussing how the movement got going, before touching on its use of mainstream and social media and the different tactics and forms of action used to protest against austerity and highlight the alternatives. I put these actions in context, looking at the social movements Uncut grew out of and how it relates to other political groups and issues. Finally, I describe some of Uncut's protests from my own perspective, considering the movement's overall significance and the importance of direct action as a tool for achieving social and political change.

How UK Uncut started

UK Uncut was born on 27 October 2010, just one week after Chancellor George Osborne announced the deepest cuts to public spending since the 1920s (Guardian, 2010). Around 70 people ran along Oxford Street in London, entered Vodafone's flagship store and sat down to protest at the company avoiding billions in tax (Murphy, 2010). Three days later a second day of action took place, with protesters claiming to have closed ‘at least twenty-one’ Vodafone stores across the UK (UK Uncut, 2010b). A few months later, and UK Uncut actions had spread to up to 50 towns and cities and several tax-dodging targets. Everyone from ‘pensioners to teenagers, veterans to newbies’ took part in actions in towns ‘from Aberdeen to Aberystwyth’ (UK Uncut, 2013a).