>Re-PHOTO

This was Movement for Justice’s 11th protest at Yarl’s Wood, and the 10th that I’ve attended, having missed the first and perhaps most exciting when people actually broke down a fence to get to the prison fence. Now the authorities leave a gate open that they can go through to the field next door to the detention centre.

I don’t often travel so far to take pictures, except for very special events, partly because of the time it takes, but also because it gets a little expensive. And partly for medical reasons I no longer drive, no that I ever did much. So that means public transport, and getting to Bedford is easy enough, though it costs more than the average repro fee I get. Financially any trip out of London is likely to be a loser for me, but this is a protest that I cover not for the money but because I think the cause is a particularly important one.

Yarl’s Wood is a little over 5 miles north of Bedford which is a little over 50 miles from where I live. Going by train to Bedford station takes around 2 hours, but from there the journey is a little tricky. MfJ put on coaches from London, but I’d have to leave home rather early to catch them, and there was also a coach from Bedford station, for a donation of a fiver for the return journey, which I’d used previous times, but it was slow (especially when the driver didn’t know the way) and has sometimes meant I’ve arrived rather late. I could take a taxi, but unless I found someone to share this would be expensive. There is a bus from Bedford, to nearby Milton Ernest, which would be free for me, but leave me with a mile walk uphill to the meeting point. As the bus is only hourly it would add considerably to the journey time.

So the obvious thing to do was to take my folding bicycle on the train. I could then walk off the train at Bedford, unfold the Brompton and pedal away, getting to Yarl’s Wood rather quicker than the MfJ coach which would be waiting around and probably only leaving the station car park more or less as I was riding to the Yarl’s Wood meeting point.

It more or less worked out. But I hadn’t really allowed for the hills, and the road goes up and down a bit. The down is OK, but the ups were just a little tiring, particularly as for some reason I could only get the middle and top of the bikes three gears. And the last stretch up from the main road at Milton Ernest was pretty exhausting, but fortunately the road levels out just before my destination and I was able to arrive at the protest at a reasonable speed – and to cheers and catcalls from some of my colleagues who had come up from London by car.

Carrying my photo gear on the bike probably isn’t good for it, but the Brompton has a front carrier bag which will double as a rather poor camera bag simply by fitting a shoulder strap on it. Back when I first got the Brompton at the end of 2002, I used it mainly for taking me out into the landscape with a panoramic camera.

At the protest I locked the bike to a fence, took off the bag and put it on my shoulder and worked as normal. But then the protesters set off on the march to the field next to the immigration prison. I cycled ahead of them on the road, then jumped off and took some pictures, and some more as they were going into the first field. From there it got difficult, as there is around three-quarters of a mile of footpath mainly along the edges of some fields, some of which were a little rough and muddy. The Brompton isn’t a good off-road bike and most of the way I had to get off and push – and there are no pictures on My London Diary from this section of the march. Once we got the the field I could lock it and leave it again and get down to work.

Fortunately the weather had been reasonably dry for the previous few weeks, or the mud on the path would have been more of a problem. And where we were protesting was relatively dry – on some previous visits the mud had made it very hard to keep on your feet while taking pictures, particularly as the ground is uneven.

As always there was a huge welcome from the prison windows which overlooked the protest, with those inside shouting and waving and pushing out messages and anything to hand through the narrow slits that the windows will open. Between us and them is a 20ft high fence, the lower half solid, but the upper part a mesh through which we and they could see, though making it hard to take photographs.

Mabel Gawanas spent almost three years inside Yarl’s Wood

It’s totally shameful that this country looks up asylum seekers in this way for indefinite periods, leaving them never knowing whether at any moment they will be taken away and an effort made to deport them. Something like two thirds are eventually given leave to remain; some others are released with their cases still undetermined and some are packed onto planes and flown home, sometimes to face persecution in their own countries. Locking them up makes it much harder for them to prove their cases, and is no way to treat people who have fled persecution and physical danger, often beatings, torture and rape, and are in need of care and compassion. As too many reports, particularly those by undercover journalists who have got jobs inside them have shown, in Yarls Wood and the other immigration removal centres they are physically and mentally abused, even sexually abused. And of course there are the stories from the detainees themselves, some of which from both current and former detainees, are heard at these protests. Unlike convicted criminals, the detainees in our immigration prison are allowed mobile phones and their calls can be relayed to us outside.

The centres like this one are run for profit, with corners being cut on food and care, often understaffed and by people with inadequate training and unsuitable for the job. These centres should be closed down, and only those people who present a real threat to others – a vanishingly small percentage of those currently held – should be detained.

Getting back home was quicker too and I could leave when I liked. Better still, apart from one short very steep hill it was more or less downhill all the way, and caught a train an hour earlier than I would probably have done on the coach. The total journey home, with two trains and the underground between London stations was actually a little faster than the only time I’ve gone to Yarl’s Wood by car.

Many more pictures at Shut down Yarl’s Wood Prison

Continue reading Yarl’s Wood 11

I seem to have spent a great deal of time at the LSE recently, with two separate groups of protesters both supporting the campaign by the cleaners for parity of terms and conditions with staff employed by the LSE. It is time to end the practice of outsourcing key services like cleaning as a way to get the work done using employment practices that the University itself would never allow.

The cleaners belong to the United Voices of the World, a registered trade union which follows normal trade union practices – if a little more boisterously than most, picketing the workplace and also taking part in peaceful though noisy protests, together with sympathisers and students. ‘Life Not Money at the LSE’ is a direct action group allied to Rising Up, which calls ‘for a fundamental change of the political and economic system to one which maximises well being and minimises harm’ and believes that a more confrontational approach is necessary.

Life Not Money came to the LSE on May 3rd and tried to protest at the entrance to the library but were moved by security onto the road outside where they handed out fliers and displayed banners, posters and flowers. But the main point of their protest that day was to force the LSE to get someone arrested, with one of them attempting to write the slogan ‘END INEQUALITY AT THE LSE’ in spray chalk next to one of the doorways.

Unfortunately his timing wasn’t too great and he only got as far as EN and halfway through the D when he was tackled by a security guard, who held him until two police officers arrived to make an arrest. Life Not Money feel it will shame the LSE into action if a number of people get arrested for ‘criminal damage’ in this way, particularly as the chalk used wipes off cleanly with no damage and should any case get to court there is a good chance of it being dismissed as a petty waste of the court’s time.

Eight days later there was a further protest at the LSE when the UVW cleaners were holding a one-day strike and a lunchtime rally in the street outside the LSE Library. They came with vuvzelas and megaphones as well as banners and leaflets and made a great deal of noise. Although there was plenty of support from many who walked past, one or two staff stopped to argue with the protesters and tried to make them stop, but police supported their right to protest. But police also harassed some of the supporters, including Sid Skill from Class War, and it seemed likely they might arrest him. He left, followed by two officers, but managed to jump on a bus just as the doors were closing and left them behind.

As the UVW rally was coming to an end, after a march around other sites on the campus we were listening to performances by several of Poets on the Picket Line in the area outside the student’s union when we heard a disturbance a short distance away and rushed to find three protesters from Life Not Money blocking Portugal St and the entrance to the LSE’s extensive building works.

This time they had chalked on the road and not on the walls, and their message read ‘Next Director on £500,000 But No Pensions for the Cleaners! London School of Exploitation – L$E‘ and they were sitting patiently on the road in colourful red and shiny gold costumes waiting to be arrested. But on this occasion there were no arrests.

LSE Equality Life Not Money protest

LSE Cleaners strike

Since the successful end to the LSE campaign some of the same activists and others have been involved in another Rising Up campaign ‘Stop Killing Londoners‘ against the almost 10,000 premature deaths a year in London caused by excessive pollution levels. Four were arrested on November 6th 2017 and held in custody on remand until their trial on November 14th, with some going on hunger strike. They had been under bail conditions not to return to City Hall after having been arrested there for chalking slogans the previous day, but had returned and chalked ‘Cut Air Pollution – Air Pollution Kills’ in large letters and waited to be arrested. At their trial they were found guilty and fined £385 each but no conditions were imposed. There is an appeal for donations to cover their legal costs.

Continue reading Back at the LSE

One of the problems of the Conservative Party has long been a failure to understand how most people live. Of course there are poor people who vote Tory, and people in the party who have come from working class backgrounds, but their policies are largely made by people who have never known (or long forgotten) what it is like to live in poverty. And those few who started poor often seem to blame those who remain poor, feeling they worked their way out of it so why can’t everyone else?

Austerity was always the wrong policy and it hasn’t worked, but it has led to a great deal of suffering and misery, punishing the poor for crimes of the rich and the failures of successive governments to regulate the activities of the wealthy, allowing huge levels of tax avoidance and encouraging scams such as ‘buy to let’ and the use of housing as an investment vehicle, particularly for foreigners, which, along with a concerted attack on social housing are at the root of our ‘housing crisis’. We don’t really have a housing crisis – there are enough homes to go round, but many are empty part or all of the time and beyond the means of those who need them, while private landlords benefit from high rents made possible only by heavy housing subsidies – and low pay for workers means companies are subsidised by ‘in-work’ benefits while CEOs and other higher management get silly money.

A recent study published by the BMJ concludes that austerity has led to an increase in death rates and suggests that this has led to 120,000 additional deaths since 2010 due to cuts in public expenditure on healthcare and social care. The study’s lead author was quoted in The Independent as saying “It is now very clear that austerity does not promote growth or reduce deficits – it is bad economics, but good class politics. This study shows it is also a public health disaster. It is not an exaggeration to call it economic murder.” Though those who get their news from the BBC will probably have missed the story.

The Tories seem to have a special hatred reserved for the disabled. They seem to see them simply as a drag on the economy, taking high levels of benefits without any return to society (though paradoxically they have cut much of the support which did previously enable many to make a positive contribution.) They appear to have thought the disabled would be an easy target and would just go away and die quietly. But although far too many have died, campaigning groups such as DPAC (Disabled People Against Cuts) and MHRN (Mental Health Resistance Network) have been some of the most active protesters against their policies. And on this protest they reflected back a little of the Tory hate with t-shirts that read ‘Who 2 vote 4? Not the f**king Tories’.

In part this comes from desperation, and from clearly seeing that the cuts are life-threatening. But it is also helped by considerable public sympathy – at least once the public are told what is happening. The police find disabled people difficult to deal with, partly out of a genuine sympathy, but also because they realise how badly they might look in the press attacking the disabled – which is one reason why its important that I and other journalists cover their actions. There are also practical difficulties for them in making arrests, needing specially adapted vehicles for those protesters in wheelchairs or on mobility scooters – and police stations also may lack disabled facilities.

Not all disabled people are in wheelchairs, and not all disabilities are visible. One of the groups present at many of these protests is Winvisible, women with visible and invisible disabilities, and of course there are men too. But wheelchairs and scooters have proved very useful in protests, especially for blocking roads, and after protesting outside Parliament on the last day of its sitting before the General Election and then going on to protest outside the Tory HQ nearby, the protest finished by bringing traffic to a halt on busy Victoria St, leaving the road only after final warnings of arrest from the police. Stopping traffic in London, though an annoyance to those blocked, is one of few reliable ways to get any protest noticed.

More at: DPAC against Tory Hate

Continue reading Disabled protest Tory hate

Way back, soon after Ian Bone moved to London, Class War began to produce a newspaper or magazine, an irregular tabloid size publication, which became notorious for some of its covers, several of which have more recently appeared as posters, such as ‘We have found new homes for the rich’, showing a huge cemetery of crosses. In its early days it was produced in an obscure tower block in North Kensington where Bone was living, which has more recently headlined the news, Grenfell Tower.

When Class War decided to produce a new issue of the newspaper, I was asked if they could use some of my pictures from their events, and I was pleased to let them do so. It was perhaps more serious than the earlier issues, with some substantial articles about Class, Housing, the Women’s Death Brigade etc, as well as some hilarious horoscopes and features on Duncan Disorderly and Potent Whisper.

The protest outside the White Cube Gallery had been planned earlier as a protest against gentrification, following on from earlier protests there  in December 2015 –  Class War at Gilbert & George ‘Banners’ and January: Class War Footy at White Cube. As with many Class War events, in started in a nearby pub, where copies of the newly printed newspaper were read.

Eventually people walked down the street to the yard in front of the gallery:

And people posed for a group photograph with copies,

before playing a little football, something which isn’t usually allowed on the yard, empty space in a crowded inner city with astronomical land prices, seen by Class War as akin to burning £50 notes under the noses of the working class population of the area, still present in the Peabody and council flats despite the increasing hipster invasion.

But the real treats of the afternoon were at a higher cultural level, though not appreciated by the gallery staff hiding behind police and security with the gallery locked for the afternoon. First Potent Whisper performed his latest spoken word piece on the housing crisis, Estate of War, followed up by speeches by Simon Elmer from Archtiects for Social Housing (ASH), Ian Bone and another well-known anarchist, Martin Wright, then songs from ‘one-man anarcho-folk-punk-hiphop phenomenon’ Cosmo, more from Potent Whisper and then a truly incredible new improvised performance from Adam Clifford and his guitarist (unfortunately not recorded for YouTube), after which Jane Nicholl performed her introduction to   Adam’s performance of ‘The Finest F**king Family in the Land‘.

Adam ended his performance in his usual style:

and the event was still continuing with other musical performances when I had to leave.  It had been, as I wrote at the time, a legendary performance, rather eclipsing anything the White Cube has had to offer at their site, and I felt privileged to have witnessed it.

Class War at White Cube

Continue reading Class War Paper Launch