Category: Political Issues

In most recent years I’ve managed to attend the annual commemoration for the British volunteers who travelled to Spain to fight against fascism in the Spanish Civil War in 1936-9.  Each year fewer veterans of the war are able to attend, with only seven British veterans still surviving, all in their 90s or older. Although that is a remarkable figure, a third of the known surviving veterans from the Republican side.

Our government refused to act, even making it illegal to send aid to the legitimately elected Spanish Government that was being attacked by Franco,  but over two thousand men and women from Britain, socialists and mainly communists, made their way to support Spain; over 500 dying there.

One veteran whose absence at the ceremony this year was deeply felt was Jack Jones, one of the truly great British figures of the last century as a trade unionist and activist, and former head of the International Brigade Memorial Trust.  Sam Lesser, at 95 one of the younger veterans of the war, gave a moving tribute to his life.

Others who died in the past year were Bob Doyle, Bernard McKenna and Rosaleen Ross. McKenna, who came from a poverty-stricken Irish family in Manchester, had been wounded in two battles, recovering to return to the front and was then captured by the Germans and interrogated by the Gestapo. Unlike most others he was not executed but spent some time in an Italian prisoner of war camp.  He was repatriated in a prisoner exchange in 1938 – and got a bill for repatriation- £4 – from the Foreign Office on his return. It was still unpaid when he died last year.

You can see more pictures from this event at the International Brigade Memorial in Jubillee Gardens on the South Bank,  on My London Diary, as well as some from the events in 2007, 2006 , 2005 and 2004

One of the many not-so-bright ideas that entrepreneurs have come up with to combat climate change is biofuels. Of course there is some scientific basis in this – growing biomass takes carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, and when you use the stuff you’ve grown as fuel it simply returns it, with no net increase. So, on the face of it, biofuels would appear to be carbon neutral.

But of course that’s simplistic, failing to take note of the actual inputs into the process, such as the work involved in tilling the ground, harvesting and processing the crops, producing any chemicals used in growing, pumping water, transporting materials and so on. So while it may be carbon neutral as a part of a local subsistence economy (like bonfires in my back garden) once it becomes part of a global manufacturing process it certainly isn’t.

Even more simplistic is the failure when thinking about biofuel production to take into account the effects of setting up such an industry on the ecology and communities where the industry is established.  There isn’t empty land going spare anywhere on the planet that could be used.

If you want to make a fortune out of biofuels, first you convince governments in the west that they are a good thing. This isn’t as hard as it ought to be, because too many are clutching at any straw(!)  that seems to be a technical fix for the climate that is better short-term than taking effective action. So we have an EU directive that says governments have to increase the amount of biofuel use.

Next you find a warm country with a corrupt government and large areas that could be suitably productive – perhaps at the moment covered by tropical rainforest, which is of course doing an important bit for the climate, but nothing for your profits.  A little promise of profits to those in government for making lax laws that allow you to steal land from its traditional users with a minimum of compensation (which of course nobody is going to bother to enforce you to provide) and you are in business.

A business that means grubbing up and probably wastefully burning forests to plant your monoculture biofuel crop, destroying species and habitat, forcing the inhabitants to scraping a living in  marginal areas.  Taking over land that once grew crops to feed local people- but will now be dedicated to keeping the cars of the rich world running.

One country where biofuel production is having disastrous effects is Indonesia. Species such as the Sumatra tiger and the orangutan are disappearing fast and the people who used to live in areas taken over for agrofuels have lost their ancestral lands and their livelihood.

So the Climate Rush came to Mayfair, some dressed as usual as suffragettes, one as an orangutan – and quite a few smaller orangutans came as well –  to protest outside the hotel where a gala dinner for delegates at the World Agri Invest Congress was taking place. The protesters brought there own jazz band to hold their own ‘Gala Dinner and Dance‘ in the street outside.

Police fail to convince Tamsin Omond that being penned in would be a good idea

For most of the evening it was a well-behaved protest and police too were on their best behaviour, even when the protesters insisted on dancing on the road rather than in the pen the police had provided.  It wouldn’t have been a Climate Rush without an attempt to charge the doorway of the hotel, but although there was a little pushing and shoving, things didn’t really get greatly out of hand.

Back in the ’60s, a friend of mine was in court following a demonstration, charged with grievous bodily harm for having hit a policeman.  At some point in his cross-examination he was asked about the level of violence at the time, and replied that it seemed to him rather similar to that in a game of rugby. At which the judge sat up straight, turned towards him and and said “Ah, so you play rugger do you?” and we all realised he was going to be acquitted.

But last Wednesday I took my eye off the ball for a few seconds, and when the ‘rush’ started I was ten yards behind and couldn’t quite make it in front of the rushers, although I was moving considerably faster.  It had been a longish event and I’d lost concentration – and should have spotted the signs – and have set my camera to a higher ISO as the light was fading slightly. I did get some pictures, but too many were blurred, and I went home thinking I could have done better.

Oh yes, Michael Jackson came along as well – pictures and more on the event on My London Diary.

The Home Office Building in Marsham St in Westminster is perhaps the only government building in London from the past 50 years of any real architectural interest – quite a contrast from the boring blandness of those blocks on Victoria St or the terribly twee pipes of Portcullis House. It’s also a building that creates its own environment, and on hot days the water and the grass make it some kind of an oasis in Central London.

The light too is often luxurious, a kind of glow combined with the dappled sunlight that produce such a sheer pleasure that I sometimes find it hard to concentrate on making images.

It’s hard perhaps to reconcile this meliorating atmosphere surrounding the building with the inhumane starkness of some of the actions decided on inside, in particular over the hounding of migrants in this country and the decisions that are made and the evasion of justice that occurs, allowing – if not organising – pre-dawn raids in which doors are kicked down, people rounded up, forced onto planes and sent back, often to countries they have fled because of persecution, and where they may well face imprisonment, torture and even death.

Of course in theory this doesn’t happen, but too often it does in practice, with too many politicians and officials who just don’t care – or are frankly racist in their assumptions and actions.

It’s a building no one with a conscience can look at without feeling shame, and embodying the strange and awful paradox that those who are responsible for making and applying the laws often choose to ignore and short-cut them.

Cleaners at SOAS, School of Oriental and African Studies of the University of London, are largely migrants from Latin America.  Lime most places, SOAS outsources its cleaning to save money. And as is always the case this means that these cleaners are employed under conditions SOAS would not contemplate for its own staff. Outsourcing is only ever cheaper because the workers are exploited; it’s a tighter screw which gives them less for doing more, adds a profit for the shareholders and delivers the contract at a price that an ethical organisation couldn’t match. If we ever get a socialist government in this country it’s a practice they would make illegal – just as we’ve outlawed practices like sending children up chimneys.

Recently, cleaners in London have been getting organised, with the help of the trade unions and others, and demanding a living wage. The cleaners at SOAS had just achieved that, and in retaliation the contract firm employing them brought in the Immigration Police, kitted up in riot gear, to a meeting of cleaning staff at 6.30 am one morning.

The cleaners were detained and questioned without being allowed trade union or legal representation. Not surprisingly there were some who were not carrying papers stating they had a right to work here. Some may have been in this country legally but under our draconian legislation caught by the law that denies them the right to work. None of them were doing anything harmful, all of them were doing useful work, doing a cleaning job with unsociable hours and low pay that no British worker wants to do.

Nine were arrested and taken to Immigration Detention Centres – prisons for people who have not been convicted of any crime. Most of the nine have already been forcibly put on flights back to their native countries, although it is possible that some had a right to remain here, and some have all their friends and families here.

This demonstration was another of those occasions when I felt ashamed of my country and its lack of humanity. But at the same time proud that there are people like those at this demonstration who are fighting for human rights – and such campaigning does sometimes bring results.

One of the speakers was a civil servant and trade unionist, who asked us not to blame the civil servants who are just doing their job. It’s tough, but if your job demands that you are racist or unfair, then you should fight and take the consequences (in the Civil Service probably a transfer of another department.)  It’s a lesson the twentieth century should have taught us.

You can see the pictures on My London Diary.

It’s nice to know that someone at the British Journal of Photography reads Amateur Photographer (interestingly the word ‘Amateur’ in the masthead of their web pages has now shrunk to about 2 point size)  and it was a ‘tweet’ from ‘1854’, that obscurely named BJP blog (of course I know why, but that doesn’t make it any less obscure) that sent me to the AP feature posted yesterday, Photographers a ‘security’ risk, warn 2012 Olympic chiefs. Not the snappiest of headlines (sorry!)

Like many of us, Dr Patrick Green is taking photographs around the Olympic site as it develops (I started in 1983, but that’s another story.)  And he was trying out  his new Olympus E-30 DSLR at Dorset Place, just off the Leyton Rd on the east boundary of the site a couple of weeks ago around 4pm on Sunday 14 June.

His picture in the AP shows a security guard standing next to a secuirty barrier witht he Olympic site in the background.  Dr Green says he was told that that photography was forbidden and one of the guards “threatened to call more security who he said ‘would come with dogs’.”

Dr Green apparently got to see a “security manager” who told him that his pictures posed a ‘security risk’ – terrorists might use the images to plot an attack if they were posted on the internet. And while an ODA spokeswoman stated “Filming and photography of the site from public highways and areas around the Olympic Park is permitted,” she also made it clear that anyone appearing to take a particular interest in security operations was likely to be talked to by the security guards.

While this event appears to be yet another example of paranoia about photography – and yet another skirmish in that long-running battle between security men and photographers, so far I’ve yet to have a real problem with security in taking hundreds if not thousands of pictures since the blue fence went up around the Olympic site.  One of the men putting up that fence did ask me why I was taking pictures – and so I told him, and although I don’t think he could be described as satisfied, that was the end of the matter. Other times I’ve seen security men looking at me and my gear, but so far I’ve not been asked about my pictures. And once or twice people from the ODA I’ve met have even been friendly.

I don’t think I’ve photographed in Dorset Place, a short street with not much of a view, though I have taken pictures from the next street off Leyton Road, Thornham Grove, and this is from just down the road:

These buildings are mainly for the shopping centre. Here’s one taken last Saturday from half a mile or so away looking towards the Olympic stadium. I’ll put a few more on My London Diary later.

Stratford Station and the Olympic Site

Although I can’t claim a High Court judge’s knowledge of Michael Jackson, he was never more than a vague figure to me, and I find today’s hype ridiculous. The 20th century produced plenty of musical geniuses – Charlie Parker would be my nomination for the No 1 spot – with Jackson not even in the running so far as I’m concerned. With music videos and MTV culture Jackson seems more a symptom of the breakdown of our civilisation than anything positive.

A Michael Jackson fan at Soho protest against Sony, June 2002

Not that I personally wished him any harm. I had a great deal of sympathy for the way he was hounded by the press, and certainly wouldn’t wish a heart attack on anyone –  having been fortunate enough to recover from one.

But he was one of the very few celebrities I’ve photographed – it happened by accident, as I was on my way to photograph a demonstration against the use of sweated labour – ‘Give Nike A Red Card’ – at Oxford Circus in June 2002, saw a TV crew running, and followed them.

Fans were demonstrating against Sony failing to support Jackson’s latest record, and I took a few pictures of them – and eventually put a couple on what was then my new web site, My London Diary – halfway down this page. I hung on taking pictures for a bit and then an open-top bus appeared and the fans broke out from behind the barriers and surged around it. Jackson appeared with a large placard, ‘Sony is Phoney’ and a puppet, and pretended he was going to climb down into the sea of fans.

I was shooting with a Leica and probably my normal 35mm lens, rather more interested in the fans’ responses than Jackson himself who appears rather small on the few images I took (and I’ve cropped the two above for the web so he is more visible.)

And when I got the the end of the roll it didn’t seem worth loading another  – so I went off to photograph ‘No Sweat’, who after their demo at Oxford Circus set off kicking a football and marching down Oxford St.

It was an interesting day and ended with what was I think the first of a number of curious encounters I’ve had with the Met. After I’d followed the demonstrators to somewhere opposite Selfridges – and by then the police had pushed them onto the pavement – an officer came up to me and very politely said – with a curious little smirk “I think you’ve taken enough pictures now, don’t you Sir?”

On Saturday 6 June, a group of activists occupied a site next to Kew Bridge that had been empty for more than 20 years, intending to develop it as a community resource. The action was very much inspired by the 1996 ‘The Land is Ours’ action in Wandsworth, where a site owned by Guinness was occupied for five and a half months before the eviction.

Land is a scarce resource, particularly in urban areas, and land rights campaigners argue that it should be used for the good of all, not simply for the profits of landowners. Local communities should have a much greater role in planning, and where owners fail to live up to their obligations to use land responsibly they should lose their rights. Legally UK local autorities have quite extensive powers to “remedy the condition of land”, including the issue of notices under Section 215 of the Town and Country Planning Act, 1990 and compulsory purchase, but seldom make use of them.

The site at Kew Bridge has been derelict for over 20 years, being simply used by its owners as an appreciating asset as land prices have risen. LB Hounslow has failed to take effective action. A year or two ago the current owners submitted a very extensive mixed development for planning permission which was rejected and are making a further submission which Hounslow are in process of approving.  It seems astonishing that while the rejected proposal included affordable housing, there is none at all in the latest proposal. However the current fall in housing prices probably makes imminent development unlikely even if permission is granted.

The site appears to have been left to grow wild by its owners, with some dumping of materials in parts of it. The large fence around its perimeter creates an empty eyesore in an extremely desirable and visible riverside site, next to Kew Bridge, part of London’s South Circular Road. The site is also a few yards from a railway station and on several bus routes, and not far from the Great West Road and M4.

The occupiers intend to use the site productively, growing vegetables and providing workshops and meeting spaces for the local community. Local people have brought materials for building and plants and helped in clearing the site and constructing some simple buildings on it. The site welcomes visitors warmly but wants to be a good neighbour and  has banned amplified music and enforces a strict policy against alcohol or drugs on the site.

Last weekend the Eco Village/Brentford Community Garden had a solstice open weekend with activities including face painting, music, picnic area and children’s workshops, and I dropped in at the end of the day to take some pictures. Already the site has been considerably improved.

More pictures from the Kew Bridge Eco Village on My London Diary

Organisers the British Tamil Formum estimate that  100,000 Tamils marched through London today from Hyde Park to Temple Place, calling for justice in Sri Lanka and a separate Tamil state there. The march was led by a group of ‘detainees’ in a barbed wire prison camp to dramatise the terrible conditions of civilians held in internment camps and demanded their immediate release as well as full UN access to the camps.

Some also carried photographs of their relatives who have been killed or who have disappeared and demanded that the Sri Lankan government and army be tried for war crimes, as well as calling for economic sanctions, an arms embargo and the suspensiotn of Sri Lanka from the Commonwealth.

Some in the demonstration carried black flags, but many showed their support for the banned LTTE (Tamil Tigers) with flags and t-shirts.

The march was certainly more than 2 km long, as when I was with the head of it in Trafalgar Square a police officer I was standing beside received a message saying that it was still coming out of Park Lane. The front was moving slowly (it isn’t easy to walk with a concentration camp) and the people behind were generally fairly tightly packed across the whole eastbound carriageway of Picadilly and down Lower Regent St, so I think that the BBC figure of 20,000 was probably a considerable under-estimate. By the time I went home just after 4pm, crowds were still streaming past onto the Victoria Embankment.

More pictures on My London Diary.

As a part of Refugee Week, London Amnesty Local Groups  and others including the Refugee Council organised ‘Still Human – Still Here‘,  a march starting at Cleopatra’s Needle on the Embankment to a rally in Trafalgar Square. As well as marchers with placards and banners, there were a number of large puppets depicting refugees from different countries.

Among the other groups taking part in the march were the London Detainee Support Group ‘Detained Lives‘, Refugee Action, members of the ‘Let Them Work‘ campaign, supported by Student Action for Refugees (STAR), Refugee Council, TUC, Brighter Futures, Barnardos, and Still Human Still Here,
Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! and the Gay Activists Alliance International.

The UK’s treatment of asylum seekers is often inhumane and seems driven more by a desire to look tougher than the right wing on immigration than any sensible response to the issue. A report by the Independent Asylum Commission last year stated that our treatment of asylum seekers “falls seriously below the standards of civilised society“. In particular, as many including MP Iain Duncan Smith have commented, “the policy of making asylum seekers destitute is mean and nasty and has not worked.”

Many of those who come here have skills that would contribute to our society – and are keen to do so. One placard pointed out that there are over 1100 medically qualified refugees on the BMA database. Others emphasized the considerable contribution made by famous refugees, both historical, such as Isambard Kingdom Brunel, and more recent refugees including Rashmi Thakrar, the founder of Tilda Rice, the first company to bring Basmati rice to the West, who arrived in Britain in 1972 when Idi Amin expelled Ugandan Asians.

Allowing refugees to work would also reduce dependence on public funds and avoid the degrading hardship faced by those who are forced to depend on charity and handouts. It makes sense in every respect, but to do so might leave Labour exposed to attacks from the ultra-right. Labour are running scared of the BNP.

Stopping locking up asylum seekers and would-be migrants in immigration detention centres when they have committed no crime would save considerable public expenditure and avoid the current denial of justice when many of them are unable to have access to advice and legal support. The detention centres – run by private companies to maximise profits at the expense of the detainees – have been repeatedly condemned for their mistreatment of those in their care.

Our treatment of refugees is a disgrace, and New Labour’s record in this area is sickening. There really is something gravely wrong with the priorities of British media (and perhaps the British people) when so little is made of this and other major issues and so much of the relatively minor expenses fiddles by our politicians.

More pictures on My London Diary.

Thursday I was splashed down the back with Gordon Brown’s blood. It was a clean shirt, and a new one or else I wouldn’t have minded. It’s soaking in cold water now and I just hope it will all rinse out.

Brown himself was in a sorry state. I’d watched his head torn off and his limbs dismembered, and now the zombies were trying to eat the revolting bloody mess from inside his torso. The dummy (it is really was a dummy, not just a figure of speech about our revered leader) was in pretty poor shape, rather like New Labour, outside whose HQ on Victoria Street we were. Even the best efforts of the zombies to bring him back to life were fruitless.

At the megaphone, Professor Chris Knight was calling for New Labour to go, and for a new Labour Party to return to socialist values, starting with the re-adoption of Clause 4:

“To secure for the workers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry and the most equitable distribution thereof that may be possible upon the basis of the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange, and the best obtainable system of popular administration and control of each industry or service.”

Around Knight’s neck was a placard with a simple solution for a current problem: “No Redundancies – we’ll nationalize the Lot!”

Membership cards for the real The Labour Party were handed out, signed by the new General Secretary, Chris Knight, who led the small assembled crowd in ‘The Red Flag’, and unlike most party conference delegates he actually knew the words.

The meeting was then addressed the Political Commissar for Zombie Wrangling of the Government of the Dead, one V I Lenin, who carried a poster misquoting himself from 1918, “I want to support the ‘New’ Labour Party in the same way as the rope supports the hanged man“, complete with a small gibbet and hanging skeleton.

A police community support officer had come and talked to the demonstrators and had moved away after declining to join the party and asking them not to stay for more than half an hour and to tidy up after them. The New Labour offices are in the area where permission is required for demonstrations, but this piece of street theatre probably qualified as a ‘media event’, for which apparently permission is not needed. It’s a fine distinction, but one that saves considerable police time.

The event was also watched by a couple of rather low-key security men from the New Labour offices, one taking photos. The only slight unpleasantness was when a man going into the offices barged angrily through the people standing around watching, and then came back to threaten one of the photographers who had protested at his rudeness. He withdrew when a number of people – including the security men – came up to him and quickly guided him inside. From his attitude I thought he might be from the No 10 Press Office, but his language was insufficiently colourful.

More pictures on My London Diary