protest | >Re-PHOTO

Trade Justice At Brighton 2004

Trade Justice At Brighton: Twenty years ago on Sunday 26th September 2004 I spent the day in Brighton, not with my bucket and spade on the beach but with my Nikon D100 camera, and both a wide-angle and telephoto zoom lenses.

I was there with around 6000 other people at an event organised by the Trade Justice Movement going to lobby at the Labour Party conference – who at that time were in government with Tony Blair as prime minister.

According to its web site, “The Trade Justice Movement is a UK coalition of nearly sixty civil society organisations, with millions of individual members, calling for trade rules that work for people and planet.“

They want not free trade but fair trade “with the rules weighted to ensure sustainable outcomes for ordinary people and the environment. We believe that everyone has the right to feed their families, make a decent living and protect their environment. But the rich and powerful are pursuing trade policies that put profits before the needs of people and planet.”

And of course the rich and powerful are still in charge, still driving headlong towards global catastrophe while concentrating on amassing global power and vast fortunes, amounts far beyond what anyone can actually spend or benefit from. Certainly the world does not need – and cannot afford – billionaires.

We need a fairer system to share the world’s resources, and fair trade has a large part to play in this. Back in 2004 the Trade Justice Movement tried to get our government to change its policies but with little effect – and it is still trying to do so.

On the web site they list that they are calling on the UK government to:

Ensure that trade rules allow governments, particularly in poor countries, can choose the best solutions to end poverty and protect the environment;
Ensure that trade rules do not allow big business to profit at the expense of people and the environment.
Ensure that decisions about trade rules are made in a way that is fully transparent and democratic.

My description of the day in Brighton in 2004 was that it began with a rally on the promenade and “continued with a march along the seafront to the centre where the Labour party annual conference was in session. With around 6000 on the march, it straddled about a quarter-mile of seafront. “

“Outside the conference centre there was a two-minute silence before a further several minutes of deafening cacophony from whistles, banging on drums and saucepans and anything else that could make a noise.”

“Then ballot papers calling for trade justice were collected in and put into large ballot boxes along the seafront. Many people had brought cards completed by friends and a good start was made towards collecting the million signatures aimed at.“

On My London Diary I divided the pictures into four groups, General, Speakers, Performers and pictures from the March. This now seems rather confusing, but this was a time when few of those accessing the site were then on broadband. So there were pages of large postage-stamp sized thumbnails which would load reasonably rapidly, with the instruction “Click on any image to load these; they will be slow to download unless you are on broadband.“

The links on the September My London Diary page still go to the pages of thumbnails, but you can go directly to the larger images now on the links below.

General
Speakers
Performers
March & Ballot

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Haringey Development & Ritzy Strike – 2017

Haringey Development & Ritzy Strike: On Saturday 23rd September 2017 hundreds marched from a rally in North London against the council’s plans to make a huge transfer of council housing to Australian multinational Lendlease, which would result in the demolition of thousands of council homes, replacing them largely by private housing. I left the march close to its end taking the tube to Brixton where strikers at the were marking a year of action with a rally.

Haringey Against Council Housing Sell-Off

People had come to a rally and march against Haringey Council’s ‘Haringey Development Vehicle’, HDV, which proposed a £2 billion giveaway of council housing and assets to a private corporation run by Australian multinational Lendlease.

This would result in the speedy demolition of over 1,300 council homes on the Northumberland Park estate, followed by similar loss of social housing across the whole of the borough.

Similar ‘regeneration’ schemes in other boroughs such as Southwark, Lambeth and Barnet had resulted in the loss of truly affordable housing, with the result of social cleansing with many of the poorer residents of the redeveloped estates being forced to move out of these boroughs to areas with cheaper private housing on the outskirts of London and beyond.

London’s housing crisis has been made much worse by the activities of wealthy foreign investors buying the new properties and keeping them empty or only occasionally used as their values rise. Among the groups on the march were those such as Class War and Focus E15 who have down much to bring this to public attention.

In London it is mainly Labour Councils who are in charge and responsible for the social cleansing of the poor and the loss of social housing that is taking place on a huge scale.

Along with speakers from estates across London where similar schemes are already taking place there were those from Grenfell Tower where cost cutting and ignoring building safety and residents’ complaints by private sector companies including the TMO set up by the council created the disaster just waiting to happen.

On My London Diary I quoted part of a speech by then Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn a few days later at the Labour Party conference which condemned current practice on estate ‘regeneration’ and housing of which the HDV is the prime example.

“The disdain for the powerless and the poor has made our society more brutal and less caring. Now that degraded regime has a tragic monument: the chilling wreckage of Grenfell Tower, a horrifying fire in which dozens perished. An entirely avoidable human disaster, one which is an indictment not just of decades of failed housing policies and privatisation and the yawning inequality in one of the wealthiest boroughs and cities in the world, it is also a damning indictment of a whole outlook which values council tax refunds for the wealthy above decent provision for all and which has contempt for working class communities.”

You can hear the speech in full on the article by Architects For Social Housing on the conference, where they give their comments and more detail on the section I quoted above:

“Indeed it has. And high in the list of that brutality is the estate regeneration programme that threatens, is currently being implemented against, or which has already privatised, demolished or socially cleansed 237 London housing estates, 195 of them in boroughs run by Labour councils, which vie with each other for the title of ‘least caring’, and among which the councils of Hackney, Southwark, Tower Hamlets, Lambeth and Haringey could give the Conservative-run Kensington and Chelsea council a lesson in disdain, privatisation, failed housing policies and the inequality they produce. But it’s good to hear Corbyn discard the Tories’ contemptuous terminology of ‘hardworking families’ and ‘ordinary people’ and finally – if belatedly – refer to the ‘working class’.“

They go on to comment less favourably on Corbyn who they say had ignored “the estate regeneration programme that is at the heart of London’s transformation into a Dubai-on-Thames for the world’s dirty money” and so had failed to perceive that “every estate undergoing demolition and redevelopment could produce a similar testimony of inept and incompetent local authorities, bad political decisions and a failed and broken system of democratic accountability.”

The grass roots revolt against the HDV plans resulted in a political change and the scrapping of the plans. But the Labour Party has also changed radically, and those very people responsible for those ‘least caring’ local authorities in London and across the country are now in government.

More pictures at Haringey against council housing sell-off.

One year of Ritzy strike – Brixton

A quite different vehicle was the star of the show in Brixton, where BECTU strikers at the Ritzy Cinema were celebrating a year of strike action with a rally supported by other trade unionists, including the United Voices of the World and the IWGB and other union branches.

The strikers continued to demand the London Living Wage, sick pay, maternity and paternity pay, for managers, supervisors, chefs and technical staff to be properly valued for their work, and for the four sacked union reps to be reinstated.

After speeches in English and Spanish, came the surprise. The vehicle in Brixton was the newly acquired ‘Precarious Workers Mobile’, a bright yellow Reliant Robin, equipped with a powerful amplifier and loudspeaker, and after more speeches this led the protesters in a slow march around central Brixton.

Various actions at the Ritzy had started three years before this, when workers called for a boycott of the cinema. In 2019, after an industrial tribunal had won some of their claims BECTU suspended the boycott and the Living Staff Living Wage campaign although still continuing to fight for equal pay and against other dismissals.

More pictures at One year of Ritzy strike.

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Druids, Paddington & Hizb ut-Tahrir – 2013

Druids, Paddington & Hizb ut-Tahrir: This year the Autumn Equinox is on Sunday 22 September at 12.44pm GMT (1.44pm BST), and the Druid Order will again be holding their ceremony on Primrose Hill in London as they have for many years. They meet earlier to get things ready but the ceremmony begins around 12.30 The pictures here are from the event in 2013, and afterwards I took a walk around Paddington Basin before going to photograph the start of a march by the women and children of Hizb ut-Tahrir against the massacres of civilians being committed by the Assad regime in Syria.

Druids Celebrate Autumn Equinox – Primrose Hill

Druids, Paddington & Hizb ut-Tahrir - 2013

The Druid Order celebrated the Autumn Equinox (Alban Elued) with a ceremony on top of Primrose Hill in London at 1pm on Sunday 22 September 2013 in their traditional robes. They have been organising similar celebrations for just over a 100 years.

In My London Diary you can read a description of what takes place at this event, which marks the start of the Druid year.

On their web site they write “The harvest festival, when the power of heaven is infused into the fruits of the earth, and you reap what you have sowed. You see the full reality, what you made of your dreams, projects and plans, the actual reality, the truth that gives understanding and wisdom.”

The pictures on My London Diary are in the order in which I took them and I think include all the key moments in the ceremony, together with some commentary in the captions.

I had photographed this and the Spring Equinox ceremony at Tower Hill on a number of previous occasions and you can find pictures on the March and September pages for most years from 2007 to 2013.

By 2013 I was beginning to feel I had little more to say about the event and the following year, 2014 was the final time I went to take pictures.

A few of the pictures were taken with the help of a monopod which enabled me to hold the camera several feet above my head and take pictures with the help of a remote release. But although I could control the moment of release it was tricky to keep the lens pointing in the right direction.

Also on My London Diary is a brief history of the Druid Order, which although it has ancient roots in the Druidic tradition was founded a little over a hundred years ago.

There are a number of other Druid orders, some with very similar names, and members of the Loose Association of Druids including the Druid of Wormwood Scrubbs watched for a while before leaving for their own ceremony in the nearby Hawthorn Grove.

More on My London Diary at Druids Celebrate Autumn Equinox.

Paddington Basin

I had some time after the end of the Equinox ceremony before a protest I was to photograph and decided to take a walk around Paddington Basin, close to where that was to start.

Paddington Basin is the London end of the Paddington Arm of the Grand Union Canal and was opened in 1801 to bring goods by canal into Westminster and to the start of the New Road, a toll road across the north of London, now the A501. The Paddington end is now Marylebone Road and further on it becomes Euston Road.

Paddington Basin lost some of its traffic a little over twenty years later with the opening of the Regent’s Canal, which led from the Paddington Arm at Little Venice directly to the edge of the City and on to the River Thames at Limehouse.

Development of the area around the canal began in 1998 in one of London’s larger development areas under the Paddington Regeneration Partnership, later the Paddington Waterside Partnership.

Hizb ut-Tahrir Women March for Syria – Paddington Green

Women of Hizb ut-Tahrir appalled by the chemical attack and other massacres of women and children in Syria marched in London to show solidarity and called for Muslim armies to mobilise to defend the blood of their Ummah.

Hizb ut-Tahrir protests are always segregated and often seem to marginalise women, but this was clearly their show, with only one small group of men with a banner and a heavy public address system and around a thousand women and children.

The call to the march stated “rows upon rows of dead children in their burial shrouds have no doubt brought us to tears as Muslim women, for this is our beloved Ummah that is being killed.” They called on women to “Stand in solidarity with your sisters in Syria and speak out against the shedding of their blood and that of their families and children.”

Hizb ut-Tahrir oppose the current corrupt rulers in Islamic states and call on Muslims to rise up and get rid of corruption, and in particular of “the criminal regime of the butcher Bashar Al Assad” in Syria, and for “Muslim armies to mobilise and replace the rule of the dictator with the rule of Allah.”

I left the marchers as they went down the Edgware Road on their way to the Syrian Embassy in Belgrave Square.

Hizb ut-Tahrir was banned in the UK as a terrorist organisation in January 2024 after protests in London in which it praised attacks on Israel.

Hizb ut-Tahrir Women March for Syria

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Guns & Knives, Pineapple, Orange & Thames 2008

Guns & Knives, Pineapple, Orange & Thames: On Saturday 20th September 2008 after photographing a protest over gun and knife crime, a festival in Stockwell and being assaulted at an Orange March I went to Open House Day at Trinity Buoy Wharf and then crossed the river to walk along the riverside path from North Greenwich to Greenwich.

The Peoples March – Kennington Park

The Peoples March’ against gun and knife crime from Kennington Park was organised by the Damilola Taylor Trust and other organisations and supported by the Daily Mirror and Choice FM and came at the end of London Peace Week.

In 2007 there were 26 teenagers killed on the streets of London, and many of those on the march “were the families and friends of young people whose lives were ended prematurely by violent death, and the grief felt by many of those I photographed was impossible to miss. They were stricken and angry and demanding that something was done to stop the killing.”

These deaths continue. They peaked in 2021 when 30 were killed, but most years there have been around 20 such tragic deaths. Despite many marches such as this and projects such as the Violence Reduction Unit set up in 2019 by London Mayor Sadiq Khan these deaths continue.

Prime Minister Keir Starmer met with victims’ families just a few days after the election and earlier this month held a knife crime summit at Downing Street aimed at halving it over the next decade. Earlier in the year King Charles and actor Idris Elba hosted a mini-summit on knife crime at St James’s Palace in July. A ban on the sale and possession of zombie-style knives and machetes will come into force in 4 days time.

It remains to be seen if these initiatives will have any effect. Back in 2008 I commented that “Effective action would involve huge cultural shifts and a direction of change that would reverse much of what we have seen over the past 50 or so years” and unfortunately there still seems little chance of this happening.

The Peoples March

Stockwell Festival – Pineapple Parade

My spirits were lifted by seeing so many people taking part in the Pineapple Parade, part of the Stockwell Festival, clearly enjoying themselves taking part with others in the event. As I commented, “Community festivals such as this have an important role in building the kind of relationships that lead to healthy communities.”

John Tradescant the Elder (1577-1638) and his son John Tradescant the Younger (1608-1662) had their extensive nurseries a little up the road from where I was taking pictures and brought many exotic species to this country in the seventeenth century, and possibly pineapples were among them, although sources differ on this. Some pineapples were imported here in that era but apparently they were only cultivated here in heated greenhouses in the nineteenth century.

But as I wrote in 2008 “among the dancing and fancy dress I also found a reminder of violent death, Stockwell is probably best known for the brutal shooting by police of an innocent unarmed Brazilian man who had just boarded an underground train at Stockwell Station in 2005.”

More pictures Stockwell Festival – Pineapple Parade.

Apprentice Boys of Derry March – Temple

I shivered a little as I went down the escalator and boarded the tube on my way to Temple to photograph the Apprentice Boys of Derry March in which various Orange Order associations were taking part.

As you can see from my pictures, most of those taking part were proud to be there and happy to be photographed.

“But at one point I found myself being pushed backwards by a large man in dark glasses and instructed very fimly to leave. This kind of intimidation certainly isn’t acceptable and of course I continued to take pictures of the event. But it was a reminder of the darker side of Loyalist Ulster, which I hadn’t expected to see on the streets of London.”

More pictures on My London Diary at Apprentice Boys of Derry March.

Open House at Container City – Trinity Buoy Wharf, Leamouth

I took the tube to Canning Town and then walked down the long way to Trinity Buoy Wharf, cursing that the path beside Bow Creek and long-promised bridge had not been built. Part of the walkway is now open and an new bridge to the redeveloped Pura Foods site now provides more convenient access.

It was Open House Day in London and I took advantage of this to visit Trinity Buoy Wharf and the Container City there, a set of artists studios built using containers. Begun on the site in 2001, this had by then expanded considerably.

Trinity Buoy Wharf is open every day of the year except Christmas Day, but in 2008 as this year there were many extra activities for Open House. And at the end of 2023 the only complete Victorian steam ship in existence, the SS Robin has joined the collection of Heritage Vessels there, though tours for Open House on Sat 21st & Sun 22nd September 2024 are fully booked.

The containers were interesting but I think it was other aspects of the site and the view from it that interested me most, as well as the chance to take the specially laid-on ferry across the Thames to North Greenwich.

Open House at Container City

North Greenwich to Greenwich – Thames Path, Greenwich

The riverside walk is one I’ve done many times and its always of interest although the section at North Greenwich was only opened up in the 1990s and in more recent times parts of the walk have been blocked during the construction of some of the new blocks of riverside flats.

A large aggregate wharf remains although most of the riverside industry has gone, including the silos and the rest of the works at Morden Wharf. And only Enderby House remains of the site from which ships left to lay undersea cables across the world.

Greenwich of course retains its grand buildings, now a part of Greenwich University.

On My London Diary there are also some views across the river, both to buildings Canning Town, Leamouth, Canary Wharf and the Isle of Dogs. It’s a walk I’ve done several times since and might well do again, probably starting from North Greenwich Station. You can see pictures from a walk in 2018 on My London Diary. And there are still some good pubs when you reach Greenwich on your way to the buses or stations there.

More pictures from September 20th 2008 at North Greenwich to Greenwich.

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Save Hospitals & Secular Europe – 2012

Save Hospitals & Secular Europe: On Saturday 15th September 2012 almost two thousand people marched from Southall to meet others at a rally in Ealing to save Accident & Emergency Services at their local hospitals. Later I photographed humanists, atheists and others marching in Westminster.

Thousands March to Save Hospitals – Southall

A large crowd had come to Southall Park for the start of a march against the the closure of A&E and other departments at Ealing, Central Middlesex, Charing Cross and Hammersmith hospitals. Another march was going from Acton to the rally in Ealing.

A few days ago Keir Starmer talked about the crisis facing the NHS, and how it will take perhaps eight years to put it on a firmer footing for the future. He and Health Secretary Wes Streeting blamed its current parlous position on the reforms criticised by Lord Darzi as “disastrous” introduced by the coalition government in 2012 and the lack of investment in infrastructure under the Tory-led years of cuts since 2010.

Of course both these things are true, but not the whole picture and they say little that was not said by those working in the NHS and almost every commentator at the time about Andrew Lansley’s controversial Health and Social Care Act which came into force under his successor Jeremy Hunt, as well as lack of proper funding.

But they also leave out the disastrous effects of the many PFI schemes introduced under New Labour which landed the NHS with huge debts and continue to impose severe costs on many hospitals with excessive maintenance and other charges. PFI did provide much needed new hospitals, but did so at the expense of the NHS, transferring the costs away to make government finance look better; avoiding short-term public financing but creating much higher long-term costs.

New Labour also accelerated the privatisation of NHS services, which has of course increased greatly since the Tories came to power. Both parties became enamoured of a move away from the original NHS model to an insurance based system modelled on US Healthcare, a system that leaves many poorer US citizens with inadequate access to healthcare and is responsible for around 62% of the two million annual bankruptcies in the USA when for various reasons people’s insurance does not cover their treatment costs.

We in the UK spend almost a fifth less on health than the EU average, and only around a third of the per person spending in the USA – according to a 2010 article in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine comparing the two systems.

We all now have complaints about the level of service provided currently by our overloaded and cash-strapped NHS. Waiting times are sometimes ridiculously long and appointments hard to get. We need a better NHS, and to pay more for a better NHS, one that is better integrated rather than divided by Lansley’s competitive marketing-based model. But I have little confidence that our current government will make the right changes for either the NHS staff or the people.

We also need much better industrial relations, and the efforts by the new Labour government to sort out the disputes with healthcare workers deliberately engineered by the Tories which led to the strikes are encouraging. But many more changes to improve staff morale and retention are necessary. To remove the reliance on agency staff there needs to be an improvement in the treatment of NHS employed staff – and a number of simple measures including the removal of staff parking charges would help. And of course we also need to train more healthcare staff at all levels and in all specialities.

The rally on 15th September 2012 was supported by local councils and local MPs and there were many speakers with years of experience in the NHS who gave short speeches about the effects the closures would have – and the inevitable deaths that would result, particularly from the longer journey times through often highly congested streets to the remaining A&E services. Fortunately most of the politicians were told they would have to wait for the rally at the end of the march to speak. So I missed them as I walked a few hundred yards with the marchers along the main road towards Ealing and the rally, but then left them and walked to the station to take a train into central London.

More about the rally and march on My London Diary at Thousands March to Save Hospitals.

March & Rally for a Secular Europe – Westminster

Around 250 humanists, atheists and others marched from Storey’s Gate, next to Methodist Central Hall and across the road from Westminster Abbey, both in their different ways reminders of the links between the state and states and religion. And I presume the rally venue in Temple Place was chosen for the same reason.

They had come protest against the privileged status of religion and call for a truly secular society with freedom of religion, conscience and speech with equal rights for all in countries across the world, but particularly in Europe.

They demanded a secular Europe with complete separation between church and state and with no special status on grounds of religion, one law for all without execeptions.

The main banner read ‘For Universal Human Rights‘ and marchers chanted slogans including ‘2,4,6,8, Separate church and state‘ and of course ‘What do we want? A Secular Europe. When do we want it? Now‘, as well as stating that Women’s rights (and Gay Rights, Children’s Rights etc) are Human Rights.

But perhaps the most popular chant was one directed in particular against the Catholic Church, ‘Keep your rosaries Off my ovaries.” And at the rally in Temple Place Sue Cox of Survivors Voice, reminded us not just of sexual abuse of children by priests, but also of the continuing failure of the Catholic Church to deal with this, as well as the sinister power that that church still wields in countries including Italy.

As the march arrived at the rally there the London Humanist Choir performed some Monty Python songs before a number of speeches from Peter Tatchell and others. As he said, many people of faith also support both equality and the separation of religion and state, and that “for every bigot there are also people of faith who are with us.”

More at March & Rally for a Secular Europe.

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Trans Pride & Anti-Racist March in Brixton – 2019

Trans Pride & Anti-Racist March in Brixton: Five years ago today on Saturday 14th September I photographed the start of London’s first Trans+ Pride march before taking the tube to Brixton for an anti-racist march and rally.

London’s First Trans+ Pride March

Hundreds met at Hyde Park Corner to march along Oxford Street to Soho Square in London’s first Trans+ Pride March, was both a celebration and protest for trans, non-binary, intersex, and gender non-conforming individuals and their family, friends and allies.

They marched to increase the visibility of the trans+ community and to protest against the continuing discrimination in the UK and around the world against trans people.

Many carried placards and posters with messages such as ‘Trans Rights Matter‘ and ‘Trans Rights Are Human Rights’.

There has been increasing transphobia in British media, with trans people being attacked on the streets, and this has continued to grow since 2019.

The charity Stop Hate UK reports that in “2020/2021, 2,630 Hate Crimes against transgender people were recorded by the Police, an increase of 16% from the previous year” though they say the actual number of incidents is much greater as 88% of transgender victims of serious incidents did not report them.

Incidents reported to Stop Hate UK were of “verbal abuse, threatening behaviour, harassment and anti-social behaviour, such as having derogatory terms shouted at them, having invasive or inappropriate questions asked of them or facing harassment from neighbours, co-workers or strangers. “

In 2018 Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists had disrupted the Pride March in London with an anti-Trans protest and there were fears they might try to disrupt this march. There were many feminists supporting trans rights on this march.

More pictures at London’s First Trans+ Pride March.

Brixton anti-racist march

I took the tube from Green Park to Brixton where Movement for Justice and Lambeth Unison Black Workers’ Group were protesting against the continuing persecution of Windrush family members and other migrants.

They called for freedom of movement, the closure of immigration detention prisons, and an end to Brexit which is being used to whip up immigrant-bashing and nationalism to establish a Trump-style regime in Britain under Boris Johnson.

I missed the start of the rally in Windrush Square, but heard several of the speakers including Eulalee who has been fighting the Home Office for 16 years to remain in the UK with her family and was wearing a ‘More Blacks! More Dogs! More Irish‘ t-shirt.

People picked up their posters and marched the short distance to busy Brixton Market.

Here they stopped for more speeches, with many shoppers stopping briefly to listen and taking the fliers that were being handed out.

The protest seems to get a very positive reception in the market.

Green MEP for London Scott Ainslie joined the protest to speak about his ‘LDNlovesEU‘ campaign calling for an end to Brexit.

After his speech the protesters picked up their posters and moved on along Electric Avenue,

and turned into Atlantic Road,

They then marched down Brixton Road back to Windrush Square where the protest ended with some brief speeches and photographs.

More pictures on My London Diary at Brixton anti-racist march.

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Corbyn Victory & Refugees Welcome – 2015

Corbyn Victory & Refugees Welcome: Saturday 12th September 2015 was a day of hope when Jeremy Corbyn won the Labour leadership election with a landslide victory, getting more than three times the vote of his nearest rival, Andy Burnham. Several hundred Corbyn supporters met at Speakers’ Corner before the Refugees Welcome march to listen to the results of the Labour Leadership election.

Victory Party for Jeremy Corbyn – Speakers’ Corner, Hyde Park,

Tension built as the Deputy Leader results came and then erupted with Jeremy Corbyn’s first round victory.

Corbyn had only been able to stand in the election because some Labour MPs who did not support him were prepared to nominate him so that the Labour left would have a candidate in the ballot and not feel it was rigged against them. They thought he would only get a miserably low percentage of the votes.

According to Wikipedia, the release of opinion polls before the election which showed Corbyn in the lead prompted “high-profile interventions by a number of prominent Labour figures including Gordon Brown, Tony Blair, Jack Straw, David Miliband, and Alastair Campbell, among others” who felt Labour with Corbyn as leader would be unelectable.

These interventions almost certainly increased support for Corbyn, and although these and other Labour figures such as Peter Mandelson, along with most of the media and press did their best to try to get rid of Corbyn, including various plots and mass resignations from the Shadow Cabinet, he remained popular in the country.

The 2017 election turned out to be a much closer contest than most had imagined, and it was only due to deliberate sabotage by Labour party officials that Corbyn lost. A leaked report in 2020 which demonstrated this led to the setting up of the Forde report into Labour party factionalism which although it called the earlier report “factional” confirmed many of its suspicions and conclusions – as well as criticising both sides in the party – remained secret until July 2022.

What shocked many of us was the evident relief shown by some leading members of the party as the 2017 election results were coming out that their party had lost. And the witch-hunt against the left in the party continues unabated.

On the 12th September 12th 2015 there was much more media interest in the few hundred celebrating Corbyn’s victory than in the huge Refugees Welcome march which followed, and in the media scrum I got knocked flying and my equipment scattered, but managed to gather it up and continue work.

Victory Party for Jeremy Corbyn

Refugees Welcome Here Rally & March

From Speakers Corner I joined the huge crowd – at least 50,000 – filling Park Lane as far as I could see. This national march was a response to the many reports of refugees fleeing war and persecution, with people wanting to show their support for refugees facing death and hardship and their disgust at the lack of compassion and inadequate response of the British government.

On My London Diary is a list and photographs of some of the speakers before the march set off. I photographed the front of the march as it set up at the southern end of Park Lane and went with it for the first couple of hundred yards into Piccadilly, where I stopped to photograph the rest of the march as it came past.

The marchers were fairly densely packed and spread across the whole of the roadway (and sometimes on to the pavement too) and it took exactly an hour to go past me.

There were many at the protest who were not the usual protesters, people who said this was the first protest they had ever attended, as well as those that I knew from previous protests, and there were many interesting placards and banners to photograph – and many more pictures on My London Diary.

As the end of the march passed me I rushed into Green Park Station and took the tube to Westminster, arriving on Whitehall as it went very noisily past Downing Street.

I ran back to Parliament Square, and this soon filled up with people and banners. I sat down on the wall close to the Churchill statue, realising I was rather tired and hungry.

Many marchers left rather than stay and listen to the speeches, though the square was still crowded and I decided I would leave too.

More on My London Diary:
Rally Says Refugees Welcome Here
Refugees are welcome here march
Refugees Welcome march reaches Parliament

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9/11 Anniversary – EDL & Extremist Muslims – 2010

9/11 Anniversary – EDL & Extremist Muslims: On Saturday 11th September 2010 the extreme right English Defence League marched to the Grosvenor Square memorial to pay their respects to those killed in the 9/11 terrorist attacks, then stopped briefly at the American Embassy before going on to protest at the Saudi Embassy. Later Anjem Choudary and Muslims Against the Crusades came to hold a protest outside the US Embassy and the EDL returned to protest against them.

Around 150 EDL supporters met outside a pub close to Bond Street station to march to the 9/11 memorial in Grosvenor Square and posed there for photographers.

As well as the usual EDL St George’s flags there were also others on display, including one man with both Israeli and Portuguese flags and a Dutch Flag with the name of far-right Islamophobic Dutch politician Geert Wilders. He had been banned from visiting the UK in 2009, but the ban had been overturned on appeal.

One man proudly told the press that he had put a pigs head on a mosque, and later showed us his tattoos.

Another flag combined the US Flag and the Union Jack, with the message ‘Never Forget & Never Surrender‘ and some women carried wreaths which were laid at the memorial in Grosvenor Square with a two-minute silence before the marchers moved on for more photographs at the US Embassy.

The EDL the marched to the Saudi Embassy to show their feelings towards a country that is widely seen to have supported Muslim extremists and terrorist groups, including those involved in 9/11.

Here they burnt a number of black A4 sheets with white Islamic text which apparently included the name of Allah. There were also a number of clearly Islamophobic chants, including a blasphemous declaration of paedophilia.

I returned to the US Embassy where Anjem Choudary had arrived to protest with around a hundred extremist Muslims from Muslims Against Crusades.

They had called for the day to be made ‘International Burn The American Flag Day‘ after Florida pastor Terry Jones had threatened to burn a copy of the Qur’an on the anniversary. The regard the US flag as a symbol of unbelief and of war – military, ideological, social and economic – against the Muslim religion.

As I wrote:

“Muslims Against the Crusades (MAC) is widely seen as a successor to Islam4UK, banned in January 2010 and itself regarded, along with Ahl ul-Sunnah Wa al-Jamma (ASWJ) as a thinly veiled reincarnation of the previously banned al-Muhajiroun. Anjem Choudary, a UK born former solicitor was one of this organisation’s founders, and a leader of Islam4UK, ASWJ and MAC.”

The group, described by the Muslim Council of Britain as “a tiny, and utterly deplorable, extremist group” was finally banned in the UK in 2011. I still wonder why they were allowed to continue for so long.

The US flag they had brought proved to be fairly fireproof, although some paper copies and pictures of Pastor Jones burnt more freely, and with copious quantities of lighter fluid it did eventually melt and burn. I was in the front row of the large group of press surrounding the burning and got uncomfortably warm, though fortunately the wind was blowing the toxic smoke away from me.

Police had earlier led the EDL away towards Green Park Station, but some had managed to return to the US Embassy to protest against the extremist Muslims. At first they protested from behind the hedge to the Grosvenor Square Gardens and police cleared the area after a beer can was thrown into the centre of the MAC protest – fortunately no one was injured.

Police moved the EDL to a pen at a safe distance from the extremist Muslims and they continued their protest, shouting insults. The atmosphere was much more angry than in the morning, and at times there were threats made against the press as well as the MAC.

Police managed, with the assistance of some EDL stewards to keep the two groups apart, although I think there were some arrests. When I left an hour or so after the flag burning, police seemed very much in control, holding the EDL back while the MAC protest was continuing.

More on My London Diary:
EDL Remember 9/11
Muslims Against Crusades Burn US Flag
EDL Protest Against MAC

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Netanyahu, Immigration & Shaker – 2015

Netanyahu, Immigration & Shaker: On Wednesday 9th September 2015 groups came to Downing Street both to protest against and to support the Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu then making an official visit to David Cameron. And in Parliament Square there were protests supporting the parliamentary report on immigration detention which was being debated, as well as a weekly vigil calling for the release of Londoner Shaker Aamer, still then held in Guantanamo.

Netanyahu visit protests – Downing Street.

Over a thousand people had come to Downing Street to protest the official visit of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who they say should be arrested for war crimes in the attack on Gaza in 2014.

There were too many for the small penned area the police had allocated for the protest and many chose instead to stand in the area between the two carriageways, although police tried to clear the area.

A much smaller group who had come to support Israel were in another pen a short distnace down the road. They included supporters with a Union flag with the message UK CHRISTIANS LOVE ISRAEL.

Some of them had come with posters about other issues, including a woman holding a hand-written sign ‘THEY ARE CRUCIFYING CHRISTAINS IN IRAQ!’ But ISIS which has carried out such atrocities were encouraged by both Israel and the CIA and ISIS relies on Israeli money for the oil they smuggle out to Israel.

The pro-Israel supporters complained to police that they were not controlling the pro-Palestinian protesters, and one attempted to stop me photographing him as he did so. But I continued to photograph him.

By this time many from both sides were protesting on the pavement in front of Downing Street, and police had made a number of arrests, mainly of pro-Palestine activists. But others continued to complain to police.

Police managed to clear an area so that cars could still leave and enter Downing Street when the gates were opened, and people from both groups shouted at each other across the narrow divide. More police arrived and were able to keep this area clear.

Many protesters had remained on the far side of the road, and they were joined by anti-Zionist Neturei Karta orthodox Jews who held posters saying ‘State of “Israel” Do NOT Represent World Jewry’

Yet more police arrived and the protests continued with a great deal of noise from both sides. There were more complaints by the Zionists that a few of those at the protests were waving flags in support of the Lebanese Hezbollah. In 2008 the military wing of Hezbollah was proscribed but the parliamentary group which together with its allies had a majority in the Lebanese parliament was not – and both use the same flag.

So it was still legal to use the Hezbollah flag in 2015. But in 2019 Home Secretary Sajid Javid added Hezbollah’s political wing to the list of proscribed terrorist organisations making the flag now illegal to fly in Britain.

One of the pro-Israel protesters was holding a definitely legal Welsh flag, though I could not understand its relevance at this protest. The protest was still continuing very noisily when I left.

More on My London Diary:
Netanyahu visit protest – Free Palestine
Support for Israel & Netanyahu

Fight immigration detention MfJ tells MPs – Parliament Square

The Report of the Inquiry into the Use of Immigration Detention in the United Kingdom
by the All Party Parliamentary Group on Refugees & the All Party Parliamentary Group on Migration was being debated in Parliament and Movement for Justice came to Parliament Square to support some of its conclusions and demand more radical action on immigration.

One of its key conclusions was that there should be a time limit of 28 days on immigration detention which is currently still indefinite. At least one person has been kept in our immigration prisons for three years (less one day) before being released, and none of those held know when or if they may be released or deported. They constantly face the risk of being forcibly deported to a country where their lives are at risk.

Some of those taking part in the protests had previously been held in detention centres for months or more, while MfJ were still calling for an end to the illegal ‘fast track’ system which is clearly designed to remove migrants and asylum seekers before they have a proper chance to prove their right to be here. They also called for a complete end to detention and immigration raids, the opening of the Calais border and an amnesty for migrants.

The report also called for “a whole-sale shift in approach, away from merely focusing on enforcement and towards quality engagement with individuals at all stages of their immigration process” which has been highly successful in other countries.

Needless to say, the Tory government failed to implement any of the changes suggested, and although Angela Rayner, now Deputy Prime Minister, was the only MP to come out and listen to the protest, there seems little chance of our Labour Government moving away from the current racist policies.

Fight immigration detention MfJ tells MPs

Shaker Aamer weekly vigils restart – Parliament Square

This was the first of a new series of weekly vigils opposite the Houses of Parliament calling for the release of Battersea resident Shaker Aamer, still held, abused and tortured in Guantanamo after more than 13 years despite never facing any charges and having been twice cleared for release.

Shaker Aamer weekly vigils restart

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Windrush & Climate – 2018

Windrush & Climate – On Saturday 8th September 2018 after photographing a protest against the continuing hounding of Windrush generation migrants to the UK in Brixton I went to a Climate Change protest outside Tate Modern.

Justice for Windrush descendants – Brixton

A rally and march hosted by Movement for Justice called for the Windrush scheme to be widened to include all families and descendants of the Windrush Generation and for an end to the racist hostile environment for all immigrants.

The Windrush scandal first came to public attention in 2017 and 2018 when we heard that hundreds of migrants including those who had been urged to come and help Britain rebuild after the Second World War and who were then given the right to live and work in this country permanently where being hounded by the Home Office and some had already been deported.

Much of the information came from the work of Guardian journalist Amelia Gentleman publishing the experiences of these people. The Home Office in 2012 under Theresa May had introduced a ‘Hostile Environment’ law which required people to produce at least one official document from every year they had lived in the UK to prove they had the right to stay here.

Many were of course unable to do this, and the Home Office itself had destroyed many of the official records which would have proved their case. Many were declared to be ‘undocumented migrants’ (or as the politicians and press racistly and inaccurately labelled them, ‘illegal immigrants’.

They “began to lose their access to housing, healthcare, bank accounts and driving licenses. Many were placed in immigration detention, prevented from travelling abroad and threatened with forcible removal, while others were deported to countries they hadn’t seen since they were children.“

The government promised to correct the matter and in May 2018 the then Home Secretary Saji Javid set up a ‘Windrush Lessons Learned Review’ under Wendy Williams. When published in 2020 it showed that the Windrush scandal was the deliberate and inevitable result of Tory government policies.

Home Secretary Priti Patel then said she accepted the reports recommendations but in 2023 Suella Braverman decided to ditch three of of them. In June 2024 the High Court ruled that her actions in abandoning the promise to establish a migrants’ commssioner and to increase the powers of the independent chief examiner of borders and immigration was unlawful.

The scandal continues, and the replacement by 2025 of physical residence permits by digital e-visas for the roughly half a million non-EU immigrants with leave to remain in the UK seems almost certain to generate a similar scandal.

After a rally in Windrush Square which included Eulalee, a Jamaican grandmother who has been fighting for 17 years to stay in the UK with her Windrush generation husband, daughter and grandchildren as well as others affected by the scandal there was a march around the centre of Brixton, with several stops for short speeches in the more crowded parts.

*Eulalee and Michael Groce on the march*

Also on the march was Michael Groce, poet, community worker and Green Party candidate as councillor in Brixton, holds a poster ‘Yes, It’s Racist’. The 1985 Brixton riots began after police shot and seriously wounded his mother, putting her in hospital for a year. Later they paid her over £500,000 in damages without admitting any liability.

On the railway bridge across Brixton Road was the graffitied message ‘CLAPHAM THAT WAY YOU 2D FLAT WHITE TEPID COLONIALIST WANKER”, with Brixton gentrification now taking away much of the unique character of the area where many who arrived on the Empire Windrush in 1948 settled after having been initially housed in a giant wartime underground shelter on Clapham Common.

After marching around the centre of Brixton spreading their message with megaphones and posters the campaigners returned for a further rally in Windrush Square.

More at Justice for Windrush descendants.

Worldwide Rise For Climate – Tate Modern

Climate Reality, a global and diverse group of activists, community leaders, organisers, scientists, storytellers and others united to act over global warming was supported by the UK Campaign Against Climate Change, Fossil Free UK and the Green Party in one of thousands of rallies around the world demanding urgent action by government leaders to leaders commit to a fossil free world that works for all of us.

They called for people to take personal actions to reduce their own contribution to climate change but more importantly to join together to press for action at local, national and international level.

In particular they called for the government to end its support for fracking and for local authorities to divest from fracking and fossil fuels.

Worldwide Rise For Climate

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