Category: Political Issues

Amnesty International group at WorldPride 2012

Pride ain’t what it used to be, for sure. But this year, with a ban on vehicles forcing everyone onto the streets perhaps took it back a little towards the kind of event it used to be and less of the slickly commercial festival parade it has been becoming. This was also an important anniversary, WorldPride London marked 25 years since the first Pride in London, with some of those who came out on the street then marching proudly at the front of the event. Their protest – and it was then both a personal and a political protest – was one of the forces that have led to a profound change in attitudes in the past 25 years, making it almost impossible to understand how things were back then.

Stonewall group at WorldPride 2012

Of course I photograph many of the more eccentric and flamboyant dressers that give the event much of its character, but the pictures that tend to be of more interest to me are on the more political end. The first two pictures both centre around an individual in a crowd, in both cases seeming a little distanced from all that is happening around them.  Both also emphasize a single message repeated across the frame, ‘Love is a Human Right’ and ‘Some people are gay – get over it’. And it is really the other things that are happening in the frame that make them appeal to me, the different expressions of the people, the couple kissing, the giant and the child and so on.

These were both taken as the march formed up on Baker St, where the people are much closer together than during the actual march, and either standing around or moving slowly.  In both I’ve used flash, and with the wide angle – at 16mm in the top image and zoomed out a little to 22mm  in the lower one, I’m very close to the people I’m photographing. Many of the people in them are aware that I am photographing them because I’ve already taken several frames, and of course there are many other people around also taking pictures.

Queer Resistance at WorldPride 2012

Later in the day I came back to the march as it neared its end and took a few more pictures on Whitehall, including several of the small group of gay anarchists. I was attracted by the directness of the message held up by this young man, carrying one end of the ‘Queer Resistance’ banner and out to ‘smash the church, the state and patriarchy’ and took several pictures walking backwards a short distance in front of him as he pushed the message out towards me.

Nelson on his column in Trafalgar Square rising above his hand seemed somehow appropriate, certainly representing London and perhaps also the state and the system he was intent on smashing. It also strikes me as a rather phallic monument, and perhaps appropriate for that reason also.

Cleaners protest inside John Lewis on Oxford St

Cleaners protest outside John Lewis on Oxford St

I’ve spent quite a lot of time this year photographing the efforts of the cleaners to get decent conditions, to be treated fairly and with respect by their management and to get a living wage.  The series of protests at John Lewis – I photographed three in July, Cleaners Strike at John Lewis, John Lewis cleaners step up protest and Cleaners Continue Fight at John Lewis – highlighted their case, with John Lewis, in some respects at least a model company with its ‘partnership’ structure getting its dirty work done on the cheap by outsourcing it to a company that paid them as little as it could and treated them like dirt.

The protests by cleaners, backed by their union, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW – later in the year they formed their own group, the IWGB) are loud, colourful and very public and have proved effective, embarrassing managements and forcing them to negotiate. Larger and better-known unions could learn a lot from them and the way that the IWW/IWGB have made the workers more central to disputes and united them in the actions at the workplace.

I think that these pictures show something of the spirit of the cleaners, their solidarity and their determination – which has been rewarded by some notable successes, although there are still far too many workplaces in London where cleaners are underpaid, overworked and subjected to management abuse, and the struggle continues

Photocall at Marble Arch for ‘Spare the Bears’

PETA ‘Spare the Bears’ March against the use of animal fur in ornamental military headgear was one I almost missed. I’d gone to its start point only to find a handful of people standing around in rather heavy rain and nothing happening at the time I’d been told it would start. I went off to photograph something else, but when I’d done that tried to find them on their way. I’d pretty well given up completely by the time the actually arrived for the final photocall at Marble Arch, where this picture was taken. I took several pictures with this woman holding her bear at the front of the group, mainly in portrait format, which are perhaps better, but this is the one I come back to, with just the head of the pale cream bear peeping over the black arm and purple glove.

First communicants waiting to take part in the procession

Another event that I’ve photographed many times over the years is the annual procession of Our Lady of Mount Carmel from the Italian church in Clerkenwell.  As so often its a picture about the different gestures and expressions of the people in the picture, but also one that makes clear what and where it is. Another picture close to the main figures with the 16mm and tightly framed.

Continue reading 2012 – My Own Favourites – July

 
58/87mm f5.3 ISO 800

December started with a busy day for me. I’ve photographed most of the events organised by the Campaign against Climate Change (CCC) since it began, and their annual climate march at the start of December is a fixture in my diary, and I’d also been asked personally to take pictures.

So I was there at the US Embassy in Grosvenor Square for the start at noon, though it was disappointingly rather a slow start. But eventually things got going with a decent number for a rally and then the construction of a pipeline along the whole length of the square – around 250 metres – held up by activists, running between the embassies of the USA (the world’s leading polluter and the country that has done most to prevent any effective action over climate change) and Canada (currently raising the stakes over dirty energy with its tar sands.)  Like all too many media stunts which seem a good idea to those promoting them, it was virtually impossible to photograph in any sensible way – though I did my best. The picture above only included a single length of pipe, though I did manage one that worked with slightly more.

16mm f4 ISO 800

Finally, almost half an hour later than planned, the Climate March set off to Westminster, and I left them a few hundred yards down the road to go elsewhere.

By now it was 2pm and I rushed up to Oxford St,  where I found a rather smaller group of activists than I had expected starting to get ready to protest outside Adidas against the company’s failure to pay the redundancy due to some of those who had produced goods for them in Indonesia.

18/27mm f4.5 ISO  800

It took a little while for them to get organised and for a few late-comers to arrive, but then it was fairly straightforward to take some pictures before jumping on a 73 bus for the short journey to South Street and the Egyptian Embassy to photograph the protest there against the decree by President Morsi. There were rather fewer there than I expected too, although the protest had been timed to start around 45 minutes earlier and the Egyptians sometimes seem to turn up rather late, so perhaps some were still on their way. A very small bonus was that this turned out to be two protests, with 4 or 5 supporters of the President holding their own protest against the main one – which was perhaps ten or twenty times larger.

26mm f4.5 ISO 800

It wasn’t too easy to follow what was happening, as most of the placards and all of the speeches were not in English, and I had to spend a few minutes talking with protesters as well as taking pictures, but it wasn’t long before I had done enough and was on my way to Green Park station.  But I was already late, and had to hurry, running a little to get there faster.  Getting off the train at Westminster, the marchers had beaten me, but I arrived at Old Palace Yard a little out of breath but in time to photograph the raising of the mock fracking derrick there. It was another stunt which sounded rather better as an idea than producing good pictures.

16mm f6.3 ISO 1600

I took quite a few, but couldn’t really get anything that worked well.

Earlier in the day there had also been another protest I’d photographed in Grosvenor Square, by West Papuans outside the Indonesian Embassy on the anniversary of their short-lived independence. It was a protest by a small group, but visually more effective than many with the flags and face-paint.

75/112mm f8 ISO 800

Links

Climate March Says ‘NO’ to Fracking
Morsi’s Dicatatorial Decree
Free West Papua Independence Day
Adidas ‘Pay Your Workers’

As usual, I’d planned my day the previous night, working out which events I could cover and the timings and how I could get from one place to another. For once, despite some things running a little late, which made me change things a little, my plans more or less worked out.

Continue reading Busy Saturday

June was a shorter than usual month for me, as I spent a week, welcomely coincidental with the royal shenanigans,  away in the wilds of rural Devon. Though they are not very wild and were very wet, so I took relatively few pictures, and none that made my favourites list.

But I was pleased to be in London for the annual Naked Bike Ride, a rather curious and somewhat vaguely ecological protest that gives a great deal of interest and amusement to riders and spectators alike. One of the challenges for the photographer is in finding images that are widely publishable with so much flesh on display, and I’ve always been fairly cautious in the images that I have put on the web, although I know that there will still be some that offend a few people.

Personally I can’t find nudity offensive, although I think there are good reasons for most of us to keep most of our bodies covered up most of the time, not least our British weather. Since Genesis tells us that God created man and woman in his own image I find the objections of some extremist Christians blasphemous, but making a cult of nudity and body worship is equally disturbing, with its echoes of the Third Reich (when “Mensch und Sonne” was official party literature.)

I’ve deliberately not put the picture from the Naked Bike Ride at the top of this page, and if anyone is likely to be upset in any way by looking at pictures of people without clothes they had better not scroll down. But I like this picture because it shows a whole group of people taking part in the event, standing with or sitting on their bikes, mostly more or less naked (the only absolute clothing rule is that you have to wear something on your feet.)

They are taking a breather on Westminster Bridge, with the Houses of Parliament behind them, making obvious that this is taking place in the centre of London. Cycling for me – and I learnt to ride a two-wheeler when I was six – has always been about freedom, and I like the sense of freedom in this image. People are together but doing their own different things, including drinking water, taking pictures, being photographed; only four of the twenty or so are wearing cycle helmets, a couple have sun hats and another two are in wigs.

More pictures (if some more nudity won’t offend) in Naked Cyclists Ride Against Oil.

A very different event in very different weather just a few days later,  was the Carnival of Dirt, a mock funeral procession to remember the many activists around the world who have been murdered for standing up against the interests of the powerful mining and extraction companies, many of which are based in the City of London, listed on the London Stock Exchange and who trade on the London Metal Exchange. Many of those taking part wore black, and one of the most striking was this woman, with the message ‘Poverty is Filth’ across her face.

I’d talked briefly with her and photographed her a couple of times at the start of the event on the steps of St Paul’s Cathedral, and its hard to choose the best of several images (which you can see on My London Diary.) But this, taken in fairly heavy rain as we stood for some short speeches outside the Stock Exchange on Newgate St (yet again we were barred from Paternoster Square.)

I seldom ask people I’m photographing to look at me, although it is often important that eyes are visible, ‘eye contact’ isn’t always important in images, and often detracts. But here is is absolutely essential and unusually intense, large irises with small pupils staring fixedly from the image. I didn’t need to ask, this was obviously someone very aware of the image she had set out to create and the contrasts between black and white in her dress and hair and hat – and of course those bright red lips and the message written across her face.

The inspiration behind this event, and many of the more imaginative protests we have seen in recent years in London was the radical anthropologist Professor Chris Knight, a Marxist sacked from his post at the University of East London in 2009 for his involvement in the political street theatre group ‘The Government of the Dead’.

I’ve photographed him on many occasions at protests, usually in his black suit and hat, but the picture of him speaking through a megaphone at the London Metal Exchange, along with a crowd of protesters with coffins and placards with images of murdered activists is one of my favourites.

I was working with the 10.5mm partly because of the crush of the crowd which made it impossible to stand any distance away, but also because of the wet weather. Both the other lenses I was carrying – the 16-35mm and the 28-105mm Nikkor had become unusable, with condensation steaming up on internal lens elements. Like most zooms that change physical length the 28-105 isn’t good in damp weather as zooming pumps moist air in and out, but the 16-35mm where zoom and focus are both by internal movements is usually much better.

The wide angle has let me bring in so much that is happening around Knight, while the curvature of the image makes everything centre around him and the megaphone and the patch of mud on his face in symbolic solidarity with the people of West Papua where the Indonesian government is carrying out a policy of genocide on behalf of mining interests.

Several Fathers Day Vigils for Custody deaths were held around the country on June 17, and I went to Brixton Police Station, where a number of people over the years have died  – have been killed – under suspicious circumstances. Physically healthy young black men taken in by police dead within hours of arrival. Among them Ricky Bishop and Sean Rigg, killed inside Brixton Police Station on 21 August 2008, and whose inquest had just begun on 11 June 2012, a few days before I took this picture of his two sisters fixing a framed picture of him to the memorial tree outside the police station.

The case of Sean Rigg is just one of several thousand  – in my report on the event I noted:

The official statistics are deliberately (if not criminally) misleading and record only a small fraction of such deaths. A report published by the Independent Advisory Panel on Deaths in Custody in 2011 states:

‘in total, there were 5,998 deaths recorded for the 11 years from 2000 to 2010. This is an average of 545 deaths per year. Despite the fact there have been 11 unlawful killing verdicts since 1990 there has never been a successful prosecution. ‘

What makes some of these cases stand out – and in particular those of Ricky Bishop whose family organised this event, and of Sean Rigg – has been the determined effort by these families to get justice, not just in the case of their own families but also for others through the United Friends and Families Campaign.

Finally for June I’ve chosen a picture from Sudanese march in London, a protest on the anniversary of the coup by which President Omar el-Bashir came to power in 1989 calling on him to step down, for the release of all political prisoners and for BashiR, the first sitting head of state to be indicted by the International Criminal Court in a controversial decision in 2010, to be turned over to the ICC.

The picture, taken at 40mm (60mm) on the 28-105mm I think shows the united crowd calling for change, echoed by a red crowd in a placard behind the central raised fist. The shutter speed of 1/160s has rendered the people at the front of the crowd and their placards fairly sharply but the limited depth of field at f6.3 makes the more central man with the raised fist on whom I focussed stand out with critical sharpness, while the movement of his central fist gives it a very tangible blur.

Continue reading 2012 – My Own Favourites – June

May always starts with something of a bang, with various events marking May Day, including the annual march which has celebrated the day in London for around 40 years, but also with other groups organising their own events to mark the day. This year after the march I went to a protest by Campaign4Justice and Merlin Emmanuel outside the offices of the IPCC calling for its abolition for its failure to investigate police actions and then caught up with a group who were roaming central London protesting against shops using free labour with unemployed people given the ‘choice’ of working for nothing or losing their benefits.

Among those taking part in this ‘workfare’ protest were a group from Occupy London, and in the early evening after the police who had been following them all apparently went off shift walked up into the City and finally reached their original objective back in October 2011, the London Stock Exchange. I’d been there back in October 2011 when a general meeting at Westminster at the end of the Block the Bridge NHS Protest had voted to occupy the Stock Exchange, and outside with them the following Saturday when police blocked their access to the private Paternoster Square where is is situated, and on the steps of St Paul’s Cathedral when they came to the decision to camp there instead.

Occupy London finally reach the Stock Exchange – 1 May 2012

So I was pleased to be one of the small handful of photographers who was actually with them when a small group finally made their objective and set up tents in the doorway of the London Stock Exchange, even if we all knew it was only a token gesture.  After a few minutes they were made to move a few yards away, and by the time the word got out and more police, photographers and press arrived the moment had gone, although the protesters were kettled in the square for some hours, long after I’d filed my story and gone to bed.

Again I needed the 16mm, and perhaps something even a little wider would have done the job even better – it could have been better with the whole of the design at top left and more of the second tent and person holding the banner at right.  There were too many people milling around to work from further away. The light was pretty dim and I had to use flash. The banner was only in position for a fairly short time and I was pleased to have managed to get its message and the sign for the London Stock Exchange in the picture above the line of seated protesters and the two tents. More pictures from the event at Stock Exchange Occupied.

Public Sector Pensions Strike and March

On 10 May there was a one-day strike by public sector workers over the raising of the retirement age and worsening of pension provisions as well as cuts in services. Many workers feel the trade unions have been slow to take action against the cuts and the austerity programme, including the attacks on the NHS, and the strength of feeling was shown in votes such as the 94% of Unite’s NHS members who voted for this day of action. This was a picture that I hope shows some of that strength of feeling and unity, with three of those holding the union banner shouting in unison, and the Unite flags flying behind them as they came over Westminster Bridge at the head of the march from St Thomas’s Hospital behind them at right of the picture.

Police March Against Cuts and Restructuring

On the same day the police were also protesting, both against the affect of the 20% cuts in police budgets and the proposed restructuring which will result in a partial privatisation of policing. But although impressively large, the police protest was visually a little on the dull side, and for me the main interest was in the various groups which took advantage of the event to show a little solidarity with them or raise some of the serious issues about policing which the Police Federation would prefer not to have explored or exposed. So near the front of the march, Ian Puddick, who was intimidated, attacked and prosecuted by City of London Terrorism Police and Counter Terrorism Directorate in an operation costing millions carried out on behalf of a giant US security corporation after he discovered his wife had been having an affair with one of her bosses was marching with a placard reading ‘Police Corruption’ and Occupy London were marching with them calling for  “fully, Publicly funded, democratically accountable Police force who’s aims and objectives enshrine the right to peaceful Protest in some sort of People’s Charter!” 

But my favourite among the fringe demonstrators was a ‘professional protest stall’ manned by the Space Hijackers, with advice on suitable placards and chants for the protest. I wanted to show some of these, along with the police march. Many of the police were obviously amused as they marched past, but the display did offend others, and I was present when police not taking part in the march threatened the Hijackers with arrest, particularly if they displayed a poster with the acronym ACAB on it, which you can also see on the peak of the cap being worn by the masked protester.  Shortly after I took this image, a line of police came and stood between the stall and the march in an attempt to hide it from view.

The London May Queen as Flora scatters flowers

On 10 of May I photographed a very different kind of event. From 2005 to 2010 I made a series of pictures at various events involving May Queens in London, in particular of the Merrie England and London May Queen Festival. 2012 saw the crowning of the 100th London May Queen and although I felt I had finished the project in 2010 this was something I didn’t want to miss.  I also wanted to show some of the people I had photographed the book I had produced (there is an earlier version with a preview and an i-pad version also available.)

I spent quite a lot of time talking to people and perhaps didn’t concentrate on taking pictures as much as in earlier years, but you can see the other pictures in London Crowns 100th May Queen.

One of the hardest things to photograph is the procession of the May Queen around the arena near the end of the event, when she scatters flowers to the children in the various May Queen realms seated around the outside. The picture captures this, with a rather large bunch of them in mid-air having just left her hand. I was fairly close – again with the lens at 16mm – but of course having to keep out of the way of the flowers and the children seated on the ground who they were being thrown towards. This was taken at 1/800s, fast enough to freeze the action, although the flowers are not quite sharp probably because they are out of focus. I wanted to get all of the procession sharp, and depth of field even on a well stopped-down 16mm has its limits. I’d decided not to use flash even though it would have helped with the nearer figures – as you can see I was working more or less directly into the sun – but to use a little post-processing to lighten these shadow areas. Any useful amount of flash would almost certainly had burnt out the very close flowers.

I’ve chosen two pictures from No To NATO, Troops Out Of Afghanistan in front of the US Embassy in Grosvenor Square on May 19.  One shows a left-wing newspaper seller talking with one of the protesters in the crowd holding placards in front of the embassy. The newspaper looks like the ‘Workers Hammer’ published by the Trotskyist Spartacist League. I don’t know if anyone ever does buy it, and though I’ve on occasion been given a free issue I’ve seldom found much of it worth reading.

Selling the Workers Hammer, No To NATO, Troops Out Of Afghanistan

Like most of my work, this was taken with the 16-35mm, but this at the long end of the zoom. It is I think all about gesture and expression, and about the kind of things that go on in the crowd at demonstrations, although I’m not sure it is all about selling newspapers.

My final selection from May was of one of the speakers at the same event. There were an interminable number of them, and after an hour or so my attention had rather drained away. But this speaker was different, because he came accompanied with flags.

Bahraini speaker and flags, No To NATO, Troops Out Of Afghanistan

The flag at bottom left was fairly static but the one behind the speaker was being waved fairly vigorously on a long pole. There was no wind to make a flag fly, but photographing this speaker and the flag was something of a challenge and I think the result is reasonably striking. Certainly it stands out against the probably 30 or so attempts I made, most of which where more or less immediately deleted .

Continue reading 2012 – My Own Favourites – May

Grattan Puxon speaking in the Holocaust Memorial Garden

Roma Nation Day is April 8, the date of the first World Roma Congress, held here in London in 1971, and Grattan Puxon was one of its organisers.  At least 500,000 Roma are thought to have been killed in the holocaust, and the German government formally recognised the Roma genocide in 1982. As well as holding a short ceremony at the memorial in Hyde Park, the group also went to protest outside the embassies or cultural centres of some other European nations where the Roma are still being discriminated against, including France, Bulgaria, Italy and Hungary, and ending after I left them, at the offices of our own Department for Communities and Local Government. The Dale Farm evictions were, as Grattan Puxon said, “very much the tip of the iceberg” here.

There was quite a crowd of photographers and videographers at the event, but I’d got to the scene before most and had carefully chosen my position, with the memorial stone at the centre of the image. I couldn’t know exactly how people and things would arrange themselves around it, but things worked out well.  Using the zoom at 16mm Grattan almost exactly filled the frame vertically. It was a dull day and the memorial garden is surrounded by trees, and I used a little flash to make him stand out from the surroundings, and the low viewpoint gives him something of a heroic aspect.

Andy Greene of DPAC in a wheelchair chain blocking the road

Disabled Activists Block Trafalgar Square was the headline for my story, and this was a picture than for me encapsulated the determination and frustration of disabled people who are suffering so badly from the cuts in benefits and cruelly dismissive target-led tests by Atos, and also the dilemma of the police in dealing with their protests.  Again it shows how the wide view of the 16mm is really needed in the kind of media scrum that happens around these events.

It wasn’t easy to take pictures which really showed the chain that locked the wheelchairs in position across the roadway well, but what really makes this picture for me are the expressions, particularly that of Andy Greene in his wheelchair holding up the chain. Less obvious in the small reproduction is the look of concern on the face of the police officer, also holding up the chain, and the concentration of my colleague holding the video camera. The two still cameras at top left and right also help to add a feeling of urgency; usually I try to avoid other photographers in my pictures, but here it was unavoidable anyway and they have become important parts of the scene.

Pussy Riot protester opposite Russian Embassy

The protests over the imprisonment of members of Pussy Riot have produced some interesting pictures, and there are several in my Protest Supports ‘Pussy Riot’ that I might perhaps have chosen. What makes this one stand out for me is of course the face that this woman is making over me taking her picture – again from a close viewpoint although the 16-35mm was racked out to 30mm.  Hers is also a very stylish mask, with its gold edging – rather a contrast to the roughly cut balaclava at the left, and she is also wearing some very stylish knitwear and a fine large black ring. It was a dull day, and even at ISO 1000 and full aperture of f4 the shutter speed was only 1/30 second, and the only truly sharp part of the image are her eyelashes, but I think the slight blur of her lips as she puckers them adds to the image.

It wasn’t the picture I chose to head the story, either on My London Diary or on Demotix, as there were others that were more recognisably part of the Pussy Riot stereotype, but this was my favourite image, and one that somehow seems rather more Russian.

Cyclists and dogs call for Safer Roads

The final picture of my April choice was taken in some of my least favourite working conditions, with many of my pictures being spoilt by rain on the lens filter despite my obsessive wiping. It’s also one of the few pictures that I’ve used significantly cropped – not just the little bits that sometimes need tidying where things have crept in unnoticed or invisible around the edges.

My favourite version of this image – seen above in full frame – crops off a little at the top and bottom and around a fifth of the image at the right -just removing that raised hand. Getting dogs to look the right way for a picture isn’t easy and I couldn’t get the framing right too.

Far too many cyclists get killed on London’s roads, and the Big Ride for Safe Cycling was an attempt to get the mayoral candidates to promise to improve things. And all the main candidates – including the winner – made promises, though so far little has happened. There are many ways in which the infrastructure could be improved, but what is really needed is a change in attitudes particularly by car and other vehicle drivers. But it was perhaps unfortunate that the ride didn’t strongly make the point that helmets are not an answer. Most of those who have been killed in London were wearing them and they offer very little if any protection while encouraging drivers not to give cyclists the room they need.

Continue reading 2012 – My Own Favourites – April

Two pictures from five individual frames over two seconds with the lens at 16mm as a security guard tells me not to take his picture and threatens to assault me and smash my camera. That finger in the lower image is around six inches from the front of the 16-35mm f4, and too close for the lens to focus on. The guard is slightly less sharp than in the previous images because he is moving towards me, and after making this exposure I moved back.

I’d been photographing him telling a group of protesters against workfare – a government scheme that forces unemployed people to work for nothing or lose their benefit payments – that they could not protest in the street outside the shop where he was working, Superdrug, which they say is using the unemployed as free labour rather than taking on extra staff for the Christmas rush.

Fortunately too, he stopped, probably not because I told him he was breaking the law by threatening me, but because everyone around – including the man who has put a hand on his shoulder was telling him too, and he turned around to argue with them – and I continued to photograph him, but from slightly further away.

After a few minutes with the protesters talking to him he calmed down. He listened and understood why the protesters were there, and went back inside to continue to do his job rather than try to intimidate a legitimate protest. I hope he learnt something from the experience, which obviously he hadn’t been trained to cope with.

He wasn’t employed by Superdrug, but by a security company who are “an NSI Gold accredited organisation and has an ACS score that positions it within the top 5% of all manned guarding companies.”  They claim that their security officers are highly trained, but obviously they had not given this particular man the basic training in law (and common sense) needed to deal with such situations. His actions were of course counter-productive for both Superdrug and his employers and gained publicity for the event both on the street where it was happening and on the web. Though I wasn’t happy when Demotix made the threat to me the main point of the published story rather than the issue of workfare that the protest was about.

The protesters knew they had the right to protest on the street (and had been told so by two PCSOs elsewhere earlier in the day) and told him, but he continued to argue with them and attempt to get them to stop. And of course I knew I had the right to photograph, but he seemed unaware of this too. They don’t appear to have trained him that it is an offence to threaten assault (and even more of an offence had he carried out his threat.)

I’d photographed the same protesters earlier in the afternoon when they protested against workfare at a shop run by the charity  the British Heart Foundation.  Here they actually went inside the shop to make a protest, and I followed them inside and took some pictures. As soon as I was told I couldn’t photograph inside the shop and was asked to go I left, but continued to photograph as best I could from the street outside through the door and windows.

One of the staff, possibly a volunteer (and of course there is nothing wrong with charities using volunteers – but many charities are now using people who haven’t chosen but are forced to work for them without pay or lose benefits) was obviously concerned by my taking pictures and came to try and stop me. She told me I needed a licence to photograph, and I told here that she was wrong, and that everyone was free to photograph on the street, and that I had the right to photograph what I liked. She ran away into the shop when I offered to take her picture and raised a camera to my eye.

Shops could of course choose not have large windows so that we can see inside, but most deliberately invite the public to gaze inside, so they can have no expectation of privacy. And for me there was a clear public interest in what was happening both with the charity and with companies such as Superdrug – as well as security companies that fail to give their employees proper training.

But what the incident outside Superdrug clearly shows (and such incidents are not unusual, with security guards who know and understand the law being in my experience unusual) that security companies need to properly train their staff both in dealing with protests and with dealing with photographers. That NSI (National Security Inspectorate) Gold accreditation looks rather tarnished.

Some things may have improved in the City of London since the film ‘Stand Your Ground‘ was made, with police (who came out of the video pretty well) and photographers giving some training to security guards but in general there still seems to be a lack of proper training for security staff.