Little Italy Festival

Back in the middle of the nineteenth century the area of London around the Clkerkenwell Road to the west of Farringdon St was crowded with Italians living and working there, and one day a year it still is, when many return to the area for the annual Processione della Madonna del Carmine – the Procession of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, which has been taking place there (except during the two world wars) every year since the 1880s. Clerkenwell by the end of that century was home to thousands mainly from the south of the Italy, with those from the north settling around Soho.

Apart from among Italians in the UK and people who live in the immediate area the festival still doesn’t seem that well known to Londoners. I’d not heard of it until around 20 years ago I went with a friend of Italian origin to photograph it and the Sagra  – the festival – which accompanies it in the street below St Peter’s Church, which is itself worth a visit, opened it 1863 it is Grade II listed.

Statues for the procession and lined up in front of the church, and floats prepared down the side roads, while people wander in the crowds in the Sagra, buying Italian food and wine.  This is one occasion when I do have a cup or two of Italian red while working.

When the time comes for the procession,crowds line both sides of the Clerkenwell Road to watch as a long stream of biblical tableaux on float, walking groups with banners, the Four Evangelists, at least two Jesuses, one accompanied by Roman soldiers and carrying a cross and another leading first communicants,   people in traditional Italian dress and more make their way past the front of the church and process around the streets of the area.

The exact form has changed a little from year to year, but not greatly in the 20 or so years I’ve been going most times.  At some point members of the clergy are handed white doves and release them – and more recently this has happened both around the beginning and end of the procession, and there is also some tinsel fired.

At the end, the clergy who have been watching from the road in front of the church join on the the procession and are followed by a large crowd of the congregation. And as they move off, some of us take the opportunity to return to the Sagra for another cup of wine.

But the pictures tell the story better than I can in words:
Processione della Madonna del Carmine

Continue reading Little Italy Festival

Barts – NHS vs Serco (and PFI)

The rally and march from the Royal London Hospital to Mile End Hospital has a new relevance with the recent collapse of Carillion, which has brought new attention to the problems of PFI and of out-sourcing of facilities that are at the root of the problems at Barts Health Trust. One of the speakers at the rally – seen on the march in the picture above – was Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell, whose criticisms of both of these problems have received considerable airing in the last few days, though of course he has been making them for a very long time.

The dispute was between the cleaners and porters of Barts Trust who are members of the Unite Union and had been on strike for five days, demanding an increase of 30p per hour in line with inflation and cost of living increases . The strikers voted 99% in favour of strike action, their militancy because of the actions of Serco, whose first action when they took over the contract was an attempt to take away their paid tea breaks.

Serco were forced to back down over that by concerted action, but the cleaners still accuse Serco of increasing stress and workload with a climate of bullying, intimidation and fear and a failure to set up procedures for reporting problems with facilities. And they say that Serco have acted illegally during the strike by  bringing in agency workers with inadequate training to replace them, resulting in insanitary conditions in the hospital.

I took a number of pictures of Unite’s Gail Cartmel at the event but particularly like this one of her speaking, which shows something of her dynamism. It also includes in the frame some key elements – the Unite flag (and flags are always problematic for photographers, seldom behaving as we want them at the right time so they can be read), the inbuilt caption ‘The Royal London’, and both some of the hospital’s Victorian building at right, as well as at top centre the new PFI-built hospital which has crippled the Bart’s Trust with a huge debt –  £2.4m per week in interest payments – under a disastrous New Labour deal.

It was hard to chose just one of the pictures of the strikers to put in here, and I chose this  particular image partly because it seemed to show something of their determination, but also for the poster which explains what the image and the dispute is about, “30p an Hour – Because They’re Worth It”, and the crowd of placards behind.

And although this dispute involved one of our big unions, some of the most vocal support at the rally and on the march came from other cleaners, particularly in the United Voices of the World. Victor Ramirez, a cleaner from the UVW spoke at the rally and was among the leaders of the march, with his spirited contributions in Spanish being translated by Claudia from the UVW behind him in this picture – and marching behind John McDonnell in the top image.

Barts NHS Cleaners march against Serco

Continue reading Barts – NHS vs Serco (and PFI)

Peak Design Fault?

Last year I needed a new camera strap. Well no, really I didn’t but one of my straps had broken and I found myself walking around holding one of my two cameras in my hand all afternoon. I couldn’t really complain about the strap breaking as it was probably over 20 years old having seen out the life of at least half a dozen cameras. Each of which had come in a box with a strap inside, most of which are probably somewhere in my loft.

But I seldom use the straps that come ‘free’ with the camera, and certainly not for the cameras I work with. Most of them must have added at least 50p to the overall cost of the package, and tend to feel like that. My favourite neck strap for a heavy DSLR (though I started using them with SLRs) is still the Optech Pro Strap with its nice wide neoprene cushioning which means you hardly feel the weight – and once I started using this I no longer had an aching neck at the end of the day’s work.

But good though it is, you can’t really use two of them at the same time – though they do sell special rigs for the purpose, a double sling and a dual harness – I really didn’t like the look of these. Functional they doubtless are, but there was something about having to be strapped into a rig that didn’t appeal to me.

So I looked around for alternatives and read the reviews. Some straps were clearly for the fashion conscious, to go with expensive leather cases (and I never before realised how expensive these could be) and it was easy to dismiss these. Others had the kind of narrow belting that slowly beheads you from behind as you work, but there were a few that seemed worth a try, and in particular the Peak Design Slide. This would keep my second camera at my side, well out of the way of the one on my Optech strap carried high on my chest, but enable me to quickly bring it up to my eye. So I ordered one, and have been using it for quite a while now, and am generally fairly pleased with it.

The strap attaches a little differently to a normal neck strap with special short quick-release anchors which are left in place on the camera. The web site and packaging shows these fitting directly onto the lug on the camera body, and while this was never going to work with the anchors that came with my slide, the latest design has thinner and stronger cords which can be pulled through the hole with a strong thread, It is a neater solution than using the normal split rings supplied with the camera, and avoids any possible damage to the camera body. You can also buy extra anchors making it a ten-second job to switch the strap from one camera to another, and it is equally fast to change from the Slide to a wrist strap from the Peak Design range.

There are two ‘quick adjustment’ sliders on the slide, to allow rapid adjustment of the length of the strap, and it is about these – or at least one of these – that I find Peak Design’s design at fault. They show a diagram with the rear adjust being used for “long term adjustment based on body type and preference” while the front adjuster is designed for “quick adjust”. But the two adjusters are identical and neither has a lock.

The consequence of this is that whenever I use the strap for any length of time, both adjusters end up at the bottom and the camera gets to hang rather closer to my knees than my waist, which is something of a nuisance. Yes, it is ease and quick to adjust, but when I’m busy working the last thing I should need to do is to fiddle with my camera strap. I want to firmly set the maximum length of the strap around 6 inches shorter but Peak provide no way to do this.

They rightly say that the strap resists a sharp pull without changing length, but somehow – perhaps by being knocked by my camera bag or just by the normal movements of my legs and body and the sliding up to my eye to take pictures which cause them to slowly creep, the adjusters inevitably work their way down.

My part solution to this problem involves using a safety pin which prevents movement of the rear adjuster, but a fudge like that shouldn’t be necessary with a high price product like this, and safety pins do sometimes come undone. When I’m sure I know exactly the length I want I’ll perhaps put a few stitches in.

It wouldn’t be difficult to design a rear adjuster than locked more firmly in place, and keeping the current front adjust would retain the quick adjustment that is a part of the design philosophy. A quick Google shows me I’m not the only one with this problem, and people have written to the support page asking how they can prevent it happening. They get told it is a part of the design, but like me I’m sure the questioners regard it as a design fault.

So while I’m generally happy with this, and have just bought another Peak Design product, a wrist strap (Cuff) for my newly acquired Fuji X-E3 (a detailed review here), it does seem to me that the company should perhaps stop spitting in the face of customers and rethink on that rear adjuster.

More about the X-T3 later. I’ve been quite excited about it, as it seems to have fixed most of the niggles I’ve had with previous Fuji-X cameras. It seems far more responsive than the X-T1, focusing faster with all my lenses and not yet leaving me waiting when I want to take a picture. I’ve just sent the X-T1 in for repair – again – so I can’t directly compare the two, and I’m still working my way through the manual – some settings are rather hard to find and understand – but the only thing I’ve found less impressive so far is the slightly smaller viewfinder. I suppose the big difference is the fixed back, but if you can live without that then I think the X-E3 is the best in the current Fuji range. Of course an upgrade to the X-T2 is rumoured for later in the year, so things may change.

So far as straps are concerned, if you only carry one camera and are still using the neck strap that came in the box, I’d highly recommend the relatively small cost of an Optech Pro, which will almost certainly get rid of those neck pains and headaches at the end of a long day at work. But I’ve grown to like using a sling strap with the camera resting on my right hip as an even more functional and relaxing way to carry a camera. If you are above average height (or girth?) the Peak Design Slide may be the right length for you, but until they fix the creep problem for the rear adjuster I’d hesitate to recommend it for those of average and below size. There are many other sling straps available at a wide range of cost – from around £2 to £150 – including one that looks very similar to the Peak at around a tenth of the cost though clearly without the same quality of finish and probably of materials. I’d hesitate before entrusting a camera and lens costing £2000 or more to some of them.

Reclaimed Pride

It was back in 1993 that I first photographed Pride – or as it used to be called then, Gay Pride, and I returned to photograph it every year for quite a while – and you can see some of the pictures in ‘Ten Years of Pride‘, the second show of some of that work at the Museum of London.  My going there in 1993 was a part of a general growing awareness that gay rights was not just an issue for the gay community, but an important aspect of human rights.

Over those ten years there was a very clear change in the nature of Pride. What had been a protest clearly of great moment to many of those taking part – and for quite a few it was their first public ‘coming out’ – gradually became more and more corporate, at first mainly a reflection of the growing pink economy and later of the importance of the pink pound in the wider economy. In recent years it has become a huge sponsored parade, dominated by major companies, with large contingents from the armed forces, police and other public services, with just a few groups keeping up the tradition of protest tagged on to the end.

I’d continued to cover it most years, missing out only when I wasn’t in London, and it had become one of the few events for which I’d applied every year for accreditation, as it had become highly organised and this had become necessary.  But I was finding it less and less interesting, and in 2017 had decided not to bother with the actual parade, thinking that perhaps I would just photograph on the streets of Soho where things are more spontaneous and interesting.

In the end it didn’t turn out like that, and I started on Oxford St where the previous year I had photographed the Migrant Rights & Anti-Racist Pride organised by Movement for Justice for those who wanted to show their opposition to the corporate nature of Pride, with sponsors such as Barclays and BAE systems. In 2016 they marched to Oxford Circus and then joined the back of the official parade with other protest groups.

But for 2017 the organisers had decided on tight security, insisting that no groups who hadn’t signed up and got the official armbands would be allowed to join the parade. But it isn’t easy to stop several hundred determined protesters and the police had the sense not to try as they spilled onto the route at Oxford Circus in front of the official head of the parade.  Police tried to get the parade stewards to allow the protesters past but they refused, and for a while there was a stalemate, with the parade route blocked.

Eventually the main parade was held up and the Migrant Rights & Anti-Racist Pride went along the official route past cheering crowds leading the whole event – though the mainstream media colluded with the organisers to pretend they didn’t exist in their coverage.

There was another hold up at the end of the parade, where some of those who had been on the march from ‘No Pride in War’ decided to lie down and block Whitehall. Pride stewards held up the front of the main parade at Trafalgar Square and tried to clear the road without success, but after a few more minutes the police decided to take action, threatening those still blocking the road with arrest. They decided they had made their point very effectively and got up.

I decided too that I had my story for Pride and it was rather more interesting than most years, and decided it was time to go home. The crowds in Soho would have to wait for another year.

Anti-Racist & Migrant Rights reclaim Pride

Continue reading Reclaimed Pride

Facebook

I often feel like mounting a one-person protest outside Facebook, which so often seems to be misbehaving in some way or other. It messes up my posts and hides the posts of many of my friends from me, so often I only find out about things too late. Of course it isn’t all Facebook’s fault, and I’d like to see a complete ban on all the automated software that people use to post to Facebook that clutters it up with so much rubbish. Perhaps one of those checks to show your were not a robot on every post would be annoying, but it would make Facebook much more useful for users, if not for marketing.


Men from company that employs the cleaners at Facebook watches me as I photograph them watching the protest

But my frustrations with Facebook are nothing compared to those suffered by some who work in their offices, though the cleaners are not actually employed by Facebook; as I point out on My London Diary:

There are two redundant levels of management at these offices; rather than employing cleaners directly, Facebook uses the property management company JLL who in turn use Peartree cleaning services to employ the cleaners; money which should go to the workers goes to these unnecessary levels of management and profit.

People often talk about the greater efficiency of outsourcing, but it is a myth. It isn’t greater efficiency but a lowering of standards, almost always of the actual services delivered but invariably of the conditions of employment of the people who actually do the work.  Companies that claim to be ethical employees with good conditions of service – pensions, sick pay, holidays etc – seem happy to give contracts to companies that employ for people who work for them, providing services at their workplaces which have minimal concern for their employees and provide only the basic minimum possible under our laws, often combined with poor management practices – bullying, discrimination etc – and a failure to properly engage with trade unions, often attempting to prevent union organisation by victimisation.

Both the Grenfell disaster and the failure of Carillion have exposed some of the problems caused by the contracting out of services – with level after level taking their unfair share and problems in communication. If Facebook employed their cleaners they would know what was happening, would ensure fair processes and conditions and not be able to say it was none of their business, denying responsibility for people who keep their business working.

The protest was organised by the Cleaners and Allied Independent Workers Union (CAIWU) who say managers on site are guilty of racism, bullying and nepotism and who are also demanding to be paid the London Living Wage. At the end of the protest CAIWU organiser Alberto Durango talked briefly with Peartree’s commercial director Stuart Conroy who had been in a group watching the protest and there seemed to be some hope that a dialogue might emerge.

The protest took place in one of London’s now many privately owned public spaces, and I was pleased that the security there actually intervened when a couple of people tried to interfere with the protest.

The CAIWU had agreed with them that the protest would be a short one so as not to interfere greatly with a community event that was taking place. Photographers I know have been stopped when taking photographs in this area, but I and others covering the protest were not approached – nor have I been at other protests in this area.

Cleaners protest at Facebook HQ

Continue reading Facebook

Stop Killing Londoners

Air pollution in London is a serious problem, with official figures pointing to nearly 10,000 premature deaths each year in Greater London as a result of it, as well as a great deal of suffering from various respiratory illnesses, with many lives made miserable. But although there has been an increasing realisation that something needs to be done about it – though our former mayor Boris liked to laugh it off – there seems to be little action.

The major source of harmful pollutants is road traffic. Recently the finger has been pointed at diesels, with their manufacturers having been found in various ways to have engineered test procedures that gave artificially low figures for the harm they were causing – including one manufacturer even installing software to fool the test. Many older diesel vehicles – cars, taxis, buses, lorries – are highly polluting and need to be phased out as rapidly as possible. People now agree on this, but not on how it should be done.


Campaigners wait for the start of the protest which had a ‘disco’ theme

Mayor Sadiq Khan has made statements and begun to make plans, but little so far has been done that has any impact on pollution levels, and Londoners continue to die early, though at least things now appear to be moving, if only slowly. But there is no sign of any of the kinds of radical policies that have tackled similar problems in cities in other countries over many years.

As someone who works regularly on the streets of London, its a problem I’ve very aware of, and one which is often only too visible when distant views are often shrouded in haze and you can see a cloud of pollution in the sky, and when my eyes begin to sting. Where I live, 20 miles to the west the air is hardly pure – with the M25, M3 and M4 as well as Heathrow we have plenty of local polluters – but the air is often palpably cleaner when I get off the train to walk home. And I do get more than my share of persistent chest and throat infections which I’m sure healthier air would see off.


Protesters sitting on the road were behind the banner

‘Stop Killing Londoners’ isn’t the first group to protest about these problems, and in particular a longer runing campaign with a similar name, Stop Killing Cyclists has raised the issues in their protests around the capital both at their vigils following the killing of cyclists on the roads and in more general protests over the several years they have been active. And as well as protesting, Stop Killing Cyclists and its members have put in a lot of work with other groups and councils- including with the Mayor and London Assembly – to get some action. As might be expected, these are issues that the Green Party and its councillors have been working ontoo.


and rather easier to photograph when they stood up

But Stop Killing Londoners feel the situation is so critical that more needs to be done, and believe that a series of direct actions which will confront the authorities is the way to raise public awareness and to push the authorities into action. The protest on July 5th was the first in a series of peaceful direct actions London-wide aimed at getting everyone to know about it and to act together to get effective action to cut air pollution in the capital. They keep their actions brief so as to avoid serious disruption to people on the roads but are confrontational – and some at least are prepared to use their arrests as a way to challenge complacency. However on this occasion, although a few drivers got a little angry, the police only arrived after the event had finished and the protesters were walking away for a picnic in Regent’s Park to discuss what they had done and plan further protests.


A driver argues angrily with the protesters

Photographically there were a few challenges. There was only one large banner and that only had its message ‘Stop Killing Londoners – Cut Air Pollution’ on one side, and it was a little difficult to convey what the protest was about in some pictures. And while five or ten minutes may seem a long time to a driver in a hurry to get somewhere, it seems very short to a photographer trying to think about what they are doing and how best to show it. There were opportunities I missed by the pressure of the rush, when I really needed to keep rather calmer and think more.

I’d had little idea what the protest would be like when I was asked if I would photograph it, and afterwards I was left wondering how the campaign would develop – and whether it would have the desired result.  On it’s own I think not, but perhaps it will add a little urgency to the efforts of others who want action, including those in Transport for London and the Mayor.

Stop Killing Londoners Road Block

Continue reading Stop Killing Londoners

Siege of Haringey

Housing has been an issue very high on my agenda for some time, though I’m fortunate enough to own my own house, I can still remember the days when things were different, and the sometimes frantic search for somewhere to live when I was a student. I spent my first year in a hall of residence, but then moved out into flatland along with two of my former schoolfellows. The first place we found was just one very large room on the first floor of a Victorian house that had been marginally converted, and we spent a term there. I think I was the lucky one who got the single bed while the two others shared a double.

The place had a large open staircase up its three storeys and we were sometimes disturbed by noisy footsteps going up and down it and pretty well all hours of the night. We soon found out that the fairly demurely dressed young woman in another room on our floor made her living from the many men who paid her relatively short visits from early evening to late at night, and that the older and brassier woman from the ground floor who came every Friday to collect the rent shared a similar occupation. And there were a few rather embarassing moments when I was the only flat-dweller in when she came to collect and seemed to want rather more.

We began to look for better accommodation, searching through the Manchester Evening News and phoning any likely looking adverts or rushing to them where there was no phone number. We found a very nice place in a quiet part of North Manchester, just what we wanted and a reasonable rent, but having shown us around the woman asked said to us “But you’re not Jewish are you – I’ll have to ask my husband” and promised to let us know. We weren’t Jewish and we never heard. Finally we did find another flat, rather more poky, on the first floor of a house on the edge of Moss Side, and spent the next two terms there before hearing of a rather better place some third years were leaving from in Dickenson Road which we snapped up. Unlike the earlier two this was a real student flat, with a landlady living on the ground floor who always had students (though I hope most were quieter than us) and was often pleased to make us tea and tell us some often fascinating stories about her youth when she had been a secretary to Lloyd George. I only wish I had written them down.

The following year, after 6 months as an industrial chemist, I returned to Manchester and was again looking for accommodation, this time on my own. The first room I found, in an Irish house in Fallowfield looked OK, but after my first night I found I was covered in red bumps where the bed bugs had found warm flesh. I bought some powder that was supposed to kill them, but I think it just made them more vigourous and multiply. I gave my notice and moved out at the end of the week to a Polish house in Rusholme that served for the rest of the year until I could get a place in university accommodation. The Poles were friendly at it turned out fine, though the glass of Polish spirit I was handed every Friday night when I went to pay the rent was near lethal.

My first two years of married life were spent on the top floor of a terraced house off Platt Lane. The rent was reasonable, but the gas and electricity meters swallowed coins at a huge rate, with great profit to our landlord. Draughty sash windows made it a truly chilly place and we plugged the gaps with plastic bags and bought a paraffin heater, the damp from which brought the wallpaper falling off the walls. And first thing when we moved in was to get rid of the several inches of congealed fat on the bottom of the cooker. But it served us well for the next two years and I was sorry to move away, especially as the next flat we found, in Leicester, was rather worse. It was there I had to break the ice to wash, and began to grow a beard because it was too cold to shave.

But from there I went to work in a New Town, with a two-bed flat from the housing corporation at a social rent and a really decent sized living room and the luxury of built in heating. But we wanted to move nearer to London and industrial action including strikes by teachers led to the 1974 Houghton report and a considerable rise in teachers’ pay; together with a promotion to Head of Department it meant there was a short window when I could afford to buy a house, and we took the opportunity and have lived in it since. Other colleagues who made similar purchases at that time have moved and ‘traded up’ and now have properties worth several times as much, but we like it here, so why move?

In many ways we would have preferred to live in social housing. Its a system that works and can provide quality housing at much lower cost than the private sector. But government after government of both parties have found ways to take money out of the system. The Tories are keen to destroy it and to make profits for private enterprise, and much of Labour is the same, though with a greater delusion that somehow this is in the public interest, holding to this even as they trouser the proceeds.

The Haringey Development Vehicle, or HDV, looks at those large, well planned council estates, with large amounts of green space between the buildings (which still achieved high densities) and sees it just as acreage, ripe for development with large numbers of high market price units with the odd sop of unaffordable “affordable” housing. It’s perhaps unfortunate that there are some people currently living there, homes and communities, but CPOs, minimal compensation and vague promises that will never be kept will soon deal with that. And £2 billion of public property is gifted to the developers who will doubtless find various ways to reward those benefactors generous with what they do not own.

It should be criminal, but we don’t generally have laws against the kind of crimes that make the rich wealthier, which is after all how those who make the laws – and particularly the monarchy and aristocracy – got where they are.

You can read about what happened when the march reached the council offices, and you can see it in the pictures. Technically there were a few problems as the light was getting a little low, and there was a lot of crowding and movement. It was hard to get to the right place, and hard to keep the camera still while taking pictures. Once again it was a situation where the 16mm fisheye proved its worth. I had been taking pictures of people behind the barriers in front of the council offices at ISO 800 when the rush to the doors began, and had to climb over a railing to get rapidly near the doors rather than take a longer route around. Around the entrance was a dense, surging crowd, in the middle of which I needed to increase the ISO and make some lens changes.

I began photographing with the 18-35mm on the D750, changing the ISO to 3200, then decided I needed a wider view and put the 16mm fisheye onto the D810. It also has the advantage at f2.8 of being a faster lens. Unfortunately it was only after taking a few images, some of them rather blurred, that I realised I had left the ISO at 800, and needed to increase it. I soon spotted another mistake too; I’d been using the D810 with my 28-200 telephoto in DX mode (makeing it a 42-300 equivalent) and had left it in DX mode rather than switch to FX. When things really happen suddenly like this it is hard to get everything right.

Things calmed down a little and I suddenly saw that some of the protesters were heading for the back of the building and rushed to follow them. Soon I was standing against a huge glass window there feeling it flex around half an inch or more as the protesters attacked it, and at first I stood back a few inches to avoid the movement shaking my camera before deciding there was a good chance it would shatter and I wasn’t in a good place. I rapidly moved back a couple of meters, just as the police rushed in from the front of the building and formed a line across the front to stop protesters trying to break it down. I did feel a little relieved.

Those inside the council offices were still looking very worried, but the police stood their ground but sensibly didn’t try to take much action as they were greatly outnumbered, and the situation slowly settled down, with a rally with speeches taking place on the steps at the front of the building. Inside the council meeting continued, though they would have been very aware of the strength of feeling being demonstrated outside. Not all of the councillors had managed to get into the meeting, and there were a few protesters inside who were unable to leave, but it seemed clear that there would be little else for me to photograph and I left for home.

Council meetings now are largely a matter of rubber-stamping the decisions already taken by a very small group of cabinet members, with little real attempt at discussion, and I’m told that this was the case, with the plans passing through to the next stage. There will of course be further protests, as well as attempts to challenge the decision in the courts, and it seems likely that a number of councillors backing the HDV will lose their seats in the May elections, though this may be too late to stop the plans.

Haringey Residents protest housing sell-off

Continue reading Siege of Haringey

Theresa May Must Go!

There were I think over 20,000 people on the march organised by the People’s Assembly Against Austerity from the BBC to Parliament Square calling for Theresa May and the Conservatives to go, and I photographed quite a few of them.


Theresa May at Downing St

Taking part were people from a wide range of groups and causes, all affected by the cuts under the Tories and wanting change to policies that put the interests of ordinary people, particularly those in greatest need, ahead of those of the already rich who include many Tory MPs and the relatively small group of people who donate to Tory Party funds. Tory Party membership has declined dramatically and is now thought to be around 70,000, roughly a tenth of Labour membership, and smaller than that of the Lib-Dems and SNP.


Theresa May in Parliament Square

With so many to choose to photograph I doubt if anyone’s pictures can be truly representative, but I tried hard to show the wide range of causes as well ad photographing the people and posters and banners that seem most interesting.

One of the trade union banners that attracted me was a new one for Hull City Unison Branch, which includes Amy Johnson in ‘Jason’ towing a banner with the emblems of the 3 unions that formed UNISON, the Humber Bridge and Spurn Lighthouse and a lifebelt, the Spanish Republican flag and two of the eight from Hull who went to fight with the International Brigade, dockers leader Walter Greendale, Hull’s Rugby League legend Clive O’Sullivan, Mary Murdock, Hull suffragette and the first woman doctor in the UK, Tony Benn, a member of Hulls LGBT community, Headscarf Revolutionary ‘Big Lil’ Bilocca who forced legislation to improve safety on trawlers and Hull’s iconic ‘Dead Bod’.

Of course like most photographers I was drawn to the various smoke flares set off by some of the marchers, which always add a little drama. And despite their aversion to ‘A to B’ marches, Class War were on this one, though they disappeared briefly before the end.

I was sorry to miss them when they returned to Parliament Square to confront Jeremy Corbyn over the terrible Labour housing policies of most Labour councils, with almost 200 council estates on the list for demolition and replacement by high cost housing, in what is a far greater threat to social housing than the Blitz, forcing those on low pay out of much of London in a huge programme of social cleansing. Of course it is a program driven by Corbyn’s enemies on the right of the party and there may be some changes in Labour policies in boroughs as Corbyn supporters – many of whom were on the march and chanting that drearily sycophantic ‘Oh Jeremy Corbyn’ flex their muscles and become local councillors.

Its an issue which Class War and their friends in ASH (Architects for SOcial Housing) have done more than any other group to put on the agenda, and they have been at the forefront in other housing issues, for example with the lengthy campaign against ‘Poor Doors’ – separate doors for social tenants and the wealthy living in the same block which I recorded in a magazine, still available from Blurb, or direct from me to UK addresses for £7.50 including postage.

Tories Out March

 

Continue reading Theresa May Must Go!

The Conversation

I’m often critical of the BBC, and they way they promote an establishment view in many of their news programmes, often failing to report or minimising stories which would embarrass the government and, as academic studies have demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt, being extremely biased in their treatment of trade unions, Jeremy Corbyn and class issues generally.

It is a very middle-class institution, and employs too many people as commentators who come from highly privileged backgrounds (with private education and Oxbridge), but does produce some excellent programmes. And one whole area that particularly stands out is the BBC World Service – which also covers the news more neutrally than the internal services, which often follow the lead of the UK newspapers which are owned by a small handful of billionaires including of course Rupert Murdoch and reflect their perspective on matters.

On Monday morning this week the BBC World Service broadcast in their series ‘The Conversation’, which looks at the experiences of women across the world on “image, work, relationships, equality, migration and working lives” had presenter Kim Chakanetsa talking with two women, Mexican photographer Cristina Goettsch Mittermeier and Ami Vitale from the USA.

It was a lesson in sensitive presentation, with Chakanetsa encouraging the two women to talk with pertinent questions (unlike some BBC programmes which end up being more about the interviewer than the guests), and in the roughly half-hour programme there were some interesting reflections on photography, on women photographers generally, on news, on ways of working and more, much of which as they state applies to photographers whatever their ethnicity or gender. You can listen to the programme online (along with 169 other episodes of the series) or download it from the page.

Both women are photographers for National Geographic, and Mittermeier’s recent video of a polar bear starving without the ice it needs to hunt has attracted global attention to the problems of climate change. She is also the founder and President of SeaLegacy, a non profit organization working to protect the oceans. Ami Vitale’s ‘Pandas Gone Wild‘ won her second prize for Nature Stories in the 2017 World Press Photo – to add to her many earlier awards.

I first wrote about Ami Vitale many years ago as one of the more interesting photojournalists around, and it was a great delight to meet her in Poland in 2005.


Ami Vitale (in red) at Alcatraz, Bielsko-Biala, Poland

You can read more about that event, the first FotoArtFestival on My London Diary, which links to my own diary of the Festival.

EDL, FLA & Anti-Fascists

Police has taken what seemed excessive precautions to prevent a clash between the EDL and anti-fascists on the streets of London, imposing conditions for their protests under Section 12 and 14 of the Public Order Act, 1986, due to their concerns of serious public disorder, and disruption to the community, and there was a very large force on the streets, easily outnumbering the protesters.

Of course neither group conformed in detail to the conditions, but there were plenty of police around to keep the anti-fascists away from the EDL and rather more to protect the small group of EDL supporters as they stood outside the Wetherspoons (a few more were inside) but the numbers of both groups were pretty small – perhaps a total of around 50 for the EDL and roughly twice that for the UAF counter-protet. Though I can’t understand why any police officer thought they would get the EDL to gather anywhere but in a pub.

Obviously I have my own views on the EDL, but as well as making these clear in what I write I’ve always tried to report their actions objectively and accurately – which is perhaps why I get so much hate from a few of them. Fortunately there were plenty of police around and I felt reasonably safe taking pictures from a close distance with my usual wide-angle lens. And as usual there were some of them who also photographed me, probably to add to the portfolio on right-wing hate sites which encourage violence against photographers.

But most of them were in a reasonably good mood, enjoying the day out and the publicity – and even smiling for the camera. Police had held them at the pub until they had escorted most of the anti-fascists down to a pen on the embankment a couple of hundred yards away from where the EDL rally was to be held.

I’d earlier photographed the anti-fascists as they gathered at the top of Northumberland Avenue which they had thought the EDL would be escorted down. They were a much more ethnically diverse group than the EDL, with many women and looked rather more like a typical London crowd, though some were wearing mask and there was a group of clowns. But the whole atmosphere was much more friendly and positive and there were absolutely no problems in taking pictures – even from very close distances with the police standing well back.

I moved back and forth a little between the two groups and then followed the EDL as they were escorted down to their rally, around half an hour later than I had expected. Their late departure meant that I arrived at a third protest, by a new group called the Football Lads Alliance (FLA) more or less as the event ended with laying of wreaths on London Bridge, the scene of the most recent terror attack in London. The police had also issued them with conditions, preventing them from marching on to Borough Market.

Although I reported that the march was a silent one – as the organisers had intended, I later watched a video that showed at least some of the marchers had been shouting and chanting anti-Muslim slogans on the route, though the thousand or more football supporters on the bridge were applauding politely when I arrived and held a short silence in memory of those killed in the attack.

Like the EDL, the FLA are keen to point out that they are not a racist organisation, though some of the actions they urge the government to take seem both simplistic and an attack on the human rights of citizens, and particularly Muslims. Clearly on this march some of the marchers had no qualms about being openly Islamophobic. And although the event was more restrained than those organised by the EDL, with no flags or banners, there was no evidence of any of the left-wing or anti-racist football groups and campaigns being involved.

I walked down to London Bridge station, stopping briefly to take pictures of the many sticky notes and huge pile of flowers, now rather faded, left by Londoners in memory of the dead, and then caught the Jubilee line back to Westminster where I had a couple of other events to photograph before moving on to the US Embassy and then a victory party for the cleaners which I wrote about earlier.

EDL march against terror
Anti-fascists oppose the EDL
Football Lads Alliance at London Bridge

Continue reading EDL, FLA & Anti-Fascists