Political Issues | >Re-PHOTO

Sam Lesser 1915-2010

In the print edition of The Guardian on Saturday I read with sadness of the death of Sam Lesser, one of the few remaining veterans of the International Brigade that fought against fascism in Spain. It was a very short note and I hope they will publish a proper obituary at some point. Spain was important, not just for the left but for all of us, and the Sam Lesser was one of the more than 30,000 volunteers who went to fight for freedom – and around a third of them gave their lives there. He survived and continued through his life to follow his beliefs and work towards a better world.

I’d photographed him a number of times, and was impressed by his speeches, although I wasn’t present at the Spanish Embassy last year where along with the other seven then surviving British and Irish volunteers he was at last honoured by the Spanish Government by being made a Spanish citizen. According to the Morning Star obituary, his “emotional anti-fascist speech” in “fluent Spanish” on that occasion reduced some of the embassy staff to tears. Characteristically it linked the struggles of his youth to the current day fight against fascism here and the rise of the BNP.

Lesser took part in the fierce fighting at the University of Madrid shortly after arriving in Spain in 1936 which killed 24 of the first 30 British volunteers, but was wounded in a battle in January 1937. Hit by bullets from both sides, he was left overnight dying on the battlefield but saved by a comrade who insisted on going back to look for him the following day). After a period in a Spanish hospital he was sent back to England for treatment. He returned to Spain hoping to fight again but failed his medical and instead made radio broadcasts for the Republicans and worked as a journalist for the Daily Worker, escaping to France as the Republicans were finally defeated. You can read more in an interview with Angeles Rodenas which the Socialist Worker published four years ago, and you can hear him speaking in English as a part of the programme ‘Witness‘ broadcast on the World Service of the BBC.

During the Second World War he was again turned down for military service because of his wounds and he worked as an inspector in an aircraft factory. After the war he returned to journalism with the Daily Worker, the communist party newspaper, which sent him to many scenes of post-war conflicts. His experiences working in the Soviet Union and reporting on the Soviet invasions to crush the popular movements in Hungary and Czechoslovakia destroyed his faith in communism and he moved increasingly towards social democracy, even becoming a strong supporter of New Labour.

Lesser, who worked as a journalist under the name of Sam Russell, was in Cuba for the missile crisis, and spent a night with Che Guevara at the height of it (his interview was heavily censored by the Daily Worker, removing all Che’s more controversial war-like rhetoric) and he also reported for them on the Vietnam war. As a student I read many of his reports in the Morning Star (the Daily Worker was relaunched under this title in 1966), which often presented a rather more accurate overview of events at a time when much of the media was over-saturated by cold war rhetoric and US propaganda.

The Morning Star obituary also tells the story of his visit to Chile in 1973, where he arrived for a fraternal visit the day before the CIA-backed coup and was woken up early the following morning by the gunfire. His fluent Spanish (he learnt it while in a Spanish hospital bed) enabled him to pose as a Spanish engineer and move into the Santiago Hilton, later relaying his report to the Morning Star, where it made the front page with the headline “I Saw Democracy Murdered.”

Sam Lesser was a founder of the International Brigade Memorial Trust which holds an annual commemoration every July at the memorial in Jubilee Gardens on the South Bank, at which the pictures here were taken. In 2009 he gave a spirited address there in front of the Spanish Ambassador, a month after he and the other veterans had been given their Spanish passports.

Excalibur!

On Thursday I got on my bike and cycled from Waterloo Station to the Excalibur Estate at Downham in Catford, whose streets are named after knights of the Arthurian Round Table. This is the only large example remaining of a number of prefab estates constructed as the Second World War ended for returning soldiers and their family. Although intended as temporary dwellings, they were basically well-made and equipped with all mod cons including fitted kitchens, refrigerators, built-in cupboards and heated towel rails.

For many years now, Lewisham Council has left the maintenance of these bungalows to the residents, and a few of them, along with rather more who have bought their homes, have made a real effort to keep them in good order.

Where tenants or owners – past or present – haven’t taken over the council’s responsibilities, these homes are in often in very poor condition. So bad that when residents move or die, they are no longer re-let, but allowed to become derelict.

As you can hear on a slide show at The Guardian, for the first residents who moved to these properties were impressed by the standard of the accommodation they offered, and the standards set by the Ministry of Works were high- more modern properties are built to rather meaner specifications. The minimum floor area was 635 square feet, though I think these are a little larger, and some have now been extended. Although they were meant to cost £500 each, the actual cost of these was, made by the Selection Engineering Company Ltd was well over a thousand pounds – some things don’t change.

One of the designers of the kitchens in the ‘service units’ – kitchen and bathroom – was the Czech industrial designer George Fejer who worked on them from 1943, and later was one of the team that worked at Hygena creating the British style of fitted kitchen.

The UniSeco design – and around 29,000 were built – was perhaps the most innovative of all the various prefab designs built, with a distinctive modernist look, for example in the joined corner windows and the almost flat roofs.

The Excalibur estate, with 187 UniSeco Mark II or Mark III units and a prefabricated church – St Marks Downham – and church hall was assembled by German and Italian prisoners of war in 1945-6 on an area of public open space for the neighbouring Downham estate – with the promise that after the 10 or so years these temporary buildings were to last it would be returned as open space. For some years Lewisham council have wanted to demolish the lot and build new social housing on the entire site.

It is the only large prefab estate remaining, and residents and others pressed for its preservation and listing. English Heritage had advised the listing of 21 of the units, which would have enabled something of the character of the estate to be retained if on a much smaller scale. The Department for Culture Media and Sport reduced this to six; four Mark IIs and two Mark IIIs, which although retaining these individual buildings will loose any real sense of the estate, although those chosen are a compact group and were selected because they were relatively unaltered – while some others have undergone considerable ‘modernisation.’ It still is not clear whether or not the church will be retained, though in any case it is of rather less interest.

One of the problems of renovating prefabs of this type is the large amount of asbestos sheeting and cement used in their construction, covering the timber and plywood frame.

I first came across and photographed the estate while walking the Greenwich meridian around 15 years ago – it runs through the middle of the estate – and was impressed by the feeling of openness and space. As some of the residents say, living there is the nearest thing to living in a village you can have in London, and some have made their homes look rather like country cottages, surrounded by flowers. Many have lived there for a very long time.

© 2010, Peter Marshall
One of the residents who doesn’t want to move – the sign says he’ll take the council to court
Others on the estate want to get out and live in something more modern and better maintained, and there appear to be two fairly well defined camps. Lewisham, having promised for several years to consult residents finally organised a vote this year, and the results, announced in August were 114 votes for demolition and regeneration with 89 against, with 21 of those entitled to vote not doing so.

Although the time-scale isn’t clear, the council are going ahead with the scheme which involves transfer to a housing association who will carry out the redevelopment. Current tenants who want to move back to the new estate when it is completed will be allowed to do so.

But I wouldn’t leave it too long if you want to visit the last example of one of our more interesting attempts at providing low-cost housing.

74 Years Since Cable Street

Grey though my beard is getting, I wasn’t at Cable St in 1936, but four years ago I was there for the celebration of the 70th anniversary of the Battle of Cable Street, which I described as:

“a joyous event, celebrating an important grass-roots victory for the labour movement, when the people of the east end stood up and took action, largely against the orders and advice of the organised Jewish and socialist leadership.

it was a real peoples movement when workers from London’s east end fought the police at Gardiner’s Corner and barricaded cable street to stop Mosley’s fascist black-shirts marching through their area.

(I’ve made a few minor corrections to the lower case original version.)

The festival started on Cable Street itself, and then those taking part came into the gardens where it was to continue for the rest of the day, coming past the splendid mural about the event. I’d decided to try to catch the group holding the letters making up the slogan ‘They Shall Not Pass‘ in front of it, and just about managed to do so, though the exposure wasn’t quite correct.

It was something that there was really no time to do, and of course I don’t believe in posing such things, so it was a minor miracle that it came out. It’s also an example of a file that I could I’m sure process rather better from the RAW file now compared to the rush job I did for the web in 2006. I’ve improved it a little working from a larger jpeg and added my copyright watermark for this post. But I get the feeling that I could get an improved result with Lightroom 3 on the original file. RAW software really has improved in the last 4 years.

I try not to pose portraits either, although I did ask some of those who had been there in 1936 to stand in front of the mural for me, and moved myself to get them looking in the direction I wanted. Of course by this time there where other photographers also taking pictures of them. But I hope this picture expresses a little of the kind of spirit of those who stood up and stopped the fascists.

There were of course plenty of reminders that it is a battle that still needs to be fought – and at times on the street as well as elsewhere.

More of my pictures from 2006 on My London Diary, and you can read a number of eye-witness reports on the web, though not I think one by the man I talked to and suggested he write his story. One I like was written in 2005 by NUJ member Reg Weston.

Undesired: India’s Dying Daughters

Thanks to duckrabbit for the information about the short (12 minutes) film ‘Undesired‘ by MediaStorm with photojournalist Walter Astrada you can watch on MediaStorm. Don’t miss watching the epilogue – linked on the page as ‘Part II: More from the photographer‘ which includes some of Astrada’s powerful still photography as he talks about what he found. ‘Undesired‘ is a powerful and moving film that makes the scandalous situation that most of us were probably at least vaguely aware about real in a very direct way.

Don’t miss watching the epilogue – linked on the page as ‘Part II: More from the photographer‘ which includes more of Astrada’s powerful still photography as he talks about what he found.

The film tells the story of some of the 40 million girls ‘missing’ in India through abortion, neglect and murder. You can also read more on MediaStorm in the feature ‘Mothers of A Hundred Sons: India’s Dying Daughters‘ by Shreeya Sinha, who was Associate Producer for the film, and made the interviews and some of the video, illustrated by pictures by Astrada, as well as elsewhere in a article by Swami Agnivesh, Rama Mani and Angelika Köster-Lossack published in 2005 by the New York Times and a story last year in The Guardian by Ciara Leeming.

Astrada‘s work on his Violence For Women project is also covered in an article in the on-line BJP by Olivier Laurent, who met him when he was showing his work at Visa Pour l’Image in Perpignan. Surprisingly I don’t think this has appeared in the print version, nor for that matter has anything else from Perpignan. Perhaps because BJP is now a monthly publication, and Visa Pour l’Image took place at the start of September, shortly after the September issue this and their other reports from Perpignan was old news by the time the October print issue came out.

It’s a reflection of the magazine’s changed priorities that I could find nothing in that issue about Visa Pour l’Image, nor, for that matter about the largest photo event taking place in the UK at the moment, the East London Photography Festival, Photomonth 2010. In fact I’m finding it increasingly hard to see any justification at all for the print magazine, though of course it is difficult to survive just on the basis of web advertising (though About.com, who I wrote about photography with for almost 8 years managed it.)

You can see more of Astrada‘s work on the photographer’s own web site, including images from previous work about violence against women in Guatamela and the Congo. A former Agence France Press photographer he is now represented by Reportage by Getty Images.

A Busy Day (Part 2)

The minimum wage in the UK has just gone up – from today it is £5.93 an hour for adult (over 21) workers, an extra 13p. Of course it isn’t enough to live on in London, where there is a strong campaign for a London Living Wage, (LLW) established by the Greater London Authority, which was raised earlier in the year to £7.85 per hour.

Groups including ‘London Citizens‘ have led a powerful campaign (I photographed their launch in 1976 and a number of their actions since, for example here and here as well as their big marches and demonstration) , particularly in the City of London, to get employers to both pay the LLW and improve working conditions. It’s in the City that we get some of the most blatant examples of inequality – with the same offices being worked in during the day by bankers getting million pound bonuses and cleaned at night by people being paid less than enough to live on.

Trade unions have played a part in these campaigns, though it often seems to be much more driven by local branches and activists than real support from the centre – except in the case of the RML. And on Saturday the Tube Union branch of the RML called for a demonstration outside the London headquarters of Initial Rentokil who they allege is making use of irregularities in the immigration status of many of London’s lowest paid workers to bully and intimidate its workforce. Workers who complain about unsafe working conditions and try to organise their workmates to stand up for their rights have been reported to the immigration authorities who have then carried out ‘dawn raids’ on workplaces.

The companies who employ these workers break the law by turning a blind eye at sometimes doubtful paperwork (or lack of it) and London would soon grind to a halt without the essential work carried out by its estimated 400,000 improperly undocumented workers, many of whom have lived and worked here for many years (the Conservative Mayor of London has actually given his support to considering an immigration amnesty for the majority of them.) Because of their status, many of these workers do not want to bring attention to themselves by demonstrating in public, so this protest was by a group of trade unionists and workers rights activists.

Freelances of course are not covered by any minimum or living wage, and many of us work long hours with very little financial return. There were three NUJ members covering the protest. My story and pictures appeared on Demotix, and are unlikely to result in any income. You can see them rather better on My London Diary.

Earlier in the day, while stuck in traffic on the top floor of a double decker I’d had a slightly mystifying photographic moment while taking this picture.

One third in from the left edge is a woman in a yellow coat, and looking from my seat all of her head was clearly visible, while when I looked through the camera she was partly obscured by the frame between the bus windows. I moved back as far as I could in my seat and she was still obscured, and for just a few moments I couldn’t understand why.

Then I looked at the lens I was using, the Nikon 16-35mm f4 on a D700 body. Despite the short focal length I was using (it was taken at 19mm) the lens actually sticks out so its front element is around 8 inches in front of my eye. Without going into any optical theory I think that means that it is actually viewing the scene from around that distance less 19mm – still over 7 inches – in front of my eye. So or the camera to see exactly from my viewpoint I need to move back that 7 inches. Which in this case would have meant being in the seat behind. So I didn’t quite get the picture I wanted.

From Old St it was a short ride on the 243 to Haggerston, where there are considerable changes taking place with the regeneration of the Haggerston West and Kingsland estates. Its a process that (seen as an outsider) seems to have learnt something at least from the great mistakes of earlier years and the kind of fight that I was personally involved with in Manchester in the 1960s with the Moss Side Housing Action Group, one of the pioneers in this country both of the use of direct action over redevelopment and the involvement of the local population through ‘planning for real’ participatory events.

What is probably London’s largest photographic show, along the length of a large block of 1930s council flats (and I think around the side too) facing the canal expresses the importance of people in planning, with its huge portraits of former residents covering the windows of empty flats. The portraits are photographically straightforward head shots – some, apart from size would fit the requirements for a passport – and I think some have possibly faded rather (or were badly printed to start with – certainly some images on the web are better .) But ‘I Am Here’, initiated by residents of Samuel House and produced by Fugitive Images, an artist collaboration founded in 2009 by Andrea Luka Zimmerman, Lasse Johansson and Tristan Fennell (information about the regeneration and the project is on the web site) is on an impressive scale. I spent a few minutes working out the best way to show the whole frontage in a single image, and ended up with taking pictures at around 12 pace intervals with the 16-35mm, which I later cropped and combined into a single image in Photoshop.

One of the problems in photographing the artwork (as often) was reflections, with the sun making some of the heads invisible when viewed obliquely. Shooting straight on helped to solve that issue, but not eliminate it entirely. It wasn’t possible for me to get further away and still see the whole of the flats, although students at the new Bridge Academy on the opposite bank of the canal would get a good view.

The Nikon 16-35mm attracted some attention while I was photographic this. A man came up and asked me if he could take a photograph of it, and got out his phone, but the battery was dead. Could I stick around for five minutes he asked, while he ran home to get his camera. I was amused and also wanted to take a few more pictures and said ‘Fine’. So he came running back and took a few pictures, wanting an image of an impressive looking lens to use in a video project he was working on. I’ve had people ask me if they might take my picture many times, but I think this must be the first time anyone has asked to photograph my lens.

As a former teacher, I’ve been appalled by successive government’s education policies which have almost totally ignored all proper educational research and had a profoundly divisive effect on our education system. Academies like these were one of several great follies of the last Labour administration, a continuation of disastrous Conservative policies – and the LibCon alliance will doubtless find a way to further weaken state education.

I have some happier memories of Laburnum St, where the Academy is, and in particular the two Laburnum St parties I photographed in 2006 and 2007, and it was a little sad to walk down it today in its current rather dilapidated state. But at the end of the street the minaret of the Suleymaniye Mosque on Kingsland Road lifted my spirits a little as I walked to the bus stop.

But later as I sat on the 243 we passed the former Foundry pub, and I felt sadder again at the loss of a vital resource where I’ve attended several interesting shows over the years. I read the advert across its frontage and completed a literal translation ‘I don’t know what’ with ‘we are coming to’ and the guy on the phone at left seemed rather to be scratching his head.

There are more of the pictures from Haggerston (and elsewhere) on My London Diary.

A Busy Day (Part 1)

Last Saturday I had a busy day in London, starting outside the French Embassy:

I wasn’t sure how welcome male photographers would be at an all-women demonstration, but although one or two women turned away or hid behind their placards when they saw I was taking their pictures there were no problems.

More pictures of this demonstration by Hizb ut-Tahrir against the French decision to make wearing full-face masks on the street an offence – and some of my thoughts about it – on My London Diary.

As I left I walked back and got on a bus to get another view of the protest, and found myself stuck in a traffic jam. Unfortunately having moved very slowly until reaching the protest, the bus then moved past it fairly rapidly, giving me little chance to take pictures – and none were worth using. It didn’t help that half of the protest was taking place below some scaffolding. Of course the bus got stuck in traffic again before the next stop, but fortunately the driver let me off through the front door and I hurried along to take the tube to Covent Garden. I like travelling by bus – particularly on double deckers where you get such a good view from the top deck – but the slightest problem can lead to long hold ups, and in central London at least the tube is often much quicker and generally more reliable.

Outside the Ahava shop on Monmouth St, close to Seven Dails, there were two demonstrations taking place. Ahava sells beauty products produced by Israeli settlers in the illegally occupied West Bank. Supporters of the Palestinian cause call for the government to stop the illegal trade and for people to boycott the shop, while the Zionist Federation and the right wing English Defence League were opposing the boycott – and handing out leaflets which compared those calling for a boycott to the Nazis.

Although the boycott demonstration was scheduled to take place from 12-2pm, things were pretty quiet when I was there shortly before 2pm and it apparently only really got going around an hour after I had left. More pictures.

A short walk from Covent Garden took me past Aldwych station, which had reopened for a special event as a part of the celebrations of the Blitz, 70 years ago. There were tours (they sold out rapidly) inside the station, where many sheltered from the bombing, and an old London bus parked outside, with a Picture Post advert on its front. Aldwych, a short branch down from Holborn on the Piccadilly line closed as a station years ago, but was kept for staff training and to hire for film use. I took a few pictures inside on a visit there back in 2002. But what really caught my eye was the advert on the front of the bus for ‘Picture Post’, showing two large eyes. Getty Images, now the owners of the Hulton picture collection, organised an exhibition to mark the 50th anniversary of its demise in 2007, and you can see some of the images from it on the ‘Time’ site.

The ‘Life 4 A Life‘ march calling for increasing sentences for murder was gathering at Temple, but one of the groups taking part asked to to go with them and photograph them in front of the Royal Courts of Justice, a short walk away.

Most of those taking part were the families and friends of murder victims, and it was impossible not to feel for their grief. And there were certainly some cases where it seemed that the legal system had failed – as with Danny Barber whose friends are in the picture above.

But in general harsher sentences would not help at all, and have no deterrent effect. We already have a very high prison population and clearly the system isn’t working properly, but rather than keep digging we need to change direction and find ways that work. We need to change the whole way that we police communities – and it isn’t something that can be left to the police. It calls for a cultural shift involving the mass media as well as attitudes throughout society – perhaps something that the ‘Big Society’ should really be about. More pictures

To be continued shortly in Part 2.

UK Customs

I won’t comment on the Brighton show by seven-year-old Carmen Soth (with a little help from her dad, Alec) , because I’ve not seen it. Part of the Brighton Photo Biennial, (BPB) it goes on show at the Brighton Museum & Art Gallery from Oct 2nd – Nov 14th 2010 and you can read rather more about it in The Guardian. I first heard about it on Soth’s Little Brown Mushroom blog, where you can see Carmen’s shooting list.

Soth came to the UK around the end of March this year with his family to work on a commission for Brighton, but on arrival was told by an immigration official that as he didn’t have a work visa he could not do so. The official threatened him with immediate deportation, but finally let him stay for a holiday with his family, warning him that if he took any pictures he could get two years in jail.

So he went around with Carmen, who had his digital camera and took the pictures with a little help and advice from Dad. But I guess if she comes back to the UK she’ll be facing those two years banged up in Holloway.

It’s a story that illustrates the mess we are in over immigration, where government and opposition have for years been engaging in a bidding war to see who can look toughest for the right wing press. But it also threatens the right of all journalists to report on events in other countries – or at least on those from other countries to report on what is happening in the UK.

Frankly I’m amazed that neither those running the BPB nor Magnum of which Soth is a member had the right connections to get an incandescent Tessa Jowell on the line from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport and a few heads bashed together at the UK Border Agency, the decision reversed and the official concerned given a rather stiff reprimand.

Practically we now seem to be one of those countries for which you need a second passport that does not mention your profession as a journalist or photographer and which you need to enter as a tourist in order to carry out your job.

Actually I think the show may well be worth a visit. Years ago I gave my son, then around the same age, a cheap plastic ‘Russian’ camera when he would sometimes accompany me taking pictures. I think he produced some more interesting results then than he sometimes does now.

I wrote an article to go with some of his pictures and submitted it to the Amateur Photographer, with some silly title like ‘Easy, Peasy, Shutter Squeezy‘. It was the only piece I sent them that they didn’t publish, the editor telling me that they felt their readers might feel insulted by seeing that a seven-year-old could do better than them.

Pope Protest

I was surprised that over 10,000 people turned out in London on 18 September to protest against the state visit by Pope Benedict. It was obviously a pleasant surprise for the organisers too, and too much for the police to take in. They were reported as saying at a briefing before the event that they expected 2,000 and quite a few people published that as the actual turnout. Too many reports and comments in the press come from people who aren’t actually present at the events they are reporting on.

Photographers have to be there to take pictures. Even when newspapers use stills taken from film or TV coverage, the guys who made those have to be there. To photograph events you have to be in the thick of it, while it’s not unknown for writers to work from a nearby cafe or hotel room.

But many of the events I photograph are good places to be, where people are enjoying themselves, having some fun together while also making a serious point. Quite a few times there were placards that made me laugh, and some were a reminder that humour can be a powerful weapon.

Several of the speakers at the rally had everyone laughing too, though others were starkly serious. And at times I remembered that the women who were speaking about being abused as children were the ones who had managed to survive and flourish despite what they had suffered, and that there were others whose lives are still in a mess many years afterwards.

Most of the speakers were impressive. Richard Dawkins, who so often seems to comes over as a simplistic and blinkered atheist in radio interviews seemed far more impressive when allowed to develop his thoughts without constant questioning an interruption.

Barbara Blaine spoke powerfully in front of a placard with a picture of her as a young girl in her white first communion dress with the message ‘Raped at Age 8’.

You can read my account of the march and also see my set of pictures on My London Diary as always.

As often, when I was photographing the protesters before the march,the light was against me, as they were lining up with the sun behind them, though it was usually possible either to keep it out of frame by choice of angle, or to hide it behind a person or placard, but it made fill flash more or less essential. I’d probably have been using it anyway, usually a stop or more down so it has only a slight effect, but does ensure that people notice me. The first frame I take may often catch them unaware (and sometimes I turn the flash off to take several that way) but generally the flash catches their attention.

I was photographing a group of demonstrators protesting against child abuse by Catholic priests, among them a young woman with a placard ‘Where is the Love’ high above her head. I took several frames of the group, then one of another woman in the group with a placard ‘Your Taxes Paying For His Bigotry’ and then moved towards her, trying to work out if I could make a picture with her head and her placard a couple of feet above. Instead I got this picture:

She pulled down her top more or less immediately but a had time to take a couple of frames before we both more or less collapsed in giggles. I had no time to adjust the camera settings, so although she was very much exposed, the picture was a little underexposed thanks to the light pouring in from the bright sky.

“What was that about?” her friend asked and she wasn’t entirely sure, but she had intended it as a gesture of liberation against the sexual repression of the Pope and the Catholic Church.

I took a few more pictures of the group, and it was one of those later images that I actually used with my story that evening on Demotix, because I felt its message was clearer. Someone said to me later in the day when I told them the story, it would have been great had I been working for ‘The Sun’. But the bare flesh involved here wasn’t the kind of empty and gratuitous nudity which they and the Daily Star parade, but a political gesture.

Congratulations Ed!

I didn’t have a vote in the UK Labour leadership election, despite currently being a member of two trade unions. I’ve never bothered to re-join the party after they threw all of us Labour students out in the sixties (when I suspect the main attraction for me was getting to know Barbara Castle) and I didn’t vote Labour at the last election.

In fact I don’t really think it’s sensible to have politicians at all, not in the way that we do – career politicians like all of the current party leaders and I think all of the candidates for the Labour post. I’m not quite sure how my ideal system would work, but it would certainly involve politicians having had lengthy experience of working in the world before being allowed to run the system.

But over the years I’ve been photographing events I’ve met and photographed quite a few politicians, and there are some I’ve admired and others I certainly wouldn’t trust to run a scout troop let alone a country.

Ed Miliband is one who surprised me last year when he came out from his ministry and argued seriously with protesters outside over the government’s energy policy and the choices he had to make. I wrote about it at the time both here on >Re:PHOTO and with more pictures on My London Diary.

I’ve photographed many protests outside government and company offices over the years, and this is the only occasion I can remember where the guy in charge has actually come out, invited questions, listened to them carefully and tried to answer as best he could, giving them around a quarter of an hour of his time, rather obviously to the dismay of his staff.

I didn’t agree with much of what he said, and he didn’t have real answers to many of the problems, but his attitude impressed me. Had I had a vote, he would have been my first choice.

Agrofuels Protest

I’m sorry not to be at Portland today, for the national protest organised by the Campaign Against Climate Change (CACC) calling for a stop to Government subsidies for Agrofuels and deforestation. The protest is at the proposed site of a new palm-oil burning, agrofuel power station at Portland in Dorset.

Part of the reason for my not being there is simply the cost of transport, as living on the edge of London it wasn’t really feasible to join the coach organised from central London, and going to Weymouth (the nearest station) by train from here seems to be very expensive. But also I’ve got other problems at the moment, as well as there being other events I’d like to cover.

But although I couldn’t make it to Portland, I did cover the issues in a central London protest by CACC last week, when they delivered two boxes of postcards to Energy minister Chris Huhne at the Department of Energy & Climate Change (DECC) in Whitehall.

Chris Huhne himself didn’t appear, though his face mounted on a stick appears in some of my pictures, but there were a few protesters with placards, and arriving at the end of the lunch-time photo-call, a woman in an orang-utan suit.

As well as the lunchtime event, there was also a similar early evening demonstration again outside the DECC with a few speeches, and then later a rather larger meeting with more speakers elsewhere which I didn’t stay in London for.

There were no great problems in taking the photographs, though the lighting was rather uneven, and I think almost everything needed fill flash. I worked the entire press call using the 16-35mm, though at the later rally I needed a longer lens for the speakers and a little light rain didn’t help.

This isn’t as yet a subject the media have found any interest in, and although a press release had gone to all the usual papers and agencies, I was the only photographer to turn up. My story appeared later in the day on Demotix, but wasn’t picked up elsewhere. Even on Demotix, with my usual posts on Facebook and Twitter, the story hasn’t generated a great deal of interests, having only been read so far by around a tenth of the audience who will see this post today. More pictures and text on ‘My London Dairy‘ shortly.

But the article – and this one – is all a part of a long, slow process of building up awareness of the issues. I had to ask to be reminded about ROCs (Renewable Obligations Certificates) which lie behind these subsidies for unacceptable forms of energy production – as well as promoting proper renewable solutions. The ‘Deforestation Certificate‘ shown in some of the pictures perhaps makes things clearer, and other placards drove home the basic message:

Agrofuels drive deforestation drives Climate Change.

As I said to the organisers, to get the media interested needs some kind of stunt (or involving celebrities) and perhaps today’s events at Portland will do something to make it more visible. Just being a vital issue that could seriously challenge our future isn’t enough to make any issue “news.”