The Sovereign Exception: Occupying St Paul's Cross

On 15 and 16 October 2011 a space adjoined to St Paul's Churchyard in London was occupied. The occupation comprised approximately 200 tents, a few hundred participants at any one time, medical supplies, a library, cooking facilities and toilets. The occupiers networked with other camps around the world. They established procedures for making decisions about life in, and the future of, the camp including how to respond to the local authority and the police. The camp was coordinated by meetings of a general assembly and different working groups in a spoke-like system of decision making. The occupiers answered to no authority other than that of the assembly. It suspended the political authority of the state and of the City of London Corporation.

The social scientific literature focuses on a set of particular questions about Occupy. These include its global reach; its decision making and democratic structures; its rejection of conventional politics in favour of an anarchist inspired recipe of collective decision making by all present (what Lorey (2015) termed a presentist form of democracy); its challenge to the political and financial institutions responsible for the 2008 crash epitomised by the slogan ‘We are the 99%‘; and its relation to and differences from more conventional social movements.

Surprisingly there is little focus on the antagonistic confrontations with those deemed to have legal, propriety authority over the occupied space. St Paul's Cross is land owned by the Corporation of London, although a small part is owned by the Church of England. Nor has any author focused on the laws invoked to justify the removal of theoccupants. These superseded the legal right to lawful protest under articles 10 and 11 of the European Convention. At stake were rights over property and propriety, and the claim made by the Corporation of London to lawful possession of the highway. The legal judgement in favour of the City of London Corporation combined a straightforward verifi cation of the corporation's claim to possession, with a set of statements about the inappropriate nature of the occupation. The occupiers, the judge concluded, violated health and safety standards, caused crime, spread noise pollution, housed abusive drinkers, encouraged the spread of vermin and made others feel unsafe in their lawful use of the highway. He ruled that there had been a violation of rights to possession, and that the occupiers constituted a public nuisance and undermined health and safety. He granted an order for possession to the City, combined with injunctive and declaratory relief providing legal remedy to remove the protest.