Re-photo

This was the 20th annual march by the United Families and Friends Campaign (UFFC), a coalition of of people killed by police, in prisons, in immigration detention and in secure psychiatric hospitals. I first knew about their campaign in 2003, when I took the picture above, along with others. Then the list they carried of those who have died in custody since 1969 hand around 1800 names on it; now it is considerably longer, with many new names being added each year.

Some of those I photographed in 2003 were still there in 2018, but others have themselves died – sometimes as a result of their grief. Many have given up on the struggle for justice, beaten down by the system which lies and obstructs the course of justice – including the police, coroners and judges who all dissemble, and a complaints procedure dedicated to being ineffective. For most there is no justice – but many are determined to fight on despite this. The most determined sometimes make a little progress, but still the system keeps slapping them back.

Of course not every death in custody is a result of criminal acts by police or others concerned. Some are from natural causes. But too many are from a lack of care; too many from the use of excessive force and failures to carry out proper procedures for restraint. And too many from clearly criminal acts which our courts allow to go unpunished.

The only case among around two and a half thousand where there has been a sucessful prosecution, so far as I’m aware, is one where the violence by fellow officers so offended one policeman that he broke ranks and gave evidence against them. In other cases police have got away with perjury, supporting the clearly false evidence of their fellow officers, making up stories between them that bear little relation to what actually happened.

So many police inquiries into these incidents have been at best half-hearted and often facially incompetent or even criminal. CCTV cameras – even in police stations – never seem to work when officers would be in the frame, and interviews are not made or delayed for months.

Of course police have a difficult job, and mistakes will sometimes happen, but this goes beyond this, and is an institutional problem – like the racism which, despite its revelation after the death of Stephen Lawrence, is still active in police forces around the country, and involved in too many of the deaths. Many of the victims are also people with mental health problems, and the continuing deaths also reflect a lack of proper mental health provision, exacerbated by changes in policies and government cuts both to health services and to community services.

The campaigners met in Trafalgar Square, and then marched slowly, very slowly down Whitehall, stopping for a rally opposite Downing St, where many representatives of the bereaved families spoke. A delegation went to take a letter to the Prime Minister at 10 Downing St, as they have done each year, though never getting a sensible reply. This year they were even refused entry, despite having made their application several months earlier. Police on the gate were apologetic (and the police had facilitated the march and rally in exemplary fashion) and took the letter promising to see it was delieved, but apparently their request had been lost, perhaps deliberately, by Theresa May’s office and they could not be allowed to enter.

‘No Justice! No Peace!’ is the slogan of the campaign, and so far justice is sadly lacking.

More at:
20th UFFC remembrance procession
20th UFFC remembrance rally

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My London Diary : London Photos : Hull : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage

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

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As the holed and bloody NHS logo under Jeremy the Vulture suggests, the NHS has been subjected to a long and brusing campaign of privatisation by the coalition and Tory governments since 2010 (and New Labour before then didn’t help.)

Many of us have found that our NHS clinics and services have been taken over by companies including Richard Branson’s Virgin Healthcare, and more and more of our NHS services are being moved into the hands of private companies, with even some NHS hospitals being run by them – though at least one has been returned to the NHS when the private company found it couldn’t make enough.

The process of privatisation has been carried out largely by stealth through various reforms by politicians who mouth about the NHS being safe in their hands while selling off parts of it to companies owned by party donors, friends and relatives and deliberately failing to cope with many of the real problems of the system.

One of the latest of these back-door privatisation schemes is the ICP contract. The Health & Social Care Act 2012 forced competitive contracting onto the English NHS, resulting in the wasting huge amounts of time and resources on competition and tendering processes. NHS England want to plaster over the obvious failures of this by adding another layer of contracting, the Integrated Care Provider contract, rather than getting rid of the system which has failed.

Brexit comes into all of this through the hope by some leading Brexiteers that after Brexit we would be able to offer the US a trade treaty which would enable American healthcare companies to take over much of our NHS as an incentive to get advantageous terms for British companies trading with the US.

The introduction of ICPs would break the NHS into smaller business units which would be competed for by private sector organisations. The plan is being driven by NHS England under CEO Simon Stevens, previously a senior executive of the giant US healthcare and health insurance company United Health Group.

The Carillion failure shows the danger of such contracting arrangements, where a failure of a ‘lead provider’ with multiple sub-contracters has led to thousands of job losses, abandoned major projects (including part-built hospitals), poorer services and great public expense.  Similar arrangements with multiple levels of contracting also made possible some of the failures which made Grenfell Tower a deathtrap.

We need – in the NHS and elsewhere – to move towards simpler systems and eliminate the many unnecessary and costly levels of management. Huge amounts too are wasted on consultancy fees. There is a kind of cult of management which bears no relation to its actual utility and too often it gets in the way of efficient working of organisations rather than facilitating it, often by forcing unsuitable structures in a ‘one size fits all’ approach.

I’m not an expert on the ins and outs of ICP, for which I suggest you look at the National Health Action Party’s page Reasons NHS England should scrap the draft ICP contract. The party and most of the speakers at the protest were professionals with years of experience in the NHS who are appalled at the privatisation which has taken place.

Among those who came to speak at the event was MP Eleanor Smith, a former NHS theatre nurse and Unison President, whose private members NHS Reinstatement Bill was due for its second reading later in the day, calling for the re-nationalisation of the NHS. 

Public services campaigning group ‘We Own It‘ had come to the event with a petition with 31,870 signatures to scrap the ICP contract, a large number considering the rather technical nature of the scheme, and after the rally the campaigners marched to the Dept of Health to hand in.

More pictures at Scrap ICP Contract, Keep NHS Public
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There are no adverts on this site and it receives no sponsorship, and I like to keep it that way. But it does take a considerable amount of my time and thought, and if you enjoy reading it, a small donation – perhaps the cost of a beer – would be appreciated.

My London Diary : London Photos : Hull : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage

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

To order prints or reproduce images

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A protest outside the Saudi Embassy in London called for all those responsible for the horrific murder and dismembering of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, including Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman who is thought to have approved sending the death squad to the consulate in the Turkish city of Istanbul, to be brought to justice.

The Committee to Protect Journalists website lists the name of 53 journalists killed in 2018, including Khashoggi,  one of the 34 murdered. Others were killed by crossfire (11) or on dangerous assignments (8).  Twelve of them were photographers, half killed by crossfire. Seven other media workers were also killed.

Few of these deaths made the UK news, because most were local photographers, working in their own countries, and there were no deaths in the UK. Kashoggi’s death made the news partly because he was a journalist for a major US newspaper, but also because of its horrific nature, dismembered while still living using a bone saw and his body in parts smuggled out of the Saudi consulate. I read about the recording apparently transmitted from his watch during his killing, but could not bear to click the link to listen to it.

Few if any believe the Saudi denial that his killing was approved by Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman, generally known as MBS, which placards expanded to Minister Bone Saw.  It’s perhaps something of a mystery why MBS thought he could get away with it – though the rich often do, and while there was international revulsion there has been little or no real action. Also hard to understand is why Kashoggi believed the assurances he was apparently given about his safety.

Here in the UK, journalists are generally fairly safe, though a few of my colleagues have suffered at the hands of police, with teeth being knocked out and arms broken, normally the worst we get are a few bruises.  The only UK death on the CPJ site, which has records since 1992, was of Martin O’Hagan, a 51-year-old investigative journalist for the Dublin Sunday World, shot dead outside his home in September 2001 in Lurgan, Northern Ireland.

The protest outside the embassy was also against the Saudi involvement in the war in Yemen and called for the UK to immediately stop arms sales to Saudi Arabia.

Justice For Jamal Khashoggi & Yemen

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There are no adverts on this site and it receives no sponsorship, and I like to keep it that way. But it does take a considerable amount of my time and thought, and if you enjoy reading it, a small donation – perhaps the cost of a beer – would be appreciated.

My London Diary : London Photos : Hull : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage

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

To order prints or reproduce images

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Although the front of the People’s Vote March for the Future was at the Hyde Park Corner end of Park Lane, several thousand people were in front of the banner when the march was due to begin, stretching some way down Piccadilly.

Among them and right at the front were a group of protesters from Movement for Justice who clearly see Brexit as motivated by xenophobia and racism. They called noisily for Brexit to be stopped and for free movement and an end to the UK’s racist immigration policies. Among them were many who have suffered long periods of indefinite detention in Britain’s immigration detention centres, where MfJ has held numerous protests calling for these prisons to be closed, as well as campaigning and giving assistance to those held inside .

Piccadilly behind the MfJ was fairly densely crowded and it took me some minutes to make my way back to the official head of the march with its banners and placards, where I think stewards were waiting hoping that the road ahead would be miracuolously cleared, but there were just too many people for this to happen.

The march began and I stood on Piccadilly taking pictures of the marchers (some of which are in People’s Vote March – Start on My London Diary.) When people were still walking past me half an hour later I got on the tube at Green Park and went to Westminster, where I found that before any marchers had reached Parliament Square it was already fairly full.

I walked around the edge of the square, then decided to walk up Parliament St towards Downing St to be around there when the marchers arrived, stopping there for a few minutes to photograph anopther protest taking place by the People’s Mujahedin of Iran against executions of the political opposition in Iran.  Political artist Kaya Ma was standing there with paintings of Theresa May, Jeremy Corbyn, Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees Mogg.

Among the first to arrive was Elvis, riding a tricycle, coming to sing and play with others who were already opposite Downing St, and soon Theresa May turned up holding a rope, with which she was leading a captive Britain.

At the end of the rope tying his wrists together was a man dressed up in a Union Flag, his mouth gagged and wearing a blindfold, carrying a small poster ‘No Influence’.

The whole width of the road was filled with people walking slowly towards Parliament Square, though after a while this was full and Whitehall also began to fill up. Some friends at the back of the march told me that they never managed to leave Park Lane, and there were reports of a large overfill in Green Park, unable to make further progress.

Eventually I decided I’d been standing on my feet too long and decided to try and make my way to Charing Cross – the crowd towards Westminster station which was closer looked too dense to make much progress. There was a single Brexiteer with a megaphone taking on a small crowd who gathered around him, but failing to make much sense, and a line of police across the entrance to Horseguards Avenue where a small protest was taking place in front of the Ministry of Defence.

I wandered down briefly to find it was Veterans United Against Suicide, who as well as calling for more to be done to help service men and veterans in the fight against their developing PTSD and eventually committing suicide were also supporting a soldier discharged for being photographed in  uniform with extreme right figure Tommy Robinson.

I returned to Whitehall and walked up towards Trafalgar Square, but was soon brought to a halt by a densely packed crowd now also trying to leave. People were partying in Trafalgar Square and it took me around 15 minutes to get to Charing Cross station for a train.

MfJ at People’s Vote March
People’s Vote March – End
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There are no adverts on this site and it receives no sponsorship, and I like to keep it that way. But it does take a considerable amount of my time and thought, and if you enjoy reading it, a small donation – perhaps the cost of a beer – would be appreciated.

My London Diary : London Photos : Hull : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage

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

To order prints or reproduce images

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