Category: Political Issues

Back in 1910, a Chicago factory inspector Helen Todd, speaking at an event launching a new campaign for votes for women picked up on a comment made to her by a young woman worker that votes for women would mean “everybody would have bread and flowers too”, elaborating it in her speech, quoted in part in Wikipedia:

“… life’s Bread, which is home, shelter and security, and the Roses of life, music, education, nature and books, shall be the heritage of every child that is born in the country …”

Later that year, Todd was involved in the Chicago garment workers’ strike led by The Women’s Trade Union League, making a number of speeches, and “We want bread – and roses, too” was one of the slogans used by the strikers. It was soon picked up by others, including James Oppenheim who published a poem, ‘Bread and ROses’ in 2011, and by a number of leading suffragettes and women trade unionists including the Polish-born American socialist and feminist Rose Schneiderman of the Women’s Trade Union League of New York, with whom the phrase became associated.

It was the 1912  Lawrence textile strike, often known as the Bread and Roses strike, that made the phrase well-known.  Most of the unskilled work in the mills was carried out by immigrant women, and at the start of the year they found without warning that their wages had been cut because of a new Massachusetts labour law which cut the working week for women and children fromf 56 to 54 hours.

The established unions were not concerned with the loss of pay as they mainly represented the skilled white male workers who were unaffected. The IWW came in to organise the immigrant workers, who had come to the USA mainly from countries in southern and eastern Europe and the Middle East – and spoke around a couple of dozen different languages.  They set up relief commitees and organised large and noisy protests where some women carried a banner “We want bread and roses too.”

The employers and the authorities hit back with force and dirty tricks, including arresting the union leaders on clearly false murder charges and getting the firemen to turn their hoses on the marchers in freezing weather, but newspaper coverage of this made the strike a national outrage, eventually forcing the employers to agree to almost all of the strikers demands, including a  a 15% pay raise, double pay for overtime, and an amnesty for strikers.

‘Bread & Roses’ was the inspiration for the Women’s March in London (and similar events elsewhere around the world) on January against economic oppression, violence against women, gender pay gap, racism, fascism, institutional sexual harassment and hostile environment in the UK, and called for a government dedicated to equality and working for all of us rather than the few. Many of those organising the event and taking part, like those who struck in 1912, were from our migrant communities, and there are certainly similarities between the IWW’s tactics in the 1912 strike and the activities of some of the smaller independent unions that are now active with low-paid workers.

Speakers with scripts in orange folders and directed by a BBC camera crew

The march began outside of the BBC, with a few speeches on the steps of the BBC church, All Souls in Langham Place, in a rather curious short rally that appeared to be both scripted and stage-managed by a small camera team from the BBC, who were directing the women who spoke, and generally barging their way through some of the protesters and photographers. I was told they were making a documentary about a group of the women, but if so they clearly have a very different idea of documentary to me, and it seemed more like a play. Other than that of course the BBC as usual ignored both this march and any other protests taking place in London on the day.

More at Women’s Bread & Roses protest

______________________________________________________

There are no adverts on this site and it receives no sponsorship, and I like to keep it that way. But it does take a considerable amount of my time and thought, and if you enjoy reading it, a small donation – perhaps the cost of a beer – would be appreciated.

My London Diary : London Photos : Hull : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage

All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated, are taken by and copyright of Peter Marshall, and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.

To order prints or reproduce images

________________________________________________________

Although inside Parliament Brexit seemed to be in the same rut as it had been since the ridiculous decision to invoke Article 50 without any real plan or consensus as to what Brexit actually meant – enshrined in Mays mantra ‘Brexit means Brexit’ – things outside seemed to be hotting up. The Tories had the strange notion that entering negotiations was like were playing a poker hand rather than trying serious discussions with our European partners over how the difficult process might be best arranged, and there were so many legal arguments about how the referendum was carried out that should have been played out before the decision was taken. So many things called the result into question that it seems clear that had it actually been a binding referendum it would have been declared null and void.

Obviously I voted to remain largely because I felt the country would have much greater control over its trade negotiations as a part of a much larger entity than as a single smaller body and because I value some of the associations and benefits we have built up in cooperation with our European neighbours. And some of our deprived areas – and we have some of the worst in Europe – have benefitted greatly from money from Europe financing projects in a country where our national governments have so clearly favoured London and the surrounding area.

The referendum did not show a decisive majority in favour of leaving Europe, but a nation roughly split down the middle, and was the kind of result that another vote a few months earlier of later could well have reversed. And had we used other versions of eligibilty to vote it might well have been different. Hugely important constitutional change like leaving Europe should only have been triggered by a much more significant vote than a simple majority.

But we are where we are, even if nobody quite knows where that is at the moment. I went to Parliament to photogrpah on the morning when May’s deal was coming up for a vote – and the only sure thing seemed to be that virtually nobody though it was acceptable – and when the vote came there was a huge majority against it. I’m not sure if Brexit will come to a sensible conclusion, or exactly what that might be. Perhaps to revoke Article 50 and schedule another referendum, perhaps with the stipulation that it would only be binding on the government under similar conditions to those that have been imposed on trade union strike ballots!

The pavement opposite Parliament and beside College Green was pretty crowded in parts on this morning, and the group one of my colleagues calls the ‘yellow pests’ was out and very vocal along with the more reasonable protesters on both sides, harassing Steven Bray and his SODEM supporters and apparently any MP they could find, though I wasn’t a witness to that today.

More at Brexit protest against May’s Deal.

______________________________________________________

There are no adverts on this site and it receives no sponsorship, and I like to keep it that way. But it does take a considerable amount of my time and thought, and if you enjoy reading it, a small donation – perhaps the cost of a beer – would be appreciated.

My London Diary : London Photos : Hull : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage

All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated, are taken by and copyright of Peter Marshall, and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.

To order prints or reproduce images

________________________________________________________

It should have been easy to finish getting My London Diary on-line for March, as minor ill-health meant I was unable to take pictures for ten days, so I covered rather fewer events. But it is increasingly a struggle to get it done.

For some years I’ve been wanting to move away from Nikon to smaller, lighter cameras which would be less tiring to carry. I’d hoped that the Fuji X cameras would do the job, but although the lenses are superb, the cameras are just not responsive enough. Over a few years and several models they improved in various ways, but they still (I’ve not tried the latest) don’t provide the confidence that when you press the shutter release they will take a picture. Sometimes the fastest way to wake them is to turn the camera off and on again, and in the second or so it takes for them to respond the picture has gone.

This month, should you care to examine the EXIF data, you can find pictures made with Nikon, Olympus and Fuji cameras. I think the Olympus can probably do almost everything I need, despite its sensor size only half that of the Nikon and the smaller file size, but I’m still evaluating the results. The camera I have is the OMD EM5II, which seems ridiculously cheap for what it offers.

Mar 2019

Freedom, justice & equality for Palestinians
Climate Protest at Barclays Bank

Kurds support hunger strikers
Fridays for Future climate protest
Brexiteers protest Betrayal
Vigil and protest for Christchurch victims

8th Anniversary of the Syrian Revolution
No to Racism, No to Fascism
Remember Fukushima 8 years On
No more deaths on our streets

London Schools Climate Strike
Million Women March against male violence
Blood of Our Children – XR

Women’s Strike Red Feminist March
Camden Panoramas
Global Women’s Strike
Graffiti at Leake St
Yellow Vests applaud Kurdish protesters

Rally supports Kurdish hunger strikers
Sudanese support the non-violent uprising

Algerians say no 5th term for Bouteflika
Scrap Universal Credit
End Japanese dolphin slaughter
Black Cab Drivers blockade
Weekly climate protest
Plastics protests in London

London Images

Back in January I photographed Foil Vedanta campaigners outside the Supreme Court in Parliament Square where British mining company Vedanta was appealing High Court and Court of Appeal rulings that 1,826 polluted farmers from Zambia can have their case against the company and its subsidiary Konkola Copper Mines heard in the UK.

Vedanta are a British mining company, and were forced to delist themselves from the London Stock Exchange at the start of October 2018 after pressure from politicians and activists following the Thoothukudi massacre in Tamil Nadu in May 2018, where 13 protesters were killed and dozens injured.

Grassroots activism on a large scale has managed to shut down Vedanta’s operations in Goa, Tuticorin and Niyamgiri and Foil Vedanta last September released a daming report ‘Vedanta’s Billions: Regulatory failure, environment and human rights’ with a comprehensive account of the company’s crimes in all of its operations, and of the City of London’s total failure to regulate Vedanta, or any other criminal mining company and revealing the vast scale of tax evasion and money laundering. Earlier Foil Vedanta had exposed the illegal activities of the company’s subsidiary Konkola Copper Mines in Zambia, where Vedanta actually boasted about their illegal tax avoidance and they have campaigned over the pollution of the Kafue River, supporting the farmers in their legal action against the company.

The Supreme Court appeal concerned the attempt by Zambian farmers against Konkola Copper Mines, which they want to pursue in the UK courts. Vedanta appealed against the case being heard in the UK as KCM is a Zambian company, but the HIgh COurt in May 2016 and Court of Appeal October 2017 both ruled that Vedanta is responsible for the activities of its subsidiary and since Vedanta is a British company can be taken to court here. So Vedanta took the case to the Supreme Court.

Yesterday, 10th April 2019, the Supreme Court gave its judgement, again dismissing Vedanta’s case. This is not only good news for the Zambian farmers, but also sets as precedent as the first reported case in which a parent company will have have been held to owe a duty of care to a person other than an employee of the subsidiary who has been adversely affected by the operation of the subsidiary.

The Zambian farmers who claim KCM have polluted the River Kafue since 2004 with excessive levels of copper, cobalt and manganese, causing sickness and deaths, damage to property and loss of income can now take their case in the UK courts. But this decision is also important for all communities affected by the crimes of UK multinationals who have hitherto been denied justice in British courts.

More pictures: Vedanta Zambian pollution appeal

______________________________________________________

There are no adverts on this site and it receives no sponsorship, and I like to keep it that way. But it does take a considerable amount of my time and thought, and if you enjoy reading it, a small donation – perhaps the cost of a beer – would be appreciated.

My London Diary : London Photos : Hull : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage

All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated, are taken by and copyright of Peter Marshall, and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.

To order prints or reproduce images

________________________________________________________

17 years ago, on 11th January 2002, the first prisoners were illegally brought from various secret US torture sites around the world to an illegal prison in a US base on Cuba, Guantanamo Bay. Most years since then there have been protests in the UK on the anniversary of this shameful camp, and in 2019 this took place in Trafalgar Square. As well as this annual event, there are also regular protest vigils both at the embassy and outside parliament.

All of the detainees with a UK connection have been released from this torture camp, none of them ever charged or convicted of any offence. Like almost all of those held and taken to Guantanamo they were not terrorists, but innocent men who were unlucky enough to have been caught up as foreigners in the wrong place, when the US were offering a bounty for anyone delivered to them as a ‘terrorist’. Over 85% of those transferred out of the camp during the Obama administration were found by the US authorities to not even have been suspected of engaging in any terrorist activity.

Because there are no longer any ‘Brits’ of any sort there, Guantanamo has more or less disappedared from our news, but it is still there, holding around 40 men. Around half of them there is little or no evidence against, and many of the rest nothing that would hold up in a proper court of law, but all have been held and routinely tortired for over 10 years.

Obama had promised to close Guantanamo, but didn’t keep his word, though the numbers held their reduced significantly while he was president. A total of 780 men have been held there, and during the Bush years around 500 of them were released. Obama released 242, a large proportion of those still held, but around 40 were left when Trump took over.

Since Trump became president, only one prisoner has left Guantanamo, Ahmed al-Darbi who pleaded guilty to being an al-Qaida member in 2014 and was transferred to serve the rest of a prison sentence in jail in Saudi Arabia in May 2018. Before that the last detainee had left on the final full day of the Obama administration, 19th January 2017. Trump has actually promised to put more men in Guantanamo, but has not yet done so.

It’s important that Guantanamo and the remaining detainees be remembered, and that pressure is put on Trump to continue the programme of releases. Of the 40 inside, five were already cleared for release during the Obama administration. But it isn’t easy to keep GUantanamo in the news, and not easy to produce fresh images that would help in this.

Vigil marks 17 years of Guantanamo torture
______________________________________________________

There are no adverts on this site and it receives no sponsorship, and I like to keep it that way. But it does take a considerable amount of my time and thought, and if you enjoy reading it, a small donation – perhaps the cost of a beer – would be appreciated.

My London Diary : London Photos : Hull : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage

All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated, are taken by and copyright of Peter Marshall, and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.

To order prints or reproduce images

________________________________________________________

I hadn’t gone to London to photograph the continuing protests over Brexit, but found it impossible not to go and take some pictures when I found myself walking more or less past them on my way to the station.  Perhaps I should have chosen another route, but I’ve got in to the habit when I have time on my way home to go down Whitehall, often on a bus, to see if anything is happening opposite Downing St, then alight at Parliament Square to see if there are any protests either in the square, in front of Parliament or a little further down the street at Old Palace Yard.

I suppose on this occasion I was pretty certain that there would be protests over Brexit. Steven Bray and his SODEM supporters have been there at least a part of every day Parliament is in session  since some time in 2017, and much more recently there have also been ‘Leave Means Leave’ people with posters on the pavement outside the House of Commons and by the traffic lights in Parliament Square most days as the debate hots up.

Of course there isn’t a great deal of interest in taking the same people doing the same things every day, and there have been days when I’ve just gone along, had a brief look and perhaps exchanged a few words with some of the protesters and then gone along to walk or catch a bus to the station.

But January 9th was a busy day, probably because of some debate taking place in Parliament, and pro-Brexiteers had come out in larger numbers than usual, some bringing with them a waggon with a large bell and drum which were being used with monotonous regularity.

While the ‘Leave Means Leave’ supporters were making their views clear in a reasonable manner and having sensible conversations with some of the remainers and members of the public, other pro-Brexiteers were intent on rather different behaviour.

Most of this group were wearing yellow jackets, and one man in particular stood out. He held up a large poster with on one side the text  ‘Guy Fawkes Movement 2019 Yellow Jackets’ and the threat ‘Out means Out Or Civil War – No More Lies’ and on the other a list labelling Labour and Tory MPs, police chiefs, judges, the BBC, SKY and MSN and more as corrupt, while coming to shout at and harass Steven Bray and other SODEM protesters. When Bray complained to police he came and shouted abuse at both him – calling him a ‘cry-baby’ and the police who were largely standing around and failing to keep the two sides apart.

The SODEM supporters, who included ‘Alba White Wolf’, Madeleina Kay, voted ‘E U upergirl, wearing a union flag jacket and a t-shirt which says ‘LOVELY DAY TO STOP BREXIT’ – and apparently to drink Guiness – did their best to ignore the harassment and continued their protest.

I didn’t stay long – that bell and drum were rather annoying, as was the ignorant shouting, and left to catch a bus to the station.  I walked past again a couple of days later, when things were much quieter as there were few protesters apart from SODEM present, and I only took a handful of pictures before moving on.

Pro- and Anti-Brexit protests at Parliament
Brexit Protests continue
______________________________________________________

There are no adverts on this site and it receives no sponsorship, and I like to keep it that way. But it does take a considerable amount of my time and thought, and if you enjoy reading it, a small donation – perhaps the cost of a beer – would be appreciated.

My London Diary : London Photos : Hull : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage

All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated, are taken by and copyright of Peter Marshall, and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.

To order prints or reproduce images

________________________________________________________

When I grew up our education system still proudly proclaimed the positive nature of the British Empire, even though it was more or less in its death throes, being replaced in part by the ‘Commonwealth’ (until 1949, the ‘British Commonwealth’). But we were never told about any of its less positive aspects, including often the total ignoring of the rights and laws of the people of the lands we conquered. Many of course were killed, either deliberately or by the introduction of diseases against which they had no natural resistance.

The area now in Canada around Hudson’s Bay, known as Rupert’s Land, was granted to the Hudson Bay Company by Royal Charter in 1670. The French set up ‘New France’ covering much  of what is now USA, including Canada, then the districts of Québec, Trois-Rivières and Montréal. At the peace treaty following the global Seven Years’ War in 1763, Canada became a British colony. In 1821 the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) took over the North-Western Territory, putting them in charge of most of the rest of modern Canada. The country came together when the UK Parliament in its Rupert’s Land Act 1868 approved the sale of all of the territory held or claimed to be held by the HBC to Canada.

Back in 1670, the charter had made it clear that so far as land rights were concerned it only recognised the land rights of “our Subjects, or … Subjects of any other Christian Prince or State.” I’m not entirely sure if the Christian in that document always included Catholics, but certainly the indigenous peoples of the area we annexed were considered to have no rights at all, and the same continued to be true in 1868.

The First Nations were clearly in possession of the land when the British and others arrived in the 17th century but they had no concept of ownership of land and any treaties they later made were for them not about ownership of land but of sharing its use. It was only in 1973 that a Canadian court acknowledged “that the aboriginal title, otherwise known as the Indian title, to their ancient tribal territory has never been lawfully extinguished“.

A passing artist, Margaret Dawn Pepper and her friend stop to show support

The Wet’suwet’en of British Columbia have never signed treaties with Canada or given up rights and title to their ancestral lands and say Canada is violating Anuk Nu’at’en (Wet’suwet’en law) as well as Canada’s own colonial laws in building the Coastal GasLink pipeline across their land to carry fracked natural gas to a processing plant. 14 of them were arrested at gunpoint on Jan 7th for obstructing the building of the pipeline, after an injunction had been obtained ordering them not to block it.

The day after this protest in London took place the Wet’suwet’en leaders came to an agreement with the RCMP to allow limited work on the pipeline to go ahead, so long as they were allowed access to their healing lodge and the back country to continue trapping.

Claire James, Campaigns Coordinator of Campaign against Climate Change

The Wet’suwet’en remain opposed to the pipeline project which they say endangers their water supplies and traditional trapping areas, and there have been continuing complaints about the pipeline workers bulldozing traps, endangering the health centre and restricting access to areas of their land.

The Wet’suwet’en have been backed locally, nationally and internationally by groups concerned with the protection of indigenous rights and by enviromentalists, worried at the huge amount of carbon dioxide that will be produced by gas exported through the pipeline and the global warming this will produce. We should be cutting our use of fossil fuels, not promoting new sources such as this.

The protest started with just a hundful of protesters but was over twice as large by the time I left. They protested at three different entrances to Canada House.

More pictures at Solidarity with Wet’suwet’en Pipeline Protesters

______________________________________________________

There are no adverts on this site and it receives no sponsorship, and I like to keep it that way. But it does take a considerable amount of my time and thought, and if you enjoy reading it, a small donation – perhaps the cost of a beer – would be appreciated.

My London Diary : London Photos : Hull : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage

All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated, are taken by and copyright of Peter Marshall, and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.

To order prints or reproduce images

________________________________________________________

Finally I’ve finished uploading pictures and text for February.  It was a busy month and I seem to have taken a lot of pictures despite it being a short month. I’ve been trying to ignore Brexit and hope it will go away, but there were a few things to do with that, including a group of extreme right-wing Brexiteers who continue to be a nuisance, and although I never set out to photograph them I kept meeting.

Other things were more pleasant. It’s always a pleasure to photograph Class War, and their performance at the London Palladium was no exception, and it was good to meet Ken Livingstone again on the two Venezuela protests. And I was particularly pleased to meet Venus again at the ‘Reclaim Love’ Valentine Party – and there is a rare picture on the site that was not taken by me of the two of us.

Feb 2019

Class War protest Rees-Mogg freak show
North Woolwich

Outsourced Workers at Justice ministry
Outsourced Workers protest at BEIS
Rally for an end to Outsourcing
Eton & Windsor
Staines & the Thames
Leake Street graffiti
Bolivians protests against President Morales
Yellow Jackets continue protests
Sudanese support non-violent uprising

Stop Trump’s Venezuela gold & oil grab

Against political trial of Catalan leaders
Reclaim Love 2019 street party
End BP sponsorship at British Museum

Bring Goldsmith’s Security In-House
Pro-EU campaigners and Brexiteers
Workers strike at Business ministry
UPHD drivers protest unfair congestion charge
Kashmir Awami Party call for Freedom

Kashmiris call for freedom
People’s Trial of the Home Office
Extinction Rebellion Hackney Street Party
Bank of England return Venezuela’s Gold
Aylesbury residents protest lack of heating
Tamils protest on Sri Lanka Independence Day
Staines walk
Canada Goose
Sudanese support the uprising
Yellow Jackets in Westminster
Hands Off Venezuela

London Images

______________________________________________________

There are no adverts on this site and it receives no sponsorship, and I like to keep it that way. But it does take a considerable amount of my time and thought, and if you enjoy reading it, a small donation – perhaps the cost of a beer – would be appreciated.

My London Diary : London Photos : Hull : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage

All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated, are taken by and copyright of Peter Marshall, and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.

To order prints or reproduce images

________________________________________________________

It was rapidly approaching the time of year when most sentient activities close down for the holidays. For what used to be Christmas but has now developed into a rahter longer holiday apparently stretching for most until some time in the New Year. Except of course for people who work in shops, who endure the last minute rush to get provisions and presents and then return for the frenzy of the Boxing Day and New Year sales.

Unsung and under-appreciated among these workers are the cleaners, who keep the shops fit to shop in. Most of them come from London’s migrant communities, and many work for wages that keep them in poverty and working conditions that are shameful. Some employers event try to withold or evade the statutory minimums, and arbitrary and repressive management with disregard for worker’s health and safety seems to be  more or less routine.

With a few honorable exceptions, mainly down to union activists in particular branches, the problems of these low paid migrant workers have tended to be ignored by the larger established trade unions. Low paid workers who joined them  too often found the people who were meant to represent them had little interest in those at the bottom in organisations and were more concerned with keeping differentials and promoting the cause of the better paid – and left to set up their own grass roots unions.

A passing bus has a suitable message; cleaners want to be recognised and treated with dignity and respect

I’ve photographed a number of actions by these unions over the years and almost all have ended with significant gains for the workers, both in terms of pay and conditions. The difference between the current minimum wage (the Government misleadingly call the minimum rate for over 25s the ‘National Living Wage’, though it is well under the  UK Living Wage) of £7.83 and the London Living Wage, currently £10.55 per hour is a huge one for low paid workers, perhaps best appreciated by the calculation that to earn the minimum the Living Wage Foundation calculates is needed to live in London at the lower rate would mean a worker doing an extra 14 hours on top of their 40 hour working week.

For some, getting the higher rate means they can afford to travel to work by tube instead of by bus, and for those who can only afford rents in the outer areas but work in the city centre this may cut travel times to and from work by a couple of hours each day. Buses are cheap but longer journeys can take an age.

Like many companies, Debenhams does not directly employ the workers who clean its shops. It saves money by paying another company, Interserve, to employ them. Interserve cuts costs by paying low wages, giving them the minimum conditions of service, and increasing workloads to an intolerable extent, employing them under conditions that a more responsible company like Debenhams would be ashamed to offer.

Back in May 2018, the workers asked Interserve to pay them the London Living Wage, but the company have refused to discuss the situation, saying that it will not recognise the trade union, CAIWU, the Cleaners and Allied Independent Workers Union that the cleaners belong to.  So today the workers were on strike, protesting on the pavement outside the Oxford Street store along with other CAIWU members and trade unionists, making a great deal of noise, dancing to Latin-American music, making short speeches about why they were on strike and handing out leaflets to the passing shoppers. Those who stopped to find out what the dispute was about almost all expressed their support, and some stopped for a few minutes to join in the dancing.

Debenhams so far have I think said the cleaners pay and conditions are nothing to do with them. They claim to have no responsiblity for this people who work in their store. But usually in disputes like these once the shop’s operations are disrupted they start to take an interest and put pressure on the outsourcing company, even if only behind the scenes, and a succesful conclusion is reached.

Unfortunately with some workplaces, the gains made are only temporary. Outsourcing contracts come to an end and a new round of bidding leads to a new employer whose low bid (and shareholder profits) again depends on screwing the workers, either by reneging on the earlier settlements or by cutting the number of workers, increasing their workloads.  The only real solution is to end out-sourcing, something which various Labour shadow ministers have promised they will do when they get into office.

More pictures at Debenhams Pay Your Cleaners

______________________________________________________

There are no adverts on this site and it receives no sponsorship, and I like to keep it that way. But it does take a considerable amount of my time and thought, and if you enjoy reading it, a small donation – perhaps the cost of a beer – would be appreciated.

My London Diary : London Photos : Hull : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage

All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated, are taken by and copyright of Peter Marshall, and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.

To order prints or reproduce images

________________________________________________________

I used to think the BBC was a fine example of broadcasting, and in some ways it still is, with some excellent reporters around the world, and programmes on radio and TV with high production levels. But in recent years I’ve been very disappointed, even apalled, at a general failure to address some important issue, and with a consistent bias in favour of the status quo and the upholding of some widely held but cleary fallacious views. And with its often slavish following of what our overwhemling right-wing press decides is news and what the view on it should be, most evident in recent years over its assault on Jeremy Corbyn. Academic studies have confirmed the anecdotal impression that his views and actions have been consistently misrepresented, often even falsified.

The BBC employs people who mainly come from a limited section of society; middle-class, university educated, well-off and conservative with a small c – and for its political commentators, usually with a large C too. The board that oversees it comes from the same type of people, part of a metropolitan elite. Perhaps we need quotas to slim out the Oxbridge and Eton mobs and other over-represented groups.

Perhaps most damning has been its failure to properly address the crisis of climate change, potentially the most disastrous issue we all face (though too many still have their backs turned), with the potential to make our own species extinct, along with most others. While the BBC hasn’t entirely ignored it, it has generally failed to recognise the huge amount of sceintific interest and studies, and has often given the views of fossil fuel investors and the flat-earthers of climate studies the same importance as those of climate scientists in the pursuit of a false impartiality.

Climate campaigners from Extinction Rebellion came to protest at the BBC calling it to stop ignoring the climate emergency & mass extinctions of species already taking place and to end its promotion of destructive high-carbon living through programmes such as Top Gear and those on fashion, travel, makeovers etc. Virtually every programme the BBC broadcasts displays a high resource high pollution lifestyle as the norm and is an aspiration for the great majority of viewers in the UK to live beyond their means and well beyond what our planet can support for the great majority of its population.

I’m not sure we can expect TV ever to come real. I gave up regular watching of television back in 1968 for variouis reasons, largely because I saw the time sitting in front a screen as preventing me from doing things I felt both more interesting and more important – like forming and illustrating my own view of the world. It seemed to me to be too passive, allowing others to write my agenda and discouraging of critical thought. And while there have been programmes since which I have watched and admired, the great mass of output from the BBC and commercial channels which I’ve occasionally and rather randomly seen since have fairly definitively confirmed my views.

Every time I’ve come awake in a hotel room to TV’s breakfast shows I ask myself ‘How can anyone watch this drivel?’ which makes even Radio 4’s often infuriating Today programme seem remarkably adult. We truly need a cultural revolution, and I don’t mean red books and Chairman Mao.

The protest outside the BBC was organised by the Climate Media Coalition (CMC) and its director Donnachadh McCarthy; they brought mannequins wrapped in white cloth to the BBC representing the bodies of a Greek village killed by fire, increasingly common as global warming brings higher temperatures and greater instability to the world’s weather systems.

It was a protest directed both at the BBC to live up to the terms of its charter and agreement, and to the mass media in general to wake up and realise and report the real problems the planet faces. We don’t need to know celebrity trivia but we do need to have a future for life on Earth, both human life and that of other species. The current extinction rate from man-made causes, according to the WWF “is estimated by experts to be between 1,000 and 10,000 times higher than the natural extinction rate,” and is rapidly increasing.

Taking place on their doorstep – and with crowds and security barriers through which those working at the BBC had to cross and a volume of noise that they could not ignore even though they chose as usual not to report it, following their policy of not reporting dissent unless it fits a particular agenda (or involves one of their favourite celebrities, political or otherwise) and above all of not rocking the boat.

You can read more about it and see the pictures at Extinction Rebellion at the BBC.

Unfortunately I missed the most newsworthy part of the action, as when the protest organiser deliberately got himself arrested climbing over the barriers I was making pictures at the barrier on the other side of the plaza.

______________________________________________________

There are no adverts on this site and it receives no sponsorship, and I like to keep it that way. But it does take a considerable amount of my time and thought, and if you enjoy reading it, a small donation – perhaps the cost of a beer – would be appreciated.

My London Diary : London Photos : Hull : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage

All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated, are taken by and copyright of Peter Marshall, and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.

To order prints or reproduce images

________________________________________________________