Re-photo

UK Uncut cakes to hand out and eat – but the rest of the food went to local food banks after the demo

This morning my wife was volunteering at our local food bank, as she does a couple of mornings most weeks, sorting and packing up food and delivering it to those who need it. Despite living in a reasonably affluent area on the fringe of London, there are plenty of them. Many because they have had benefits stopped. Or because they have to wait until benefits are sorted out, or while they appeal decisions – and now are somehow expected to be able to manage to live without any income at all.

Hard to believe but true – over half a million people in the UK now rely on food banks to keep them from starving.

The 10.5mm let me get the food bank in from a short distance

UK Uncut makes the point that the UK banks received enormous financial support from the public finances – variously estimated at between £700 and £26,500 per taxpayer (the higher figure ignoring the eventual recouping of some of the support when the banks are sold back into the private sector and the lower taking a particularly rosy view of the return when this happens.) They call for an end to ‘bank welfare’, and point out that the avoidance of taxes by large companies and the wealthy costs the country more than will be saved by the government cuts that disproportionately impact on the poor and disabled. And the banking sector is the biggest user of overseas ‘tax havens’ to avoid paying UK taxes.

The ‘big four’ UK banks, Barclays, HSBC, Lloyds and RBS, are reported to have over 1,600 tax haven subsidiaries between them, with HSBC being the largest offender, with over 550.  The amounts lost to the UK are several billions of pounds. Changes to the Controlled Foreign Company (CFC) rules by the government which came into effect this January were estimated to give another billion to the users of tax havens, a huge bonus while the rest of us were suffering from the cuts

UK Uncut’s protests at the premises of tax dodgers have certainly put the issue onto the political agenda, and made HMRC at least seem to take a little more action, as well as persuading some companies to contribute a few million more. Perhaps by setting up food banks at HSBC branches they will put the spotlight on the use of overseas tax havens by the banks to avoid taxes, and also on the Department for Work and Pensions, directly responsible for a large proportion of that half a million needing to use food banks, who appear to be conducting their own private war against welfare.

The food bank on the move to Oxford St HSBC

Photographically the event held few problems, although the pavements where the food banks were set up were at times rather crowded, not least with other photographers. The Oxford St pavement is rather narrow – the street should have been pedestrianised long ago – and police pushed the protesters back to allow pedestrians to walk past.

They stood along the edge a yard or two apart, but objected firmly when I stood between them to take photographs, arguing that I was “causing an obstruction.”  Clearly that wasn’t the case – and I was if anything less of an obstruction than they were, but logic isn’t a powerful argument against handcuffs and I had to move.

Photographing from inside the protest with the 10.5mm

So I went into the protest, using the 10.5mm to work at very close range. The alternative, to stand on the narrow strip in the middle of the road with a long lens, with a view obstructed by a line of police and the passing pedestrians, was taken by most of the press, but it wasn’t a good idea.

From the middle of Oxford St with the 70-300mm.

There are perhaps rather too many pictures from the event on My London Diary, but it was difficult to edit, as there were so many that I liked. Take a look at them at UK Uncut HSBC Food Banks.

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My London Diary : Buildings of London : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage

All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated are by Peter Marshall and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.

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A cleaner speaks at the end of the ‘3 Cosas’ protest at the Senate House

London relies on its low paid workers to keep running. People like the cleaners are essential workers, but they get treated like dirt – one of their slogans is “We ain’t the dirt we clean for you” Politicians like David Cameron and Boris Johnson support the idea of the London Living Wage – the minimum hourly rate needed to live on in London – but do little if anything to persuade employers to pay it.  Those who are on low pay also usually get very poor conditions of service, with usually the legal minimum provisions for sick pay and holidays. Few if any are in pension schemes.

The cleaners, catering workers and  security staff at London University are not employed by the university. The university – and banks and other companies – have high ethical standards and give their employees decent levels of sickness pay,  holiday entitlement and pension schemes. But working in those same institutions are people who don’t get these – the university has delegated their employment to contractors, washing its hands of its responsibilities towards them.

Green Party leader Natalie Bennett came to speak in support of the ‘3 Cosas’ campaign

It enables the university to feel good about its employment practices, but get the dirty work done on the cheap.  The ‘3 Cosas’ campaign, in which the cleaners are supported by students and many staff employed by the university points out the hypocrisy involved. Either the university should directly employ everyone who works there, or if it uses contractors, should insist that they pay the living wage, give workers there comparable conditions to those it gives its own employees and manage them with respect.

So I like to photograph these protests, because these are people who are being mistreated and deserve support.  They also campaign in a way that is both effective and visually interesting, making it easy to photograph. The rise of grass-roots trade-unionism is also an interesting phenomenon, and I think points to problems within the trade union movement, which for various reasons has unfortunately largely failed these lower paid workers, a matter of some regret to me as a trade unionist (I belong to two unions and was for many years a union rep at my former workplace.)

The latest response by the University, which followed an incident in which a student  was arrested after chalking a slogan across the foundation stone (and charged with criminal damage as well as two charges of assaulting a police officer when she was being arrested – she has pleaded not guilty to all offences)  has been to ban student protests in the areas in which most of the pictures here were taken, the Senate House cloister entrance and the East and West car-parks, and to threaten to prosecute students (and presumably others) who protest there as trespassers.

I don’t know what effect this will have on future protests, but feel that instead of making such threats they should be addressing the issues that have led to the protests.

More about the protest and more pictures at London University Cleaners Protest.

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A few years ago these properties were mainly in a poor state, many squatted and near derelict. Now each block is worth millions.

Nothing is what it used to be, and certainly Brixton isn’t.  First developed with large middle-class housing along the main roads out of London to the south and south-west at an easy distance from work in Westminster or the city, by the start of the 20th century it had become a largely working-class inner London area, with many of the larger houses converted to boarding houses or flats and streets of working class housing. In the 1930s it was the best shopping centre in South London, and it still has one of the best markets in London.

The London County Council and the local council built social housing in large estates around the area in the 1930s, and more followed bomb damage and slum clearance after the war. The first postwar Caribbean migrants came from Jamaica on the Empire Windrush in 1948, and were given temporary housing just up the road in the Clapham deep air-raid shelter, and they found local jobs at the nearby Labour Exchange in Coldharbour Lane in Brixton, moving out into the local boarding houses and flats, forming the nucleus of a new community in the area.

By the 1980s as well as being a centre of London’s Afro-Caribbean community, it was also a haven for white squatters, often unemployed. The area had a huge waiting list for social housing and much of the housing stock was substandard; there was very high unemployment, particularly among the black community and the crime rate was double that of any other area of London. One area was known as the ‘Frontline’,  an area the police could neither understand or control, limiting themselves to occasional skirmishes which largely served to further antagonise the local mainly black population.

Preparing for the protest. The council removed the seats that used to surround this tree because they didn’t like the kind of people who sat on them.

Iused to go there occasionally, particularly to buy surplus photographic materials from a shop just a few yards away. I’d occasionally wander down the Railton Road, perhaps go into a shop and buy a drink or snack. I even took a few pictures. Occasionally I politely refused an offer to buy what could have been (and probably was) weed as I passed a small crowd of youths.

Few were surprised when there were riots in 1981 – known by some as the ‘Brixton Uprising’.  More surprising that it hadn’t happened before and didn’t happen more often.  What was perhaps surprising were some of the stories of the solidarity between black and white people involved in defending their area, and some of the more lurid lies in the media about what was happening.

Brixton is now rather a different place, though its history gives if a certain chic for some, and it’s not too long since I looked out of a window and saw a man in the street with a gun, and even shorter that I was last offered drugs on the street.  Good transport links and its nearness to the city make it a very desirable place for young professionals. House and flat prices have soared, estate agents have taken over many of the once useful shops, and many of the once-squatted buildings – often converted into short-term lets – are now being renovated. The tenants who have little or no rights are evicted, the flats modernised and then sold or let at ridiculous prices.

There is little new social housing, and nothing affordable for those who are evicted. Even squatting is less of an option now, with recent law making squatting in residential properties a criminal offence.

Whether you choose to describe the changes as regeneration or gentrification, the consequences for many of the poorer residents of the area is the same – there is nowhere for them to live in the area once they are evicted. It is a process that is difficult to fight or even to know how to fight, as the discussion at the protest against the evictions on Rushcroft Road demonstrated. It demonstrates a lack of any concern for people involved that seems shocking in a civilised society, but we seem no longer to live in a civilised society, or at least one which is only civilised for the wealthy. As the recent report Human Development Report from the The United Nations Development Programme indicates, the UK is the most unequal society in the western world, on a par with Nigeria. Of industrialised countries only Russia is more unequal. In the UK, the poorest fifth have incomes on average one tenth of the richest fifth, and have incomes per head a third less in the US and 44% less than in the Netherlands.

This woman and child stopped for a while at the protest

And in the UK the gap is growing rapidly – twenty years ago the gap between rich and poor was only 6.7 times – it has increase by around 50% over the last 20 years. It isn’t surprising that there are problems in the poorer areas of the country, only that in general the poor are so passive about it most of the time.  Of course the circuses are being trowled on thick – Olympics, Royal Wedding, Royal Jubilee, Royal Birth, a new Dr Who… – but the bread is getting thin.

People listened intently to the discussion once it got going

It wasn’t an easy event to photograph for various reasons. There was an awful lot of frustration in the air, and a certain negativity towards photographers, and really not very much happening.

There were disturbances in Brixton following the events in Tottenham over the shooting of Mark Duggan a couple of years ago, but our ‘riots’ then were relatively mild and didn’t spread a great deal. But events like these evictions do make me feel that a spring is slowly being wound up that at some point may lead to truly major insurrection. It didn’t seem likely in the former Soviet Union before it happened, nor in Libya or Egypt, but perhaps one day we will have a truly British (or, post-devolution an English and Welsh) Spring. Though I sincerely hope it won’t be another Syria.

I felt depressed as I left Windrush Square, with such rather gloomy thoughts in my mind, and was even more depressed on crossing Coldharbour Lane as I stopped to read the posters of a group of Black Hebrew Israelites or Black Jews. As I stood there the preacher started to attack a black woman passing by – her sin according to him that she was with a white man. She stood her ground and argued against this nonsense, and I felt like congratulating her. But I moved away, not wanting to get involved, and I felt bad about it.

More pictures from Brixton at Brixton Protests Gentrification & Evictions.  Earlier in the day I photographed the annual International Brigade Commemoration in Waterloo, a reminder of the commitment and sacrifice of many in the 1930s.
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