Sometimes demonstrations seem to be like London buses, and after you’ve waited ages, three come along at once. It happened last Saturday, when as well as the three events in London I did get to – if rather briefly to two of them – there were also demonstrations I would have liked to cover in Swansea and Ratcliffe-on-Soar. But I’d decided I wasn’t up to the roughing-it that joining in with the Climate Swoop to photograph what was planned as a 24 hour action.
I’d actually visited Ratcliffe-on-Soar a few years ago – and it has been pretty popular with photographers, not for the tons of carbon dioxide it creates, but simply visually, and it did have its attractions.
But I think since I was there they’ve put up a rather better fence, and last weekend there were a thousand or two police getting in the way of the view. If you want to see some pictures from the demonstration, one of the better sets of images I’ve seen is by Fil Kaler, and there a quite a few videos that give some of the atmosphere from – here’s a poetic one on Blip.TV and you can also see how a Climate Camp medic came to the aid of a policeman who had collapsed – and there are more videos on that site. Perhaps surprisingly, one of the fuller reports of the swoop was on CNN, just a pity they didn’t use any of the decent pictures that were available – but presumably they have a contract with Getty that means their pictures are dirt cheap or even at zero marginal cost. Just a pity they aren’t rather better. The three photographers I know personally who did go there all got considerably more interesting pictures.
Swansea too has its attractions, but it was a long way to go for what was expected to be a rather small demonstration by the right-wing EDL (or possibly WDL – Welsh Defence League) and rather more than three times as many in a counter demonstration by Unite Against Fascism. I’ve so far only found one picture of this protest on the web.
In London I had a busy day, starting with the Tamils, then rushing to Knightbridge for an anti-fur march before going back to Westminster for a demonstration against forced deportations of refugees back to the still terribly unsafe Baghdad. But each of those deserves its own post on the blog.