Category: Political Issues

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

Some events are important but don’t really offer a great deal for the photographer to work with. On Saturday lunchtime at the Angel in Islington I went to a demonstration against the shameful way that we treat people who want to come and live in this country and to contribute to our economy. Some come seeking asylum, some for other reasons, but whatever restrictions we have on immigration, we should treat people fairly and humanely. At the moment it is only too clear that we do not.

We have policies that stop people from working but fail to provide proper support. That imprison people who have committed no crime (and set up special prisons for the purpose, run for profit by companies that are apparently without morals.) We have a Borders Agency that seems to take delight in operating procedures that deny people proper legal representation and  that appears to be institutionally racist. A government that seems determined to outflank the racists on the right hand side in an attempt to gain electoral advantage.

The people in the background of this picture are from the Suarez family.  One of their young members who grew up in this country – where all his family now live – faces deportation because of a juvenile offence.  He’s one of the successes of our system in that since then he hasn’t been in trouble again. But a few years later he is threatened with deportation to a country he left when he was six and has no family. His case has gone to the European Court of Human Rights, but our immigration officers don’t care about that – they tried to deport him without waiting for the legal process to take its course.  He’s still here only because all his family turned up at Heathrow to protest when they tried to put him on a plane.  They will probably try again and hope they can get away with it without the family noticing.

But it was Christina who made me thing and feel most at the event. Nineteen years old, her husband is in Campsfield Detention Centre awaiting deportation, breaking up their young family. She had never spoken in public before, and broke down in tears. It was hard to keep on photographing, but I felt I had to, to do what little I could for her case – and to put the pictures and her story on news sites as soon as possible.

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

It saddens me a little now to walk on the Greenway across Stratford Marsh to remember what has been lost. The business estates and small works etc of course were not to everyone’s taste, although there were some modest but pleasing buildings among them, but there were some invigorating areas of minor wilderness, and some lush willow trees along the Pudding Mill River, along with some nice little touches of the picturesque.

Willow trees by the Pudding Mill River on Marshgate Lane, 2005

The trees were at the left of this scene – June 2009

So much has now gone, and so many areas are now inaccessible – as for example:

Bridge over Pudding Mill River at junction with Old River Lea, 2006

You can see many more pictures of the Olympic area, including Stratford Marsh on my River Lea site, including some from the 1980s as well as since 2000. When I get time I’ll add more from the 1990s, when the waterways and footpaths in the area were all cleaned up and neatly signposted for walkers.

Saturday I went to take pictures to show the progress being made in covering the area with concrete for the Olympics, and made some more panoramas:

The opposite side of the Greenway to the Olympic stadium

You can see this rather larger, and also panoramas including the growing Olympic stadium and other pictures of the site on My London Diary.

Unfortunately the section of the Greenway south of the main railway line to Stratford High St is closed until Spring 2010, with a detour in place across to Pudding Mill Lane at Pudding Mill Station and down this to Marshgate Lane and Stratford High Street. This is to allow the roadway under the railway to be dug out to allow double-decker buses to pass under.

Poplar isn’t an area of London I know particularly well, although I’ve walked around it a few times and taken some photographs. I’ve found more to interest me just down the road in the Isle of Dogs, to the west in Limehouse, or along the Lea and Bow Creek  to the east and north.

But it was very pleasant to take a walk around on Saturday afternoon in the company of around 18 other people and be led around by Bridget Cherry, who together with Charles O’Brien and Nikolaus Pevsner wrote the definitive volume on the architecture of East London in the ‘Buildings of England‘ series – she started work with Pevsner in 1968  and was editor of the Pevsner Architectural Guides from 1971-2002.

The walk was one of half a dozen ‘Story of London’ trails organised by the Heritage of London Trust in association with Pevsner Architectural Guides, and although you’ve missed the chance to be guided personally by the experts you can still download a copy of the walk from the web site. (Or you can instead use the book, which includes rather more buildings and generally more detal than the walk, but is a little less convenient to carry than an A4 sheet.)

I thought I needed some people on these stairs – and one
of them turned out to be Bridget Cherry

The walk started just below the stairs in this picture and related the buildings around Poplar High St and the East India Dock Road to the development of the area from the 17th century to the current day.

The most recent building mentioned on the walk is also one of the more controversial. Robin Hood Gardens, completed in 1972, has been encouraged by the council to get into very poor condition, partly by simple neglect but also by using it as a sink estate and permitting overcrowding. They want to demolish it and rebuild on the rather large site (and some people would undoubtedly make large amounts of money from doing so.)

Narrow balconies overlook the park in the centre of the development; the outer side has wider ‘streets in the sky’ for access

Many tenants like the estate (though some hate it) and it still seems basically an excellent solution to a difficult problem, and a unique one. I was more than surprised to find it was not a listed building – it is a major work by two of our best-known architects – and shocked to hear that it was turned down. I’m sure the grounds must have been more to do with the politics of the situation than architecture.

Almost a country park in the middle of a city

Growing salad crops

You can read more about the area and the walk and see more pictures on ‘My London Diary‘

On Sunday Sikhs marched through London on the 25th anniversary of the storming by the Indian Army of their holiest site, the Golden Temple at Amritsar. Indira Ghandi had ordered the assault to capture or kill Sikh separatists who were in the compound at a time of year when it was also full of pilgrims.

It’s hard to be sure how many people were killed by the attack, but independent estimates suggest around 5,000, including many women and children, as well as hundreds of Indian soldiers and a relatively small number of Sikh militants.

A few months later, Mrs Ghandi’s Sikh bodyguards killed her. Following the assassination, high-ranking Indian politicians from her Congress Party incited mobs to indiscrimately attack and murder Sikhs, and thousands were massacred.  Sikhs continue to fight for a nation of their own, Khalistan, through groups such as Babbar Khalsa International, and repression against them has also continued; Sikhs allege that  “over 250,000 Sikhs have been killed by in an orchestrated genocide by the Indian government.”

You can see more about the march and rally before the march on My London Diary, where there are many more pictures.

One aspect that worried me was an attempt by the police to censor the placards before the start of the march. The officer in charge, Superintendent Raj Kohli, the Met’s highest-ranking Sikh officer, objected to a number of them because of the images on them, and a woman officer said that some might cause offence, particularly because they might be seen by children.

I didn’t think that the arguments the police put forward were in fact valid. Children would be unlikely to be able to interpret the images in any detail when they were being carried on placards in a demonstration, and I think they would have rather less impact on children than on adults. The placard that Kohli was most insistent about was different, showing a simple graphic of a person’s head seen in a gun sight, and the name of a prominent Indian politician who was implicated in the massacres of Sikhs.  He saw this a clearly a provocation to violence, while I would see it more as an expression of what should the persons concerned deserve.

Although some agreement seemed to have been reached between Kohli and the protesters, many if not all of the disputed placards were carried in the march and can be seen in the pictures on My London Diary.

Kohli was carrying an A4 printout of the symbol of Babbar Khalsa International, a proscribed organisation under the Terrorism Act, 2000.  This was present, along with the name Babbar, on many of the placards and banners that people carried in the march. So far as I saw the police took no action over this, perhaps because it would have involved dealing with thousands among those marching.

BKI and attempt to establish Khalistan certainly appears to have the support of a large fraction of British Sikhs, and more obviously so than when I started photographing Sikh events, perhaps around ten years ago.  It’s only aim appears to be self-determination for the Sikh nation and I can see little reason why our government should feel a need to include it on the list of banned organisations. Though of course I wouldn’t want to express any approval or support for it, as that would almost certainly be an offence.

It’s hard not to agree that America is the root cause of much of the current troubles in both Pakistan and Afghanistan, but while it may be an ‘American War’ that Pakistan is currently fighting, it is rather harder to see what the solution should be.

The placards say ‘Khilafah – only way to stop America and Terror’  but at the moment a Caliphate isn’t on offer from any of the sides in Pakistan, and Muslims are capable of killing Muslims without the encouragement of the USA.

It’s also hard to disagree with Hizb ut-Tahrir when they talk about many (if not all) Muslim regimes as corrupt. But those areas under attack by Pakistani and US forces in Pakistan and Afghanistan have seen terrible repression, particularly of women, under Taliban rule. If any of the speakers mentioned this, I missed it.

I missed too hearing what the women who made up almost half the march thought, as none were called to speak. At the two rallies they stood apart, some way from the speakers – the party insists on the segregation of sexes in public activities, insists on the covering of women’s bodies except for face and hands, forbids women ot be in private with men except immediate family, bans them from important public office and insists on their duty to obey their husbands.

More about the march and more pictures on My London Diary.