march | >Re-PHOTO

Afrikans demand reparations

Time for a little more colour on >Re:PHOTO, and looking back to warmer and sunnier weather at the start of August last year.

The Afrikan Emancipation Day Reparations March has been an annual event in London http://mylondondiary.co.uk/2014/08/aug.htm#rastafari since 2014, which was the centenary of the foundation by Marcus Garvey of the Universal Negro Improvement Association in Jamaica. Garvey had spent the previous two years working as a journalist and studying in London and founded the UNIA as as a means of uniting all of Africa and its diaspora into “one grand racial hierarchy.” The organisers of that first march intended it as a one-off event, but others took over insisting it should be annual. This was the first time I’d managed to cover it since 2014.

Garvey chose the date as 1 August 1834 was Emancipation day, following the Slavery Abolition Act 1833, when slavery was ended in the British Empire. Claims for reparations for descendants of those enslaved by the Atlantic Slave Trade came to the fore in 1999 when the African World Reparations and Repatriation Truth Commission called for a payment of $777 trillion to Africa within 5 years, and in 2004 a case was brought and lost against Lloyds of London and Jamaican Rastafarians made a claim for £72,5bn for Europe to resettle of 500,000 Jamaicans back in Africa which was rejected. Other claims have been lodged on behalf of Guyana, Antigua, Barbuda and Barbados.

I felt a little apprehensive at photographing this event, and just a few people have shown a little hostility towards me, though many more have been welcoming. Anyone who has grown up white in the UK has obviously benefited from the historic proceeds of slavery (as so do those of any other origin living here) but I’m fairly sure that my ancestors were not among those carrying out and profiting from the trade. They will have been being exploited by that same class that was enslaving Africans; some thrown off their lands by the Highland Clearances to make way for sheep. Others will I think have been at the heart of the emancipation movement. They will have received nothing of the huge financial compensation that was paid to the enslaving class, which created a debt which members of the British public were paying off through taxation until 2015.

This year the march was divided into 9 blocs, although in practice there was a great deal of overlap. One of these was the Ubuntu – Non-Afrikan Allies Bloc which included Extinction Rebellion XR Connecting Communities.

While I think there is a firm moral case for reparations, I think the demands are unlikely to impress European or American governments, certainly not on the scale being claimed. And I wonder if the demand actually deflects from a more important need for decolonisation of Africa and the Caribbean as well as other areas of the majority world, reclaiming national assets from the various multi-nationals that are now continuing the exploitation of the continent.

I left the march as it made its way through Brixton towards Parliament where there was to be another protest rally in Parliament Square.

Afrikans demand reparations

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Remainers march

Back in July there still was hope that we might be able to avoid the huge mistake of Brexit, and thousands came to march in support of staying in Europe. And while the recent election makes it almost certain we will leave – and leave on terms that will be very damaging to the country, I still suspect that in a few years time we will be begging Europe to let us back in, or at least to come to some much closer arrangement than is likely to result from negotiations by the current government.

Like the referendum, the election campaign was marked by an enormous amount of misinformation and lies, mainly from the Conservative Party; First Draft checked out the ads from both parties on Facebook from Dec1 to Dec 4, and, according to Full Fact, ” found that a majority of the Conservative ads during this period included or linked to claims that Full Fact has questioned“. First Draft give a figure: ” 88% (5,952) of the most widely promoted ads featured claims about the NHS, income tax cuts, and the Labour Party which had already been labelled misleading by Full Fact.

Labour put out far fewer FB ads during this time and for technical reasons the first report by Full Fact missed any misleading claims in them; later they updated the figure to say that of their 104 ads during the same period only 6.7% contained or linked to misleading data.

The Brexit referendum was similarly marked by deliberate misleading by the ‘Leave’ campaign, including the figure on the side of their bus. But perhaps even more importantly we were told that leaving Europe would be a simple process, and the public were given the impression that once they had voted it would all be over within a few months.

But the politicians are only a part of the story, and the huge misinformation campaign of both referendum and election is largely driven by the media, both newspapers and broadcasting. The Sun has previously boasted of having determined the results of UK elections, and certainly it and the other newspapers, mainly owned by a handful of billionaires, have played a vital role. Most of the broadcast media, with the exception of the BBC are also similarly controlled.

The BBC is a special case, and has long been under attack by both the left and right in politics for failing to be impartial. Unfortunately this doesn’t imply that it is getting the balance right, as the two sides attack it for very different reasons. Many Tories have long wanted to close it down largely because it is a public service and as such not making money for them and their friends, but at the same time have been very effective in getting members of a highly conservative establishment into positions of power within it. Labour have seen in taking up the anti-Labour views of the press and collaborating with the opposition to Jeremy Corbyn, conspiring with some Labour MPs opposed to him and even inventing fake news to discredit him and the party.

What we are left in now is a real mess. A country which would now almost certainly vote to remain being taken out of the EU, on the basis of a promise made by a former Prime Minister over a non-binding referendum. A referendum result that had it been binding would almost certainly have been challenged and rendered invalid in the courts. Scotland looking increasingly likely to break away and rejoin the EU after we have left. A border in the Irish Sea that makes the reunification of Ireland seem much closer (perhaps the only positive outcome of the whole sad business.) And a country that is going to become much poorer and more unequal. But most important of all will be the failure to take action over the climate crisis.

No to Boris, Yes to Europe

Protesting in the rain

Protests, particularly those over climate change, seem to rather often take place in the rain, and it causes problems both for protesters and photographers. Bad weather cuts down the number of people who come out to protest, leaving only the hard core; few of us like getting wet or cold or both and those who are wondering whether they should make the effort to take part are likely to take a look out of the window and think to themselves that perhaps they will go on the next protest and give this one a miss.

And of course photographers like myself do sometimes check the weather forecast and if its an event I’m wondering whether or not to cover it can be the deciding factor. I don’t like the cold or the wet, and I don’t really like working in the dark either, though I’m prepared to go out and do my best if I think it is really important.

Protesters can sometimes shelter under umbrellas, though it can be hard to carry a placard or poster as well as a brolly. It has to be pretty extreme before I’ll try to hold one while I’m taking photographs; really I need both hands for the cameras and an umbrella just gets in the way too much. It’s an accessory that really needs to come with an assistant to hold it.

While printed placards normally stand up to the rain, hand-made ones, usually of more interest, often have images or messages that run, or glued on letters or pictures that fall off. Most of the cameras I use are reasonably weatherproof, and some of the lenses are also said to be so.

I’ve tried using various kinds of plastic bags to keep cameras dry, including those manufactured and sold for the purpose, but have never found them much use. And of course you can’t put them over the part that really matters, the front surface of the lens.

I generally now work holding a chamois leather (vegans could try a microfibre cloth but they don’t work as well) balled up in my hand pressed against the front surface, taking it out immediately before I want to take a picture, and replacing it after I’ve pressed the shutter. But it’s surprising how often a rain drop can fall while you are focussing and composing the image.

When I know there is to be prolonged heavy rain I’ll think about wearing a poncho and then it’s easy to simply lift out the camera and take a picture then put it back in the dry. But my bag isn’t big enough to hold the poncho and I don’t like having it hanging around my waist. Usually I have a jacket and can put one camera inside on my chest, though it does mean opening the zip enough so I get a bit wet.

Lens hoods help too, at least with long lenses, but those on wideangles and most zooms give little protection against rain falling on the front element.

Something I’ve not heard much talk about, but has often been a real problem for me in wet weather is condensation on the inside of the lens. I can’t really understand why this is such a great problem for me, as I would only expect it to happen when warmer air saturated with moisture meets a cold glass surface. But it seems to happen whenever I’m working for a long period in wet conditions, at first simply giving flare and reducing contrast in all or part of the image and then when it gets worse making the lens unusable until I spend some time in a warmer place and it evaporates.

By the time we had got from Parliament Square to Piccadilly Circus, both the lenses I was using were beginning to steam up, and I decided it was time to get somewhere warmer and dry if I was going to cover the second event in my diary. This was in Kensington and fortunately my the time I had travelled there with a little help the lenses were clear again. One of the lenses changed its length when it zoomed, and so pulled air in an out helping the drying – and I also wiped any moisture off the lens barrel that became exposed when zooming out.

Students march for climate

All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated, are taken by and copyright of Peter Marshall, and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.

Marching with a yacht

Although police had put up with Extinction Rebellion blocking the Strand for their protest outside the Royal Courts of Justice calling for an Ecocide Lay, by late afternoon they were beginning to demand that people move or be arrested for blocking the highway.

XR had already identified a site where they were hoping to camp for the next few days, close to Waterloo, so in late afternoon they formed up to march the relatively short distance to their new home at Waterloo Millennium Green.

As well as around a thousand marchers there was also a giant pink dodo and a rather large blue yacht, the Polly Higgins, named for the environmental lawyer who fought for years for a law against ecocide and died this April. I hadn’t seen them moving a yacht through the streets before and was interested to see exactly how that would be done.

Another attraction of the march for me was that it would take me to Waterloo Station, where I could catch a train home. I had intended to march all the way, but actually gave up when the march was held up for some minutes on the Waterloo Road.

Earlier we had crossed Waterloo Bridge, where police had made many arrests of XR protesters during their ‘Garden Bridge’ occupaton of the bridge in April. Although the protesters were peaceful and not resisting arrest, following XR’s policy of non-violence, there had been considerable and entirely uncalled for violence from the police during some of these arrests, and the procession halted and sat down on the road for a few minutes for speeches condeming the earlier police action.

More at XR Summer Uprising procession.

All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated, are taken by and copyright of Peter Marshall, and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.

Hackney XR March

On Friday I’d had to leave the Extinction Rebellion ‘The Air That We Grieve’ march as it reached the Hackney border to go to a protest at Senate House, but on Saturday afternoon there was another march as a part of the ‘East London Uprising weekend, walking through the centre of Hackney from Hackney Fields and on to the centre of the event in London Fields.

Before the march in Hackney Fields there were a couple of things taking place, a dance performance which I found less than exciting visually and some kind of meditation thing which was frankly off-putting. There is an odd-ball new age side to XR that I think works very strongly against it appealing to the great majority of people and which certainly turns me off.

But there were the people, the giant bees and the skeletons to photograph, so I stayed and took pictures, and of course I wanted to photograph the march. But it did make me think that perhaps this was a part of the reason why of the several million East Londoners only a couple of hundred were with us for this march. XR has had a remarkable success, but only with some sections of the community and I think rather more in small towns and rural areas than in working class urban communities.

Looking through the many pictures I made on the march it doesn’t really look like a Hackney event, though I’m sure many or most of those taking part were from the area. Official figures show that “around 40% of the population come from Black and Minority Ethnic groups” but these were severely under-represented.

This isn’t a criticism of those that did take part, and I think the XR has been important in raising awareness of the urgency of the enviromental crisis we are now facing. It has performed a vital service and we see its efforts represented to some extent in the manifestos of all the political parties in the current general election – though so far there has been little real commitment by our government – or those of most other countries.

It was a hot day and I’d been on my feet for several hours and I needed a rest by the time the protest passed Hackney Town Hall. I had intended to continue to the festival taking place on London Fields, but couldn’t bring myself to walk any further, and after a brief rest made my way to Hackney Central to begin my journey home.

More pictures at East London Extinction Rebellion March.

All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated, are taken by and copyright of Peter Marshall, and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.

March for Clean Air

Extinction Rebellion East London had organised a whole weekend of event , a festival of play, protest and education, the East London Uprising calling for a rapid end to the use of fossil fuels.

Apart from their huge contribution to our increasing carbon dioxide levels which are leading to unprecedented man-made global heating the will put the future of humanity at risk, the pollution levels already present in London and other cities from coal, petrol and fuel oils which pollute the air with toxic chemicals and particulates is already causing many thousands to suffer from various often serious lung diseases and is estimated to lead to almost 10,000 early deaths in London alone.

The marchers met in a small open space called Paradise Gardens, between the busy Cambridge Heath Road and houses in Paradise Row. It may have seemed like paradise when these houses were built in the late 18th and early 19th century, and doubtless they are now horrifically expensive, but this paradise is now highly polluted.

The march set off from Bethnal Green to Hackney behind a banner ‘The Air That We Grieve’, and included a marching jazz band, and of course plenty of families with children. As well as the jazz band there were samba drummers, and the ‘king of the bottle tops’ and others.

The march attracted considerable interest as it went up the Cambridge Heath Road, with many expressing support. But there was no general uprising and perhaps there are releatively few who are actually changing the way they behave, changing to lower carbon lifestyles as we all need to do. It requires a much greater urgency from a government which is prepared to make statements but not to take on the vested short-term interests of many of its backers by significant green investments and policies that will really impact on personal choices.

More pictures from the event at XR East London marches for clean air

All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated, are taken by and copyright of Peter Marshall, and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.

Kids march for more school

Whatever is wrong with modern children? I just cannot imagine myself at primary school protesting at getting an extra half-day off school. We would have cheered.

Of course parents are likely to be upset. Having to find some way to look after their offspring on a Friday afternoon when in most families both parents will be at work. It must be bad enough having to make arrangements for the school holidays without this extra burden,

While I was teaching we did get the occasional day where school closed and we were sent home early, and I think we were generally rather pleased, particularly if it was a day when we were down to teach 3G last period. Though I suppose we might have got a little concerned if it were happening on a regular basis, and particularly for some of the classes who were nearing their GCSE or A level exams – and I think there were some times when these exam classes remained for lessons when others left early.

But now of course we have exams at every level, the dreaded SATs, starting in the May of Year 2, when children are only 7. Some schools add to the training in terror by making them take ‘optional SATs’ at the end of every year there isn’t a real SAT test (the next one comes for 11 year olds in Year 6.)

And teachers, particularly head teachers, are of course concerned about the results, as they place their school in the league tables. So concerned that although they only take place for a short period the SATs have come to dominate the whole year’s work in most of our schools. Schools that want to be seen as successful have had to change their whole ethos to “teach for the tests.” It shouldn’t be so.

It was of course a fiction that children were not tested before the SATs. At secondary level children came to us with the results of properly standarised tests from the NFER, tests that were adminstered with none of the anguish and stress of the SATs, which were used to diagnose a pupil’s needs and not to judge schools and which were considerably more useful and reliable, and were not the tail wagging the dog of the school.

As parents, we sent our children to the local schools. The primary school they both went to was a happy school and well run. It tried to continue that way when the SATs came in (fortunately after our children had gone on to the local secondary) but the results of the first year were miserable compared to the other local schools that had drilled their children for the exams from the start, and they were forced to change.

This protest, though I think driven by exam pressures, was not about getting rid of the exams but about funding. Schools have suffered under austerity, and those in the more difficult areas have suffered more than those with wealthier parents, though even those have problems. Parents associations which used to raise funds for extras are now having to do so for essentials, and parents in many schools are now asked for ‘voluntary contributions’ to our free education system. Though with various reforms by both New Labour and Tories we hardly have a system, more a mess.

This protest, like so many schools, was also funded by voluntary contributions, crowdfunding led by Labour MP Jess Phillips who also led the children along Whitehall to Downing St.

Give Me Five days

All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated, are taken by and copyright of Peter Marshall, and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.

Stonewall 50

At 1:20 a.m. on Saturday, June 28, 1969, police began a raid on the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village, New York, a Mafia owned pub according to Wikipedia “known to be popular among the poorest and most marginalized people in the gay community: drag queens, transgender people, effeminate young men, butch lesbians, male prostitutes, and homeless youth.”

Police raids on gay locations were not uncommon, but usually the police who took money from bar owners and tipped them off in advance of the raids, but this hadn’t happened at Stonewall that night, probably because the police felt they weren’t getting enough payback.

In the raid, police separated all those dressed as women and as usual in such raids tried to get them to go into the toilet with a woman officer to be examined – and, if they had male genitals, arrested. But people refused, and men refused to show police their ID.

You can read a lengthy account of how the events developed in the Wikipedia article. The riots that arose from the raid, largely started by lesbians and transgender people who stood up to the police continued the following day and are generally accepted to have begun the gay liberation movement not just in the United States but elswhere across the world.

The annual Pride celebration in London is now largely a corporate event, a parade rather than a march, and although this year it was said to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Stonewall, to many it hardly seemed to do so in an appropriate fashion. But there are other Pride celebrations around London that now seem more authentic, and the Forest Gayte Pride festival had the advantage of taking place on the actual 50th anniversary of Stonewall, with events on the 28th and 29th June.

I arrived a few minutes late for the start of the Pride march in Forest Gate, which appeared to have started a little earlier than the time I had been given, but managed to photograph its final few hundred yards and the speeches in the Pride Market at its conclusion. Unlike the huge event in central London, this was very much a community event, and far more interesting for that.

Among those who took part in the march and spoke was the local mayor Rokhsana Fiaz. She replaced the former mayor of Newham, Robin Wales, who had been mayor since the post was established in 2002 but was deselected in 2018 after a challenge to questionable voting procedures by affiliates which would have kept him in power despite the votes of local party members.

More at Forest Gayte Pride celebrates Stonewall 50

All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated, are taken by and copyright of Peter Marshall, and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.

The Time Is Now

Lobbies of Parliament are generally not the most exciting things to photograph, but at least ‘The Time is NOW for Climate Justice‘ began with a kind of march, and had at least one very recognisable face in ROwan Williams.

I’m sure some of the other faith leaders holding the banner as they march along the pavement in Whitehall will be recognisable to some, and we can probably work out which faith most of them are representing. It was a rather timid march, moving quietly and sticking to the pavement, which isn’t very wide here and has quite a few obstacles as well as tourists to get in the way of both photographers and marchers.

The front of the march halted briefly for photographs in Parliament Square, though the place just isn’t so interesting with Big Ben (and the rest of the Clock Tower) under wraps. As well as to photographers, this is a disappointment to the tourists who I think should get a discount on their trips to London until the covers are lifted. I’ve managed to partly hide the rather ugly sight behind Lloyd George in his Superman costume about to leap off his plinth, though I have to say his is one of my least favourite statures, looking like some nasty plastic toy that might come free in your cornflakes.

I let the leaders move on and walked back to photograph the other walkers straggling along behind, eventually finding some who were enjoying themselves and making a considerably more lively protest.

A few minutes later I met yet more people marching down Whitehall, this time with some dressed in giant condoms, with the message “Don’t Screw With The Planet” and that it’s no use us cutting carbon footprints if we keep increasing the number of feet.

‘Population Matters’, of course it does, and it’s a message that is far more important for the richest nations, where people typically have ten times the carbon footprint per capita than in poorer countries with high birth rates. The most effective way to curb population growth in poor countries is to increase people’s wealth and security. While it’s good to make effective contraception cheap and widely available, people also have to want to use it.

More pictures at:
Time Is Now Walk of Witness
Condoms Cut Carbon

Hands off Sudan

The protest in London on 15th June was a response to the massacre of 124 peaceful protesters by Janjaweed militias (Rapid Support Forces) in Khartoum on 3rd June and the 3-day general strike prompted by this the following week. Protests began in Sudan in December 2018, calling for an end to the military regime headed by President Omar al-Bashir and calling for a return to civilian rule.

The protests continued and military coup in April removed al-Bashir from power and the country was under control of a Transitional Military Council, which the protesters demanded transfer power to a civilian-led government. Negotiations continued between the two sides until interrupted by the Khartoum massacre, and were resumed following the three-day general strike.

The massacre was thought to have been prompted by demands from Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates that the miltary and police take a tougher line against the protests, and so the London demonstration began at the UAE embassy in Belgrave Square before marching to Mayfair and the Egyptian embassy in South Street and finally the Saudi embassy nearby.

My only real problem in photographing the protest was in finding it, as although I knew the starting time I hadn’t been able to find any timings for the other two embassies. It wasn’t clear how long they would be in Belgrave Square or when they might arrive elsewhere.

Because of covering other events I was unable to get to the start in Belgrave Square and thought by the time I could get to the protest it might be at the Egyptian Embassy. I took the tube to Green Park and walked there – passing the back of the Saudi Embassy on route. There were only a handful of protesters at the Egyptian Embassy and it was clear the protest had not yet arrived, so I continued on the likely route towards the starting point.

As I crossed Hyde Park Corner I saw and heard the protest emerging from Grosvenor Crescent and hurried to meet it. They stopped for some time on Grosvenor Place where I took the first few pictures on a fairly narrow and very crowded pavement; heavy traffic there made it unsafe to photograph from the road.

After a while the protesters moved across to the wider pavement in front of the monumental gateway to Hyde Park, where again it halted for some loud singing, chanting and dancing before moving off around into Park Lane. By the time I’d photographed the end of the procession crossing South Carriage Drive at the Queen Elizabeth Gate I decided I’d probably taken enough pictures and could make my way home. One of the noticeable aspects of the protest was the large proportion of women among those most active in it.

In Sudan negotiations continued with an agreement being reached between the TXC and the Forces of Freedom and Change representing the protesters agreeing there would be a judicial investigation into the Khartoum massacre and other events and that they would share power for a transitional period until elections in mid-2022 led to a civilian government. Street protests have also continued, but it looks as if they have acheived their goal.

More at: Hands off Sudan march

All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated, are taken by and copyright of Peter Marshall, and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.