HP BETT

In the past I’ve bought HP printers. Both inkjet and laser printers for the college at which I taught, and we still have an HP Laserjet 1100 attached to my wife’s computer, still going strong after around 18 years, though now always with cheap compatible toners. I won’t buy HP – and their toners cost 5 times as much.

I probably first bought HP printers after seeing them on the HP stand at BETT, which used to be known as the British Educational Training and Technology Show but is now billed as the “World’s Leading EdTech Event” and likes to hide the British bit of its name. Back when I first went it was at the Barbican, then moved to Olympia, where I took my first ever pictures with a digital camera on one of the stands (and wasn’t too excited by the quality) and is now held every January at the Excel Centre on London’s Royal Victoria Docks.

People do come from all around the world to the show now – not that there is really any need to, but it’s a good excuse to get out of school for a few days and get a trip to London and your hotel paid for by your employer, though for me it was only a day off and the train fare. You can pick up a few ideas at the various sessions and stands of all the leading companies, and I certainly saved my employers money by getting some good deals on gear, but that was before the days there was so much on line that big shows like this with all the travel etc are really just a perk for those who get to dine out on them. How much longer we can waste all the carbon involved?

But now I certainly wouldn’t buy from HP, as I’ve read all the information from Inminds at this and other protests, and know the vital role that HP play in supporting the often illegal and inhumane persecution of Palestinians by the Israeli state and its military. Inminds launched its campaign to boycott HP in September 2014 and I’ve covered a number of their protests at various venues since then. You can read why they boycott HP on their web site, which also has some of their pictures from the protests and graphics which show some of the posters too small to read in my pictures.

I didn’t stay too long at the protest – the courtyard in front of the exhibition centre is a cold and windswept place. It’s also one of London’s many (and increasing) privately owned public spaces, and although the centre’s management don’t try to prevent the protest, they do try to marginalise them. Throughout the time I was there the police were constantly coming to the protest organisers and trying to move them further away or restrict their activities, though their requests were not always complied with.

Quite a few of those going into the show came to read the posters and others came across when they came out from the exhibition for a cigarette break. There were a couple of people who reacted adversely – one complained bitterly and loudly that they were not protesting about the mistreatment of Armenians, and was told if he felt strongly about the issue he should organise a protest. Police eventually led him away and talked to him and he went on into the exhibition.

Another man threw a hefty show catalogue at the protesters, fortunately missing them and complained that they were anti-semitic. They told him that they had no issues with Jews – and several of the protesters were Jewish, handed his catalogue back and told him to behave himself, and again police came and told him to keep the peace.

But there were more who came to praise the protesters and thank them, taking photographs on their phone and tweeting about the protest, including one woman who then went along the line of protesters, hugging and kissing each in turn.

More pictures: Ban HP from BETT show

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King’s Cleaners

Until recently, my main contact with King’s University in the Strand in London has been waiting for buses outside it, most usually for the short journey to Waterloo or Westminster. A lot of buses stop there, though as often in London you can wait a little while before the one you need comes along. And while you do, there are giant portraits along the frontage of Kings (aka KCL) of some of the alumni listing their achievements.

And it is an impressive pantheon. King’s began in 1829 when King George IV and the Duke of Wellington got together to found it, and not surprisingly it got a royal charter that same year. In 1836 it got together with University College London (which predated it by 3 years) to found London University. In more recent years it has added to the names it can proudly display by a number of mergers, taking in among others Queen Elizabeth College (formerly its Ladies Department), Chelsea College of Science and Technology, the Institute of Psychiatry, the United Medical and Dental Schools of Guy’s and St Thomas’ Hospitals and the Florence Nightingale School of Nursing and Midwifery.

Something it can’t be so proud of is the way it has treated its cleaners. So ashamed that it actually has employed another company to do its dirty work, outsourcing the cleaning to Servest.

Cleaners at King’s are paid less than the London Living Wage and are overworked, often expected to do the work of colleagues who are sick or on holiday in addition to their own. They have conditions of employment significantly worse than King’s would dream of giving staff directly employed by them, getting only statutory sick pay and other benefits and are subjected to arbitrary disciplinary measures. They work in King’s to keep King’s clean – but King’s denies any responsibility for them.

Perhaps surprisingly, the cleaners are members of one of our major trade unions Unison. And much less surprising was that in the ballot they voted 98% in favour of taking strike action. And this rather dull day I was photographing their lunchtime rally on the second day of their strike. They had been picketing there since the early morning, but were still in great spirits, blowing horns, speaking, shouting and dancing, supported by some King’s students and staff, and Unison members from other branches, as well as some cleaners from elsewhere in other unions including the UVW. There does seem to be an increasing feeling that low paid workers need to work together to get a wage they can live on and for cleaners to no longer be treated like the dirt they clean.

King’s College cleaners strike
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Peckham against Deportations

A week after their march in Brixton, Movement for Justice returned to South London for another march against deportation, this time in Peckham, another area where immigration raids have met with anger from the local population.

The protesters are calling on the governments of Nigeria, Ghana, Jamaica, Pakistan and Afghanistan to end their collusion with the racist UK government. They say that immigration raids and mass deportation charter flights are targeting long-established African, Asian and Caribbean communities, dividing families, deporting people who have built lives in the UK with parents, partners and children here.


One of several stops for short speeches to let everyone know why they are protesting

They compare these flights to the ships used in the slave trade, calling them modern slave ships, with deportees shackled with a guard on each side in a cruel and divisive act of racist discrimination.

High Court decisions have ruled that the Home Office has exceeded its legal powers in its deportation of people between 2005 and 2015 with over 10,000 asylum seekers having been illegally deported from the UK in that period. But those who oversaw these illegal acts – including Theresa May have gone unpunished.

Among those supporting the march were SOAS Detainee Support (SDS), Anti Raids Network, Zimbabwe Human Rights Organization Mazimbabweans, Jewdas, BLMUK, London Mexico Solidarity, Sisters Uncut South East London and Lesbians and Gays Support the Migrants.

More at Peckham march against deportations.

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Trump, Trump

There is a particularly Stygian gloom in front of the US Embassy, as if by some secret technology they are able to extract light from the area for when protests are taking place, but the under-exposure of the image above was more down to my fidgety thumb, always a problem when I work in shutter priority mode. I’d set the shutter speed to 1/60 when I gave up working without flash, but gradually the setting had been nudged up as I walked around taking pictures. While I was still using flash, or in areas where there was movie lighting it wasn’t a problem and things looked fine on the camera back when I bothered to check. The frame before this one was exposed at 1/400th f4, and while the background is dark, the foreground figures are well exposed (a little too well) by the flash.But for this I needed the shadow, and so off went the flash and I took the picture by ambient light; 1/400th at f4, ISO3200. Of course I usually deliberately under-expose at night – it doesn’t look dark otherwise, but this was another three stops less, and three stops too far. When I saw later what I had done, Charlie’s comment below the red button he was carrying seemed rather apt.

Even with a lot of noise reduction and burning and dodging it really is just a little too far out, though I could probably improve a little. You can see the purple that covers highly underexposed shadow areas in quite a few areas of the picture, and further retouching could reduce this, as well as apllying some more local noise reduction in some areas.

It was the night of President Trump’s inauguration and there didn’t seem to be a great deal of celebration going on at the Embassy, but the was a sizeable crowd protesting outside – and more in Trafalgar Square where I went later.

Perhaps the poster this woman in pink was holding up in the flower beds in front of the embassy, ‘Dear Queen, We’re Sorry. Take Us back? Love, An American‘ was rather widespread.

There were some speeches, and a large crowd gathered around the tented platform from which they were being made. But a strong fluorescent tube light just behind the speakers head made trying to photograph the speakers unrewarding, and the posters seemed more eloquent. Many in the crowd probably thought so too, or perhaps it was just too crowded to get near enough to hear, but they spread out over a wide area in front of the embassy – the booth from which speeches were made was out of the picture above to the left.

Here’s another picture of Trump, Trumping thanks to Charlie X. The speeches were still trundling on when I left to see what was happening in Trafalgar Square, where a protest had also been called.

The answer when I arrived was not very much, though there was a giant orange Trump head and groups of protesters rather scattered around the square, with Heritage wardens telling them they were not allowed to protest there. The protest there had not really begun, and I decided I’d had enough and left.

Later I heard that things did get going some time after I went home, and that there had been several arrests after protesters had come under an unprovoked attack from the police.

Crowds protest Trump’s Inauguration
F**k Trump
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Brixton against deportation

The following Saturday I was with Movement for Justice again protesting against deportations, but in Brixton, marching through areas of the community to gain support along with people from groups including Sisters Uncut, Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! and the Mazimbabweans, a movement for freedom, democracy and equality in Zimbabwe.

I arrived almost an hour late, thanks to my train being held up by signalling problems in the Clapham Junction area, and found there was nobody at the meeting point in Windrush Square. I tried the phone number I had for one of the organisers, but only got her answering service, and wondered what to do. I wandered up towards the underground station and as I came opposite it could hear the sound of a protest, though there was nothing in sight. But walking on a few yards in the direction the noise was coming from I saw them coming around 50 yards down Atlantic Rd.

The march turned on to the Brixton’s main street, holding up traffic on the busy road and being seen by many of the shoppers, quite a few of whom applauded, waved or shouted in support. Once people saw the banners and posters and saw what the protest was about there was a very positive response from most.

We turned off down the Brixton Station Road to march through the market stalls there, and past the few remaining businesses still refusing to be moved from Brixton Arches and continued a tour of the neighbourhood,  going along Gresham Rd to Brixton Police Station and then turning back onto Brixton Road to march through the centre back to Windrush Square.

The march held up traffic as it went slowly towards Windrush Square, but  many of the drivers passing on the northbound lane waved and beeped in support, and again there was a very positive response from shoppers on the street.

At the junction with Acre Lane the march spread across the whole crossroads and briefly blocked all traffic before moving on to Windrush Square for a rally, where everyone who wanted to speak was allowed to do so, giving a range of views and experiences of the problems facing those coming to this country. Many of those on the march were people who had come here as refugees and asylum seeks, and some were still waiting to receive permission to stay.

As one woman said, every time she went for her regular routine appointment at one of the immigration reporting centres she knew that she might not be allowed to walk out and go back to her friends, but might find herself handcuffed and being taken to be put on a plane back to the country from which she had fled, fearing for her life.

More at: Brixton march against mass deportations

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Nigerian Flights

On Wednesday Jan 11th I joined Movement for Justice at their protest outside the Nigerian High Commisison in Shaftesbury Avenue, always one of London’s gloomiest streets, lined with tall buildings and large trees. Darkness was falling anyway as the protest began in late afternoon, and I set the D810 on Auto ISO with a minimum speed of 1/100th to take some pictures without flash. Working with the 28.0-200.0 mm f/3.5-5.6 lens the pictures were taken with the lens wide open and then the ISO went up to 4500 and then my maximum setting of 6400 and then the shutter speed began to drop. When it arrived at 1/40th I decided I had to use flash as these protests are fairly lively events.

I kept the ISO fairly high, generally around ISO2500 to keep a decent amount of exposure in the background and avoid a typical bad flash look, and changed to shutter priority (Nikon’s flash gets some crazy ideas in P mode, using the ISO setting to stop down the lens, which to me makes absolutely no sense.) I began with a shutter speed of 1/160, but as usually happens that slowly crept up as handling the camera jogged the main control dial.

On the wideangle images taken with the D750 and the 16.0-35.0 mm f/4.0 I’d forgotten to move the dial from ‘P’ to ‘S’ with the result that the first few images I took were at f11 (see above) and gave a typical background gloom with closer figures far too light. I could compensate partly by some burning in with the RAW files in Ligthroom, but it wasn’t ideal.

Fortunately I soon noticed the error and switched to working in A, aperture priority, mode. With the wide angle I’m less worried about shutter speed and decided I would get sufficient depth of field working more or less wide open, occasionally taking it down a half a stop or so. The 16-35 is a good performer wide open, but improved by just that little stopping down.

The Home Office arranges charter flights to Nigeria every couple of months, and to help with its figures isn’t fussy about who it decides to forcibly deport. Many are people who have been in the UK for most of their lives, with parents, partners and children here, as well as students who have not yet finished their courses, some are still in the course of making their claim for asylum, others people with serious health problems and carers for elderly and disabled relatives and some those who will face violence on their return, particularly if gay.

People don’t matter to the Home Office. They are just numbers in their racist ‘numbers game’.  The protest called on Nigeria to refuse to accept these flights

End Deportation Charter Flights to Nigeria

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15 Years of US Shame

It’s hard to believe that its 15 years since the first men were illegally taken to a new prison camp that was being set up at the US base at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. Harder still to believe that there are still around 40 detainees held there, despite a promise by President Obama to close it down.

It’s hardly fair to blame Obama for failing to keep that promise, given the opposition he had to face from both Democrats and Republicans; he made an attempt soon after he was first elected but was opposed by both the administration and the Senate and by 2011 he had been largely defeated. But during his time in office the number of men imprisoned there went down from around 245 to 41.

The camp was illegal in almost every respect from the start, flouting international law, the Geneva Conventions and every standard of human rights and common decency; it is hard to think of anything that has more negatively affected the reputation of the USA around the world.

Even its presence on the site in Cuba was in breach of the agreement under which the naval base was established in 1903 on what the USA still regards as sovereign Cuban territory. Though the whole US presence there is also of doubtful legality as the agreement was repudiated after the Cuban revolution as having been made under duress.

But the prison camp remains, and people held there are still being subjected to inhumane treatment, apparently still being tortured routinely – if no longer with the involvement of the UK’s security services. It remains a shameful blot on the USA.

Surprising this year was the absence from the anniversary protest of the human rights organisations that have joined in marking it in at least some previous years. The protest was organised by the Guantanamo Justice Campaign and included the London Guatanamo Campaign who still hold monthly protests outside the US Embassy.

This year the protest had a clown theme with slogans such as ‘Guantanamo is no laughing matter’ and ‘I weep 4 Justice’, and a number of those taking part were dressed and made up as clowns.

15 Years of Guantanamo – No Joke!

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End of Year Walks

Most years we have some kind of a family Christmas, usually at home, and one of our traditions is to go on walks. On either Boxing Day or Christmas Say, we walk the five or six miles (depending on the route we chose) for lunch at my sister’s house, partly for a little exercise, but also because there is generally no pubic transport. We could cycle, but usually we have more people staying with us than bikes- or even people who can’t ride a bike, so we walk.

We are happy to accept a car ride home, though I suppose we could also walk back, but its less comfortable in the dark. We could take a taxi, but I don’t work on these days and don’t want to make someone else work.

I no longer have a driving licence, and seldom drove for the last 45 years, partly for environmental reasons – and I’ve also, whenever possible avoided flying – I can still just count the number of journey I’ve made on my fingers.

And later in the holiday, usually either New Year’s Eve or New Year’s Day we take a longer walk. Last year, on 31st December it was from Sudbury to Brentford, some of it along the River Brent and the Grand Union Canal.

I’d planned the route to have something to appeal (I hoped) to all of the family, with a section through an industrial estate at Perivale, a couple of interesting churches and a long section by rivers and canal.

It turned out to be a little too long – or rather we walked too slowly – and we ended in darkness and missed a train home by seconds – and so had half an hour to wait for the next, but otherwise it was fine. Though I did have to drag people past a tea-room screaming when it was really far too late to stop.

And certainly the weather could have been better. We climbed the hill to arrive at a well-known viewpoint and could see very little. And there was just a little rain.

New Years Eve Walk
Boxing Day Walk

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Bangladesh and Harrods

My New Year’s Resolution to take things a little easier this year started well and it was not until Saturday 7th January that I picket up a camera with intent, traveling to Whitechapel in the East End, the centre of London’s Bangladeshi community, for the London event in a the global day of protest to save the Sunderbans, the world’s largest mangrove forest.

I’ve never been to Bangladesh, though in the past I’ve been invited and we now have parts of our wider family there through my son’s marriage last year. But it would be a very long way on a bicycle and I really would have to have some vital reason to justify the environmental cost of flying there.

The Sunderbans protest was all about the environment, and the loss of a unique habitat and the species it supports, including the Bengal Tiger, threatened by the development of a coal-fired power plant on its northern edge at Rampal. The development would be disastrous for this fragile ecosystem, and also another nail in the coffin of our world as a whole, increasing the production of greenhouse gases and reducing an important area for their absorption.

It’s difficult for me to understand why anyone should want to build a coal-fired poor station in an area with such a abundant supply of solar energy, with the cost of generating electricity from this falling at a huge rate. If it goes ahead by the time it is built it will be outdated technology – but of course the same will be true about our own fearfully expensive white elephant under construction at Hinkley Point.

More at Save the Sunderbans Global Protest.

The journey from Whitechapel to Harrods was from one side of London to the other – East End to West End – and to very different issues, though I suppose still at base about the greed of the wealthy, who profit from wrecking the environment and also from stealing the waiter’s tips.

United Voices of the World were protesting outside Harrods on behalf of the many waiters who are paid on or a few pence above the minimum wage in an establishment that caters for the ultra-rich. When these diners leave tips for the waiters they expect them to go to to the waiters and catering staff – but much of them instead was going to swell the profits of the owners, probably the richest family in the worlds, the Qatari royal family.

The action by the UVW was supported from its inception by Class War, who turned up with a couple of banners and helped to make the protest even more noticeable. It was perhaps the reputation of Class War that aroused a huge reaction from the police and the interests of some of the press, and the policing was really at extreme levels, with officers on all sides of the block containing the store and vans parked in all the side-streets around, considerably outnumbering the protesters. Harrods too seemed to have a large number of extra security officers on duty inside the store.

Officers came and told the protesters that if they entered the store to protest they would immediately be arrested for aggravated trespass. Some had already gone inside earlier, hiding leaflets about the protest in places where customers and staff would find them later, and had left undetected.

Class War’s methods were more direct, though largely street theatre rather than posing any real threat to property. There was a struggle to open the main doors, and to cover them with their banner to stop those inside filming the protesters, but mainly a lot of shouting and dancing.

And there was very much a clash of cultures, which seemed to me to be summed up by the expression on the face of one well-dressed woman on seeing some of Class War’s more distinctive characters.

The protesters moved off the pavement onto the Brompton Rd in front of the store and were intending to march around the block, but police surrounded them and kept them blocking the road for some time, urging them to go back onto the pavement when they would probably have moved away much more quickly. Eventually the police gave up pushing and threatened to arrest anyone who stayed in the road and the protest moved back to block the pavement. One woman standing on the curb was arrested for arguing with the police that she was on the pavement, and a few minutes later police snatched another who they accused of letting off a smoke flare earlier.

The protesters moved to a wide pedestrian are at the corner of the building for a short rally and then brought the protest to an end, and people, including myself left. Later I heard that as the UVW was packing up police came and arrested four of them including the UVW General Secretary Petros Elia. They were kept in cells at Belgravia police station for up to 18 hours before being released without charge (though the guy accused of letting off a flare apparently accepted a police caution) but on police bail with a condition that they were not to go within 50 metres of Harrods.

These arrests of trade unionists seemed a clear abuse of police powers and a clear demonstration of whose side the police were on. I commented at the time:

It appears to be a deliberate abuse of the law to try to stop protests at Harrods – however legitimate these may be. Harrods and their owners, the Qatari royal family have many friends in high places including the Foreign Office and presumably these were able to put pressure on the police to take action against the protesters.

Many more pictures at: Harrods stop stealing waiters’ tips.

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Howl for the NHS

I saw the best minds of my generation howling in protest for the NHS, though fortunately they had not been destroyed by madness but were just howling mad at our governments plans to dismantle and privatise our National Health Service. The privateer’s latest ploy is the ‘Sustainability and Transformation Plans‘ (STPs) which were due to be signed off that day in all 44 areas of the country.

According to some of the placards, STP stands for ‘Slash Trash and Plunder‘ and many see it as a continuation of plans to move our NHS away from the public sector and into the hands of healthcare companies.

In 2005 Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt was one of the authors of a Conservative Party policy pamphlet that called for the NHS to be replaced by an insurance market system delivered by the private sector and in 2014 was one of 70 Conservative and Lib-Dem MPs listed by the Daily Mirror as having links with healthcare companies.

Many of those at the protest were health workers, and others were those who rely heavily on its service; all support the three basic priciples laid down by Aneurin Bevan back in 1948:

  • that it meet the needs of everyone
  • that it be free at the point of delivery
  • that it be based on clinical need, not ability to pay

Nye Bevan was very much in evidence at the protest, his face on posters and t-shirts with his message “The NHS will last as long as there are folk left with the faith to fight for it.” Though he expressed similar feelings, apparently Bevan never actually said this, but it was said by his character in a TV play.

But one thing he did say:

“The eyes of the world are turning to Great Britain. We now have the moral leadership of the world, and before many years are over we shall have people coming here as to a modern Mecca, learning from us in the twentieth century as they learned from us in the seventeenth century.”

Instead what we see is Tory politicians and theorists going to the USA and getting ideas from a medical system that is at least three times as expensive and totally fails to provide for the need of the large numbers of the less wealthy to bring back here and destroy a system that still in many respects is the envy of the world. It makes sense only to those crazy for greed.

More about Howls of protest for death of the NHS on My London Diary.
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