Political Issues | >Re-PHOTO

BBC Ban on Humanitarian Appeal

Around 10,000 people attended a demonstration at the BBC building in central London on Saturday 24 Jan, 2009, in protest against the continuing siege of Gaza and to show their contempt at the partisan decision by the BBC not to broadcast the emergency appeal for Gaza. Protesters marched from a rally there to Trafalgar Square.

I woke this morning to hear Tony Benn being interviewed on Radio 4 about the BBC decision not to broadcast the Disasters Emergency Committee emergency appeal for humanitarian aid for Gaza. Taken on the spurious grounds of ‘impartiality’, it is a decision that is clearly partisan, placing the Corporation firmly on the side of the government of Israel and their sick fiction that there is no humanitarian crisis there.

I was delighted to be able to congratulate him on this performance in person as he sat outside Broadcasting House. In the interview he gave the details of the DEC appeal on air (see below), and he told me he had repeated this in BBC TV News interview. He also told me that the whole Today programme studio had been on his side, against the decision taken by the BBC hierarchy.

If you missed his contribution you can hear it again on the BBC web site. He tells people they can make cheques payable to the ‘Disaster Emergency committee Gaza Crisis’ and send them to PO Box 999, London EC3A 3AA, or go to any Post Office and make a payment quoting Freepay Number 1210. You can also go to the DEC web site and make a contribution,

Later the Today programme broadcast Caroline Thomson, one of the BBC bosses attempting to justify the decision. Frankly what she said was appalling and my immediate response was to log on to my computer and send my complaint to the BBC. You can hear her on the Today site, as well as International Development Secretary Douglas Alexander who asked the BBC to think again.

After a short press conference outside Broadcasting House, Tony Benn led others into the BBC building to deliver a letter of protest. Around 20 people entered and then a policeman stood in front of me and prevented me from following them. But they soon came out and moved up the road to where the rally was to take place. Police pushed a number of demonstrators who wanted to continue to demonstrate outside the BBC across the road away from the building, and tempers got a little raised, but there was no real violence.

Speaker after speaker denounced the BBC decision and called on them to change their mind, and there was considerable cheering when it was announced that other broadcasters had decided to run the appeal. Benn in his speech forecast that the pressure on the BBC which was coming from all sections of the community would soon force them to change their mind.

The demonstration had been planned long before the DEC appeal became an issue, and the starting point at Broadcasting House was chosen to draw attention to the lack of honest and unbiased coverage of the Israeli attack on Gaza by the BBC. This was not the fault of the many journalists who – in so far as the Israeli press ban had allowed – had worked as well as they could, but an institutional bias, in part resulting from the same kind of misapplication of the idea of impartiality that led them to the ridiculous decision over the DEC appeal. The demonstrations main aims, also reflected in the speeches at the rally were to call for an end to the blockade of Gaza, for a stop on arms sales to Israel and for the Israeli war criminals to be brought to justice.

The rally overran and the march proceeded to Trafalgar Square directly rather than as had originally been planned going past Downing Street, and shoes were thrown on the road outside the BBC rather than there. A few people were arrested for obstructing the police as the march reached Piccadilly Circus, and stewards halted the march, apparently demanding that those arrested should be released before they went on. But after around ten minutes the march moved on anyway to a final rally at Trafalgar Square. As this got under way I left, walking past many police vans parked around the square and in Whitehall. There had been a very strong police presence throughout.

At home I read the Press Association report of the demonstration. Ridiculously it stated there had been 400 demonstrators at the BBC, and I think this was the figure used in the BBC news I heard at 6pm. On their web site the BBC now says 2,000. The report on Sky quotes a police estimate of 5,000 – which would normally mean there were 10,000 on the march. It would seem that the PA reporter only looked at the few people on the pavement outside the BBC for what was essentially a press conference (the police wouldn’t allow demonstrators to remain there) and ignored – or didn’t notice – the thousands across the road.

More pictures on My London Diary

Gladstone and Matches

I’m not sure why, at least according to the BBC, celebrations for the ‘Grand Old Man’ of Victorian politics, William Ewart Gladstone (29 Dec 1809 19 May 1898) should be launched today, but his was a story linked with Bow, where I went on Sunday for the Three Mills Loop guided walk, which takes place roughly monthly.

The first half of the walk took us from the mills through the centre of the Olympic site on the Northern Outfall Sewer (rebranded in the 1990s as the ‘Greenway’) and then along the Navigation tow-path to Hackney Wick, where we turned down the Hertford Union canal, crossing this to go down Parnell Road. Here, where the walk leader went into the newsagents to buy an ice-cream, we were close to a part of the story linked to Gladstone, although the statue comes later.

Further on we passed Bow’s most famous factory, the former Bryant & May match works, set up by two Quaker businessmen in 1861. It’s a fine brick building, now a gated yuppie ‘village’, but was notorious in the 1880s for its low pay, poor working conditions and “phossy jaw” a disfiguring disease that led to early death for many of the young women workers caused by the white phosphorus used to cut the cost of making matches. It earned its place in labour history when Annie Besant went there and organised the Match Girls’ Strike in 1888, winning better working conditions and more pay.

But it was really the Salvation Army that changed the match industry, with William Booth buying up an empty factory close to that ice-cream shop in Lamprell Street and making ‘Lights in Darkest England‘ safety matches which used the more expensive red phosphorus in place of the cheaper but highly dangerous white allotrope. Booth also paid his workers more and gave them safer and better working conditions – including tea-making facilities. He promoted these matches through the cooperative movement and also with consumer power, harnessed by the ‘British Match Consumers League’ which he set up, urging members to harass their shopkeepers at least twice a week until they sold the army matches.

It was this campaign that forced the other match manufacturers to switch to the safer red phosphorus and in 1901 Booth was able to close the factory having virtually eliminated the problem, although it took another seven years before the use of white phosphorus in matches was made illegal at the end of 1908. And yes, it’s that same material as Israeli forces have been caught using illegally in densely populated areas of Gaza.

In 1871, Gladstone’s chancellor decided to impose a tax on matches, and there was a public outcry. Although the government went as far as actually producing 1/2d tax stamps with the catchy motto “ex luce lucellum” (from light a little gain) pressure from campaigners (including the Queen herself) led to the proposal being dropped. The match workers from Bow took part (urged by their employer who had threated to pass the tax on to them) in a massive march to Parliament, which although described by some as “entirely peaceful” actually involved some massive and brutal brawls with the police in Trafalgar Square and on the Embankment.

After the proposal was dropped, Bryant and May celebrated with the erection of an ornate drinking fountain in 1872 opposite Bow Road Station (it disappeared when the road was widened in 1953, but a small plaque marks the site) but the workers were less happy when the management docked their wages to pay for it. On the day it was unveiled some of the women slashed their arms in protest, dripping the blood onto the fountain.

It was Annie Besant who got this story mixed up with the statue of Gladstone shown here, sculpted by Albert Bruce-Joy and donated by Theodore H Bryant in 1882, and it seems unlikely that workers either had their pay docked or celebrated its erection with their blood. But in 1988, to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the strike, the Gladstone statue was daubed with red paint. After the council cleaned it, someone came back and daubed it again, and you can still see it now on the plinth of the statue and also on the hands in this picture.

There is a good illustrated account covering some of the above and other relevant local history on the Kingsley Hall web site.

More pictures from the walk on My London Diary.

T5 Flashmob

I’m not sure that this is the picture that MP John McDonnell would want to put on his election leaflets, but it did amuse me – and some of his constituents who were there with him at Heathrow’s Terminal 5 to voice their opposition to the expansion of the airport and in particular the building of another runway – the so called ‘third runway’ which will go through their village and mean they are forced out of their homes.

I don’t like airports. I grew up under the flightpath to the main runway (I think in those days it had five runways, but they abandoned some and built a terminal on another) with planes passing over just out of reach, and for a while was a keen aircraft spotter writing down their numbers in my book. They weren’t hard to spot – you needed to look through the wrong end of binoculars to see the whole plane.

Seeing some going over with flames from the engines led to nightmares but fortunately I think it was only in these dreams that I saw and heard them crash. But back in those days of the Brabazon and Comet, aviation was a brave and exciting new frontier and I was caught up in its glamour, thrilling in visits to the airport where my oldest brother worked and I actually got to go in a plane, and later with him to the Fanrborough air show.

But when I grew up I studied science and became interested in the environment, and even over 40 years ago it was obvious that we had to do something about airports and air travel – and now you have to really stick your head in the sand not to believe it.

Last week’s announcement approving the expansion of Heathrow and the building of a third runway from transport minister Geoff Hoon came as a shock – how can any government be so stupid? But the protesters who came to Heathrow’s T5 on Saturday are determined to keep up the campaign to stop it, and it seems more than likely it will never be built.

For the planet’s sake I hope it isn’t.

More pictures on My London Diary, where you can also see pictures from last year’s flashmob at the Department of Transport and march at Heathrow, the 2003 march against the Third Runway and more.

Paranoia or Politics?

I was outside the US Embassy at dusk on Sunday, photographing a protest on the 7th anniversary of the first prisoners being held at Guantanamo – and remembering those who are still there and still being mistreated, including two Londoners.

To remind us, there were two figures in orange jumpsuits standing manacled while the speeches were being made, so of course I went to photograph them, framing them under the watchful eye of the eagle and the stars and stripes on the embassy roof.

Not of course an original idea, and something I’ve done myself before on numerous occasions, so I was rather suprised when a police officer came up to me and told me not to take pictures that included the US embassy, but to restrict my photographs to point my camera away from the building.

I asked why, and the answer of course was “security“. Which is of course total nonsense, but rather a common answer these days. Although it is an impressively ugly building, it has been photographed many times and pictures of it are widely available, and it is hard to see how any picture of it could represent a security risk. Rather easier to see why the US government might not wish it to be associated with such.

But I suppose these days I should think myself lucky not to be searched or arrested for taking photographs – like some others. And things could be much worse. While I was being given a polite warning I was listening to a Muslim man from Walthamstow talking about his experience of spending 18 months in prison for having a rather more impressive beard than mine and liking to go paint-balling. The police called it “military training” but fortunately for him the jury were less paranoid.

More pictures

Hizb ut-Tahrir London March

The British branch of the Islamic movement Hizb ut-Tahrir were also demonstrating in London last weekend over Gaza, but their attention was as much on the corrupt Arab regimes as the Israeli aggressors. They call for an end to the various dynasties and dictatorships set up as western puppets in the Middle East and a return to an Islamic caliphate as established in the early years of Islam.

They also call for the Muslim armies to go to the support of the Palestinian people, and visited the embassies of Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Syria to pour shame on them for colluding with the attacks on fellow Muslims.

As expected, this demonstration was highly organised and kept in order by the stewards and there was really very little need for the police other than to direct traffic.

Gaza – National Demo

I’ve had a busy week doing odd jobs and have got a little behind with putting my work on the web and writing blog posts. Last end was a busy one, and I’m only just catching up with things.

Gaza of course is still very much on all our minds, and on Saturday and Sunday I photographed two very different demonstrations. The first was the huge national demonstration in London on Saturday, when perhaps a hundred thousand marched from Hyde Park to the Israeli Embassy.

Part of the reason why things got rather out of hand around the Israeli embassy has to be the lack of planning by the police for the numbers involved. It’s one thing to issue derisively low estimates of those taking part in marches, but quite another to base the policing on similarly ridiculous figures, and make it physically very difficult for the march to actually get past the likely flashpoint.

When the front of the march reached the southern gates close to the embassy, apparently there were still people leaving the assembly point near Speakers Corner a mile and a half behind, with the mainly wide roads between fairly densely packed with people.

Obviously people would stop – at least for some minutes – close to the embassy, and using barriers to narrow the road there more or less brought the march to a halt. Trouble started both at this point and at the northern entrance to the road containing the embassy, where demonstrators thought the march had been halted by police and started to get angry.

March stewards got angry too, and I was assaulted by several of them while attempting to photograph the front of the march. But I went home early as I had a party to photograph in the evening, and the demonstration continued for several hours after it had been expected to finish. More about the event and of course more pictures on My London Diary.

Clare Kendall and John D McHugh

Yesterday’s Photo Forum event in central London was well worth attending, with excellent presentations by both Clare Kendall and John D McHugh. I’ve only managed to get to four of the ten monthly sessions so far, and this was the best yet of those I’ve made, although I certainly did enjoy last month’s Christmas party.

You can see some of Kendall’s pictures from the Arctic tip of Canada along with other work on her Photoshelter site, and also read an article by her in The Ecologist. The area and Inuit people she shows are really experiencing the sharp end of global warming, with melting ice making travel difficult, igloos collapsing and more, and work like hers really brings it home to us.

Even though Kendall’s pictures show the area to be one of great natural beauty, I find it hard to understand why people choose to live there, and how they – and photographers – survive. London has been more than cold enough for me these last few days.

One point of minor technical interest was that she took two Nikon digital cameras, a ‘pro’ D2X and the ‘amateur’ D100, and it was the latter model that stood up to the extreme conditions when the pro camera came rapidly to a halt.

John D McHugh’s very impressive work from Afghanistan was I think made using a pair of Canon EOS 5D cameras, again not their truly professional model, although rather better suited in most respects to this kind of work. John first went to Afghanistan in 2006, financing himselg as a freelance for AFP (Agence France-Press.)

On returning to the UK he got a staff job covering routine press calls in London, but couldn’t stomach it. He resigned and went back to Afghanistan as a freelance, having been able to persuade the American forces to give him a “fighting season” embed. Five weeks into that, in May 2007, his unit was caught in an ambush in which eighteen Afghan and seven US soldiers were killed and four Afghan soliders, seven US soldiers and one Irish photographer were wounded.

McHugh, close to death, was from the start determined to overcome his serious injuries and get back to Afghanistan to continue his work, and amazingly he managed to return by November 2007.

In 2008 he returned there once more, this time working for The Guardian, who used his still pictures and video, as well as running some of his diary entries, which he had previously been posting on a personal blog.

McHugh’s pictures – all shown in black and white although many were used as colour images by The Guardian – are both dramatic and down to earth, showing very much the war as experienced by the soldiers whose lives he is sharing in the field. They show the tedium of waiting for things to happen as well as the usually organised chaos when things do – many as he says shot from a low angle for very practical kinetic reasons. His is coverage that is the next best thing to being there, but thankfully without us having to be there.

McHugh also made some interesting comments on being embedded, and how although he found a few of the rules a problem he was sometimes able to “wiggle” around these. As his work shows, the Americans gave him a tremendous degree of freedom, although apparently working with British forces is orders of magnitude more restrictive.

We also got a very good impression from his talk how limited the UK media reporting of Afghanistan is, and how many of those who are interviewed on TV and radio are either ill-informed or deliberately misleading. McHugh was also quite scathing of some of the military top-brass and the lack of proper coordination particularly when units are replaced that leads to a lack of a coherent approach by the US in the country. It was a talk and show that gave a real insight into the country which he so evidently is in love with.

McHugh’s work from Afghanistan in 2007 was recognised last year by the award in May 2008 of the inaugural 2007 Frontline Club Award.

Gaza Protest at Egyptian Embassy

One event this year that I haven’t got round to mentioning was a protest outside the Egyptian Embassy a week ago on Friday 2 January. It hasn’t had a mention because I didn’t lose any pictures, didn’t get the exposures wrong or otherwise screw things up.

And although I left early, before the event was finished, I don’t think I missed anything that I would have wanted to photograph, though I was so cold I almost went home before some of the protesters set fire to some home-made Israeli flags and a picture of the leaders at the Camp David Treaty meeting.

I was even reasonably happy with the pictures – and got some positive feedback about them after I put some on line at Indymedia. Just a shame I haven’t yet sold any.

More pictures on line on My London Diary.

Naked Rambler Jailed

One of the sadder pieces of news in the past couple of days has been the jailing of the ‘naked rambler’ Stephen Gough, given a 12 month sentence by a Glasgow Court for breach of the peace.

I don’t have any particular wish to walk our streets naked myself, our weather seldom tempts me to bare anything, but I find it hard not to agree with Gough’s comment reported by the BBC, that if members of the public were offended by his nakedness then the problem was with them and not with him.

In 2000 I photographed a protest for the right to be naked in public outside the Met police HQ at New Scotland Yard. I don’t think any of the public showed any signs of concern, and most of the police seemed pretty amused by it, although doing what they considered their duty by telling people to cover up – the man below was threatened he would be arrested until he held his hat strategtically over his penis.

More recently I photographed several of the annual naked bike rides through the centre of London – last years had almost a thousand riders, mostly wearing nothing more than a little decorative body paint. It was again an event that caused considerable amusement among spectators. Here are a couple from the 2006 event:

and one from 2007:

and again from this year:

We all have bodies, and most of us have nothing very special about ours. Mine I think generally looks better the more it’s covered and I certainly feel more comfortable wearing clothes. But I can’t really think it should be an offence not to do so.

Mooning

Even where the attempt was to give offence – as in this group of anti-monarchists ‘mooning’ outside Buckingham Palace in 2000. Here the police did wade in and make an arrest – of a Swedish journalist watching the event who had kept his clothes on, but just happened to wear rather similar ‘Lennon’ style glasses to one of those taking part in the protest.

This event came into my mind last week when the police were insisting that anarchist demonstrators should remove items of clothing – face scarves – in the demonstration I photographed at Dalston last week, but here and at Scotland Yard they were attempting to arrest them for not keeping bits on.

London & Greece

You can’t really compare the events in London with those in Greece, but if the Met haven’t yet started shooting harmless teenagers for being on the streets, they do seem to be stepping up the pressure against anarchists and other demonstrators, as well as journalists.

Over the last week or so we’ve also seen an inquest verdict on the shooting of an innocent man, in which the jury were clearly prevented from reaching the verdict of unlawful killing they felt deserved, making clear that they didn’t believe the evidence given by several of the police concerned. (And it’s not clear if the shoot-to-kill policy they were following was legal – it was certainly introduced without proper debate.) We’ve seen a photographer, Jess Hurd, covering a travellers’ wedding for The Guardian detained by police for forty-five minutes in London’s docklands by police misusing anti-terrorist legislation, (you can see the wedding pictures here), photographers covering a demonstration outside the Greek Embassy assaulted, (it happened again later in the week) and many other smaller incidents in which the press is harassed and obstructed in covering protests.

So I expected there might be some problems with the police last Sunday when I went to photograph a march by Anarchists along with Greek students and workers in protest against the events in Greece. Rather than at the embassy, it was being held in North London in an area where there is a sizeable Greek population.

Police arrest and unmask a protester they alleged to have assaulted an officer

What I didn’t expect was that the police would decide to use the powers they have under the 1994 Public Order Act to force people to remove face coverings where the officer concerned is convinced they are worn wholly or mainly to conceal identity – and an Inspector or higher rank has issued an authorisation for such actions in that particular place (and time.)

It is of course arguable whether masks are worn at such events to conceal identities rather than as some kind of ‘uniform’ or even a fashion statement or just to keep warm. Few of those taking part in demonstrations have any real need to conceal their identity, and masks are seldom a truly efficient way of doing so – most of their wearers remain easily identifiable and many remove their masks at times during events.

What is clear than an attempt to get all those taking part to remove masks was doomed to failure and would considerably raise tempers at the event. Those making the decision clearly did not want the march to go ahead but wanted to create a flash-point that would lead to a confrontation between police and anarchists.

Demonstrators in the kettle.
Police complained I was too close when I took this picture – though a gap between three separated lines of police.

It was a confrontation set up to show who was boss. And although the police were rather slow in bringing up reinforcements after they only managed to “kettle” a small fraction of the anarchists (along with rather more of the Greek students and workers) they were clearly in command.

I’m starring in the film for the Police Xmas Party again

You can read a more detailed account of the events in Dalston on My London Diary, where the story is also told in pictures. My job was occasionally made difficult by the police, particularly in their insistence on keeping a clear zone around the kettle and I did get pushed around a few times when the crowd spilled over into the street and colleagues took a few amusing pictures of me arguing with police about the rights of a free press, but I saw none of the assaults and attempts to grab cameras that had marred the events outside the Greek Embassy in the previous week.