UK Uncut demonstrators protest outside a Vodafone shop on Oxford Street in London, November 2011. Photograph: Anthony Devlin/PA
It was an email. It read: “No, but you could always organise something.” It arrived in my inbox on a Wednesday afternoon in October 2010. At the time I was working in a poorly paid job in Liverpool, unsure of what I wanted to do with my life, bored out of my mind and fidgety about the recently elected coalition government, which was teetering on the edge of enacting “swingeing” cuts to the public sector.
At some point that day – 11am, I think – I was idly scrolling through Twitter (some things don’t change) and I noticed something stirring. A group of activists hadoccupied Vodafone’s flagship store in protest against the company’s alleged tax avoidance. .They shut Vodafone down. It was amazing: new, young, immediate, exciting – and totally different from the A-to-B marches I’d taken part in beforethe UK invaded Iraq in 2003.
I emailed the activists: “That was amazing! Is there anything going in Liverpool?” A man, now one of my best friends, emailed me back. And that was the moment that changed me.
To this day, I don’t know what spurred me on to take up the challenge and organise a protest in Liverpool, but a few days later I had gathered a ragtag bunch of activists I’d never met before. And the mere suggestion that we might take direct action caused Vodafone to shut down both its Liverpool stores in advance.
The London-based activists were impressed, and invited me to meet them. Within two months I had quit my job in Liverpool, relocated to London, and started taking action nearly every weekend.
Those London-based activists, of which I was now one, were the beginning of the direct action network UK Uncut. Since its inception it has inspired more than 800 protests across the country; it’s been derided by establishment institutions from parliament to Fox News; it was one of the reasons Starbucks felt compelled to pay £20m in tax to the Treasury; it propelled tax avoidance up the political agenda; and it introduced me to some of my now closest friends, changing my life irreversibly.
The events flowing from that email led me to a realisation that I have never forgotten: change is possible. Since my time with UK Uncut, I have spent a lot of time talking to people about activism, and the most common sentiment I hear is that it’s pointless: “They won’t listen anyway.” It’s the same inertia I fell into after the Iraq war, but it couldn’t be more wrong.
People in power aren’t ambivalent about protest; they’re terrified of it. Social progress plods along like a tortoise, and protest is the jet pack you attach to its back. It’s not true to say protest doesn’t work: in fact, it’s the only thing that does work. That’s why we’re constantly encouraged not to do it.
UK Uncut didn’t just change the political conversation. Along with the student occupations across the country, it resurrected occupation of private property as a form of direct action protest. It changed the lives and minds of everyone who came into contact with it. People developed lifelong friendships through UK Uncut. They fell in love; they found feminism; they built communities.
It was through writing about UK Uncut for the radical website New Left Project that I got my break in journalism, and was able to start documenting social change for the Guardian and other news outlets. Over the last couple of years I’ve met activists from Berlin to Bogotá, and I’ve seen people organising – often against seemingly insurmountable odds – for equality, justice and dignity.
I’ve seen how people’s lives can be changed through taking action, sometimes at enormous cost (as with many activists I’ve met in Colombia) – sometimes with enormous rewards, and often both at the same time. I’ve seen how activism can be a transformative process for activists themselves, as well as for the society they wish to change.
The man who sent me the email? Last year I introduced him to a friend of mine who had just moved to London, and they fell in love. So I suppose we changed each other.
I don’t think either of us knew where that initial exchange would lead. But this is the beauty of activism: you can do things that feel miraculous, form wonderful relationships while doing it, and along the way you get a lot of little moments that change you.