Joan Bakewell: my verdict on the St Paul's protest
As the Occupy London protest at St Paul's Cathedral enters its fourth week, the Anglican Church has finally woken up to the opportunities it presents
Joan Bakewell amongst the protestors in the anti-capitalism camp in the grounds of St Paul's Cathedral Photo: Christopher Pledger
7:00AM GMT 06 Nov 2011
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'When they closed the church doors, bells of alarm rang throughout Christendom,” a protester outside St Paul’s Cathedral told me last week. “Closing the doors was the turning point.” Gillian Hammerton is a middle-aged barrister and has been advising the anti-capitalist demonstrators camped outside St Paul’s Cathedral since their protest began on October 15. I had gone along in the early days to see how plausible the Cathedral’s claims of health-and-safety considerations really were. I wasn’t convinced.
On Friday, I went again. The doors are reopened now and services have resumed in the glowing interior of this magnificent building: candles are lit, visitors, congregations file into the service. It is impossible not to be in awe of its beauty. Such beauty is meaningful, the achievements of man in honour of his belief. It is not a negligible thing that such a place has become an icon for the devout and for those outside who want a better world. In many ways, their aspirations are one and the same.
Gillian regularly attends the 5 o’clock service. “I listen to see whether they make any reference to what is happening outside. But they only do it in a coded way: 'These troubled times’, that sort of thing.” Choral voices soar into the echoing spaces. Outside, the sound of drums from a group on the steps of Queen Anne’s statue set up a distant counterpoint. Both sounds are part of the life of St Paul’s now.
In the north aisle, a poster catches my eye: “Hitting the right note in St Paul’s.” It turns out to be an appeal for the choral work of the cathedral. In the mayhem of recent weeks, the cathedral itself is still struggling to find the right note. The public at large is used to the Anglican Communion’s continuing internal wrangles about women bishops and homosexual clergy and probably regards such matters as out-of-date squabbles within an archaic institution. But the occupation at St Paul’s is different, and the Church has been slow to see that. It has stumbled badly – and very publicly.
When the protesters set up their tents three weeks ago, having aimed for the Stock Exchange but kept out by police protecting private property, they sought refuge in the very place where their occupancy would have maximum resonance. The word “sanctuary” seemed appropriate. But when the church shut its doors for a week – and for the first time since the Blitz – suddenly everyone recalled that Christ drove the traders from the temple. It was a disastrous move.
