Category: Political Issues

1st May 2009

Today I’ll be out photographing May Day in London. There is a march every year to celebrate International Workers’ Day, organised by the London May Day Organising Committee,  and there has apparently been some kind of socialist celebration on May Day in London since the 1880s, although it was apparently only in 1904 that the Sixth Conference of the Second International in Amsterdam called for “all Social Democratic Party organisations and trade unions of all countries to demonstrate energetically on the First of May for the legal establishment of the 8-hour day, for the class demands of the proletariat, and for universal peace.” (thanks to Wikpedia for the quotation.)

1st May 2013

And while we may generally have the 8-hour day (or something even shorter) there is certainly a long way to go on the demands of the working class and universal peace.  The socialists of course took over May Day from its general celebration as a Spring festival, which had earlier in the 19th century become promoted as a traditional festival with the coronation of May Queens, something else I’ve also photographed.But until I gave up teaching, I was seldom able to celebrate May Day unless it happened to fall at a weekend. May Day this Wednesday is for most workers a normal working day, and we have instead a rather silly Bank Holiday on the first Monday in May.

1st May 2000

Possibly the first May Day celebrations I photographed (or at least the earliest I’ve shared online) were on May 1st 2000, which was a Monday, and the events in Parliament Square and elsewhere were an anti-capitalist event rather than the rather more staid trade union and socialist march.

1st May 2000

Later in the day things turned rather nasty and police charged the protesters, a small number of whom had broken the windows of a McDonalds on Whitehall.

1st May 2003

It was not until 2003 that I first posted pictures from the official May Day March in London, though it wasn’t the first time I had been there, rather the first time I’d photographed it digitally. As usual I was very struck by the various socialist groups from London’s ethnic communities that were taking part.  There is a long list of supporting groups on the May Day Committee‘s site which as well as other trade union and community groups includes ” organisations representing Turkish, Kurdish, Chilean, Colombian, Peruvian, Brazilian, Portuguese, West Indian, Sri Lankan, Indian, Pakistani, Bangla Deshi, Kashmiri, Cypriot, Tamil, Iraqi, Iranian, Irish, South African, Nigerian migrant workers & communities”.

But even then, once I’d photographed that march, I went on to photograph anti-capitalists also celebrating May Day in their own way, and this May Day I’ll also be with friends celebrating it rather than listening to the speeches in Trafalgar Square, though I may manage to cover some other protests later in the day.

My London Diary has pictures from May Day for every year since 2003 and I’ll have more to add after today’s events. Long Live May Day!

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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

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Private hire drivers are angry and I think they have every reason to feel aggreived. Transport for London are going to make them pay the congestion charge in Central London while licencensed taxis will remain exempt.

TfL claim that the reason they are making the drivers pay is to reduce air pollution in the city, which is certainly something that needs doing. But those licenced taxis – black cabs – are actually a much larger source of pollution, both from their own exhausts, tires and brakes, but also because of the huge effect they have on congestion on city streets, resulting in extra pollution from other vehicles.

Minicabs drive to pick up customers at a particular location, then drive to their destination.  Taxis drive around where they think they will be hailed by customers, cruising for trade, and it is this that increases their road mileage, pollution and their share of the almost 10,000 early deaths per year of Londoners from air pollution. Plying for hire made sense in the old days, but hardly does now in the age of the smart phone, and apps which can summon a cab (or minicab) on demand.

Black cab drivers through their trade organisations are a powerful lobby, and it is hard to see this differential treatment as not being a consequence of this. Most Londoners can only afford to use them on rare occasions – I can only recall a handful of taxi journeys I’ve made in London, when escorting aged and frail relatives and a few times when wealthy friends who were paying dragged me into one with them – and at least one of those journeys would have been much quicker by tube and DLR.

Of course there are problems with minicabs too, particularly with cowboy anti-union outfits such as Uber who are trying to evade their responsibilities as employers – and appealing court decisions without success. The UPHD (United Private Hire Drivers), a part of the IWGB International Workers Great Britain trade union which organised this protest is also organising drivers to get them fair treatment from employers like Uber.

I left the protest early to go on to cover another event, and things apparently got rather livelier after I had gone. It’s always difficult to know when to leave lengthy protests, and often things seem to warm up soon after I’ve left.  At times there is a connection, though not I think in this case. Often protests get more intense because of police actions, and the protesters objections to being ordered around, assaulted or arrested, all things which sometimes seem to happen once press reporters and photographers have left. But on this occasion, although I’d left there were plenty of others who stayed on.

End TfL Discrimination against private hire

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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