The Occupy London protesters remained defiant on Wednesday evening, in the wake of a court ruling that they should be evicted from the makeshift tented camp which they have been occupying at St Paul's Cathedral since the middle of October.
"This movement is far bigger than any one single location. Hopefully we will find another similarly iconic location, and if we get removed from there then we will move elsewhere," vowed Occupy London Stock Exchange movement (OLSX), spokesman George Barda.
Barda spoke to Xinhua outside the Royal Courts of Justice in central London where the City of London Corporation (CLC), the local municipal authority, won its legal battle to get the camp of about 150 tents taken down and the protesters evicted.
Barda, a graduate student at King's College London, which is just across the road from the Royal Courts of Justice and a mere five-minute bus ride from the St Paul's protest camp, said that he did not agree with the court ruling. "In terms of anything like truth, and what would be truly reasonable, I think we have very strong grounds for appeal."
"The arguments we have put forward, backing up academically the substance of why we are here, what we are doing, why things need to change, and how damaging the status quo is to the needs of democracy -- I think that case was very reasonable and it should have been answered by the court but it wasn't," Barda added.
For legal purposes, there were two named defendants from the protest camp in the court case. Barda was one of those named defendants, and he has been involved with the camp since its first day.The OLSX movement is inspired by, and linked by shared interests, with the Occupy Wall Street movement which sprang up in several cities in the United States.
Many of those tented camps were forcefully closed down by the authorities, and the court ruling means that the London camp is likely to face a similar fate.
OLSX must decide if it wants to appeal against the ruling to a higher court, but even if it decides to appeal, the higher court may rule that there are no grounds for it.
"If we thought it would be a productive use of time to try to get another court to undertake that exercise sincerely then maybe we would go ahead and appeal if we can. We may decide that our energies are better spent not engaging with the official system but actually focusing on working with communities. So we need to take it from here and discuss it as a movement," he said.
Barda said that the St Paul's camp was important to the OLSX movement, despite its success at exploiting the opportunities to communicate across the Internet.
"We can do huge amounts of things in terms of virtual connections in ways that we could not even imagine before, the way we can coordinate actions across the world. That virtual space is very important, but I think we need to be realistic that it cannot substitute for the physical space. So I think that St Paul's has been very significant, because it is right next door to the Stock Exchange, it's right in the heart of London," said Barda.
The protest camp in St Paul's Cathedral churchyard is on cathedral property and also on CLC property.
Originally, the cathedral had backed legal action to get the protest camp, which began on October 15, moved. But cathedral authorities decided they could not back legal action that would lead to eviction which could be carried out forcefully with the use of bailiffs and the London police.
CLC initially cancelled its legal action, but resumed it in late November, and the hearing took place over five days before Christmas.
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