When a group of 12 friends met for a Friday night drink at a pub in north London in October they were looking forward to chewing over the events of the week. But the discussion at the Nag's Head, in Islington, quickly turned to politics and particularly George Osborne, who had just announced details of the government's £83bn of public spending cuts.
Over the next few hours the friends – many veterans of the environment protest movement and most in their 20s – hatched a plan to highlight an alternative to the chancellor's cuts by focusing on corporate tax avoidance. They agreed to occupy the Vodafone store in central London the following week and UK Uncut, the country's fastest growing protest movement, was born.
"We did not mean to start UK Uncut," says Daniel Garvin, one of those present for the original meeting. "We simply meant to do one occupation of Vodafone's flagship store with some friends on Oxford Street on the Wednesday morning ... it was almost a casual off the cuff "let's give it a go" attempt to draw attention to this alternative."
Using Twitter to mobilise local protests around the country, the group has transformed the nature of protest in the UK. Their tactics of peaceful, imaginative direct action have forced the issue of corporate tax avoidance onto the political agenda and the campaign is offering a compelling alternative to the government's programme of cuts to a growing number of people.
"Every UK Uncut activist has not only sent a powerful message of potential brand damage to every corporate boardroom in the UK thinking of minimising its tax contributions," says Garvin. "But they have placed something as mundane as tax as an emerging battleground in UK politics, and used it to provide a serious challenge to the coalitions' narrative about the necessity and fairness of their cuts."
As well as its high-profile direct action campaigns that have closed more than a hundred high street stores in towns and cities across the country, the group's original members have found themselves at the centre of growing media interest, making regular appearances on BBC Newsnight to promote and sometimes defend their campaign.
They have also taken on some of the high street's biggest names, from Topshop to Boots to Tesco, all of which are alleged to have avoided millions of pounds in tax. UK Uncut's activities are reported to have prompted HM Revenue & Customs to launch an inquiry into alleged leaks by its own officials after private financial details of groups such as Vodafone appeared in the press.
Outside London the movement has taken hold in scores of local groups attracting teenagers and pensioners, many first-time protesters.
In Liverpool one 15-year-old schoolgirl managed to attract 60 people to a UK Uncut tax avoidance demonstration in the city centre after posting on Twitter.
"We are no longer the iPod generation," she says in a film for guardian.co.uk. "And certainly not the Topshop generation. We are politically aware, we do care about what is going on and people are starting to listen to us. People are listening to me even though I am 15 and I am just a schoolgirl."
The movement's rapid success has surprised many of those involved in that first meeting but Garvin says it has tapped into a growing anger among thousands of ordinary people.
"The injustice of the cuts, and the tax affairs of the rich, combined with effective and engaging protests promoted using savvy online technologies has meant that hundreds of high street stores have been targeted all around the country, involving thousands of people, most of whom were definitely not 'the usual faces'."
And as they look forward to taking on the banks UK Uncut is sure that their method of peaceful, imaginative direct action is revitalising the UK's protest movement.
"We have seen the opposition movements in this country become quite stale," observes Garvin. "The anti-war movement is a classic example. If you march from the US embassy to Parliament Square every other month or so ... people get tired and bored of listening to the same speakers and just trudging up and down in the rain."
Garvin argues that although UK Uncut is based on some of the same principles it offers a more effective, engaged alternative.
"This is the future of protest, but it is important to remind ourselves that the basis of what UK Uncut is doing is not new; organising in our local communities, friendship groups, unions and colleges to produce sit-ins, pickets, creative forms of public engagement and civil disobedience against the 'powers that be' are tried and tested tactics that brought suffrage for women and defeated the poll-tax.
"Only now, because of the internet, individuals can discover and engage at the click of a button, and most importantly every activist can communicate and co-ordinate nationally, and we can do it very quickly."
