Rev Billy comes to London

The Reverend Billy and his 'Life After Shopping' Gospel choir from New York were busy in London today on their 2009 UK Shopocalypse Tour.

I met them at Downing St, where they gave a brief performance, although unfortunately Gordon Brown wasn't at home. The police at this high security site, now hidden behind tall gates with armed guards, obviously didn't quite know how to handle the holy activists, and the officer who stopped the Reverend to question him failed to make much progress - other than being diagnosed by Billy as having a "shopping problem."

The Church of Life After Shopping believes that we need to "back away from the product" and resist the way that advertising and the media persuade us to live only thorough consuming corporate products, and get down to experiencing life directly.

We can live more by consuming less - and at the same time help save the planet and put an end to climate change, which is a result of our excessive consumption. It's a message that comes from New York, and Americans consume far more than people in other countries, but the UK also has much higher levels of consumption than are sustainable in the future, particularly if we want (or are forced) to move towards a fairer sharing of resource usage between rich and majority worlds.

Downing St was of course a key site at which to protest consumerism, which has been central to the expansion of our economy, but in many ways we now see to be a false God. As Billy says, following the G20 summit and the pathetic waste and greed shown in the continuing parliamentary allowances scandal, our government and MPs are clearly in need of the Life After Shopping Gospel.

Amen indeed brother!