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The Day After The Brexit Vote – 2016

The Day After The Brexit Vote – Defend All migrants. On Friday 24th June 2016 almost half the nation woke up to hear with shock and some measure of disbelief to hear the news that a small majority had voted in favour of leaving Europe.

In any sensible democracy the result of 52% to 48% in an advisory referendum would not have been sufficient to cause such a major constitutional change, but Prime Minister David Cameron had stupidly promised to abide by the result and so we were now en route to Brexit.

Cameron had been confident that he would win the referendum with a vote to remain but he had severely underestimated the depths of lying and misrepresentation that the Leave campaign would sink to, with some of the leading figures likely to make huge personal profits from the break.

Brexit of course needn’t have been the major disaster it has been. We could have retained a much closer relationship with Europe, our largest trading partner. It needed the total incompetence of Boris Johnson to get us the worst of all deals, not least because he and his negotiators simply did not understand what negotiation meant, with the politicians largely restricting themselves to making clearly impossible demands and then blaming Europe.

I don’t expect we will return to Europe during my lifetime, but I hope the next government will make some sensible moves to restore our relationships, although rather avoiding the subject in the current election campaign. But surely we cannot continue being unable to staff our care and medical sectors and with crops rotting unpicked on the fields. And we do need at least some of those plumbers, electricians and other tradesmen.

The Leave campaign reached new lows with things like that £350 million on the side of a bus, which everyone who made the slightest investigation knew was a lie. But the media spread it around with some suggesting it was perhaps not correct, while all should have been deriding it as nonsense. And it was a figure that stuck in many peoples’ minds.

Immigration was an issue that both sides failed on – and at times Remain seemed determined to try and outflank Leave on the right suggesting racist policies. Migrants were attacked and scapegoated not only by both Remain and Leave campaigns but by all our mainstream parties and media over more than 20 years, stoking up hatred by insisting immigrants are a “problem”.

Migration has been and will remain vital to the growth of our economy, as well as enriching our cultural life. Walk through our high streets or page through the TV schedules and cross out the immigrants and the descendants of post-war immigration and what you would be left would be limited and rather boring.

Senior Conservatives are even proposing that we should leave the European Convention on Human Rights so they can deport asylum seekers to Rwanda, and although Labour has said it will end this policy it has not yet put forward plans for safe routes for asylum seekers.

The protest on 24th June by anarchists and socialists against racism and fascist violence had been some planned weeks in advance, called by Movement for Justice, rs21, London Antifascists and Jewdas, and supported by other groups including Brick Lane Debates, National Campaign Against Fees and Cuts (NCAFC), Right to Remain, Radical Assembly, Clapton Ultras, the Antiuniversity, English collective of prostitutes, sex workers open university, lesbians and gays support the migrants, Razem Londyn, London Anarchist Federation, Kent anti-racist network, dywizjon 161, colectivo anticapitalista Londres and Plan C London as well as others who brought banners and many individuals.

A camera team of three working for a right-wing US website arrived and tried to provoke groups in the crowd with silly questions and appearing to gloat over the Brexit decision. Eventually police stepped in to calm things and made sure the group left.

After a number of speeches the protesters set off to march on a roundabout route through the east of the city on their way to protest outside News International in Southwark. But I think they veered off course whenever it looked likely that the large police presence might try to kettle them. Eventually I got fed up with walking and went home.

More on the protest with many more pictures on My London Diary: Defend All Migrants.

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Pensions, Cuts, Murdoch & Cafe Jiro – 2011

Pensions, Cuts, Murdoch & Cafe Jiro: Thursday 23rd June 2011 – Trade unionists march against public sector pension cuts, a protest against Murdoch being allowed to take over BSkyB and one of my favourite artists turns a St John’s Wood gallery into his café.

20,000 March for Pensions & Against Cuts

Public Service unions had organised a march against pension cuts and itt was joined by many thousands of union members as well as many others protesting against cuts in public services made by the Tory coalition government.

There was a large crowd waiting when I arrived in Lincoln’s Inn Fields over an hour before the march was due to begin and more were arriving as it left a little early as the organisers and police worried about overcrowding in London’s largest square – around 28,000 square metres.

Before we left there had been speeches by several union leaders and the march was led to Parliament by Christine Blower NUT, Mark Serwotka PCS and Mary Bousted ATL along with MP John McDonnell.

The Hutton review had clearly shown that the government was lying when it said that public service pensions were not affordable. This report had said it expected “benefit payments to fall gradually to around 1.4 per cent of GDP in 2059-60, after peaking at 1.9 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP) in 2010-11.”

There seemed to be a huge number of police on the street for a peaceful march, particularly one that was mainly composed of teachers and civil servants with only a token presence from militant students and anarchists.

Police had earlier been busy in Lincoln’s Inn Fields where they appeared to be conducting stop and searches on any young male demonstrators in black clothing.

Things did get just a little agitated when for some reason police decided to stop the march on Strand for around 20 minutes and it got very noisy on Whitehall as it passed Downing St.

I stood outside Westminster Central Hall for around an hour as more and more marchers arrived from the main march I had been on and a number of others from various parts of London. Police and march stewards there objected to Charlie Veitch and other ‘Love Police’ haranguing the crowd in his usual deadpan fashion upholding his right to freedom of expression and they moved away.

Westminster Central Hall is a large venue but far too small for the numbers at the event and there was a large overflow rally in Tothill Street at the side of the church. A group of 20 or 30 black-clad protesters there were told by police they must remove their hoods and dark glasses and there were some arguments. I heard later in the day there were a few scuffles with them and police in Whitehall and they were kettled for a few hours in Trafalgar Square.

More on My London Diary at 20,000 March for Pensions & Against Cuts.

Save UK Democracy From Murdoch – Dept Culture, Media & Sport

Outside the Department of Culture, Media and Sport was a protest organised by on-line global campaign network Avaaz and my union the NUJ against the decision by Jeremy Hunt to let Rupert Murdoch to take over BSkyB.

This was an emergency protest organised within minutes of the news breaking early that morning, and the email calling it went out when many were already on their way to work or to attend the pensions protest, so numbers were small.

Obviously some planning had taken place earlier and there was a tall stilt walker with a large but rather inappropriately avuncular head of Rupert Murdoch, surely one of the ugliest figures in world media and pursuing a clear aim of world domination, toying with two large string puppets representing David Cameron and Jeremy Hunt.

But most of the posters were clearly last minute, with laser-printed sheets being glued onto generic NUJ placards. NUJ members were “appalled – like most of the thinking population – by the thought of the UK’s largest commercial broadcaster falling into Murdoch’s hands, and the threat that this poses for in particular for news coverage, but also for a diverse and broadly based media culture. “

“They want the government to act in the public interest rather than as puppets for Murdoch’s interest and don’t want Sky News to become another Fox News.”

Save UK Democracy From Murdoch

Café Jiro 2011 – Queen’s Terrace Café, St John’s Wood

In the evening I was at The Queen’s Terrace Café, which had opened in April 2011. This was no ordinary café, but a cultural café, run by Mireille Galinou, who for some years had run a charity called the London Arts Café, which never quite managed to open a café but did organise a dozen or so exhibitions and numerous other art events in London.

London Arts Café and The Queen’s Terrace Café are no longer with us, but you can still read online about many of the the activities the London Arts Café organised during its existence from 1996-2007. For some of this time I was Treasurer of the organisation and also wrote the web site.

One of the most enjoyable art shows I went to in 2009 was Café Jiro, an installation in the Flowers Gallery in Cork St, London by a friend of mine, the Japanese artist Jiro Osuga who grow up in north London. The 2011 was a smaller and more intimate version of that show, with one of the large wall-size panels from the Flowers show, along with a number of other works specially produced for this space – including three in the smallest room.

The small gallery was packed for the opening – and for me a great opportunity to meet some old friends, and it was good to see Jiro’s work in a real café environment. You can read more about the show on a 2011 post in >Re:PHOTO.

Café Jiro 2011

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Stop the BNP, Olympic Allotments, End Deportation – 2008

Stop the BNP, Olympic Allotments, End Deportation: Saturday 21st June, 2006. A Love Music Hate Racism/Unite Against Fascism march, a visit to the replacement allotments for the Manor Gardening Society and a curiously legal protest against deporting refugees to Iraq.

Stop the Fascist BNP – LMHR/UAF – Tooley St – Trafalgar Square

The Love Music Hate Racism/Unite Against Fascism “Stop the Fascist BNP” march turned out to be a little of a damp squib, although a fairly colourful one, as only 2-3,000 people turned up to march from Tooley Street in Bermondsey to Trafalgar Square.

Perhaps Stop the War’s failure to capitalise on the mass following it gained with the largest ever demonstration in the UK in 2003 had discredited the idea of huge marches. Like Stop the War, Unite Against Fascism was seen by many as being largely a front for the Socialist Workers Party. The anti-fascist magazine Searchlight had disaffiliated from them in 2005, arguing for the need for new tactics and in particular to work in communities where the BNP were exploiting real problems rather than just opposing them on the streets and calling them fascists.

A bigger march would have been better, but more importantly for the audience which Love Music Hate Racism was attempting to reach it needed to be much more of a free and fun event.

The band who played at the start of the march were restricted to a single number, when they could well have played much more, and there was hardly any music on the march – I only saw one small marching band. Where were the great sound systems for people to dance behind?

And as I wrote, “I was frankly appalled by the attitudes of the stewards towards photographers, almost as if the event was trying to hide from publicity. I’ve had less hassle when photographing the BNP.”

More pictures at Stop the Fascist BNP – LMHR/UAF.

Manor Gardening Society – New Allotments – Marsh Lane, Leyton

The Manor Gardens Allotments fight to stay in place for the 2012 had failed. The gardens had presented the opportunity for the Olympics to show a real commitment to green ideas – and of course they had zero interest in really doing so. Green publicity stunts and lies yes, but Green actions and real content you had to be joking.

As I wrote “London in 1948 did really put the modern Olympics back on course, and it did so on vision and a shoestring – and even ended up making a profit. 2012 will be different in every respect. A commitment to corporate profit at high cost to the public purse appears to be the only vision on display, and a legacy of debt and environmental disaster seem to be the most likely outcomes.“

All tenants were evicted in late 2007 and the allotments were moved onto some common land in Leyton at a cost of £1.8 million, but the job was done terribly badly. They even took soil from the allotment site, but heat-treated it, killing all the life in it. Healthy soil is full of life – and as well as killing weed the treatment has killed off the microorganisms it needs, as well as larger creatures such as worms.

The soil was dead – and would take years to recover. Over much of the site it had been heavily compacted by heavy machinery working on the road andhad almost zero drainage. Whole areas were waterlogged. The only healthy crops I saw were in grow-bags.

I commented: “Of course it doesn’t look like the old Manor Gardens – more like some kind of prison camp, but I was pleased to see again many of those from the old site, making a good job of getting things growing again. One thing that hadn’t changed was the community spirit and the welcome – and the splendid salad and other food.”

The New Lamas Lands Defence Committee had campaigned against the loss of common land, but were assured it was only temporary – but there is now a permanent site there. In 2016 some of the tenants of the Manor Gardening Society were allowed to return to a small site at Pudding Mill, on the Bridgewater Road in Stratford. Two thirds of this site is now under threat from a development proposed by the London Legacy Development Corporation along its southeast which will put it under permanent shade.

Manor Gardening Society – New Allotments

Tent City – Stop Deporting Iraqis – Parliament Square

Voices UK had organised a 24-hour ‘Tent City’ starting at noon on 21 June, Midsummer Day as a deliberately illegal demonstration in Parliament Square, at the centre of the SOCPA restricted zone.

Much to their surprise, 4 days before it began they received an e-mail from a police office with its subject “Tent City Demonstration” and the message “I would like to inform you that an application has been received for this demonstration and it will be duly authorised“.

They had not made an application and could only think that the police had themselves applied rather than have to police an intentionally illiegal protest. Although it was now legal under SOCPA, the protest was still in breach of Westminster City Council by-laws and a couple of their heritage wardens came out to give letters telling them so – apparently accompanied by the police officer who had sent the email.

Fighting is still taking place in Iraq involving various factions as well as the occupying US and UK forces. Many Iraqis will still be at risk of their lives if they are returned.

But for the Home Office – then under Labour Home Secretary John Reid, deportations are largely a matter of numbers, not of people. Things of course got even worse in later years under Theresa May, Amber Rudd, Sajid Javid, Priti Patel, Suella Braverman and James Cleverly, but I expect little change whoever wins our current election.

Tent City – Stop Deporting Iraqis

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Housing Act, Student rents & Open Gardens – 2016

Housing Act, Student rents & Open Gardens: On Saturday 18th June 2016 I went to three events all with a connection with housing. First was a protest against the 2016 Housing and Planning Act passed the previous month, after which I briefly visited students celebrating a victory at UCL before going to South London for an Open Gardens event at an estate which Lambeth Council want to demolish.

Axe the Housing Act March – Hyde Park Corner

Protesters marched from Hyde Park Corner to Parliament against the Housing and Planning Act which tenant and housing groups, councils, academics, trade unions and communities say will deepen the current housing crisis, removing security from many tenants and will result in the demolition and selling off of almost all social housing.

The Act extends the ‘Right to Buy’ to housing association tenants and allows councils to sell vacant ‘higher value’ vacant council homes to fund this.

It brings in mandatory rent increases for households in social housing with a combined family income of ore than £40,000 in London and £31,000 elsewhere with their rents increasing over time to market rents. Amendments made this slightly fairer by limiting the income considered to the taxable income of two main household earners and excluding most of those receiving benefits from the calculations.

The Act removes security of tenure for most council tenants. New tenants will only get fixed term tenancies generally from 2-5 years, with some longer tenancies agreed for those with a disability or children living at home until they reach the age of 19 following pressure from the House of Lords.

The Act reflects and emphasises the Tory view that social housing should be a very limited resource only supporting the the very poorest in society, second-class citizens, with the landlords and house builders being able to make profits from the rest of us. But housing campaigners generally see it as by far the most cost-effective way to provide for one of our basic human needs and also argue that it can provide an income for local councils to support other vital services.

The protesters urged councils to refuse to implement the Act and call on people to stand together to boycott the pay-to-stay tax, resist evictions and block regeneration and estate demolitions.

Among the speakers before the march began was Richard Livingstone, a councillor from the London Borough of Southwark, Cabinet Member for Adult Care and Financial Inclusion and formerly responsible for housing in the borough.

Southwark is a borough with an appalling record on housing and estate demolition and many at the protest were appalled at his presence calling Southwark’s demolition of the Heygate and Aylesbury a shameful example of exactly the kind of social cleansing this protest was against.

Many feel that many Labour councillors and officers are now careerists, driven by political or financial advancement rather than caring for the people in their borough. A number have earned themselves highly paid jobs with developers and other companies in the housing sector.

I left as the march moved off towards Parliament and made my way to UCL.

More at Axe the Housing Act March.

UCL Rent Strike Victory

It was good for once to be able to celebrate a victory, after after the Complaints Panel at UCL decided that the residents of Campbell House West will be compensated in full for the final term last year – up to £1,368 per student.

They determined that UCL Management “Not only demonstrated a lack of empathy towards students’ circumstances and an understanding or appreciation of what would be an acceptable student experience, but was disingenuous to the students concerned.”

So the mass protest that had been planned, an Open Day Manifestation, turned into a celebration of their victory, and also to show their determination to continue their campaign to cut student rents.

I left after a brief visit, missing the lively victory march around the West End with flares and the helium-filled balloons I had watched them preparing.

UCL Rent Strike Victory

Central Hill Open Gardens Estates – Upper Norwood

Lambeth’s Central Hill Estate is a popular and well-planned estate of considerable architectural interest in good condition under threat of demolition by Lambeth Council. Like some other estates it has been refused listing probably on political grounds. The properties, completed in 1974, were well built and are generally in good condition though suffering like most council estates from a lack of proper maintenance and in need of relatively minor refurbishment.

This was one of the estates under threat of demolition by Government Housing policies, council regeneration programmes and property developers which were welcoming visitors to open day events as a part of the Open Garden Estates initiative by Architects for Social Housing, ASH.

There was a display of the alternative plans for the estate by ASH showing how the council’s aims of increasing the capacity of the estate could be achieved without any demolition and at a much lower financial and environmental cost.

Lambeth Council had refused to make any serious consideration of these plans, almost certainly because although the cost would be much less, they would not provide the profits to the developers from the high market value sales of new properties and market rents, and the costs of the ASH scheme to the council would be greater.

One of the visitors to the open day was Labour MP for Dulwich and West Norwood Helen Hayes, who stormed out after being questioned why she was attending when she had given her backing to Labour councillors behind the plans to demolish the estate.

Also at the open day were various food, book and other stalls, a music performance, film show (I watched a film about how Southwark Counci had mistreated the residents of Myatts Fields) and a Marxist puppet show as well as estate tours. I’d visited the estate several times in the past and had photographed parts of it in the 1990s as well as more recently in February 2016 when I wrote more about it and Lambeth’s plans to demolish.

Although New Labour’s ‘Regeneration’ policy possibly had good intentions, its results have often been disastrous, and Labour really needs to rethink its whole approach to council-owned housing.

As I wrote in 2016: “‘Regeneration’ has resulted in huge transfers of public assets into private hands, in a wholesale loss of social housing, and in social cleansing, with people being forced outwards from London, unable to afford either the laughably named ‘affordable’ properties or those at market rates. It has meant the dispersal of functioning communities, in widespread and arguably fraudulent under-compensation of leaseholders, and in a great deal of sub-standard buildings, often to lower specifications of space and worse design than those they replace.“

More people were arriving at the event when I left to go home and I was sorry to have to miss some of the activities planned for later in the day.

The estate is still standing and the fight to save it continues. In March 2024 Lambeth Council set up a contract with consultants to reappraise the plans for estate ‘regeneration’ at Cressingham Gardens, Central Hill and Fenwick. Perhaps it will come up with some more sensible proposals …

More at Central Hill Open Gardens Estates.

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March of the Human Rights Jukebox – 2007

March of the Human Rights Jukebox: On Saturday 16th June I went to South London to photograph this event and put many pictures and a fairly long text on-line on My London Diary.

Here I’ll share the text (with some corrections and links added) and just a few of the pictures – you can see many more of these on My London Diary. You can read about the Human Rights Juke Box on the South London Gallery site, and on Isa Suarez’s web site.

So this is what I wrote in 2007:

I joined the ‘Human Rights Jukebox’ in its progress from the Camberwell Magistrates Court to Peckham on Saturday 16th June. An event in the Camberwell Arts Week, the ‘March Of The Human Rights Jukebox’ was organised by Isa Suarez, who had a one-year artists residency in Southwark in 2006.

The juke box included thoughts on people’s rights from many residents and diverse groups in Southwark, some of whom marched with banners along with it.

At the start of the event, the Dulwich Choral Society performed a specially composed piece by Suarez, using words from the ‘jukebox’. On Clerkenwell Green we stopped for a impassioned recital (in French) by a Black African poet, and in front of the old baths in Artichoke Place (now the Leisure Centre) there was a long performance by Deadbeat International as well as a short song by three musicians that left us wanting more.

Deadbeat International also performed at various other points on route, including another energetic set at Peckham Library. The march was led into Peckham by a rapper, with some forthright views on human rights.

Accompanying the jukebox were the live art group ‘mmmmm‘, Adrian Fisher & Luna Montengro, covered from head to foot in sheets of paper containing the complete text of the UN Universal Declaration Of Human Rights, in both English and Spanish as well as the pages of a world atlas.

In front of the library at Peckham, mmmmm completed the event by unpinning the sheets from each other one by one, reading the clauses and feeding the sheets into a shredder (and when this gave up, tearing them up.)

Each then poured cold water over the other and threw the shredded papers, so that they stuck to the wet clothes and skin. Finally we were all invited (in what we were informed was an Argentine custom) to jump once into the air for each of the 30 clauses of the declaration.

On the way to the event, I’d jumped off the bus at the Oval, where ‘Stop The War’ and other demonstrators were protesting. Gordon Brown was apparently expected to arrive at 12.00 to watch some kind of game there. It was a very different kind of action to the ‘jukebox’ though both were political and art in their different ways, although only one gets Arts Council funding.

Also dropping in at Peckham Library were a group of young cyclists from the go-kart track in nearby Burgess Park. They were a lively crew and everyone seemed to want to be photographed.

More pictures:
Stop The War Demo
March of the Human Rights Jukebox

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Slutwalk, Syrians & More Naked Bikers – 2011

Slutwalk, Syrians & More Naked Bikers: Three events in London on Saturday 11th June 2011.

Slutwalk London – Piccadilly to Trafalgar Square

Several thousand people, mainly women, some dressed in deliberately provocative fashions, marched through London to demand the right to wear what they like and to be safe.

The protest came after a police officer in Toronto had told students “women should avoid dressing like sluts in order not to be victimized.”

They were protesting against the use of the word ‘slut’ to describe the innocent victims of crimes and the blaming of the victims for the crimes that were carried out against them. The job of police is to protect people on the street and arrest and get convictions of those who commit crimes, not to blame the victims for the crime.

I wrote then “Women should feel free to go out on the streets dressed how they like – whether burkha or bikini – and be safe. An attractive dress is an attractive dress and not an invitation to rape.”

They were also protesting against male violence against women in general and calling for better education on the facts about rape and called for improvements in the legal, emotional and practical support for the victims of sexual assault, rape and domestic violence.

Government cuts in public services had led to a decrease in support and legal aid, and the failure to provide adequate affordable social housing often makes it impossible for victims of domestic violence to leave the family home.

They also protested the failure of the UK immigration authorities to take seriously the accounts of rape given by many asylum seekers and the use of rape as a military weapon in Libya and elsewhere.

More on My London Diary at Slutwalk London.

Syrians Protest At Syrian Embassy – Belgrave Square

A crowd of over a hundred Syrians protested outside the embassy after news of the government using helicopter gunships against peaceful protesters in Maarat al-Numaab and the ‘revenge’ attacks against villages around Jisr al-Shugour, where crops have been burnt, livestock killed, olive trees uprooted and villages destroyed.

Peaceful protests in Syria have been met by increasing military force in Syria and the protesters called for President Bashar al-Assad and his regime to resign and for democratic changes in their country.

The protest in London remained peaceful but very noisy and the two armed officers guarding the embassy door had nothing to do and other officers remained in their van a short distance away. There were no signs of anyone being inside the embassy during the protest.

Syrians Protest At Embassy

Naked Bike Ride – Hyde Park & Westminster

I’ve written several times recently about the annual Naked Bike Rides in London which are an environmental protest against car culture and and oil-based economy, so won’t repeat myself here.

I also wrote at some length on My London Diary about the 2011 ride when I photographed many of the riders as they set off from Hyde Park. As I commented the ride, “Now in its eighth year the event has become a part of the tourist calendar, with listings on the major events sites for visitors and in newspapers and magazines and a large crowd had gathered for the start, making it difficult to photograph sensibly.”

This was the first ride following the introduction of ‘Boris Bikes’, the scheme set up by Ken Livingstone inspired by a similar scheme in Paris, but only launched on 30th July 2010 after Boris Johnson had become Mayor, and many on the ride were taking advantage of these hired bikes.

The mass start was made rather chaotic by the large number of spectators, many wandering onto the route holding up their phone cameras, and in later years the ride was split to start in a number of different parts of London to avoid this.

By the time I met the riders again in Westminster, having taken the tube there, the riders had been split up into a number of small groups and it hardly seemed a mass ride, but I learnt later that they had stopped to regroup and there were pictures on the news of them en mass riding up the Mall and singing ‘Happy Birthday’ to the Queen, although she failed to put in an appearance.

More pictures (which obviously include some nudity) at Naked Bike Ride.

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Palestine, Orange Order, Naked Cyclists & RFH – 2007

Palestine, Orange Order, Naked Cyclists & RFH: On Saturday 9th June 2007 I photographed a protest against the occupation of Palestine,the Orange Order celebrating 200 years of parades, the London World Naked Bike Ride and the re-opening of the Royal Festival Hall.

End the occupation – Palestine

The largest of these events was part of an international day of action marking the 40th anniversary of the 1967 six day war which had ended in complete and massive military victory for Israel, and a shameful defeat for not just the Arab nations but also the UN and the rest of the world.

And, as I commented then “in the longer term it is proving a disaster for Israel too, chaining them to a policy of brutal oppression of their Palestinian neighbours.” I continued; “Over the past few months, reading and hearing eye-witness reports of life in the occupied areas have shocked me, just as the reports from South Africa under apartheid did. And just as in South Africa, in time these things must come to an end with peace and reconciliation. War doesn’t settle things, it just prolongs the agonies.”

Seventeen years later we are seeing things that are orders of magnitude more shocking still happening in Gaza, witnessing the genocide of the Palestinian people.

Two members of the Palestinian government who had been invited to speak at the event were unable to come as they in jail in Israel. As usual until recently there was little coverage of this event or Israels apartheid policies in the UK media. Now their is considerable international interest in what is happening in Gaza but reporting is severely hampered as the international press are not allowed access other than in a few very limited Israeli army led tours.

More at End Occupation in Palestine.

Orange Order celebrates 200 Years of Parades – Park Lane

The Grand Lodge 200th Anniversary Parade marked 200 years since the first recorded Orange Parade by the Portadown Lodge of the Orange Order, Loyal Orange Lodge No. 1 (LOL 1), on 1 March 1807.

Although King William III, Prince Of Orange had successfully invaded England in what was later known as the Glorious Revolution in 1688 and the first Orange Association was founded a few days after his landing in Brixham when he reached Exeter, organised parades are only known to have started 119 years later.

This anniversary event was an impressive display with several thousand marching including lodges from all our major cities. The Orange Order still has a strong following in some former protestant working class areas but as I commented, despite “own protestant roots … such sectarian solidarity now seems a relic of ancient enmities, a throwback to a less civilised age.”

Many more pictures at 200 Years of Orange Marches

World Naked Bike Ride, Hyde Park,

I arrived in Hyde Park a little late but was able to photograph the riders setting off on their ride around London and went with them along Piccadilly before taking the tube to wait for them to reach the Houses of Parliament at Westminster.

You can read my thoughts about the ride which I think rather fails to get its message across although causing a great stir on the busy streets it goes through, as few of the riders have anything on their bodies or bikes to state its purpose on My London Diary.

For most who see it, this is simply an unusual spectacle of nudity, and an illustration of the great variety of the human form rather than the very limited body types which we see on advertising hoardings and other images of the fully or partly unclothed om the press or elsewhere.

This was the one event of those I covered that was widely covered in the media, making the national news that evening, though I think there was little attention to why the ride was taking place.

More about it and more pictures at 2007 World Naked BikeRide.

London’s Royal Festival Hall Reopens

The Southbank centre was staging a weekend of events across its site marking the reopening of the Royal Festival Hall after a considerable refurbishment which began in June 2005 and I managed to take a few photographs of these across the day.

The foyers inside the building were opened up more but I think the main purpose was to provide more commercial space to provide an income for the centre. The Royal Festival Hall was built as part of the Festival of Britain in 1951 and was funded and managed by the London County Council and their successors, the Greater London Council until that was abolished by Thatcher in 1988.

The Southbank Centre states on its web site that it “does not receive any funding from the Government to run and maintain its 11-acre national heritage site. All essential repair and maintenance work to our buildings and site has been funded from our own commercial revenues or from fundraising.“

More pictures begin at London’s Royal Festival Hall Reopens

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DPAC v Theresa May in Maidenhead 2017

DPAC v Theresa May in Maidenhead: In June 2017 we were also in a General Election campaign after Theresa May called a snap election. Labour would have won back then, but for the deliberate interference by the party right who sabotaged their efforts in some key seats to stop a Corbyn victory. Instead we got another 7 years of Tory blunders and incompetence. May, Johnson, Truss, Sunak…

Even now I wonder when Labour seems to be in a commanding position in the opinion polls whether Labour will somehow manage to snatch defeat out of the jaws of victory. They are certainly doing their best at the moment to alienate party workers in many constituencies by barring their choice of candidates and imposing often quite unsuitable (and sometimes unspeakable) people in their place.

Theresa May was standing in the safe Tory seat of Maidenhead and was re-elected with a majority of over 26,000 over Labour and in 2019 again with almost 19,000 more votes than the then second place Lib-Dem. This time May has retired but it may well be a close run thing with both Reform UK and the Lib-Dems taking votes from the Tories.

DPAC were not fielding a candidate or supporting one of the other twelve in the 2017 race but were there to protest against the Tory government, the first in the world to be found guilty of the grave and systematic violations of disabled people’s human rights by the UN.

They stated that Tory cuts since 2010 had 9 times the impact on disabled people as on any other group, 19 times more for those with the highest support needs. Tory polices are heartless, starving, isolating and finally killing the disabled who they view as unproductive members of society – and by ending the Independent Living Fund they have has actually stopped many from making a positive contribution.

The Tory Government rejected the UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities findings in 2016, which had found failures in the right to live independently and be included in the community, to work and employment, and to an adequate standard of living and social protection across all parts of the UK. A further report by the committee in 2024 found that there had been “no significant progress” since 2016 in improving disabled people’s rights and that there were signs that things were getting worse in some areas.

The 2024 report concluded that the UK has “failed to take all appropriate measures to address grave and systematic violations of the human rights of persons with disabilities and has failed to eliminate the root causes of inequality and discrimination.” Labour has yet to announce anything likely to improve the situation.

A couple of buses took me slowly to Maidenhead where I met the group from DPAC who had come from Paddington in a quarter of the time. They marched to the High Street with a straw effigy of ‘Theresa May – Weak and Wobbly’ and the message ‘Cuts Kill’. After a hour of protest with speeches, chanting and handing out fliers calling on Maidenhead voters to vote for anyone but Theresa May they returned to the station.

Although it looked to the police who had followed them closely as well as to some of the photographers who had travelled down from London that the protest had come to an end I knew that DPAC would not leave without some further action.

They waited on the pavement close to the station until most of the police had left – and most photographers had caught a train – and then moved to occupy one of the busiest roads into the town. The police came running back and began to argue with the protesters to get them to return to the pavement.

Police find it hard to deal with disabled protesters, especially those in wheelchairs and mobility scooters, and they were rather confused (as I was) by the arguments of ‘General William Taggart of the NCA‘ who claimed a military right to block roads. DPAC told the police that they would leave the road after having made their point for a few more minutes, but the police wanted them to move at once.

Eventually having blocked the road for around 15 minutes the protesters were told they would be arrested unless they moved and slowly began to do so. I left rather more quickly as my bus to Windsor was coming and if I missed it I would have to wait two hours for the next one. I arrived at the stop as it was coming in.

My journey home was not an entirely happy one. There was the usual walk between stops and wait for another bus to take me close to home. I got off, walked a short distance down the road, felt in my pocket for my phone and found nothing – I had left it on the bus, which was by then disappearing around the corner. Fortunately the bus driver later found it and handed it in at the depot and two days later I was able to cycle to Slough and retrieve it.

More on My London Diary at DPAC Trash The Tories in Maidenhead.

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Heathrow – No Third Runway – 2008

Heathrow – No Third Runway: On Saturday 31st May 2008 I joined around 4000 people marching from Hatton Cross to the village of Sipson, doomed if Heathrow was to be allowed to go ahead with its plans for a ‘third runway’.

This was a protest I had a more personal interest in than most. I grew up under the Heathrow flight path, about two and a half miles from touchdown, and have lived in the area most of my life. I now live about the same distance from the edge of the airport but fortunately no longer on the flightpath, with just the occasional aircraft making the steep turn needed to fly over our house.

My post about the protest written in 2008 began with this paragraph:
“It is now obvious to everyone with their head out of the sand is that London Heathrow is in the wrong place. It always was, since its creation by subterfuge and lies during the last years of the war, but no government since has had the nerve to challenge the powerful aviation lobby.”

In 2010 the newly formed Coalition government did cancel the plans as a part of the deal the Tories reached with the Lib-Dems. But then the government set up the Davies Commission, chaired by Howard Davies who was at the time employed by one of the principal owners of Heathrow, GIC Private Limited. Though he resigned when he was appointed it came as no surprise when his final report recommended the building of a third runway and a sixth terminal at Heathrow.

The government, now solely Conservative, approved these proposals in 2016 but London councils and the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan applied for judicial review and the Court of Appeal ruled that the decision was unlawful as it did not take into account the government’s commitments to combat climate change under the Paris Agreement. Heathrow appealed and in 2020 the UK Supreme Court lifted the ban.

Since then nothing has happened, partly because of lack of finance and arguments about who would fund some of the huge infrastructure costs involved in the proposals outside the airport boundary. The economic costs of the dislocation during the long development would also be considerable. Covid led to a huge decrease in passenger numbers and although these have picked up, finding the investment needed to finance the project probably remains impossible.

You can read more detail on Wikipedia about the supporters of expansion and also those opposed to it.

Although the project was always clearly an environmental disaster, clearly the government and Supreme Court decisions reflected the lack of importance at the time given to our increasing climate chaos. Recent weather in the UK and around the world are now beginning to change this and a new government is going to have to do more than pay lip-service and will no longer be able to push things into the distant future. So I think it very unlikely we will ever see another runway being built at Heathrow.

You can read a lengthy account of the protest on 31st May 2008 on My London Diary, when I mention that when I was taking pictures like the one at the top of the post as a few under 3000 of us made a giant human ‘NO’ on the grass of the recreation ground I was taking pictures with one hand and holding up my ‘No’ towards the cameras on the cherry-picker behind my back with the other.

Heathrow – No Third Runway

Pagan Pride & Justice for Darfur 2008

Pagan Pride & Justice for Darfur: On Sunday morning 25th May 2008 I made my way to Red Lion Square in Holborn to photograph the Pagain Pride public procession. Later I went to Downing Street were protesters were meeting to march to a rally at the Sudanese Embassy calling for Sudanese war criminals to be brought to justice.

Pagan Pride – Beltane Bash – Red Lion Square/Russell Square

Pagans – or rather neo-Pagans had come to Conway Hall in the corner of Red Lion Square for a day of celebration of the ancient Spring festival of Beltane, celebrating coming out of winter and the springing of the world into growth.

As well as their private celebrations inside the hall they were also taking part in a public procession, Pagan Pride, which goes the short distance to the fountain in Russell Square for a joyful celebration before returning to Conway Hall.

Nature and the cyclical nature of the seasons plays a central part in pagan beliefs and Godesses and Gods linked with nature play an important role in their ceremonies.

As I commented in 2008 nature appeared “not to be too kind to them as the rain bucketed down as the participants were supposed to gather, with only a few braver members (and some with umbrellas) coming out of the hall, but fortunately for them and the photographers it soon eased off, finally almost stopping as the parade got under way.”

That circular fountain in the garden of Russell Square “could have been designed with them in mind, with a strongly phallic character in the water jets, which in normal use rise and fall, but were left to flow at full strength for most of the ceremony.” In 2008 it was open for everyone to play in but on more recent visits I have noticed it is now surrounded by a fence.

“At first the group danced around the fountain in rings with hands joined, but then many of them started to run through the centre, many getting soaked.”

“Even the drummers, who at first stood on the edge providing a rhythm for the dance, eventually ran though the jets, and finally the Green Man also did so.“

By the time the parade left the square for its return to Conway Hall I’d had enough, and my feet and legs were soaked.

I left with a friend to go and have a cup of tea before going to Whitehall for a very different event.

More pictures at Pagan Pride – Beltane Bash.

Justice for Darfur – London Protest; Whitehall – Sudanese Embassy

Around 200 people, mainly from the Sudan, had gathered opposite Downing Street for a noisy protest before marching to a rally at the Sudanese Embassy opposite St James’s Palace in London.

The Justice for Darfur campaign was supported by around 30 organisations including the Aegis Trust, an international organization working to prevent genocide, Amnesty International and Darfur Union UK, who organised this event together with Aegis Students.

The campaign began when the Sudanese government refused to had over two men to the International Criminal Court. Sudan’s former Minister of the Interior Ahmad Haroun and Janjaweed leader Ali Kushayb were wanted on 51 charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity arising from persecution, rapes and murder of civilians in four West Darfur villages.

Haroun had even been promoted to be responsible for humanitarian affairs, and Kushayb, who had been in jail facing other charges when the ICC warrants were issued has been released.

In 2005 the UN Commission of Inquiry into war crimes listed 52 people for investigation and placards named some of these calling for them to be brought to justice. They included Sudan’s President Omar Al Bashir, Saleh Gosh, head of Sudan’s National Security and Intelligence Service, Minister of the Federation Government Nafi Ali Nafi and former Foreign Minister Mustafa Osman.

Earlier that month there had been fresh reports of beatings, detentions and shooting of Darfuri civilians in Khartoum and Omdurman but little had appeared in the UK mainstream press and they had sent no photographers or reporters to the event. It was one of those protests that later one photographer told me his editor dismisses as “tribal matters“.

More pictures at Justice for Darfur.

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