Category: Political Issues

Earlier this year a number of photographers campaigned succesfully to stop Clause 43 of the Digital Economy Bill, which, as I wrote at the time “would have made many of our photographs ‘orphan works’ and easy game for commercial publishers wanting a free ride on photographers backs.”

As I said at the time, it would be back, and it is – and there was a good post about it by Jeremy Nicholl on his Russian Photos blog last month.  A few days later The Guardian (who should have known better) published an article by Stephen Edwards, suggesting that the actions of photographers had effectively sealed up the BBC archives “in which photographs either form no part (radio), or in which they are of relatively small importance (television)” and calling for what he describes as “a  simple, fair and equitable solution” by the government re-instating this provision.

Unfortunately he is wrong. Clause 43 was neither fair nor equitable, as it failed to provide recompense for those who had produced the material while it would have enabled commercial organisations (and the BBC as a commercial organisation) to profit from their work.

Photographers aren’t opposed to all change, but they are in favour of changes that recognise and appropriately reward the creators of material. Legislation that did that would be welcome.

And as I recounted in New Thinking on Copyright, the photographers who mounted the campaign that played the largest part in stopping Clause 43 came up with some proposals that could for the basis for a new copyright law, and there have been other suggestions that would also solve the problem in a way that gave proper consideration to creator’s rights.

More recently, Jeremy Nicholl has published another article on his blog,
Exposed: The UK Orphan Works Covert Propagandist which lets us know what The Guardian should have made clear about its author when it published the piece.

Another project that might be worth looking at is  MILE (Metadata Image Library Exploitation) which aims to promote European cultural heritage and make digital art more accessible by improving metadata. On the information page of its Orphan Works site it has a short explanation of orphan works, which makes clear the importance providing income to artists and artists’ estates.

Certainly the last thing that should happen is the kind of rush into inappropriate legislation such as Clause 43 (rumoured to have been dictated to Peter Mandelson by one of his billionaire friends in that villa in Corfu.)

The whole question about how we see and interpret events is an important one, and my own view of what I saw on Wednesday during the second day of student demonstrations against the proposed hike in tuition fees and education cuts differs considerably from that in several accounts that I’ve seen in left-wing media.

I’m sure that there will be some who were at the event who read this and disagree strongly with it.  It represents my honest attempt to understand and report what was a rather confusing day, which I attended both as a journalist and as someone who strongly supports the opposition to education cuts and tuition fees. While I’m generally against violence I can only applaud the righteous anger that many show for the cause. Education in a civilised society should be freely available to those prepared to benefit from it and not dependent on how rich you are; educational resources should be directed at those who need them, and not available to enhance the privileged position of the children of the rich. I benefited from free education and student grants and taught in the state system for over 30 years and I’d happily vote for the abolition of private education.

I went to the event having read that the NUS and other leaders had agreed a timetable with the police as follows:

12pm Trafalgar Square
1pm March down Whitehall
2pm Parliament Square.

On the day, it didn’t happen like that, and the numbers present were considerably less than the organisers had predicted or the police had planned for – perhaps around 4-5000 in total over the day. When I arrived just before noon, there were only around a thousand in Trafalgar Square, though of course people were still coming in.

At around 12.05, a group of people who were on the plinth at Trafalgar Square started calling for everyone to go down to protest at Downing St and Parliament, and a a couple of minutes later a crowd of a few hundred was running down Whitehall.

A handful of police had tried to stop them at the top of Whitehall, but soon agave up as there were too few of them to prevent it. As protesters ran down the road, police lower down Whitehall moved across it, and by the time the front runners reached there formed a line stretched right across the road.

What I’d photographed could hardly be described as a march, and it seems hardly surprising that the police decided to stop what looked more like a mob than anything else (and mobs have their place, but this seemed to me both premature and ineffectual.)  Nothing in the police action suggested to me that they were attempting to kettle demonstrators, merely to stop them.

The vans parked in the side street and a clear Whitehall were what would have been expected if the police were getting ready to facilitate a large organised march down the street – as I had read that they had agreed.

I made my way with the protesters back up to the top of Whitehall, and there were no police attempts to stop us coming back out of Whitehall, or as we made our way through Admiralty Arch – a relatively easy place for police to have controlled movement – onto the Mall.  Again, there were none of the signs that would indicate an attempted kettle. Almost all the police were still in Whitehall – or sitting in vans in the side streets, and it took some time for them to come through Horseguards and run rather comically across towards the marchers going down towards Birdcage Walk.

A few minutes later the marchers arrived at Parliament Square having gone via Storey’s Gate and Broad Sanctuary. There again it looked to me as if the police had made preparations for a march – with the roadway in front of Parliament surrounded by barriers. A march down Whitehall would have ended where the police were now standing. Of course marchers don’t like to be behind barriers, and don’t need to be, though police usually like to pen them in so that they can more easily be controlled.

I was surprised when the demonstrators turned round at this point, as they had reached Parliament Square, where they said they wanted to protest. Clearly many of them thought that the police intended to kettle them here. Of course any static demonstration in this area is sure to attract a large police presence, but surely it only becomes a kettle when the police prevent people from leaving the area in an orderly fashion. A pen is not necessarily a kettle.

When the demonstrators turned round and attempted to leave by Broad Sanctuary, police did form a line across the street and try to stop them.  It could possibly have been an attempt to set up a kettle, but if so it lacked credibility, as it was obvious that the thin line of police would be ineffectual with a largish crowd on both sides of them,  many of the protesters not yet having reached Parliament Square.

There simply were not enough police at that point to do the job. Some people walked through the gate into the Abbey grounds before this was blocked, others climbed over the fence and I heard later that at least one person had been assaulted by police at this point.

Most of those present – including myself, simply found a gap in the police line and walked through, and after a few seconds the police gave up trying to stop people. It was the start of a long and confusing walk around the capital.

Most of the time the police simply walked along by the side of the marchers – with the occasional incident – one of which is shown in the first of these two posts. At some junctions police blocked off one street and the marchers simply went down another. There were many places where it would have been relatively easy for the police to try to detain or kettle the march but I saw no real attempt to do so.  In another minor incident in Holborn where police stopped some marchers who tried to go down a one-way street against the traffic.

By the time we had reached St Paul’s Cathedral well over half of the students had given up and left the march, many making their own way back to Trafalgar Square. As we passed the Stock Exchange it was hard to find a policeman in sight.

Certainly most of the police had also disappeared by the time the march turned up King Edward Street, perhaps because we were now outside the Met area. There certainly seemed no reason to go up Bartholomew Close and then to make a totally pointless detour to the right – many of us chose to take a short cut onto Long Lane and wait for them, and it seemed as if the march was trying hard to kettle itself. At that point there were I think less than a dozen of the Met still following the march, with the City of London police – whose area we were in- almost completely ignoring it, though shortly after I left it to catch a bus back towards Trafalgar Square I saw three of their vans moving in its direction lights flashing.

By the time I finally gave up on the march at Holborn Viaduct after around 8 miles of wandering (they did another 2 miles or so to arrive back at Trafalgar Square a  little after me), it had shrunk considerably, with perhaps 500 people left from the original few thousand who had left Parliament Square.

Police were diverting all traffic away from Trafalgar Square, and I had to get off and walk the last half mile or so. At Trafalgar Square  there were several hundred police forming lines across all of the roads, now forming a far more impressive barrier with their vans, but they were letting people move in and out freely when I came up Whitehall.

Around 3.15pm, one of the organisers of the event addressed the crowd now in Trafalgar Square, telling them that despite the heavy police presence we could see, the police had confirmed that people were free to leave in small groups along the road towards Charing Cross, the nearest tube station. He also said that although the organised demonstration had finished people were free to stay on and demonstrate if they wished. Clearly quite a few did, although others decided to leave.

Around 3.30pm a small group of policemen came onto the square, where they were surrounded by some of the demonstrators and road cones and other light objects were thrown at them. The police retreated toward their line across Cockspur St and were followed by a crowd of demonstrators, some of whom tried to push their way through the police, while others tried to prevent any disorder, some joining hands in a line in front of the police. People brought up banners and placards to stand a yard of two in front of the police in an often noisy stand-off.

Minor incidents continued sporadically here for around fifteen minutes and then things seemed to quieten down as the snow came down harder. Shortly before 4pm I decided it was time to go home, and together with a steady stream of protesters I walked through the police line and left the area and caught a train from Charing Cross (apparently the only train still running .) Police were making no attempt to check or stop anyone leaving at that point.

I drafted the outlines of my report on my way home and wrote it while while my images were transferring to my computer.  You can read it on Demotix under the title Police Close Down London As Students March – and in a few days time I’ll also put it on My London Diary, with more pictures.

My account of the day differs considerably from some others that I have read on-line. There were things that happened after I had left – when police later did close in an make a great many arrest for public order offences, which should be given a mention in my final piece.

So what of the photograph as evidence? Essentially both what I write and what I photograph depend on what I see. The pictures that I took back up my account of the day as I saw it. I saw little if any real evidence that the police were making continuous attempts to kettle protesters – and certainly found nothing I could photograph to show this. But it was a perspective that seems to have driven the 10 mile march around London and some of the accounts I read elsewhere.

There seems to me to be something in the actual act of recording events (or at least doing so lucidly) with a camera that means I have to question all the time what is going on, why is this happening, and of course, how can I show this in an image. It’s a mental focus that drives out much sloppy or doctrinaire thinking.

Clearly there are some things photographs can show, and other things that need the support of a reliable eye-witness. Still photography is perhaps better at showing the detail (and sometimes at directing us towards it and towards a particular interpretation) while video can us a more or less seamless view of how something develops.

But both still and moving pictures can provide limits to the plausible interpretation of situations. Certainly I could not have written some of the things that I’ve read in some other accounts of the day.

What exactly does the photograph above – which I took on Wednesday – show?

I think I know, because I was there and saw what happened before and what happened after the moment when I took this picture (its one of around a dozen frames, some blurred, of the incident.) But even as a sequence the pictures don’t tell the story. Yesterday I watched two rather poor quality videos of a similar incident in which a policeman punched a protester, and despite the lack of definition, they gave a much clearer idea of what was happening.

There were perhaps a couple of thousand protesters, mainly students, apparently marching without any particular direction through the major streets of central London. I think the police were equally unclear about their aims – but basically they were staying with the students in case there was any trouble, and groups of them were moving along the sides of the march towards the front. As they went along they were pushing people from the edges of the march back into the middle, out of their way and also away from oncoming but very slow-moving traffic on the adjoining roadway.

I got pushed aside rather roughly several times – and as usual there was the odd guy – perhaps one in twenty – in these police lines who was obviously enjoying throwing his weight around, using a totally unnecessary amount of force. Most officers manage to be firm and some even polite as they move people out of the way, but protesters of course sometimes complain or argue about their treatment.

I don’t know exactly how this particular incident started; I first saw the grey-hooded student being held by the officer – a police medic – who the pushed him back inside the march. Then the officer appeared to loose his temper and punched the guy several times before grabbing him around the head; other protesters tried to separate the two and pull the student away from the officer; one of the legal observers on the march who tried to get between them was grabbed by other officers, pushed away and held briefly against the bus behind.

The other police present – including an inspector, standing just behind the medic – make no attempt to stop the violent attack.

It was a short incident, over in a few seconds, and everyone involved disappeared. My last frame of it shows the medic being hurried away by the other officers.  So far as I’m aware there were no arrests and no complaint made against the Police medic – whose number is clearly visible.

Although the demonstration was one against education cuts and the huge rise in tuition fees, the form that it took – on both the part of the students and police – was very much a reaction to the police’s “kettling” of the protest in Whitehall the previous week, part of a battle over the control of the streets, expressed in the loud chants by the students “Whose streets? OUR streets.” This incident was just one of many minor skirmishes in that turf war.

Had I been shooting video, the evidence would have been far clearer, but the still photograph I think provides a greater drama.

The NO to Racism, Fascism and Islamophobia march on Nov 6 was a decent size and had rather more of a carnival air than most since it was organised by Love Music Hate Racism (LMHR) as well as being organised by Unite Against Fascism (UAF). That did mean we got a DJ playing some very loud music, and when I found at one point I wanted to be right in front of the rather large speakers next to the lorry they were using I wished I had brought some ear plugs. It isn’t that I don’t like music, but when it reaches the kind of decibel level where all your internal organs vibrate it’s a bit too much. It used to amuse me when I saw the guys at Notting Hill Carnival photographing with ear-muffs on, but it makes more sense to me now.

Both the UAF and LMHR are widely regarded as being closely linked to the Socialist Workers Party (SWP)  although both draw support from a wider range of people – and get funding from bodies such as the TUC which the SWP itself would not.  Many left-wing activists are SWP members and without the effort they put into organising things we would have far fewer demonstrations and they would be considerably smaller. Many of the more active members of Stop The War are also from the SWP.  I don’t suggest anything sinister here, it is simply a matter of fact and generally strongly evidenced by the number of people offering SWP petition forms and publications at demonstrations.

But it is bad news for photographers, as these organisations all share a style of stewarding that makes our job difficult. There is an obsession with control which seems to be central to the SWP mentality (and one reason why I’ll never join them.) Usually it is just a matter of keeping photographers away from the front of marches by surrounding the march with stewards who link arms to create an empty area in front of the banner, making it impossible to get within a reasonable working distance to the front of the march, or indeed to get good pictures of the front of a march from a longer view.

At one Stop The War march the photographers got so annoyed that we staged a sit-down in front of the march on Park Lane until we were allowed a few minutes access.  But it goes further and I’ve several times been assaulted by stewards at such events – although others have been more cooperative and have apologised for the  behaviour of others. During one march from the US embassy I was fortunate to escape serious injury when pushed violently backwards.  It’s not surprising that we sometimes amuse ourselves by making up other meanings for the initials SWP – such as ‘Sod Working Photographers‘.

There was some of that aggressive and obstructive behaviour at this event. One of my colleagues was assaulted and most of us were at times rather frustrated trying to get the pictures we needed. It just isn’t necessary and it certainly is counter-productive. Much larger demonstrations manage without stewards who think they are storm-troopers, and it is obviously in both the protesters and photographers interest to get the best pictures possible.

A little chaos really does work fine and it seldom gets out of hand, as photographers tend to regulate themselves though there are a few who don’t play the game – mainly those with big video cameras, like the guy who several times swung his round rapidly and hit me the other day. And there are those sad individuals who like to try and organise everything and everybody who deserve to be dealt with drastically by the stewards. But most of the time we get along OK, and if they stewards would just stand back and  let us get on with it unless a real problem arose we’d get better pictures without compromising the march in any way.

Fortunately I don’t often spend a lot of time at the front of marches where these things happen. Certainly on this one there didn’t seem to be any ‘celebrities’ who might occasionally need a little protection from a crush of photographers, and almost all the people I found interesting were further back in the march where I could wander around as I liked.  There the atmosphere was much friendlier.

There had been some anticipation that there might be some trouble from members of the English Defence League during the march, but they had the sense to stay away. When we saw this dog, sitting with its owner watching the march go by, most of us probably drew the conclusion both from the St George flag and the appearance of the dog owner that this could have been one of them, but when one of my colleagues asked him he told us he had no sympathy for people who behaved like they do although he was proud to be English. It was a lesson about being careful not to jump to conclusions based on people’s appearance.

For once the weather was good and I remembered to make reasonably sensible settings on my two cameras, and everything worked as it should. It does happen sometimes.

But by the time we got to Millbank, the light was beginning to fade and it was getting harder to work, and even at ISO 3200 people dancing just moved too much to be always sharp, so after another round of speeches I decided it was time to go home. There was actually another problem, which you can see in a few of the pictures on My London Diary  with light from a large TV screen, mainly filled with purple creating a rather unhealthy effect.

But by then I was ready to go home anyway.

 

I’ve just posted my pictures from last Wednesday’s higher education march on My London Diary. The pictures I took tell a very different story from that which filled the news broadcasts and papers on Wednesday evening and throughout the next day or two. But of course most of those who pontificate about it weren’t there, and even those of us who were could only get a partial view. But I’ve talked to a number of others, read eyewitness accounts, watched the videos and seen the photographs taken by others as well.

NUS President Aaron Porter passes Big Ben

The account I just uploaded to my web site – and this story here – both differ in some respects from what I wrote for Demotix on Wednesday night, because of what I’ve heard since from others who were there, but it was clear on the day that many published accounts were frankly sensationalism rather than based on fact. Even today the BBC continues to talk about the ‘storming’ of the building which just isn’t what happened. They are simply telling a lie on behalf of the political establishment and the government.

It wasn’t just the Met who got it wrong for the student protest on Wednesday; the journalists and photographers in particular did as well, which is why the editors and politicians got quite such an easy ride in making up their lies about what happened.

As the march came down Whitehall and we stopped to photograph it going through Parliament Square we’d talked about the possibility of trouble. And although one of the best-known anarchists had earlier told me “There’ll be plenty for you to photograph” I didn’t take the hint, or at least failed to understand it, though I doubt if he knew the details of what would happen.

Sit-down in Parliament Square

I’d thought that the glass-fronted Millbank offices outside which I photographed in May had only been taken over by the Conservatives as their temporary election HQ, and didn’t realise they were still there six months later. Had I known that – and if I was the officer in charge of the policing I would have known it – I might have followed the front of the march down just in case rather than keep on taking pictures in Parliament Square. But probably not, as there had been little indication that there was likely to be anything special to photograph. Certainly there had been no organised bloc that looked like causing trouble – though many obviously angry students – and I’d seen few of those that I’ve photographed at previous events who might be expected to cause trouble. Several photographers commented to me that it didn’t look likely that things would take off.

So I was a little surprised when I heard (thanks to a tweet read by one of the students I was photographing) what was going on. I’d stayed on in Parliament Square as I thought there would be a few things of interest there (and there were) while quite a few of the other photographers had continued down towards Tate Britain, outside which the rally was being held.

But few if any of them were actually there when the first group of students walked into the offices and occupied them – more or less non-violently. There are some people taking pictures on the short and fairly amateur video I’ve seen, but I didn’t recognise any of them as professionals. Rather more of the press were there when the police made their second big mistake, which was to try and forcibly remove the protesters when they had too few officers to do the job sensibly.

The photographers who were there at that point tell me that there was a great deal of indiscriminate violence by the police, much of it against protesters offering no resistance – and some photographers also have the bruises from the batons and riot shields to prove it. The said the effect of this attack was to enrage many of those who until then had been onlookers and produce an angry mob, which was the start the real battle that took place, with the breaking of windows and a fair amount of indiscriminate violence, in a second wave of occupation.  Had the police reacted more calmly and sensibly, waiting until they had the resources to properly protect the building there might have been only minimal damage.

By the time I heard about what was going on it hardly seemed worth rushing to get there  – I thought I would have missed everything. So I continued taking pictures for quite a while around Parliament, and then decided to make my way home by a route that took me along Millbank.

I ignored the NUS/UCU stewards who where by this time turning away protesters coming down Millbank at the Lambeth Bridge roundabout, telling people that the protest was all over and walked down towards the Millbank Tower. As I arrived a group of riot police got out of several vans and ran past me and into the crowded area; I tried to follow them but soon found my way blocked by a crowd of onlookers, so I went back and round into the courtyard which was slightly less packed with people, some standing around a couple of small fires.

Not a riot!

Over their heads I could see a line of riot police facing the crowd with a small gap between. I pushed through the crowd and eventually got to the front and found myself with a number of other photographers, most of whom I knew, taking pictures.

By that time there wasn’t a great deal happening, and the police were adopting a low-key policy, at least outside the building, forming a line to prevent any further ingress. A few people in the crowd were still throwing the occasional piece of card or stick towards the police, and a number fell short on the photographers and crowd, and a number of those at the front occasionally shouted at the police. Generally it was almost good-natured – more a game than any serious attack by this time. The police certainly weren’t in any great danger and though a few looked a little stressed, many seemed to be quite enjoying it.

A couple of fire-extinguishers were let off from the crowd, as well as from the roof and I got rather wet, and then covered with powder. Neither healthy for cameras. I wasn’t there when an empty extinguisher was thrown down from the roof, but on the video it’s clear that it caused an immediate angry chant from the crowd below as a stupidly irresponsible act. Someone – and and given the way it was lobbed it could have have been a protester rather than police – could easily have been killed,  was just luck that it missed everyone.

There didn’t seem to be a great deal of point in staying – there were hordes of photographers and videographers there and any pictures I got would be unlikely to add much to the coverage or even get used. Unlike some of the other photographers there I refuse to carry a helmet or hard hat, and this was a situation where I would have been happier with one on. So having taken a few pictures I left and walked across Vauxhall Bridge for a train home.

More detail about the event and more pictures on My London Diary.