In recent weeks we have seen two Governments bow to public protest and pressure across North Africa as people refuse to live with corrupt regimes, injustice and poverty. These follow demonstrations in most of the Eurozone nations that are economically vulnerable following the introduction of drastic measure to curb national debt and restore confidence.

Next Thursday will see UK Uncut (the UK’s fastest growing protest movement) stage its first national day of action against the banks who are about to announce their multimillion pound bonus packages over the next few weeks. Barclays is first to release information on Tuesday, jobless figures come out on Wednesday and UK Uncut will peacefully occupy banks on Thursday. These bonuses are tax deductable and are seen as a way to avoid paying tax, which in the current climate of tax payers subsidising the banks and facing the impact of major spending cuts has become a political hot potatoe.

I have sympathy with these peaceful protests. Particularly as they are drawing attention to the fact that the banks have lost their community connection. The banks have become so big they have morphed into a double-headed animal. No longer serving local small businesses and communities but acting more like retailers selling financial products to make money out of money and the investment arms gambling on the fortunes and misfortunes of others.

Each UK Uncut protest can choose its own focus – if libraries are being closed, some plan a read-in; as housing benefit is being capped some may go for a sleep-in; theatres are being shut so some may stage a play; health cuts may mean that some try setting up a mobile clinic in a bank. Whatever happens this is a grass-roots movement, mobilised by social networking sites, of ordinary people who are calling for change and won’t let the government off the hook.

It still looks like there is a way to go on banking reform and George Osborne’s decision this week is seen as a climb down and a breaking of the Coalition’s May 2010 agreement to tackle “unacceptable banking bonuses” and for the banking system “to serve business and not the other way around”. I am all for breaking up the banks and splitting off the investment (gambling) arms from the high street banks as well as seeing smaller, more community based, banks encouraged.

We’ll have to wait for the Vickers banking review in the spring to see if the Government can tame this double-headed animal. My sense is that its all part of the ground breaking up and a disturbing of the powers that hold things in place.

You would have to be living on another planet to not be aware of the present financial trauma shaking the major western economies these days. National debt, cutbacks, economic downturn, contagion, it rumbles on! In the last few days Spain announced they were introducing harsh measures in their banking sector to restore confidence in the system, hoping to avoid fallout from the financial crisis in Portugal. I’m no expert but it seems that a corrupt and crumbling system is disintegrating and hopefully we are seeing the end of the ‘buy now, pay later’ culture – I could be dreaming though!

The banking crisis, the easy access to credit and the obscene proliferation of junk mail touting for business that became common practice amongst credit card companies and banks in the ‘boom’ years has its origins in the de-regulation of UK banks. In the run up to the general election last year Gordon Brown admitted as much although it didn’t get major media profile. I did find it irritating that he was heralded as the saviour who held us back from global meltdown when he was as culpable as the banks themselves (both US and UK). His advocacy of ‘light touch’ regulation in the banking sector came as a direct result of an approach by the City in the 1990’s. The tax revenues that flowed from the increased profits of investment banks are thought to have funded a major expansion of the state (Did Gordon Brown let a deregulated City rip to fund the public sector). It won’t be any comfort to the public sector workers who are losing their jobs but it seems we are now in the throes of a painful corrective spasm.

What will it look like the other side of the pain? The credit card offers are still coming, the bankers are still being paid huge bonuses; something deeper has to shift – the breaking of the alignment of the City and Government for one.

In June 2010 Channel 4’s Dispatches programme covered the banking crisis and made the scary point that ‘bankers and how they think have captured the state’. The programme highlighted some of the  ‘revolving door relationships’ between government and the City (where Government Ministers have jobs in the City and City directors are given Government positions) with this practice extending across national boundaries involving the US-UK and Switzerland (Channel 4: Money, banks and government).

Also, Martin Scott has been researching the connection with the banking system in Mallorca and the spirit of piracy. I sense this also has some relevance for us as a nation of islands. Wales itself has been described as a ‘nursery and storehouse of pirates’, and there is an abundance of historical information that documents the activity of pirates drawn from across the UK from the time of Edward 1, many times authorised by the Crown. Collusion from government authorities, Sheriffs, landed gentry and customs officials made the ‘get rich quick’ lifestyle all the more possible, providing safe transit and ready markets for the stolen goods.

It’s interesting that our modern day banks have their roots in the coffee houses of London and the Royal Exchange which was officially opened by Queen Elizabeth 1 in 1571. This same year Sir Francis Drake launched the Caribbean Age of piracy by attacking Spanish galleons returning from Mexico and Peru – all legitimised by the Queen who shared in the booty. The Queen’s treasury swelled by a share of the profit from piracy – do I hear an echo from the past?

These connections have historic roots that go beyond the last century but it may be that as these are being exposed He will lead us to pray, stand and live in such a way that we will see kingdom values and principles expressed, even in the banking sector and our economy as a whole!