Re-photo

There was a short sit-down at Piccadilly Circus on the way to the Trafalgar Square rally

You, or certainly I, might think that a protest by over 5,000 people on the streets of London against the action of an oppresive regime that brings traffic to a halt is worthy of a mention on the BBC, but apparently it isn’t news.  I searched their site and found no mention, even though they cannot have failed to notice the large crowd which deliberately gathered outside Broadcasting House.

Perhaps the Kurds aren’t singled out for special treatment. The BBC routinely fails to report on protests in the UK, with a few exceptions, mainly where celebrities of one sort or another get involved, or there is some particular ‘human interest’ peg on which they can hang a report on, preferably on something only involving a handful of people and an entirely trivial subject.  But protests about serious issues tend to be avoided – unless they are happening overseas and particularly in a country the establishment has issues with.

According to Wikipedia, there are probably 50,000 Kurds resident in the UK. It’s figure used by government but which came from the BBC, as the government have not bothered to collect it – at the last census it wasn’t a category, but people could write in ‘Kurdish’ if they wanted to, and in England and Wales 48,239 reported their main language as Kurdish. Other probably even less reliable sources put the figure at 200-250,000.

The march assembled in front of Broadcasting House, spilling along the road north and south

Roughly one tenth of that population (on the BBC figure), which is spread out across most of our major cities, though with a significant number in north London and around Croydon – came to this protest about what is happening to the Kurdish community in Turkey (though many of them come from other areas of Kurdistan which also spreads across parts of Iraq, Iran, Armenia and Syria.) It’s a remarkable statistic, though the BBC didn’t think so.

Freedom for Öcalan – his picture was also on many flags on the march

Kurds have long been a persecuted minority in Turkey, which has systematically tried to eliminate their language and culture.  Opposition to this has been both political and military, with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) being regarded in many countries as a terrorist organisation (and is proscribed in the UK.) Its leader Abdullah Ocalan has been held in a Turkish jail since 1999; he still features on many of the flags carried in protests.

The Kurds also accuse Turkey of supporting ISIS (Daesh) both as a part of an attempt to turn Turkey into an Islamic dictatorship and also as a part of their fight against the Kurds, hoping that ISIS will make all of Kurdistan into part of its caliphate and sort out their Kurdish problem for them. They say Turkey – as Russian intelligence has also shown – provides a route for the oil exports that finance ISIS.

We support Turkey – and out government want to brush Kurdish issues under the mat – as a part of NATO in our continuing opposition to Russia. The US has supplied some arms to Kurdish fighters in Syria because they see their fight against the Syrian regime as also being against the increasing Russian influence. (They also got some British weapons but found they didn’t work…)  The Kurds have unfortunately become pawns trapped in the ‘Great Game’ in which our government and the BBC are players.

Photographing the march presented few problems, and it was more colourful than many with some wearing traditional Kurdish dress and many scarves in the Kurdish colours. The 16mm fisheye with its 147 degree horizontal angle of view enabled me to show the sit-down at Piccadilly Circus effectively (and as usual I ‘de-fished’ the image at the top of the page.) Like most landscape format images on this blog you can see it larger by right-clicking and selecting ‘View Image’.

I tried hard to represent the different groups and opinions in my picture – and you will see many posters, flags and banners in my pictures at Break the Silence! Turkey’s War on Kurds. As well as Kurds, the event was also supported by anti-fascist groups and a few others including human rights campaigner Peter Tatchell.
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Portobello Rd, Notting Hill 1987

Notting Hill has “gone up in the world”, if down in my respect, one of London’s epicentres of gentrification, and now a mega-tourist attraction post the 1999 film of the same name. When we went there in March, the language on the streets was Italian – even some of the beggars had signs in Italian. Both tourism and gentrification have had a heavy toll, and little of the old Notting Hill remains, though in some respects the setting is the same.

Class War came to Notting Hill long ago -back in 1837 when John Whyte enclosed land to form a racecourse, the Hippodrome, and closed a well-used public right of way. At the first race meeting, several thousand are said to have used the closed footpath to make holes in the fence and get in free. More legally, a gang of labourers from the local authority went and cleared the obstuctions to the path but Whyte simply restored them.The matter went to court, where Whyte lost but still kept the path closed and instead tried to get an Act of Parliament to allow him to divert it rather than let the hoi polloi disturb him and his upper class mates.

The people set up a petition and went to the newspapers, telling them about the various illegal activities going on there, unlicensed drinking, gambling, prostitution, and pickpockets – and The Times (long before Murdoch who would probably have backed the racecourse) wrote a leader condemning it as a den of vice. Eventually Whyte was forced to re-route the racetrack and restore the footpath – which he did with a high metal fence on each side so the riff-raff could not see the toffs.

The race track soon failed, not because of the footpath but the heavy soil, which made it dangerous for racing in wet conditions, and many horse owners refused to risk their mounts.  The ground was sold to a Mr Ladbroke, a developer and that disputed footpath became, more or less, Ladbrooke Grove.

The radical history of Notting Hill continued – and you can read more in Tom Vague’s ‘Bash the Rich‘ where you can read about Chartist leader Feargus O’Connor, the Campden squatters, George Orwell, the Free Republic of Frestonia, the Angry Brigade, King Mob, the International Times, the original Hustler, the Carnival riots and more.

Bash the Rich, 2007
Class War returned to Notting Hill and marched through Ladbroke Grove to Holland Park on the first BASH THE RICH march in 1985. Twenty two years later they returned, and this time I went with them.

Bash the Rich, 2007

The event was heavily policed, with protesters and press getting pushed around considerably, and there were several arrests for no particular reason (mainly I think for objecting to police violence) with those arrested being released without charge after a few hours of arbitrary detention. You can see more pictures at Bash the Rich.

This year’s ‘historic, riotous and fun‘ Notting Hill pub crawl attracted rather fewer people and less attention from the police. It had been planned to start at the former Colville Hotel  where Class War’s first conference was held, but the few of us who had arrived on time to find the bar there boarded up and up for sale, and had to stand outside and drink from tins. With Class War’s Rita the Raven. But a close pub is no good to man, woman or beast and we didn’t hang around too long. So some late-comers missed the tour.

The next pub on the route, formerly the Warwick Castle, once the heart of Notting Hill is now gentrified out of recognition as simply the Castle, had ‘closed for maintenance‘ for a few hours having heard Class War was coming, so again we had to stand outside. There was no sign of any maintenance inside – the only thing being maintained was a very low and scared profile. People put up blue plaques (or rather blue paper plates) to mark this as the place where Ian Bone met Joe Strummer who jumped at the idea of the 1988 Rock Against the Rich tour.

There were just a few police following us a few paces away as we walked down to the next venue, the Duke of Wellington tourist trap, once H H Finch‘s bar. They seemed to have extra bouncers on duty, but let us in and we got served, though Young’s isn’t my favourite brewery and the price was high. But I paid up and swallowed my Pride slowly. We sat for a while with a few more joining the tour, including a visit from Ray ‘Roughler’ Jones whose epic book about the Warwick Castle was titled ‘3000 Hangovers Later‘.

It wasn’t far until our next stop, one of the few real pubs left in Notting Hill, though not quite as genuine as it seems. The Earl of Lonsdale,  was once Henekey‘s, but was remodelled as Sam Smith‘s pub in a way that pretty authentically recreates the real thing – as do a number of other pubs they have worked on. It seemed we had settled down for the day, but more people were joining the tour, and onwards it went.

The next stop wasn’t a pub, but the house were George Orwell once lived – and which recently has appeared on in a faked image on Facebook with a CCTV camera Photoshopped on the the wall close to the blue plaque. As Lisa McKenzie gave us the low-down on Orwell as an upper class toff but one who understood the class war we noticed that there was indeed a small camera covering the doorway.

But this was Class War and we were close to a branch of Foxton’s, that arch-agency of gentrification, and it was our next stop. We were amused to find it had been closed and boarded up in anticipation of our visit, and it was duly stickered. A speech about the role of this company in gentrification had to be abandoned after a few minutes when a number of police vans came in sight and the tour melted away into the nearby Prince Albert, built in 1841 at the gate to the Hippodrome.

After we had been in there for around an hour (including a Class War make-up lesson) it became clear that this was to be the end of the tour rather than as intended the Daily Mail offices, where no food or drink was likely to be available, though probably a few police officers were still awaiting our arrival.  So I said goodbye and left as I could expect a good dinner waiting for me at home.

More pictures and text: Class War’s Notting Hill Pub Stroll

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Since one of the main causes of mental health problems is workplace stress it seems odd that the current government appears to believe that somehow getting those with mental health problems into work is a miraculous cure. Of course finding suitable work can be a something which helps those who have recovered stay well, but it’s had to believe that job centres will help people find suitable work; instead they will be bullied into taking unsuitable work by advisers who get brownie points or bonuses for cutting benefits – either by forcing people into jobs or sanctioning them if they refuse.

There just are not suitable jobs for the great majority of those with mental problems or with physical disabilities, and even fewer than there used to be, both with the government closure of Remploy and other sheltered work and the removal of other support. Another major reason for many people’s mental health problems is the pressure on them to find work, the cutting of various benefits, benefit sanctions, the bedroom tax and other government policies.

Finding disabled people fit for work through unsuitable ‘work capability assessments’ carried out by Atos and Maximus when they are demonstrably unfit is a major source of stress, and has led to many suicides. A very high percentage of those who appeal against these assessments succeed – but often only for the people concerned to be failed yet again when called in for another test. It’s perhaps an unsurprising effect of setting up a testing system that ignores medical reports and rewards the company administering the tests for failing people. It was a cruel system introduced under New Labour, but one which the coalition – even after its effects became clear – deliberately tightened the screw.

It would be hard to overstate the hate that many disabled people feel for the man who has directed the process, Iain Duncan Smith – and hard not to understand it when you hear one of them telling how eight of her friends have committed suicide thanks to his policies. He appears to combine a total lack of empathy and understanding of the problems faced by those on benefits with an outstanding incompetence.

This was a difficult protest to photograph outside the job centre because the pavement it was taking place on was rather narrow and soon get very crowded. There were too many people for the space and too many of us trying to take pictures. It was good that the protesters had plenty of props and costumes, but it was perhaps too elaborate to tell the story clearly, at least visually. I think it would have been easier in video.

Things were simpler once the protesters began to march, and although the police didn’t seem to know what was happening, I think it was fairly obvious that they would attempt to block the Old St roundabout. Which they did for some time. As usual disabled protesters gave the police a problem; most have a genuine concern about manhandling disabled people, while others realise how it would look in the media. For both reasons they hang back from taking action for rather longer than would be the case with able-bodied protesters – though many of those taking part were not disabled.

But eventually the police would have had to take action, with one of London’s major junctions taken out, and DPAC realise they can only push things so far. After blocking the roundabout for around 20 minutes, Paula Peters of DPAC announce it was time to leave.

I wrote a fairly lengthy account of the action on My London Diary at No Job Coaches in GP Surgeries, and as usual there are plenty more pictures there. But although I took quite a few usable images, I didn’t manage to get one that really stood out and summed up the protest in the way I would have liked; but perhaps the issues were too complicated for that.