Category: Political Issues

I’m not a great traveller, as I’ve often noted here. Though I have occasionally been lured away by the delights of Paris and Hull as well as a few trips further afield, London still has so much to offer. And people come here from all around the world, not just as tourists (though sometimes it does seem most of the world’s population is cluttering our streets) but to live and also to protest about events back in their natal countries.

After the Million Women Rise march (with a strong migrant contribution) I found a large block of people standing in neat rows in Parliament Square in one of a number of protests called around the world by the South Korean based NGO The Association of Victims of Coercive Conversion Programmes (AVCCP) called after the death of a Korean girl, Jo In Gu, allegedly suffocated by her parents for refusing to take part in a religious conversion programme. Those taking part were certainly not all Koreans, but came from various countries and faiths, including Sikhs, Buddhists and Christians and varied musical traditions, including a Scotsman with kilt and pipes.

I hadn’t actually come to photograph the AVCCP protest but the Sri Lankan Tamils who were protesting opposite Downing St against the continuing attacks by Buddhist mobs in Muslim neighbourhoods around Kandy which have destroyed shops, restaurants and a mosque. They say the Sri Lankan government, which has declared a state of emergency and closed down much of social media, does not take effective action against attacks on minorities and accuse police and soldiers for failing to try to stop the attacks. They see what is happening as part of a deliberate policy of ethnic cleansing by the government.

Back in Parliament Square another protest was taking place, with Kurds arriving to protest against the Turkish attacks on Afrin. They want the British government to take action and end its support of Turkey who has been the major supporter of ISIS and who is using former ISIS and al-Qaeda forces in its attack on Afrin, where the local authority reports that 220 civilians have been killed and 600 injured. Unfortunately the British government supports Turkey, turning a blind eye to all its (and President Erdogan’s) faults because it sees it as an important NATO ally in opposing an increasingly threatening Russia. Meanwhile of course Turkey is increasingly making overtures to Russia which has established itself as a major player in the area through its support of the Syrian regime.

The Tamils left Downing St to march to the Sri Lankan Embassy, but another protest was now taking place, part of the annual Tibet Freedom March in London commemorating the Tibetan National Uprising of 1959, 59 years since a huge mass of 300,000 Tibetans prevented the Chinese Army from abducting the Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso. A few days later, after his palace came under artillery fire, he escaped with his ministers making the 14 day journey across the Himalayas to India while the outnumbered and poorly equipped Tibetan Army fought off the Chinese.

At Downing St there were some short speeches and a rather Tibetan long prayer as well as the singing of the National Anthem before those attending, mainly Tibetans or of Tibetan origin but with quite a few Western supporters set off to march to a protest at the Chinese Embassy, but I left them to go in the other direction and make my way home.

Protest forcible religious conversions
Sri Lankans protest Buddhist violence
Against attacks on Afrin
London March for Freedom for Tibet

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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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International Women’s Day was a busy time for protests in London, though I think none of them got in the news, where there seems to be a consensus that only middle class women’s issues matter on that day.

International Women’s Day began in New York in 1909, when the Socialist Party of America organised a National Women’s Day there on Feb 28th, and the following year it was adopted as an international celebration by the 1910 International Socialist Woman’s Conference.

In 1914 the date became standardised as March 8th, and in London the Suffragettes marched, with Sylvia Pankhurst being arrested on her way to speak at the rally in Trafalgar Square. And on March 8th 1914 in Russia (for them it was still Feb 23rd) it was the actions by women in cities including Petrograd and St Petersbury that began the Russian Revolution against the Czar – and a week later he abdicated and women were given the vote by the provisional government.

It was only the the 1970s, that the UN took up the day, and in 1977 it was adopted as the UN Day for women’s rights and world peace. Though we seem to have rather given up on world peace.

My Day began in Parliament Square, where Global Women’s Strike were staging a mock trial of the Family Courts. They say the courts fail families and remove children for adoption unnecessarily, mistaking poverty for neglect and failing to give support to victims of domestic abuse, and disabled mothers as required by the 1989 Children Act, and the Care Act 2014 . In Spain almost half of children needing taking into care are placed with kinship carers – mainly grandparents – while the figure for the UK is only 9%, less than one fifth as many.

Next I went to Russell Square where women were taking part in the London Women’s Strike, refusing to do work either paid or unpaid, including housework and domestic work. There were speeches and singing and various events both in Russell Square and elsewhere in London supporting protests concerning women, three of which I attended.

The first was at the Home Office, where protesters had come to show solidarity with the women detained in Yarl’s Wood, some of whom were on the 15th day of a hunger strike and general strike against their imprisonment and the conditions and treatment by the detention centre staff and the Home Office. The Home Office has so far responded to their demand for proper treatment by issuing public denials that the action is taking place and sending letters to the women taking part threatening them with accelerated detention.

Next I met the CAIWU at Covent Garden, where a largish crowd from the London Women’s Strike had come to support the cleaners, mainly women, at the Royal Opera House, where several CAIWU members are bing victimised by contractor Kier for taking part in successful union action to get a living wage there.The larger crowd made the protest more impressive, but it took a whole series of almost daily actions there for some weeks to get justice.

My final event for the day was at Unilever House and was again with Global Women’s Strike who are calling for Unilever to end their $667 million investment in Myanmar where the military government are committing systematic rape and other torture with total impunity as part of their genocide against the Rohingya people. Posters showed their actions in marked contrast to the image and advertising of Unilever’s Dove products, which claims that “UNILEVER aims to improve safety for women and girls in the communities where they operate.”

Although some of the women were going on to further events for the day, by the end of this I was exhausted and decided it was time to go home.

More at:

Family Courts put on Trial
London Women’s Strike
Solidarity with Yarl’s Wood
Reinstate the Royal Opera House 6
Unilever & Myanmar’s Rohingya genocide

A year ago, Grenfell Tower was still burning, and I woke up to hear the news on the radio. I didn’t know the block, though I’d walked through the area on various occasions. Often very different to now as I made my way to or from Latimer Rd station on my way to or from carnival.

I  lay in bed listening to the terrible news of people trapped, burning to death, some phoning to say goodbye to relatives and friends knowing there was little or no hope of rescue. Thinking of those too who had managed to make their way out, finding their way to the stairs through thick smoke and making their way down the stairs, floor by floor.  Many years before I’d walked down eleven flights from my room, but fortunately it was for a false alarm.

Once I got up I went to my computer and started looking things up about Grenfell. One of the first things I came to was the blog by some of the residents, the Grenfell Action Group. The post KCTMO – Playing with fire! which stated as inevitable that the fire would happen at some time was only the latest in a series of posts raising the residents concerns about fire safety in the black.

There are many other posts on the Grenfell Action Group’s blog worth reading, and which expose the cavalier attitude of the Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea’s council – councillors and officers – to those in the housing it owns as well as the council’s TMO to which it delegated management. There is also an excellent recent long interview with Eddie Daffarn from the group published by Channel 4 News last month.

One of the first serious reports on the fire and its physical causes was ‘The Truth about Grenfell Tower: A Report by Architects for Social Housing‘, also available as a PDF, published just five weeks after the fire – and much of what it contains came from a public meeting they organised only 8 days after it, and recorded in edited version in the film ‘The Truth About Grenfell Tower’ which is also on the ASH page.

The official response has of course been much slower, with hearings only recently getting under way and dragging on for many months. Many see the deliberately slow pace of this and other public inquiries as being a deliberate tactic to allow the guilty to escape judgement, and it seems unlikely to unearth much that isn’t already known. Mainly it – and other major inquiries – allow the parties involved to spend huge amounts employing barristers whose task is often more to obfuscate than elucidate. And of course earn large fees in the process.

Probably the least useful document to emerge about Grenfell is the recent publication by the London Review of Books,’The Tower‘ by author Andrew O’Hagan. In ‘O’Hagan And His Ivory Tower‘ the Grenfell Action Group publish a letter of complaint to the LRB by one of the local residents interviewed by O’Hagan who was appalled to see how her input, and that of others, was misrepresented, and how inaccurate much of the essay was.

The LRB also produced a film, ‘Grenfell: The End of an Experiment?‘ by Andrew Wilks, which is considerably better, although still at times attempting to cast the council as the victims rather than the perpetrators. But at least we see some of the evidence, and not just the author’s recasting of it and can make our own conclusions.

Also well worth reading is the long and detailed refutation of O’Hagan’s essay by Simon ELmer of ASH, ‘The Tower: Rewriting Grenfell‘.

Grenfell of course isn’t just about Grenfell and those who died and the survivors who are still suffering – and will continue to feel its effects for the rest of their lives. Grenfell is a symbol of a much wider malaise in our society, and the attitudes of the wealthy towards the poor. It’s perhaps a curious and largely unnoticed coincidence that the first issues of the anarchist magazine Class War were actually produced in Grenfell Tower, Ian Bone’s first London home.

Tonight I’ll be on the silent march marking the anniversary – one of a programme of events. There are also marches taking place in other cities.

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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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It was back in 2005 that I first met Venus CuMara, the founder of London’s Reclaim Love Pavement Party celebrated at Piccadilly Circus, a free and joyous event which she organised for 14 years. I didn’t go to the first of them, not hearing about it until after the event, but since then it has become a permanent date in My London Diary, though I think there has been the occasional year I’ve been out of London at the time.

Back in 2008 I wrote:

‘”We are O-I-L
We are Operation Infinite Love because we are…
One In Love”

says the web site, and OIL sets out to reclaim St Valentines Day from its commercial appropriation in the very temple of consumerism that is Piccadilly Circus, dominated by a giant wall of advertising neon. Appropriate too because at the centre is a statue of Eros.

Venus says “Love is the most important resource on this planet and that without love we are nothing.” The event culminated in the formation of a large circle when everyone present joins hands around the area, and there was lots of music, including that finest of street bands, the samba of Rhythms of Resistance, along with other musicians and sound system, as well as free food, free T-shirts and a great atmosphere.’

This year there was still much of the same atmosphere, people getting together and celebrating life, but there was a little sadness this year, as Venus could not be there, as she was in Indonesia and being treated for cancer, and the event was missing her huge energy and enthusiasm.

And people still joined hands in what Venus called a “Massive Healing Reclaim Love Meditation Circle beaming Love and Happiness and our Vision for world peace out into the cosmos” around Eros, repeating  the mantra as in previous years, “May All The Beings In All The Worlds Be Happy And At Peace”, and we all thought of Venus, seen below in one of many pictures I took of her at the 2015 event.

Back in 2016, when I was unwell and unable to attend, I wrote a post on this site the links to my coverage of the event in earlier years, My Valentine. If you want to see more pictures from the earlier years this is a good place to start.

Pictures from this year: 15th Reclaim Love Valentine Party

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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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Lambeth Council have a problem with their libraries. Put simply they cost money to run but don’t generate any income. You might think that a Labour council would understand the idea of public service, would recognise the value of libraries to the community, but apparently not.

As someone who grew up in poverty I know from personal experience the value of a library, which opened a whole world to me. We did have a few books at home, I think most had come as presents or from jumble sales or passed down from relatives, but the weekly walk to the library with my siblings was an important part of our week. I was fortunate that only half a mile away there was a good library, part of a early 20th century civic centre, with swimming baths, library (and a later children’s library) and council offices. It’s perhaps a sign of the times that the site is now a shopping centre.

Lambeth Labour are turning the Carnegie Library in Herne Hill into a gym, which will serve the few in the community willing to pay for its services. The main room, where there are now some books and which we were allowed into, will no longer be a library but will be a hall for hire, although with very limited facilities.

Andrew Carnegie was born in Scotland, where his family struggled to make a living and emigrated to the USA when he was 13. Times were tough there too, and he started work there in a cotton mill in Pittsburg, working 12 hour days 6 days a week for the equivalent (allowing for 170 years of inflation) of around 38p an hour. A few years later he became a messenger boy for the Ohio Telegraph Company in Pittsburgh, impressing people there with his hard work and skill. While there, Wikipedia states:

Carnegie’s education and passion for reading was given a great boost by Colonel James Anderson, who opened his personal library of 400 volumes to working boys each Saturday night.[21] Carnegie was a consistent borrower and a “self-made man” in both his economic development and his intellectual and cultural development. He was so grateful to Colonel Anderson for the use of his library that he “resolved, if ever wealth came to me, [to see to it] that other poor boys might receive opportunities similar to those for which we were indebted to the noble man”.

It was a promise he made good on, after having made a small fortune in railways and following this a very large one in building up the US steel industry, selling his huge share in this to J P Morgan in 1901 for around $230 million, and devoted the rest of his life until his death in 1919 to philanthropy. By the time of his death he had given away around 90% of his wealth – a total of around $350 million, and the residue was given away in his will.

Carnegie was clearly a remarkable man, but Carnegie Steel was a ruthless organisation responsible for one of the bloodiest anti-union fights in history, the 1892 Homestead Strike, when his business partner (Carnegie was away in Scotland) ordered in Pinkerton Agents to protect the strikebreakers who had been brought in to keep the mills rolling. Ten men were killed and hundreds injured and the strike beaten, with the workers replaced by non-union immigrants.

It’s perhaps particularly appropriate to mention now that Carnegie Steel’s huge success owed a great deal to secret lobby of the US Congress by Carnegie to get favourable US trade tariffs for the steel industry, and that, according to Wikipedia “Carnegie’s success was due to his convenient relationship with the railroad industries, which not only relied on steel for track, but were also making money from steel transport. The steel and railroad barons worked closely to negotiate prices instead of free market competition determinations.” Not for nothing did he and the others become known as “robber barons.”

Carnegie had already begun his philanthropy in 1879, building swimming-baths in his home town of Dunfermline and the first Carnegie Library there in 1880. Many educational establishments benefited from his wealth and he funded around 3,000 free public libraries throughout the United States, Britain, Canada and other English-speaking countries for a total of around $60 million. Carnegie provided the buildings and fittings, but the local authorities had to provide the land and agree to provide the money to maintain and operate them.

Its a promise that councils in Lambeth more or less kept, though the maintenance has often been skimped, from when the Grade II listed library was opened in 1906 until its closure in 2016 when it reneged on this commitment.

The closure for the building to be converted into a gym run by a private company led to a community occupation and a number of protests. We were there in February for a partial re-opening, of what the library campaigners described as a ‘fake library’, offering a very limited service on a temporary basis. They say it is being done a few months before May’s local elections in an attempt to defuse the closure issue politically.

Among those taking part in the protest were Unison safety inspectors. The library managers who were staffing the library for the opening attempted to prevent them from making an inspection, but they went ahead, and after we had been inside for 15 minutes called on everyone to leave as they declared the premises unsafe, with building work and gas cylinders obstructing the fire exit, unsafe temporary toilet facilities, unsafe heating and a lack of disabled access. They are advising union members to refuse to work there.

We left and the protest continued with speeches on the steps outside. One woman had brought out a book from the library, pointing out that there were no security measures in place to stop members of the public from stealing books.

More pictures: Lambeth Council opens fake Carnegie library

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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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For a large protest which had tens of thousands marching through London, February’s ‘NHS in Crisis: Fix It Now!‘ protest got remarkably little news coverage. As so often I got the feeling that had it taken place in another country it might have got a higher profile. But it was in London, and organised by Health Campaigns Together & The People’s Assembly Against Austerity and was opposed to the growing takeover of the NHS by private companies, doubtless many of which are connected with the few billionaires who own most of our newspapers and other media organisations.

They don’t of course control the BBC, but this increasingly takes its definition of ‘news’ from the commercial media and also largely supports the status quo; there are some fine journalists working for them and reporting from abroad, but things happening in the UK are largely seen through the eyes of presenters and backroom staff with Oxbridge degrees and former positions in Conservative student and other organisations. It isn’t of course possible to entirely hide the current crisis in the NHS, but you can hide the worst of it, blame everything except government cuts.

And of course there are other mistakes that the government is responsible for. The programme of PFI hospital rebuilding, begun by John Major but largely taken over and hugely expanded by New Labour will continue to be a huge drag on the NHS for another 30 or so years, And the success of the NHS in keeping us alive longer had added to its own troubles.

Despite some of the lies put about by largely Tory politicians, we still have a health service that is the envy of much of the world, free at the point of use. But it is one that is run by politicians who have written at spoken about replacing it by a US-style system which refuses many treatment and bankrupts others. We all know about the appalling shootings that take place far too often in US schools, but for many parents whose children are shot the financial consequences add to the grief at the loss or injury of their children, with huge bills for hospital services. We get a good health service (despite some problems) and we get it on the cheap.

The NHS needs more funding. We all know it, which is why that huge lie on the Brexit bus was so effective, though most who thought about it knew at the time it would never pay up. Cancelling ridiculous ‘prestige’ projects such as the replacement of Trident could go some way towards funding it properly, and taxing the corporations that make huge profits in the UK but avoid paying their taxes would certainly help – by a conservated estimate we lose £300bn a year through big business off-shoring, roughly twice the total NHS budget, but probably we need to pay more tax directly for the NHS, though increases in income tax and national insurance. I’ve already signed a letter to the Chancellor of the Exchequer telling him I’d happily pay another penny on my income tax to go directly to the NHS.

Of course there are places in the NHS where savings could be made. It’s hard to understand why it apparently costs the NHS around £12 to provide a month’s supply of aspirin which I could buy at the pharmacist for around 30p, or why they pay a US company £3,000 for a month’s supply of a drug which can be bought as a generic from an Indian company for £40. But Trump wants to put up the charges that US pharmaceutical companies make to the NHS, saying they are getting them too cheaply.

The NHS is currently slipping away from us, increasingly privatised, currently with the introduction of US-style medical care by Accountable Care Organisations, siphoning cash from the NHS into the pockets of shareholders – including many leading mainly Tory politicians. Its also becoming increasing clear that the 2012 Coalition Government Health and Social Care Act has created a terrible mess and is in need of radical surgery or rather replacement by measures that bring the NHS back under properly accountable control. Aneurin Bevan may never have actually said “The NHS will last while there are folk left with the faith to fight for it” (it was actually the invention of a TV script writer) but the need for that fight is greater now than ever.

Fix the NHS Crisis Now

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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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