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Tories Out March – 2017

Tories Out March: Around 20,000 met outside the BBC in Portland Place on Saturday 1st July 2017 to march to Parliament Square demanding an end to the Tory government under Theresa May.

Most were supporters of the Labour Party and in particular of the then Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn, who had narrowly failed to win the recent general election, defeated not by the Tories but by sabotage within the party by the Labour right who controlled much of the party mechanism.

The Labour right had been shocked and appalled by Corbyn’s victory in the leadership contest and had done everything they could since then to get rid of him, with orchestrated cabinet resignations and the stoking up of false antisemitism claims combined with behind the scenes actions to ensure the failure of his attempts to improve the way the party tried to deal with such allegations.

We had seen on television the relief felt by some of them as the results came out when after it had begun to look as if Labour had a chance of victory it became clear that the Tories would hang on to a small majority. The last thing they had wanted had been for Corbyn to have won.

Theresa May had scraped in but had then had to bribe the DUP, a deeply bigoted party with links to Loyalist terrorists to give her a working majority.

Her austerity policies had been largely rejected by the electorate and the recent Grenfell Tower disaster had underlined the toxic effects of Tory failure and privatisation of building regulations and inspection and a total lack of concern for the lives of ordinary people.

*A woman poses as Theresa May with a poster ‘We cut 10,000 fire fighter jobs because your lives are worthless’*

The protesters – and much of the nation – knew that the Tories had proved themselves unfit to govern. The marchers and the people wanted a decent health service, education system, housing, jobs and better living standards for all.

But not all were happy with Labour policies either, although the great majority of them joined in with the sycophantic chanting in support of Corbyn. But there were significant groups who were also protesting against the housing polices being pursued by Labour-dominated local authorities, particularly in London Boroughs including Labour Southwark, Lambeth, Haringey and Newham.

Huge areas of council housing had been demolished or were under threat of demolition largely for the benefit of developers, selling off publicly owned land for the profit of the developers and disregarding the needs of the residents and of the huge numbers on council housing lists.

*Class War protest the devastation of the estates where the poor live*

One example was “the Heygate at Elephant & Castle, a well-designed estate deliberately run down by the council over at least a decade, but still in remarkably good condition. It cost Southwark Council over £51m to empty the estate of tenants and leaseholders, and in 2007 had valued the site at £150m, yet they sold it for a third of its market value to developers Lendlease for £50m.”

The estate had been home to over a thousand council tenants and another 189 leaseholders. Around 500 tenants were promised they would be able to return to to homes on the new estate – but there were just 82 social rented homes. The leaseholders were given compensation of around a third of the price of comparable homes in the new Elephant Park – and most had to move miles away to find property they could afford.

In 2017 Haringey was making plans to demolish around 5,000 council homes, roughly a third of its entire stock under what was known as the Haringey Development Vehicle (HDV) with developers Lendlease. Plans here prompted a revolt in the local area led by Labour members in the pro-Corbyn Momentum group who gained control of the council in 2018 and scrapped the HDV.

*A giant-headed Theresa May outside Downing St*

Among those leading protests against Labour’s Housing Policy was Class War who have been active in many of the protests over housing. I photographed them having a little fun with the march stewards, but unfortunately missed the scene at the rally in Parliament Square when Lisa Mckenzie confronted both Len McCluskey, General Secretary of Unite the Union and Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn asking them the simple question ‘When are you going to stop Labour councils socially cleansing people out of London?’.

*Class War lift up their banner in front of a police officer videoing protesters*

Both men ignored her, walking past without pausing to answer and “the small Class War group was surrounded by Labour Party supporters holding up placards to hide them and idiotically chanting ‘Oh, Je-re-my Cor-byn! Oh, Je-re-my Cor-byn!’. But eight years later, now in power led by Starmer and Angela Rayner, Labour seems determined to make much the same mistakes in its housing policy.

More at Tories Out March.

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Anti-Fascists Oppose the Far Right – 1 Feb 2025

Anti-Fascists Oppose the Far Right: Last Saturday, 1st February 2025, I photographed one of two marches taking place in London, kept well separate by a large force of police who had restricted the protests to widely separated routes though ending close to each other.

Supporters of “Tommy Robinson” (Stephen Yaxley Lennon) currently in jail after pleading guilty to contempt of court had called a protest to demand his release, in a march they described as ‘Unite The Kingdom’ and ‘Stop the Isolation’. Robinson is apparently in solitary confinement in HMP Woodhill for his own safety, and has refused to remove the video he was sentenced for sharing which is pinned to the top of his ‘X’ account. They began their march at Waterloo Station, marching across Westminster Bridge to Parliament Square.

In response Stand Up to Racism had called a counter-demonstration to oppose this march and more generally the rise of the far-right in Britain. This met in St James’s Street just off Piccadilly and marched to a rally in Whitehall.

According to press reports both marches were of a similar size, perhaps between five and ten thousand marchers, though some at the extreme right event claimed a hundred thousand had marched.

During the Covid lockdown there were no protests for me to photograph and I began to post here on >Re:PHOTO much more frequently about my older work, both protests I had covered in earlier years and also my walks in and around London photographing buildings and urban landscape in the previous century.

So for some months there was nothing for me to add to my posts in My London Diary web site. Which was just as well as I was getting uncomfortably close to the limit of the number of files and folders I could host on the web space I have – which hosts this blog and a number of other small web sites. That limit is 262,144 and currently My London Diary has 194,257 Files and 2,938 Folders, with >Re:PHOTO taking up most of the rest. So even when I was able to cover protests again I had to change my ways, posting the images in Facebook albums with just a link and one or two pictures on my own web space. Finally I gave up new postings on My London Diary in January 2022, though the site remains in place and I think is an important archive.

Time moves on and although I’m still photographing protests I am attending rather fewer than in earlier years and taking things easier. While ten years ago I might sometimes work on my feet for five or six hours, now after around three I’m often feeling too tired to continue, pack up and go home. And while back then I might go our five days a week, now its generally one or two, mainly on Saturdays. And while in past years I would certainly have tried to cover both marches, this year I chose just one, the counter-protest by Stand Up To Racism.

Over the years I have covered quite a few extreme right events, but I decided to leave this one to younger photographers. At many previous events I’ve been threatened, pointed out as someone who should be attacked, spat at and more, despite trying to cover them and report them fairly even though I disagree with their views. People have tried to stop me photographing and have tried to grab my equipment and police haven’t always been ready to help.

At the Stand Up To Racism event there was a far more positive atmosphere. Generally people were happy, sometimes even eager, to be photographed and I was able to walk freely through a packed crowd before the march began making pictures, as well as inside the march itself.

Of course the people at the protest were angry at the way the country (and the world) seems to be drifting towards the right, with more draconian legislation restricting our right to protest, long sentences for peaceful protesters and the kind of political policing we have seen over demonstrations calling for an end to the killing in Palestine. And some at least would be ready to fight the fascists on the streets as people did in the 1930s at Cable Street and elsewhere – and Jewish groups did after the end of the war.

*Anti-fascists from the IWW – Industrial Workers of the World were being watched closely by a squad of police*

But while being determined to stop the drift to the right in Britain – which appears to have been accelerated by the coming to power of Labour with a large majority – this was a march of the reasonable, the kind of people who will look at evidence rather than believe the lies and manipulations of the right wing media, people who embody the kind of values which I feel are important and which gave Britain hope after defeating the Nazis and led to the setting up of the welfare state, with the NHS and an Education Act that tried to provide a free and fair education. The kind of British values which I think the majority of us still believe in although they have been seriously eroded by successive governments for the benefit of that small minority – the 1% in what is becoming an increasingly unequal society.

*Police arrest a man after several flares were set off.*

My pictures tell something of the story of the march. It was entirely peaceful. I missed seeing the handful of the extreme right who had come to try to disrupt it and were arrested for breaching the restrictions that police had laid down. I saw only one person arrested, for setting off a smoke flare. I saw the smoke from several flares around a hundred yards away and rushed towards it, but the crowd of marchers across the whole of Piccadilly made this difficult and by the time I arrived a young man was being held by police surrounded by a crowd yelling for them to release him.

*NEU marchers. Many trade unions supported the march*

I stayed with the march until the end of it went into Whitehall where there was to be a longer rally than that before the start. Suddenly I felt rather tired it decided it was time to go home.

There are two albums on Facebook with my pictures from the Stand Up to Racism march:
Stop The Far Right National Anti-Racist Protest. London
More from the Stop The Far Right National Anti-Racist Protest

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UN Anti-Racism Day 2017 & 2023

Today, 18th march is the UN Anti-Racism Day, and in 2017 it was also a Saturday, and tens of thousands marched through London, starting as they will today outside the BBC and ending with a large rally in Westminster.

Today’s march, as in 2017, is organised by Stand Up to Racism, Unite Against Fascism and Love Music, Hate Racism and the TUC and supported by many other groups, including football fans from around the country who will be wearing team colours.

This years march is perhaps even more important, with the UK Government pursuing clearly racist policies against immigrants in last year’s Nationality and Borders Act, its attempt to deport refugees to Rwanda and Suella Braverman’s recently announced Illegal Migration Bill.

*Phyll Opoku of PCS ‘Stand Up to Racism’*

Football fans have been energised by the BBC’s reaction to Gary Lineker’s tweet. He was clearly correct in observing the hostile anti-refugees language used by the government to language used in Germany in the 1930s. They say the government are trying to stir up division and racism to deflect attention from their multiple crises and turn refugees into scapegoats.

Unfortunately it isn’t just the government, but also the official opposition who continue to up the ante over immigration, refusing to stand up to the government with any real attempt to improve our treatment of refugees and asylum seekers. Real opposition to racism has been left to a few increasingly isolated figures on the left of the party – including many of those who have been ejected for supposed anti-semitism, increasingly being used to expel Jewish members who support the Palestinian people. And of course left to footballers or former footballers.

Even Theresa May, who the 2017 march was strongly opposed to for promoting racist measures against immigrants and in particular Muslims in concert with Donald Trump has found Braverman’s latest proposals which will break international law on the human rights of migrants a step too far.

The 2023 march organisers say:

In Britain we face a crisis-ridden government attempting to use racism to make ordinary people pay for the cost of living crisis. The ‘Rwanda plan’, the Nationality and Borders Act, racist deportations and the hostile environment for refugees and migrants are all about divide and rule.

The government deny the reality of institutional racism – despite massively disproportionate deaths in black communities during the pandemic – and the reality of deaths in police custody, racist stop and search and discrimination across society.

Internationally we are seeing the growth of the racist and fascist right and an alarming rise in Islamophobia, antisemitism, Sinophobia, anti East/South East Asian racism and attacks on Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities.

Despite a rail strike this Saturday I hope to be there later today, again taking photographs and marching with many thousands of others.

Much more from the 2017 march and rally on My London Diary: Thousands March Against Racism.