Sadly, it seems that Tanya has many more dots to join however, as asset-stripping Oasis, her partner for the event is also heavily involved in Academies, which, along with Free Schools, are one of the prime vehicles for the commodification of schools in this country. Such commodifcation being part of a trend recently described thus by Ursula Huws:

Now one of the trends that had actually been going on, rather unnoticed for at least the last 15 years or so, was that one of the biggest fields of expansion for multinational companies has actually been the public sector. The commodification of public services isn't a primitive accumulation in the sense that we know it, of generating new commodities out of areas of life that were previously outside the money economy, like domestic labour or the body, it is actually a commodification of the collective assets of the working class. Because what the welfare state is, if you like, is what workers over the last century managed to claw back from capital. It's their share of surplus value that was re-appropriated by our parents and our grandparents, very heroically actually – not making short-term economistic demands, but demanding things for the whole working class. This is now what's being expropriated. And so for these TNCs, the financial crisis was kind of like Christmas - this wonderful opportunity for forcing governments to commodify huge new swathes of the public sector, to create a new field of accumulation of capital in the name of cutting public budgets to balance the books.

The Oasis empire, run by Baptist minister Steve Chalke MBE has acquired a number of Academies including twelve secondary schools and two primary schools. Steve Chalke has said of his plans for the schools, “we will end up with a church which is also a school…a school that is also a church…” But management style has not been particularly caring to date, and it cannot be said that his academies have been great examples of the ‘ethical capitalism’ that was the subject under discussion.

Recently pupils at Salford’s Oasis MediaCityUK Academy were involved in a near riot after Oasis announced plans to make almost a quarter of teachers redundant, and teachers are now currently involved in strike action. According to Year 10 protestors:

"The head teacher blamed everyone else but himself – he said the ones before had overspent and left him to deal with it, that there were too many teachers and not enough pupils…But the school's spent money on all these ridiculous things like two whiteboards that cost five grand each and are never used.

"There's also a radio station that cost around £8,000 that's not used…There's Apple laptops that have been there for three years and never been used - they've got all this high tech equipment and no teachers!" they added "And now they're moving to a school that's three times as big as this one and no pupils to go in it. It's getting ridiculous."

For Oasis this was the second ‘near riot’ in their short history, with a head teacher resigning after another pupil protest over school management which resulted in five pupils being permanently excluded and 25 Year 11 students suspended.

Another feather in the Oasis ‘ethical capitalism’ cap is its partnership with homophobe Brian Souter. owner of Stagecoach and worth an estimated $328m or more.

Recently Rupert Murdoch caused concern when he described the US educational system as a $500Bn market and Michael Gove who worked for Murdoch, reported a number of meetings with Murdoch "most of which have been about education".

Even the Tories might not be able to manage to persuade Britons that we should hand over working class assets directly to the likes of Murdoch, and thus ‘charitable’ organisations such as Oasis and the Church of England, have been prominent in the acquisition of schools, along with CarpetRight tycoon Lord Harris.

However, it isn’t difficult to see how the likes of Murdoch and Serco are likely to move in and hoover up any Academy that experiences financial problems, in order to exploit education for profit in the future. After all ruthless acquisitions are what they do best.

Once people became aware that a link was being built with Oasis, representations were made to try and stop it happening. As Steve Chalke said at the meeting, it was only through Tanya's persistence that the meeting did happen. What is strange then, is that Tanya is also quoted as saying:

‘Occupy is amorphous, Everyone is included in the 99 per cent. I have no doubt that the system has no way of sustaining itself. I say to the one per cent watch out, we are not prepared to pay for your crisis.’

Whilst Tanya has made it clear that she believes that the Occupy movement is a " a mechanism by which to open a dialogue with the people who have caused the crisis as much as with the governments who have avoided actually finding any solution themselves", Occupiers who attended the meeting in the name of the 99% chose not to confront Oasis with a critique of its own unethical and harmful behaviour.

In the dying gasps of neoliberalism, the multinationals are now expanding themselves through taking control of the last of the working class assets. Once they control them, we can be sure that they will not give them back. We end up paying for them, because the state will be forced to bail them out if they fail. For them it is a win-win situation. For us the opposite. And it seems Tanya is determined to press ahead with partnering those who enable that process, even when presented with the reasons not to. It seems she is in a state of confusion. Consensus means listening to, and addressing concerns, (even if they are only presented after a decision has been made because more information comes to light).

Tanya is building a name for herself in her Occupy London role, and the Occupy movement must be wary of those who begin to act outside of consensus. It must also be wary of creating specialised roles which put individuals into a position where they begin to enjoy their five minutes of fame. So too should it be wary of organisations like Oasis who try to deflect the harm they are doing by building such links, and helping themselves to some of the media limelight created by Occupy, in the process.

At Wednesday nights meeting Steve Chalke announced plans for further colloboration between Oasis and Occupy London. Tanya needs to start joining the dots quickly, and to ensure that she does not allow Oasis to whitewash its reputation by exploiting the Occupy movement for its own benefit. Oasis is happy to get into bed with the one percent and is quite probably a small step away from handing over our schools to some of the very corporations that have got Occupiers onto the streets. At the least, any future interaction involving Occupy and Oasis must ensure that it reveals the full ugly story about what it is that Oasis stands for.

Academies on the Newswire;
Liverpool school strikes over academy plans | Teachers protest over St Edward’s Academy plans | Oppose Orimiston Academy! | Anti-City Academy Teachers Take To The Trees | Academies Talk hosted at Impington VC, Cambridge

Other links:
Schools: Not Open For Business [PDF] | The battle against privatisation | The Anti Academies Alliance | The threat of schools’ privatisation | Nov 9: Defend education fight privatisation