Greedy bankers beware. UK Uncut has shed the constraints of the nation state and gone global. The protest movement that organises through social networking websites to plan and engage in direct action to confront tax-dodging corporations and banks has spread to the US. Promising signs of nascent uncut movements have also been reported in Australia, Canada, France and Greece and Mexico.

In Britain, this direct action group has emerged in response to the current Conservative-led government's ideological-driven theft of taxpayers' money to pay off the debt which the government took on to bail out reckless financial institutions in the wake of the 2008 economic crisis. Last Saturday, over 40 UK branches of the Royal Bank of Scotland and Natwest retail banks were occupied and transformed into public services. Some became schools, others universities while one or two became nurseries. In the states, US Uncut joined with its UK counterpart in coordinated solidarity action. Bank of America branches in over 50 states were picketed and occupied.
The uncut movement has caught the attention of the mainstream media in all its forms – the BBC, the Guardian on the more reasonable end of the spectrum with Fox News and even the Financial Times has reported on the protests. Its goals are reasonable not radical. But we have been living in different times for so long now, an epoch during which any demand made by ordinary people that is laid at the door of corporations or governments with a hint of basic common sense or civic decency sounds almost revolutionary.

UK Uncut's call is for corporations and the stinking rich to pay their taxes like everybody else. No matter whether the tax dodging is illegal or whether it is legal. It is an attack on the morality of tax dodging and the fact that governments are run by individuals and parties who are themselves financed by corporations. UK Uncut claims tax avoidance robs the British government of £25bn per year. One of the initial targets in Britain was Phillip Green, a multi-billionaire celebrity due to his flamboyant image nurtured as boss of high street clothes stores Top Shop and Burton. His stores were picketed and occupied, the police called and UK Uncut hit the national mainstream media radar. It turned out that he had dodged £300m in taxes last year by setting his wife up as a resident of Monaco and making her a major shareholder of this business. This way, it is perfectly legal to pay her a profit dividend that escapes tax. He did this. To the tune of £1.2bn. 

British banks are doubly compromised due to their status as corporations and for their direct culpability for the crisis and being the beneficiaries of a $1.2tr bailout. Bank of America has assets of over $2.2 trillion and pays less tax than your average US family. It also received $45bn in bailout cash from the US government. Both countries' governments are cutting public spending on education and social security to pay off this bank debt and nothing has been done since the crisis to tighten up tax avoidance loop holes to even attempt to ease the strain on the least well off. Despite this, the US Uncut's slogans remained reasonable on Saturday. "We pay our taxes, why don't they?" The group goes of its way to present itself as not "anti-business" on its website.

UK Uncut has certainly made an impact in Britain. In only four months it has grown from nothing to having over 20,000 followers on Twitter. It has attracted the support of centre-left Guardian journalist Polly Toynbee. A spokesman for the group has appeared on BB2's Newsnight, one of the biggest and most serious news programmes in the country. 

The strengths of UK Uncut campaign are that its it uses the language of the right against itself and its targets are meaningful for ordinary people. "Benefit scroungers" and "The Workshy" face regular abuse from the right for not contributing taxes and for being sponges on society. Benefit fraudsters face the same vitriol from governments and from the press. The abuse piled on the those groups pales into insignificance compared to what immigrants endure. So when the uncut movement demands that companies pay tax the right can't have much to say. At the same time, from a leftist perspective, blaming a privileged elite the points the fingers at the guilty party for once rather than the scapegoats. It also engages with people's everyday lives. In a world of celebrity, Phillip Green is someone most British people will recognise so it connects with the consciousness of ordinary people in a way that your average political demonstration with placards simply doesn't.

So as a propaganda campaign, UK Uncut has been very successful. The trouble it might have is moving beyond propaganda to applying real pressure to powerful interests so that they change what is fundamental to the philosophy that rules their existence. And when the governments in power are significantly funded by those financial the chance of peaceful protest devoid of a powerful edge pressuring politicians to tighten up corporate tax law are going to be vanishingly small. Last year, the ruling Conservative Party in Britain received $15m, over half its annual revenue expenditure. President Barack Obama received over $20m from finance industries for his presidential election campaign. When the British government Obama say 'We are all in this together' they mean corporations and mainstream political parties. You and I aren't included in their 'We.'

The uncut movement on the other hand could play a significant role as part of a more general resistance to the cuts as the consumers in a quartet of social forces. It could stand as a consumer pressure group alongside society's producers in the form of unionised workers, students struggling for free education and last but by no means least with the reserve army of labour, the unemployed.

The cuts haven't hit yet. At the moment the Top Shop boss and his ilk remain untouched, tax avoidance is still rampant and banks are posting billion-dollar bonus pools again. The neoliberal age continues and its fanatical followers have been strengthened and embolden since the crisis which almost destroyed the global economy. Only when the cuts kick in and people start being laid off and the cuts to benefits start to bite will we know if the uncut movement has any partners determined to rescue the progressive parts of our societies and shake the foundations of neoliberal hegemony.

Until then, UK Uncut should be supported and US Uncut should be encouraged to grow in the same way so that their efforts to hold the powers that be to account carry the maximum weight.