Political Issues | >Re-PHOTO

Dark Practices

Outsourcing of staff is a dark practice used by many organisations to retain their own shining images while screwing their workers, who get the kind of management, employment rights and wages you would expect from least scrupulous of companies whose only concern is making profits while reducing their bids for the contracts to the lowest possible levels.

So it was perhaps appropriate that this protest by the IWGB which represents cleaners, security officers, receptionists, porters, gardeners and others who work at the University of London keeping its central services running outside Vice Chancellor Sir Adrian Smith’s graduation dinner should be one of the darkest that I’ve ever tried to photograph.

The protesters were in their usual good spirits, making a great deal of noise and calling for the university to employ them directly, for an end to zero hours contracts and to implement promised pay rises.

In the days of film, the only possibility would have been to use flash (or pay a fortune to light this as a film set.) But digital has shifted the possibilities, and I decided to work with what little available light there was, and just occasionally to supplement this with my handheld LED light source. This event soon showed the limitations of this, a Neewer CN-216, at least when running from rechargeable AA batteries, when the power drops off considerably after only a few minutes of use, though it continues to give some light for several hours. Most pictures were made without its help. The light will also run from a number of Sony and Panasonic batteries and Neewer also make high-capacity ones to fit which might improve the performance.

Almost all the pictures were made with the camera set at ISO 12,800 and with an exposure bias of -0.3 or -0.7 stops, and were still mainly underexposed, at shutter speeds mainly around 1/30 – 1/50s. Neither of the two lenses I was using was a fast lens, the 18.0-35.0 mm f/3.5-4.5 and the 28.0-200.0 mm f/3.5-5.6, and I often had to stop down a little for depth of field. I don’t own any very fast lenses, but hadn’t expected these Stygian conditions or might have replaced the 28-200 in my bag with the heavier Sigma 24-70mm and added the petite Nikon 20mm f2.8 for luck. Neither is particularly fast but a stop or two does make a noticeable difference.

But apart from being heavier, and running out at only 70mm when I often want something longer, somehow I just don’t trust the Sigma. It wasn’t a cheap lens, but I think isn’t quite sharp enough wide open to be worth carrying the extra weight. I bought it for use on DX where it perhaps does better.

The IWGB met outside Barbican station and marched to protest outside the dinner through the tunnel under the Barbican. There the lighting was much brighter and I was able to work at a lower ISO even using shutter speeds around 1/100s.

More pictures: IWGB protest at Graduation Dinner

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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.

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Grenfell – One Year On

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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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.

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Reclaim Love 15

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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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.

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Lambeth’s Fake Library

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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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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Class War and the Shard

Class War continued their successful court record, with Ian Bone raising his fist in a victory gesture for the photographers (I think there were two of us) as he makes his way out of the High Court in the Strand, where lawyers acting for the Qatari royal family had tried to get an injunction to prevent a Class War protest against the ten empty £50 million pound apartments in The Shard, and to claim over £500 in legal costs from the 70 year-old south London pensioner. Smiling at the left is his brief, barrister Ian Brownhill who on hearing of the attempt to stifle legitimate protest had offered to conduct Bone’s defence pro bono, and at right, Bone’s partner, Jane Nicholl.

Ian Bone proudly reads the description of Class War presented to the court by lawyers for the Qatari Royal Family

Class War are a much misunderstood bunch, bringing out an existential fear in the hearts of the bourgeoisie, and in particular of the press and police force. At some of their protests they have been outnumbered five or ten to one by uniformed officers, with a number who look suspiciously undercover hanging around. The idea of anarchism still arouses a class memory of bombs, sieges and the mob running in the streets, but Class War is more an anarchy of ideas, with actions as spectacle rather than armed struggle.

Despite their small size – or perhaps in part because of it – they have been remarkably effective in many campaigns, particularly those around housing and low pay. Some of their own campaigns – such as the series of around 30 ‘Poor Doors’ protests I photographed – have shown a remarkable tenacity and have done much to bring the issues to wider attention. Led by a small core, hard for undercovers to infiltrate, they have at times attracted the support of hundreds of others. It’s not a group with membership or rules but a truly anarchist lack of organisation, a group of friends who share common ways of thinking about politics and life and are prepared to act – and anyone who thinks and acts in the same way can be Class War too.

“Want to get involved? We have no leaders, no bureaucracy, no fees and you don’t have to sell a paper! Just come along to an action and get involved.

Join in * Reject cynicism * Life’s more fun with Class War!”

Though it does require a good sense of humour, they are deadly serious about politics and the need for change, for a society that works for the ordinary people rather than being arranged for the one percent, and they and others in groups close to them often bring out some of the more glaring inequalities that those at the top would prefer to keep hidden. We all know that there is a housing problem in London, and that much of the building that is going on over London is not aimed at reducing this, but at allowing largely foreign investors to profit from rising property prices, buying luxury flats which will often never be used, just sold a few years later when their value has risen – with developers publishing investment proposals suggesting huge rises and quick profits.

At their protest outside the Shard, Class War pointed out that the ten £50 million pound apartments in it have remained empty since the building was completed, and that developers currently plan to build a further 26,000 flats costing more than a million pounds each, many replacing current social housing, when London has a huge housing crisis with thousands sleeping on the street, and over 100 families from Grenfell are still in temporary accommodation. Official figures show that despite the huge and increasing need, London is losing several thousand properties at council rents each year.

Although the court decision had made it clear that the protest was permitted outside the Shard, so long as the protesters did not enter the property, police still insisted that Class War move further away, across the road.

Their attempt to justify this seemed even more pathetic than usual, suggesting that Class War, who were standing to one side of the normal pedestrian routes, were causing an obstruction; there was a clear obstruction, but this was caused by the line of police officers. But Class War did take their banner across the road, though some members continued to protest as the court had allowed on the clearly marked edge of the property.

The Shard presents something of a challenge to photograph from a close distance, and even from across the road it was hard to show the building as a whole as well as the protesters. Even my 16mm fisheye couldn’t do the job sensibly in landscape format, and I had to turn it 90 degrees to get it all in.

While the software I use to convert perspective does a good job with landscape format images, it doesn’t cope well in portrait format. Playing a little in Photoshop with its Adaptive Wide Angle and a little more fiddling, including a change in aspect ratio and a little image rotation can produce a straighter result for the tower, which may be more acceptable.

More pictures on My London Diary:

Class War protest at Shard
Class War victory against Qatari Royals

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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Save the NHS

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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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.

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Back to the Elephant

Though not actually to the Elephant, but to the dark street outside Southwark Council Offices near London Bridge for a protest outside where a Southwark Council meeting which due to vote on plans by developer Delancey and the council which would destroy the Elephant & Castle centre and the community around it. At an earlier meeting the decision had been deferred to allow Delancey to come up with new proposals to meet the community objections.

Although they had made some changes, the proposals were still nowhere near acceptable, but the protest ended in something of an anti-climax. While the protesters had been hopeful that the plans would be turned down, instead the council voted to put off the decision until a further meeting to give Delancey time to submit a revised proposal.

There seems to be little hope that the revised plans will be very much better, but whether they will then be approved is hard to predict. It looks as if the council cabinet that backs the private developer has enough power to keep the redevelopment on the table until the opposition in the council gets worn down enough to pass it.

So it remained likely that the redevelopment would at some point go ahead, and that most of the protesters worse fears about social cleansing etc. will be shown to have been justified, while the developers and a few in the council offices do very nicely for themselves, with some moving to lucrative private sector jobs.

The protest was unusual, featuring Latin dancing and bingo, representing just two of the groups who will lose out. And of course elephants.

The struggle here is of course part of a wider struggle in the Labour movement, with Southwark COuncil dominated by right-wing Blairites, members of ‘Progress’, a group in the party opposed to many of its present policies and including many dedicated to the downfall of Jeremy Corbyn.

So far the Labour right have managed to maintain control of important aspects of the party machinery, which has allowed this group to continue as a Thatcherite fifth column inside the party, but with increasing support both in the party and in the nation for the new policies this may change. It has long been clear that the party’s only hope of re-election is to unite behind a leader – like Corbyn – who rejects the old and failed Blairite approach.

Estate regeneration, as first proposed under Blair, was one of the party’s better policies, but failed in essentials like taking the needs of the estate residents and others on council waiting lists into account and accounting for the clever tricks of developers. With proper consultation which actually took the residents views seriously and relatively small sums of money to renovate and refurbish, along with sensitive infill to provide new council-owned properties, most of the estates now being demolished could have a useful long-term future – as the schemes put forward by ASH (Architects for Social Housing) and others have demonstrated.

Many of the estates targeted so far are not those most in need of regeneration, but often some of the more viable estates, chosen because their position and scale means huge profits for private developers. Many of the estates from the 1960s, though possibly in out of fashion styles, are better built and to higher standards in many respects to their new replacements, and with refurbishment and maintenance would have long outlasted current builds.

Class War’s poster ‘Labour Councils: The Biggest Social Cleansers in London‘ is of course correct, because Labour controls most of London’s councils. And while Tory councils might well see social cleansing as one of their aims (as Dame Shirley Porter did as Leader in Westminster) we expect Labour councils to work for all their residents, including those in social housing, and their failure to do so is shameful.

One of those who spoke at the protest was Piers Corbyn, who told us he had talked to his younger brother who was determined to see a change. I worked hard to get the name Corbyn visible behind him as he spoke, with people keeping getting in the way, but I finally managed it. Southwark Momentum just didn’t have their banner up high enough at the protest, and a few months later failed to get enough of those they supported nominated for the council.

Bingo and Dancing for Elephant & Castle

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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.

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Afrin Matters

On 19 January 2018 Turkey announced that it was going to attack Afrin, a Kurdish area on its border with Syria, and an outlying part of the largely autonomous mainly Kurdish area, The Democratic Federation of Northern Syria widely known as Rojava. Turkey has been at war with the Kurds inside Turkey for many years, in a long campaign to eliminate the Kurdish culture, and Kurdish national leader Abdullah Öcalan has been held in solitary confinement in a Turkish prison since he was captured with US help in 1999.

President Erdogan launched the Orwellian-named ‘Operation Olive Branch’ to attack and destroy what he called a “nest of terror” on Turkey’s borders, claiming that the Kurdish forces there, the YPG and the YPJ are simply forces of the Kurdish PKK, banned in many countries as a terrorist organisation. He also claimed that he would be fighting Islamic State forces, which have no presence in the area.

Many might see the PKK and the 1984 Kurdish uprising when its military campaign began as an inevitable response to the attempted Turkish elimination of Kurdish identity. For many years it was a criminal offence to use the Kurdish language, even in private, and many were imprisoned for it. The wearing of Kurdish clothes, the use of Kurdish names and other aspects of Kurdish culture were also banned. Although there was some lessening of the anti-Kurdish laws in the 1990s, the situation for them and all opposition groups has worsened considerably over the past year or so, with Erdogan increasing military operations inside the country and imprisoning many of his political opponents.

Erdogan claimed that the attack on Afrin would also be against Islamic State, but Turkey has provided the major support for IS, by taking part in the smuggling of oil from their occupied regions, as shown very clearly by intelligence reports published by the Russians when they first became seriously involved in military support for the Assad regime in Syria. The only IS fighters in Afrin are some from the forces defeated by the Kurds who are now fighting with Turkey against those who defeated them.

Eight days later a larger protest took place against the attacks led by Turkey, again with the Kurds defiant. But the Kurds in Afrin were clearly out-numbered by their attackers, largely armed with rifles while the Turkish Army is large and well-equipped. But like much else that now happens in Syria it was probably the Russians whose action – or in this case, failure to act that would be the determining factor.

The Russians back Assad, and Assad rightly sees the Turkish invasion as an attack on Syria. But Russia also sees the advantages of a closer relationship with Turkey, hoping by doing so to weaken NATO of which Turkey is a member. Once the Russians had allowed the Turkish Air Force to operated unhindered over the area a military victory for the Turkish invasion seemed inevitable, even it it might be slow. Two months later they had occupied the centre of the city, with Kurdish forces withdrawing but promising to keep up military opposition through guerilla warfare. Though the war was won, it is not yet over.

Erdogan had promised to advance further towards the rest of Rojova, but his moves in that direction have met with opposition from the US who had previously allied with the Kurds to fight Islamic state. The US had stood aside and watched the invasion of Afrin but so far seem to be standing firm against further Turkish advances.

Defend Afrin, stop Turkish Attack

Stop Turkey’s invasion of Afrin

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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.

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IWGB Protest Outsourcing in Academia

I like to photograph the protests organised by the IWGB (Independent Workers Union of Great Britain) both because they are noisy, lively and generally photogenic, but also because I think it scandalous the way low paid workers are treated.

I’ve written often enough about out-sourcing and how it is used by companies to try and evade their duty as responsible employers, hiding behind the convenient fiction that they have no responsibility towards these people whose work is essential to the running of their organisations because they pay another company to employ them. It simply doesn’t wash.

As well as low wages and the legal minimum conditions of service – holidays, sick pay, pensions – outsourced workers also generally suffer from poor and sometimes despotic management, with overwork and bullying rife. Many too are on zero hours contracts, a legal fiction which is effectively a non-contract which works only in the interests of the employer and lays employees open to various unfair practices.

I’d gone to photograph the protest by cleaners, receptionists, security officers, porters and post room staff at the central administration of the University of London who had been on strike and picketing since the early morning. The picket over (severely restricted by Thatcherian anti-union laws) they were joined by other workers and supporters and myself for a loud rally in the early evening.

There was music on a PA system, much waving of flags and shouting of demands, and a great samba band all reminding the University that its workers are demanding to be directly employed. And at the end a number of speeches by the workers and their trade union leader, as well as other trade unionists in support.

And there was then a surprise. Well, by then it was not a surprise to me as one of the trade union leaders had whispered in my ear (though given the noise level I think he had to shout) earlier what would happen, and a double-decker bus arrived and we were invited to go on a mystery tour to another location where the IWGB are in dispute.

The location was not announced (though I had been told) so that the police and others listening could not warn those at our destination, where the IWGB hoped to be able to walk in and protest in the foyer. I wasn’t entirely pleased with the idea, as I was getting rather hungry and wanted to get home where dinner was waiting, but it was an opportunity not to be missed. The journey through London in the evening rush hour was hideously slow but eventually we were dropped off just around the corner from our destination, and got ready, walking quietly towards the doors. Two people went ahead and held them open as we arrived and walked in with two security guards helpless to stop us.

We were at the Royal College of Music, another academic institution that outsources its cleaners to evade its responsibilities, and where Tenon FM who recently took over the cleaning contract decided to unilaterally cut hours in half and change shift times, telling the cleaners they must work at times most already have other cleaning jobs. The cleaners now threatened with dismissal for refusing to accept the new hours.

After 12 minutes, the police arrived and ordered the protesters outside, where the protest continued on the pavement. One of the police officers was clearly incensed at the way the protesters were behaving and seemed likely to arrest some of them, but his colleagues restrained him. The protest appeared to be lawful and the police should not be taking sides as he so obviously was.

Flashing blue lights from police cars make photography a little unpredictable, and produce some strange effects, which are seldom too appealing. The high-output blue LEDs have a very limited spectral range, turning everything directly illuminated by them an intense blue. But the protest appeared to have settled down and I felt nothing much else was going to happen, so I left for home and food.

America First

Not the protectionist policy of President Trump, which I rather hope the rest of the world will take exception to and stand up against, perhaps by similarly excessive tariffs on US natural gas or some such, but I photographed what I think was the first protest at the new US Embassy in London.

It’s a building I’ve been keeping my eye on for some time as it has risen up from the ground at Nine Elms as my railway journey to London takes me past it several times each week, and I’ve often taken the odd snap in passing – the one above in December 2015.

A few months later I had an hour or so spare and took a walk around the area, though most of it was a building site and still closed to the public, but I could photograph from the road or the Thames Path.

I’m not sure the building was improved by these plastic thingies on its sides, or rather three of the four sides, but it doesn’t really have a great deal else going for it visually. It does stand out from the mediocrity with which it is surrounded, but it might have been better left naked. It wasn’t a good day for photographing the area, with alternating light and heavy rain, but I took a few pictures and told myself I’d be coming back again before long for another protest.

The protest by Stand Up To Racism was on the anniversary of President Trump’s inauguration. The protest was prompted by his racist description of African nations, Haiti and El Salvador as ‘shitholes’, and included a rather too graphic poster related to it, which you can see, along with other pictures of the event at US Embassy – No to Trump’s racism.

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.

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