Category: Political Issues

Last week I photographed a kind of composite demonstration opposite Downing St. Stop the War and CND had organised a demonstration to demand an end to the bombing of Libya, but what happened was rather more complicated.

Along with the regulars at Stop the War events, this protest, like the last one I photographed against the NATO bombing of Libya also attracted a number of Libyan supports of Gaddafi, complete with their green flags, headbands and scarves. This is of course a free country, and no reason at all why they shouldn’t turn up to demonstrate, but their presence is perhaps a little embarrassing as the official Stop the War policy appears to be that they do not support Gaddafi, and a video of their previous demonstration has a Libyan saying that Gaddafi must go.

A few yards down the pavement was another small group around the banner of the  Workers Revolutionary Party Young Socialists, with their own megaphone and their own policy, essentially that they support Gaddafi as a liberator of his people and that the Libyan opposition movement is a bourgeois tool of imperialism which they back him in trying to smash.  At one point there was a fairly heated argument between them and one of the leading members of Stop the War, who made it clear that they were not welcome and should organise their own protests. The group did move a few yards further away after this, although later the police moved them back.

A few minutes after the protest started, another small group, mainly Libyans, arrived bringing an amplifier and speakers in the back of a vehicle and started setting up their protest in opposition to the Stop the War, calling for a greater effort by the NATO forces to help them in their struggle to get rid of Gadaffi.

With the rest of the photographers I was going backwards and forwards between the groups, and so there was plenty to take photographs of. The Libyan opposition with their ‘freedom’ flags and a rather more animated approach were certainly the most photogenic of the groups, and I was pleased with a series of images as a very vociferous woman, shouting and pointing at the WRP-YS speaker, tried to push her way through the police line and was held back.

More from this series on My London Diary

After an hour or so, most of the Stop the War supporters left, simplifying the shouting match by leaving just the pro-Gaddafi Libyans at their end of the pitch and the Libyan opposition 50 yards away at the other (by this time the WRP-YS had given up and were just standing around their banner on the sidelines.) Eventually the Gaddafi supporters, perhaps overwhelmed by the greater power of the loudspeakers on the other side compared to their rather puny megaphone (curiously Stop the War had earlier been warned by the police and told they had to stop using a megaphone, but the police took no action against either group of Libyans)  decided to give up, and made off towards Parliament Square.

Photographically, apart from trying to cover the various groups at the same time, there were few problems, and for once nearly everything worked perfectly, and the biggest problem I had was in trying to edit down to a sensible number of images. There was just one small problem with the pictures taken on the D700, where a small spot of something or other – perhaps a little bit of spit from someone shouting – had made its home on the large front filter of the  16-35mm, giving a small diffused area near the top centre of every image. Often there was sky there, where it wasn’t a problem, but this also meant there was little or no sign of it when I looked at the images through the viewfinder or on the rear screen. You may still just be able to see a trace of it in some of the pictures on My London Diary where you can see rather more pictures and read more about the events in For and Against Libyan Bombing.

Perhaps what surprised me most about the ‘Hardest Hit‘ march on May 11 was how cheerful and friendly everyone was, despite the great deal of anger at the government cuts which hit the disabled hardest.  It isn’t just the cuts in public services, although those with disabilities are likely to depend more on these than the rest of the community, but a process of trying to decimate the number of people who can claim mobility and disability benefits that was started by the previous Labour government.

Most of us would agree that a policy of encouraging disabled people to work in ways that make use of their capabilities is a good idea, but the new policies while paying lip service to this actually fail to make any attempt to do so, and are just designed to get as many as possible off benefits, or at least onto lower scales of benefit.

Rather than proper and personalised assessments of people’s capability and attempts to find ways that people can be integrated into employment, successive governments have contracted a private company to carry out tests using a computer system that cannot properly take individuals into account. Those administering the tests often lack the essential skills to make a proper assessment and are allowed insufficient time to do so. The company, Atos,  has a financial incentive to carry out the tests on the cheap and to turn down benefit applicants.

Although the tests are unfair to all, they are particularly unfair to some classes of applicants, particularly those with intermittent problems – many of whom if they attend the test centre are by definition having a ‘good’ day rather than a typical one – and those with mental illnesses.

As well as the disabled, there were many supported and carers taking part in the protest, which was one of the shortest marches I’ve ever photographed. It started a couple of hundred yards before Big Ben’s Clock Tower at one end of the Houses of Parliament and finished a couple of hundred yards after At Stephens tower at the other end, so a very large proportion of the pictures I took have these buildings in the background.

As always, the height of Big Ben is a problem – fine when people are holding placards above their heads – as above, but harder to use when people are sitting low down.

More at Hardest Hit March Against Cuts.

For once there is some good news to report about one of the events that I photographed and supported. On Friday 6 May I photographed six Iranian men who had been on hunger strike for a month, three outside Lunar House in Croydon and the other three in Shoreditch when they came to protest outside the houses of Parliament and the nearby Home Office building, along with around 50 supporters.

 

My own report on the event, Iranians Hunger Strike against Deportation to Torture And Death, went on Demotix that evening, and on My London Diary a couple of days later, and I gave permission for the group supporting the hunger strikers to make use of some of my pictures to publicise their cause. Every little helps, but it was the determination of these men (of course driven by their desperate position) that impressed me and finally the UK Borders Agency to agree to reconsider their cases and their evidence, and I was very pleased to read a report in the Croydon Guardian (CG) on May 11 to that effect.

To most of us it seems insane to suggest that it can be safe to send anyone – or at least anyone except a card-carrying Muslim fundamentalist – back to Iran. Certainly not anyone who is linked in any way to the Iranian protest movement. Though the CG story attracted several comments apparently from people who knew nothing about the case and had failed to read what the CG had actually reported, but just saw it as an opportunity to air a little racist anti-immigrant bile.

Photographically I wasn’t entirely pleased with what I had taken, and felt I had missed one obvious image. Three of the hunger strikers had stitched up their lips with nylon fishing line, and really I hadn’t gone in for a close enough image to show this.  Possibly the reason was that I was using just a single camera body, the D700, with the 16-35mm Nikon and the 28-300mm Sigma, as I’d been out earlier with some of my family and didn’t want to carry more.

The Sigma does focus reasonably close, and I took a number of fairly tight head shots in which the nylon line is clearly visible, but I could (and should) have got closer, even though the lens that would really have let me do the job well, the Nikon 60mm macro, was back on my desk at home.

Although my usual kit covers most eventualities, I try to think before I leave home if I might need any of the many bits and pieces that I don’t usually carry.  But though I might have wanted to take the macro, I also wanted to travel lighter than usual because of the other things I was doing that day.

More on the story and more pictures at Iranians Hunger Strike Against Deportation on My London Diary.

Getting to Brighton is faster than getting to some parts of London, though it is further away and more expensive.  I walked off the train at Brighton station at 11.27 and looked around for someone I knew, but there was nobody in sight, and I guessed few had come down from London for the ‘May Day Protest and Party‘ held a day early on April 30.

The protesters were clearly in the mood for a party

I knew at least one photographer had come earlier, as before leaving home I’d read his tweet from a café at the station. The event organisers had decided to try and keep the police guessing by not releasing the meeting point until 11.30 when they would announce it on Twitter and Facebook. Fortunately for the benefit of people like myself with antique mobile phones which don’t read that kind of thing there was also a number we could ring and hear a recorded message. A heavy lorry passed close by just as it started, but I heard enough to guess which way to go, and set off.

Making a mental note to myself that I really need to upgrade my phone to something that will keep up with social networking. More and more tweets are used to keep people informed of exactly what is happening and in particular where the action is in demonstrations, and I’m missing this out on the street unless I’m with another photographer who can read them.

I’m fairly sure that the police will have known in advance, with at least one of those in the group planning every demonstration being an undercover cop, even if perhaps  Brighton hasn’t yet got the the stage of G K Chesterton’s ‘The Man Who Was Thursday’ where six of the seven members of the anarchist’s central council turn out to be police spies.  But certainly by the time I arrived on the seafront there were at least two mounted police and two slightly obvious plain clothes cops there, with a row of police cars watching from the opposite side of the road. More gathered as the protesters also arrived for the start.

A large dice was used to decide the first protest target – though we never got there

It seemed to be a day when neither police nor protesters knew what they were trying to do. The police kettled and then unkettled on several occasions and seemed to panic whenever the protesters started moving, while the protesters – with rather more justification given what happened – thought that every time they saw more than a couple of police they were about to be kettled and rushed off in a different direction.

An officer adopts an aggressive stance

A few people on both sides occasionally lost their tempers a little, and police arrested eight protesters, some apparently on very trivial or non-existent grounds. Most of the public who saw the protest seemed to be asking what it was about – and if they found out there were generally expressions of support.  All of us got sore feet, from walking and running in circles around the centre of Brighton, and well over half of the protesters had disappeared before the protest seemed finally to come to an end and the remaining group began to party on the shingle that passes for a beach and I finally went home.

Compared with the few previous protests I’ve photographed in Brighton – and certainly to some of the videos I’ve watched of other events – this was a relatively peaceful day, with less relatively indiscriminate violence by the police, and much less interference with the press and other photographers.  Most of the times I was asked to move I think there was a genuine concern for my safety by officers who realise how dangerous and unpredictable police horses can be – and there were clearly times when they were not really under control.

More about the day and many more pictures at Brighton MayDay Protest.

I’m not keen on weddings, and since I didn’t get an invite to the one that filled our newspapers, TV and radio for most of last week I didn’t go. Like more than half of the UK population I didn’t watch it either, but it was something even the most dedicated anti-monarchist couldn’t entirely fail to notice.

I got a phone call a few days before to enquire and discuss what I was going to cover,  and I listed a couple of events related to it. What I thought would be the more interesting of these didn’t happen because on the day before, police called at the home of those organising it and arrested them on an obviously fake charge, holding them in custody until the whole thing was safely over.

Although I wasn’t there to photograph the arrests, I was able to watch a video later in the day, and it seemed pretty clear from what little the police said and did that they were under orders to prevent any possible embarrassment to royalty competing with the wedding in the media.  Even if doing so meant breaking the law – or rather inventing a new one – and having to pay compensation for wrongful arrest later.  We live in a country where there is clearly one law for the monarchy and another for the rest of us.

I’m not a Royal Wedding Mug

Instead I went to photograph the street party organised by the Republic organisation. I’m not really a republican, though I do believe that had this country ever had any half-decent socialist government it would have nationalised the crown and land without compensation, returning the estates they and others over the past ten centuries have stolen from the people, and we would have a royal family who ride bicycles and live modest comfort while drawing an average wage for their not particularly onerous duties. It really was a tragedy in the history of our nation that Cromwell and his supporters were not more reasonable people rather than religious fanatics.

But it turned out to be a rather dull event, in part because the organisers were so keen to keep politics out of what seems essentially a political event. See more at Republic: Not the Royal Wedding Party

I’d actually taken some wedding pictures the day before, on my way to photograph a protest against the government’s intentions to end most workplace health and safety checks. It is just so inconvenient for employers to have to worry about things like workers breathing in asbestos dust or having cranes fall down on top of them.

Employment minister Chris Grayling looks a little harassed

While the Prospect union representative for London’s HSE inspectors, Simon Hester was telling the protest about the dangerous conditions he had found the previous Friday in one of the site inspections that are being abandoned to save money, his boss, employment minister Chris Grayling came out of the office and there was a short argument between them, with Tony O’Brien of the Construction Safety Campaign joining in, which ended with Grayling running off down the road.

More at International Workers Memorial Day.

The offices are just around the corner from Westminster Abbey, so I walked past the people camping out on the street there to catch a glimpse of the royal couple, and I did stop to take a few pictures.

It should have been me!

And I also made a point of going to see the protesters in Trafalgar Square, still there despite the promises of our leading politicians to get rid of them for the wedding.  Brian Haw has been in hospital in Germany for some months, but his colleague Barbara Tucker was there and we had a long talk.

Barbara Tucker

A little way along the pavement, Maria Gallastegui was on top of one of her boxes dressed in orange Gitmo jump suit and a black hood; I’d talked to her a few days ago and she told me then that she had agreed to cover up her display for the royal event. More pictures at Parliament Square Protests Continue.

On the day itself there were no buses in the central area of London, and I walked through the streets with another photographer on my way back to the station, looking for signs of celebration. We did find a few people on the streets, but most were still around the actual route back from the Abbey to the Palace or watching the large screens in Trafalgar Square. And  after having seen the rather pathetic flypast as I was walking towards Charing Cross, I looked up and saw the royals just leaving the balcony on those screens, as  you can see in the final image in Royal Wedding in Soho.

One of the great things about London is that you can turn a corner and be in different worlds. The two events I covered ten days or so ago were rather an illustration of this.

I wasn’t a fan of Smiley Culture, hardly even aware of the existence of this British reggae star who died in highly suspicious circumstances when police came to his Surrey home and arrested him, but his case is just one of many deaths in police custody, far too many over the years.  I’ve met and photographed many of the bereaved families, all wanting to know exactly what happened and calling for justice,  all apparently being met with obfuscation, lies and cover-up from the police, the so-called Independent Police Complaints Commision, and sometimes coroners and then courts. I’ve written more about various individual cases over the years (and a little more about this one in Who Killed Smiley Culture? on My London Diary.) And, as I wrote in that piece:

Of course not every one of those 930 deaths (since 1990) was suspicious, although a great many were, but we have yet to see even a single officer convicted of any offence concerning them (or earlier cases) – with the sole exception of the death of David Oluwale in 1969. It is more than hard to beleive that justice is being done. And as the protesters chanted on the march, ‘No Justice, No Peace.’ 

I left the couple of thousand protesters as their rally outside New Scotland Yard where they had marched from the Wandsworth Rd to photograph a very different event, the annual parade through of the London City of London District Loyal Orange Lodge, along with bands and visiting lodges from around England, Glasgow and Northern Ireland.

It was a very different scene as they walked along some of the same streets, on their way to lay wreaths at the Cenotaph and elsewhere, remembering the Battle of the Boyne in 1690 and celebrating the Protestant religion and traditions of Northern Ireland.

I was born and grew up in the Protestant tradition (and with aunts and cousins whose pastor was a colleague of Ian Paisley) but I felt rather more at home and closer to the people marching to the reggae beat than to the drum and flute, and I think it’s reflected in the pictures in a rather more detached view of the Orange march. More about the second event at Orange Parade in London.