Category: Political Issues

Some events (even when you are at the right place at the right time) are difficult to photograph because visually they are not very exiting of different. It doesn’t help when the issues involved are complex so that it is not easy to decide on a point of view to take.

The ‘Justice for Asbestos Victims‘ rally was organised by trade unions representing people who had worked with asbestos.  As we all know, asbestos is dangerous stuff, exposure to it killing many workers, and it is also clear that many employers have been negligent and failed to take reasonable precautions to prevent people working for them being exposed to its dangers.

The demonstration was over a decision by the Law Lords that compensation should not be awarded for pleural plaques,  a form of irreversible lung damage caused by exposure to asbestos, because in themselves these do not normally materially affect people’s physical health.  People with them are however likely to develop more serious, often fatal conditions – for which damages are awarded. I think the employers should be liable for their negligence in exposing workers and that the pleural plaques provide clear evidence that this has occurred.

Several other photographers present were working for the unions concerned who would probably be happy  with some fairly tedious group pictures showing workers and MPs and a few banners – and they proceeded to set these up.  It all helps to make a living, but I wanted to find something more, and don’t really think I managed it.  The picture I took at the International Workers Memorial Day march in April 2006 was considerably stronger – but then its message was clearer too.

Asbestos kills

Family and friends call for justice for Sean Rigg, who died in Brixton Police Station this August

Being in police custody or prison should really be the safest possible of situations, but unfortunately as the over 2500 names on the list carried in Saturday’s demonstration by the United Families and Friends of those who have died in custody shows this isn’t the case.  It isn’t even easy to get the figures and the names, and even this long list covering the years since 1969 is far from complete.  Last year there were 182 known deaths – and at that rate the list would be three times as long.

The police, the prisons, secure psychiatric units, immigration detention centres all have a duty of care for the people in them, but it a duty in which they too often fail.  Some of those 182 will be people known to be likely to commit suicide who were not adequately supervised, others those who were restrained in a manner that caused their death.

One of the names on the long list was a young Brazilian man who took a bus to Stockwell station and walked through the barriers and down the escalator. He didn’t know that his perfectly innocent and ordinary movements were being followed by a surveillance team, even though they were very close to him as he entered the station.

While I was writing my post about this year’s United Families and Friends march, I watched the CCTV footage from the station on that morning, showing nothing untoward until about a a minute after he made his way to the platform, when three armed men jumped over the barriers and rushed down.

Someone had blundered, with the result that these men were sent to gun down an innocent man. The Met’s response was to try to cover up in various ways for the mistake, and even at the inquest they are still clearly doing so.  The order that was given was clearly a gross error which should have led to the immediate dismissal and almost certainly criminal charges against the senior officer concerned, but it also highlights a ‘shoot to kill’ policy that I think has no place in a civilised society. It remains to be seen what the inquest will determine.

When Maria Otonia de Menezes came to lay flowers at the gates of Downing St, I was there with others photographing and filming. Earlier, along with other photographers I’d been asked to give the family a little space as they were finding it difficult, and I’d immediately stopped taking pictures and turned away to photograph other things, although some others took no notice of the request. But when it came to the actual pacing of the bouquets and photographs my job was to show the grief and anger of the de Menezes family and others whose sons, brothers, fathers had died to the best of my ability.  At times I found it hard to keep taking pictures, but that after all was what I was there for, and I owed it to these people to do it as well as I could.

More pictures and text about the demonstration on My London Diary

It’s good when someone actually comes up with a visual idea for a demonstration that you can photograph; too often you really get things that would only look good from a helicopter. Actually it’s usually better if people don’t try to be too clever, but give us something a little out of the ordinary in the way of masks or makeup or costumes or props that we can play around with and find a different way to photograph.

Dick Cheney, Iraqi Oil and the Shell Centre (right)

So although a giant Dick Chaney was a nice idea, and he was very well produced, and we all had some fun photographing him, I have a feeling that every other photographer there will have produced a picture more or less like mine. But perhaps not quite.

100 Days to stop Bush & Cheney’s Iraq Oil Grab! was of course a protest about a very serious issue, basically the pay-off US and UK forces were sent to Iraq to bring home. Forget WMD, Iraq was about another three letters, OIL, and Cheney with his friends at Shell and BP are now getting down to wrapping it up and bringing the swag home.

It’s a simple plan. A nationalised oil industry belonging to the Iraqi people (even if much of the proceeds went into palaces for the president) does nothing for multinational oil companies. So you invade, topple Saddam, put a puppet government in his place and send them your “oil experts” to draft natural resources laws that hand out the oil to your friends. 

I photographed the demonstration outside Shell’s UK Offices in Waterloo, before it set off for the BP offices and then the US Embassy at Grosvenor Square. There is some opposition to the proposed handover in the Iraqi Parliament – and rather more among the Iraqi people. If the give-away goes ahead I think we can forecast further trouble in the Middle East after US forces finally pull out.