Bring the Troops Home: On Saturday 19th March 2005 I photographed the Stop the War march on the second anniversary of the invasion of Iraq. From Hyde Park it went past the US Embassy in Grosvenor Square on to a rally in Trafalgar Square. I published text and pictures on My London Diary.
Don’t unleash your missiles on Iran – No more Bush wars.
This is another slightly hard to find post from the early years of My London Diary before I redesigned the site with links to every post on top of each monthly page and discovered the Shift key. Then I felt it was somehow cool not to capitalise, but I now regard as an unfortunate affection – like those photographers who think turning their digital colour images to black and white somehow makes them more authentic.
Back in 2005 I was very critical of Stop The War – and I still feel they lost the initiative after the huge February 2003 protest against the invasion of Iraq and that a more radical approach could have prevented Blair taking Britain into the war beside the USA.
George Solomou with coffin representing Iraqis killed in the invasion and occupation
That protest and the many before and after showed our nation united in a way no other campaign has succeeded in doing, with protests in almost every town and village in the country. Even in Surrey where driver after driver hooted support as we stood at the side of our local bridge with posters during Friday evening rush hours.
I’m still sorry I had to miss that big one in 2003, which came just the day after I was discharged from hospital following a minor heart operation and I could only walk a few yards. My family went leaving me at home. But I did cover all of the other main protests in London against the invasion and they are recorded in My London Diary.
In my 2005 post I was also very critical of Stop the War’s attitude to photographers, which has mellowed slightly over the years. It can still be difficult to photograph the front of their marches though the stewards are generally much more friendly.
But for all their faults, Stop the War and other organisations they work with have kept up protests over many issues, particularly in recent times over the genocide taking place in Gaza. And have been doing so in defiance of Tory and Labour governments, laws restricting our right to protest and clearly political policing.
Bring the Troops Home – Stop the War March and Rally
I remember standing in Trafalgar Square listening to Tony Benn and Tariq Ali urging us all to take immediate and radical action should our troops invade Iraq. At the time a majority of the British people was clearly against the war, and we should have taken to the streets to stop it. Instead Stop the War organised marches and peaceful demonstrations the government could easily ignore. And they did.
So the latest in the series of anti-war demos was a sad case of déjà-vu from the blinkered dinosaur. Not least because again Tariq Ali (and doubtless Tony Benn) again urged radical action and again we cheered.
Tariq Ali has the perfect anarchist hair-style, and it’s hard to get a bad picture of him. Nenn wasn’t looking at his best, but there were plenty of others to photograph, including those who had made their stand as soldiers (and a diplomat.) And some very bubbly school students.
Stop the War are also tough on the press, or at least tough on photographers. Most demonstrations welcome publicity, but they train stewards to get in the way. One colleague was physically prevented from taking pictures at one point in the march, I was obstructed and threatened quite unnecessarily by a couple of stewards, and all of us were generally ordered around and hassled.
Troops Home from Iraq; Don’t Invade Iran: Saturday March 18th 2006 I went to the large protest on the third anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, photographing as the march gathered in Parliament Square and then as the march went along Victoria Street on its rather indirect route to a rally in Trafalgar Square. As often with large marches, by the time the end of the march had passed me I was too late for it to be worth going on to the rally.
Marchers in Guantanamo fatigues and chains leaving Parliament Square, March 18, 2006
Here – with the usual tidying of capitalisation and a few minor clarifications is the post I made on My London Diary at the time. Of course things have become much worse in various ways but particularly so far as civil liberties in the UK are concerned, the situation in Iraq has been dire and there remains a real threat of military action against Iran, an odious regime but whose people would still suffer greatly from any any invasion.
The Troops Home From Iraq; Don’t Invade Iran march on the 18th was another large event organised by Stop The War, part of an international protest in cities around Europe, North America, Latin America, Asia Pacific, Asia and Africa – a total of around a couple of hundred places. In London there were roughly 20,000 who walked out of Parliament Square past where I was taking pictures, although many like me will not have made it to Trafalgar Square, and others will have joined in later on the route.
The event marked three years since the invasion of Iraq on 20 march 2003. At the front of the march were Theatre Of War representing both Tony Blair and George Bush along with two police and two judges holding placards declaring the two leaders guilty.
Put your head in a sack, Guantanamo style…
Behind them were the march leaders, including representatives of families of soldiers killed in Iraq. They had a long, long yellow ribbon with the names – no ranks – of soldiers who have died so far in this illegal war and occupation. Of course many more Iraqis killed – more than 100,000 have died so far.
The invasion, doubtful on legal grounds, was justified on the basis of false information, including information that was known to be incorrect when it was presented to parliament and the people.
Already it has led to deaths in Britain; only a small handful of people (that’s Tony Blair and some of his cabinet) doubt that the London bombings would not have happened if Britain had not joined in the invasion plans. Actually it is hard to believe even they doubt it, but rather they just can’t bring themselves to admit it.
A protester from Glasgow is warned for using a megaphone in Parliament Square
We’ve also seen the passage of draconian measures that attack civil liberties in this country (and attempts still being made to get more.) Muslims in particular have been targeted, with a rise in Islamophobia.
At last the march moved off, with stewards pushing photographers away from the front
The expenditure in Iraq has been vast. If you want to know why there isn’t the money to raise pensions (and a week of pension protests was ending today with a conference in London) there is a simple 4 letter answer. IRAQ.
Another four letter country, Iran, is currently under threat. Perhaps most chilling are the denials from Blair and Straw, who state that invasion is not on the table. For too many of us that just seems to make it more likely.
Campaign against Climate Change Kyoto Climate March: Another post from the past – 20 years ago on Saturday 12th February 2005- which has perhaps added resonance now that Trump and President Musk have condemned humanity to death with their climate roasting rejection of our last chances of survival. Though like some of his multi-billionaire friends he perhaps trusts inhumanity will survive in their climate bunkers with their heavily armed guards to keep out the rest of us. And as a small bonus I’ll add the anti-consumerist Valentines Day Reclaim Love which I photographed later the same day around Eros.
So here again is the text from 2005, suitably recapitalised and slightly corrected, along with a few of the pictures and linked to the rest. And the odd link to add context which people may have now forgotten.
Campaign against Climate Change Kyoto Climate March
The Statue of Taking Liberties
When I talked about the dangers of increasing CO2 emission and the need to cut down use of fossil fuels 35 years ago, I was a crank. Now everyone except the USA oil lobby and their political poodles recognises that climate change is for real.
Caroline Lucas, MEP, talking to other marchers
Even Blair has recognised it as the most vital issue facing us, threatening the future of the planet, although actually taking effective action still is a step too far for him. However he did call for a conference to examine the problem, which told him and us that we had perhaps ten years to take action before it would be to late.
4x4s waste fuel and endanger pedestrians and cyclists
Kyoto is history now thanks to the US boycott, (although it comes into effect this week), but it should have been the first inadequate step on the road to action.
Displaying flags of the 141 countries who have adopted Kyoto
Every journey has to start somehow, and even a half-hearted step is better than none, and would have led the way to others. What got in its way was Texan oil interests, whose political face is George W Bush.
I’ve photographed most of the Campaign Against Climate Change’s Kyoto marches over the past few years. This one was probably the largest, and certainly excited more media interest, truly a sign that the issue has become news.
Police stand guard as Lucy Wills berates ExxonMobil for their lies on climate change which drives US policy
Starting in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, the march stopped first outside the UK offices of Exxonmobil, on the corner of Kingsway for a brief declaration,
then for a longer demonstration outside the Australian High Commission in Aldwych (with guest appearances by its PM ‘John Howard‘ and an Australian ‘Grim Reaper’ with cork decorated hat),
Uncle Sam as the Grim Reaper in Trafalgar Square
before making its way past Trafalgar Square and Piccadilly Circus to the Us Embassy. more pictures
O-I-L One in Love – Reclaim Love, Eros, Piccadilly Circus
I left the climate march in Picadilly and returned to Eros, where O-I-L, One In Love, were organising a small gathering to “reclaim love” and “send love and healing to all the beings in the world” on the eve of Valentine’s day. It’s something we could all do with, and it was good to see people enjoying themselves around the statue of Eros (Anteros for pedants) in what is usually one of the most depressing spots on London’s tourist circuit.
Irish poet Venus CuMara who founded and organised these free street party
There was the samba band again, Rhythms Of Resistance, (hi guys) and dancing and people generally being happy and friendly and free Reclaim Love t shirts and apart from the occasional showers it was harmless fun.
The circle to send love and healing to all the beings in this world
Rather to my surprise, the police either didn’t notice it or decided to ignore it, an unusually sensible strategy
London Pride & Climate Change Rally; My working day on Saturday 30th June 2007 began at a rather damp Baker Street where people were meeting for the London Pride Parade and I was able to wander freely and take photographs. I left before the parade moved off and went to Parliament Square where a rally reminded Gordon Brown – then prime minister for 3 days – that climate change remains the major challenge facing the world – and the new government.
London Pride Parade – Baker Street
There seemed to be only two things that distinguished the 2007 Pride from the previous year’s event. One was the weather and so many of the pictures are of people holding umbrellas.
The second was a large group in the self-styled ‘Bird Parade‘, the ‘Bird Club‘ with their messages including ‘Aren’t Birds Brilliant‘ and ‘Femme Invisibility – So last Year‘.
There were quite a few overhanging shop fronts and other places that people could shelter under but taking pictures mainly involved me staind in the rain and getting rather wet.
I’m not afraid of rain but cameras and lenses need to kept dry. I really needed an assistant with an umbrella but I was working on my own. Its difficult to hold an umbrella and a camera and while I’ve tried various special plastic camera protectors none really solve the problem.
The cameras I use are reasonably water resistant and given he occasional wipe with a cloth and keeping them under my jacket when not in use are fine. But lenses need to have a glass front element to let the light in, and this acts as a powerful magnet for raindrops. Long lenses can have lens hoods which protect them, but when like me you work with wide and ultra-wide lenses they are totally ineffectual, except for allowing me to walk around with a chamois leather balled up into them. But of course I have to hold this clear to frame, focus and take the image, and those raindrops too often manage to sneak their way in that second or so.
I’ve shared too often my thoughts on the presence of corporates and military groups in Pride to bother to say more.
But at least there were some, like Peter Tatchell determined to retain it as a protest, with his wedding cake placard and poster ‘END THE BAN ON GAY MARRIAGE’.
It was still raining for the rally in Parliament Square and my favourite mermaid seemed to be in her natural habitat unless I carefully kept wiping the lens front.
But there was some shelter under the trees and rather fewer people had managed to attend the protest called at short notice by the Campaign Against Climate Change.
Under Blair’s government UK carbon emissions had risen by 2%, but it was now clear to scientists around the world that we needed to drastically cut them. Blair had resigned as New Labour leader on 24 June 2007 and Gordon Brown had become Prime Minister only three days before this protest on 27 June 2007.
Back in 2007 it was clear that climate change remained the major challenge facing the world – and the new government. But in 2008 we had the financial crash and Gordon Brown was diverted into saving the bankers and successive governments since have failed to make the kind of radical changes that are needed to save the planet.
In 2007 I wrote “if you ain’t got a planet, you ain’t in business is the simple message, though some of the speakers had some rather more complex graphs and charts. Blair and Brown were only there in effigy, but we did have a rather more convincing mermaid to warn about the dangers of rising sea levels.” Of course sea levels are only one aspect of the problem with our increasing climate instability and other effects of global heating. The need to take action is even more important for our next government – and for all governments around the world.
Invasion of Iraq Protest 2003 – On 22nd March 2003 several hundred thousand people marched through London against the invasion of Iraq which had begun four days earlier on on 19th March 2003.
I’d missed the huge worldwide protests the previous month, when on the weekend of 15-16th February according to the BBC, always conservative (I think a euphemism for deliberately lying) on protest numbers reported that a million people had marched in London on the Saturday among between six and ten million in 60 countries around the world.
George Galloway
I’d come out of hospital the previous day, February 14th, and was still very weak following a minor heart operation that had gone slightly wrong. So I could only wave to my wife and elder son as they set off to the station to join the other 1.5 or 2 million marchers.
I think it was March 6th that my doctor signed me off as fit to work, though I was still not back to normal, but I covered my first protest after the op two days later, cutting down the weight of my camera bag as much as I could to two cameras and five lenses – all primes.
Peter Tatchell
I’d spent some of my time recovering getting used to the Nikon D100 I had bought just a few weeks before going into hospital. It was the first digital camera I’d owned capable of professional results, and the first with interchangeable lenses, though I only then owned one in a Nikon fitting I’d bought with the camera, a 24-85mm.
As well as taking colour pictures on the D100, I was also taking black and white film using a rangefinder camera, probably a Konica Hexar RF, the kind of camera Leica should have produced but never did. It featured automatic film advance and rewind and had accurate auto-exposure and has been described as “the most powerful M mount camera there is.” And very much cheaper than a Leica. The nine pictures from the day I sent to the library I was then using were all black and white 8×10″ prints from the pictures made with the Hexar RF, as in 2003 they were still not taking digital files.
Here you can see some of the digital images I took on 22nd March 2003 with that single zoom lens. It was the first zoom lens I had used for over 25 years, having been rather disappointed with a telephoto zoom I bought soon after I got my Olympus OM1. The image quality on the Nikon zoom – about the cheapest lens in their range and light and relatively small – was fine if not quite up to the Leica lenses on the Hexar, but it gave some distortion – barrel at 24mm and pincushion at 85mm.
But the Nikon D100 was a DX format camera, and on this the widest angle of view marked as 24mm actually was equivalent to 35mm on my film camera. Hardly wide-angle at all, and on film I was often working with 15mm or 21mm lenses.
The digital images are shown here as I put them on-line in 2003, and I think I would get the colour rather better now. And of course digital cameras have improved tremendously since then, with much better dynamic range, and the software for processing digital images is also far better. Also with download speeds generally much lower in 2003 they were put on line at a much poorer jpeg quality so they would download faster – and also spread over a number of pages with perhaps just half a dozen images on each page.
The marchers met on the Embankment and marched to a rally in Hyde Park. I think I only used the D100 before and on the march and photographed the rally entirely in black and white. Probably this was a decision I made, but it could have been because the battery ran out. But I think I had decided just to use it to photograph people on the march.
We now know that Blair lied to take us to war and made use of the fake “dodgy dossier” to swing the vote in Parliament. There were no “Weapons of Mass Destruction” in Iraq – and the UN had found none because there was nothing to find. But the US had been gearing up to attack over the past year and were not going to let the facts put them off, and Blair was their lap dog.
You can read more about the Invasion of Iraq on Wikipedia. While the US had prepared for war, they had made little or no preparation for what was to follow after President George W Bush declared the “end of major combat operations” on May 1st. Iraq was still in a mess when the US troops finally withdrew in 2011 and remains so today. It was as I wrote in 2003, the wrong war at the wrong time – and by 2023 over 60% of US citizens were prepared to state that the U.S did not make the right decision by invading Iraq.
More on the March 2003 page of My London Diary where you can also find pictures of another protest against the war on Saturday 29th March calling for more balanced coverage by the BBC.
March for Peace and Liberty – 2005 Eighteen years ago on Saturday 24th September around 50,000 of us were marching through London for peace and calling for the withdrawal of forces from Iraq.
The protest, called by Stop the War Coalition, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) and the Muslim Association of Britain (MAB) coincided with an even larger protest in Washington close to the White House.
Organisers of the Washington protest claimed that around 300,000 took part, while US police said the half that number was “as good a guess as any.” Police estimates of the London march were, as usual more political than based on any reality, and their figure of 10,000 was laughably low.
I had developed my own simple methods to assess numbers. For smaller protests I’d simply stop at a suitable point and count those passing. When numbers got a little larger I’d count in groups of roughly ten, larger still groups of hundreds. Though sometimes that hundred might only have been 80 or sometimes 125 the overall figure was probably within around ten percent of the actual total.
But with really large protests such as this, well over the police figure of 10,000, any form of counting is too time-consuming and tedious. I’d often still try to get a rough figure by counting for a minute where I was taking photographs a few times as the protest went part, and then make a rough estimate using the time the whole protest took to pass me. Typically the answer this gave me was around half the number claimed by the march organisers and anything around four to ten times the figure release by the police and often quoted by news media.
It’s a little difficult to find the text I wrote about the protest on My London Diary in 2005 as there are no headings in the text column on the September page, with headings and images in a separate unlinked column to the right – later I improved the site design to unite text and pictures and provided a list of links to stories which remains at the top of the monthly pages. Back in 2005 you simply had to scroll down a long page, and while the headings and text were simple to find, many viewers never managed to find the of text, which ends with a little art criticism. So here it is, with a few minor corrections:
“What a fine mess you’ve got us into” is probably the conclusion of most of the British people about Blair’s decision to join in with Bush’s Iraq invasion in 2003. Quite how many of them turned up on the 24th to march for a British pull-out is a matter of contention. Both police and organisers estimates – ten and a hundred thousand respectively – seem to me extremely unlikely.
So I was there with probably between twenty-five and fifty thousand people, walking across Parliament Square in front of the Houses of Parliament, despite it being a Saturday afternoon, with no business taking place inside, the ban on the use of amplification within a kilometre of parliament was still in force, so the event was a little quieter than usual. Some did choose to defy the ban and the police appeared not to notice.
Gate Gourmet supply in-flight meals for British Airways. It used to be a part of the company, but was separated out, then sold to American management. Rather like what is starting to happen in our National Health Service, and of course British Airways was also originally owned by the nation.
The company takes advantage of a largely Asian labour force living around the edge of the airport, paying them relatively low wages. The new management decided to cut labour costs even more by bringing in casual labour to do much of the work (while apparently employing more managers!) and when the employees held a meeting to protest, they were sacked.
Pressure from both BA and the union (TGWU) led to the company offering to take back some of the sacked workers, but not all, and the strike continues. Some of the strikers came to take part in the rally, to publicise their case as well as call for a withdrawal from Iraq.
Most of the usual people were there at the march, and I took their pictures again – and some are on the site. When the march started I hung around in Parliament Square to watch it go past before walking rather faster than the marchers up Whitehall.
By the time I’d reached Trafalgar Square and waited again for the end of the march to pass, my knee [I’d injured it earlier in the month] was beginning to ache and I didn’t feel up to walking to Hyde Park. I sat down and ate my sandwiches contemplating the new sculpture on the ‘fourth plinth’, ‘Alison Lapper Pregnant’ by Marc Quinn. This 15ft white marble shows Lapper, an artist born without arms, sitting naked and eight months pregnant, and will stay on the plinth until April 2007.
It is a striking piece of work and was obviously attracting a great deal of attention from the tourists in the square. I took my time sitting and looking at it while I was eating, and then walking round it from all sides (slightly impeded by the preparations for a juvenile TV show to be broadcast from the square the following day.) Lapper herself works with photographs of her body, and this statue is perhaps too like her black and white photographs, with a rather unpleasant surface, sometimes more soap than marble. I found myself thinking thank goodness for the pigeons who were perching on it and doubtless adding their contributions to it.
Its position up there on a plinth is not ideal. This is work that would be best seen from roughly the same level as its base. The other plinths in the square are occupied by men on horses, which raise their figures more suitably above the plinths. Perhaps when it leaves the square a more suitable display place can be found, but its present placing is a great for catalysing debate about disability. Of course another disabled figure dominates the square; Nelson has his back to her and does not need to call upon his blind eye not to see her.
20 years ago we were at war with Iran, despite the largest ever protests in this country. I’d missed the big protest on 15 February when 1.5 million people were on the streets of London – including the rest of my family, as I’d only come out of hospital the previous day and was still very weak following slight complications after a minor operation following a heart attack. But I’d covered all the main protests in London before that, as well as taking part in our local protests every Friday night.
Of course it hadn’t just been in London that there had been protests that weekend, and there were others in at least 600 major cities around the world – the largest of all in Rome – combining to make this “the largest protest event in human history” with the BBC estimating around 6-10 million taking part around the world. And in the two and a half months leading up to the invasion on March 20th there are thought to have been 3,000 protests involving 36 million people around the world – though I think even that number fails to include small local protests like our series on Staines Bridge.
Of course it had been clear for at least a year that the USA would go ahead with its invasion whatever and had been preparing its military for it. More at stake was whether other countries would join them, and for us whether Britain would. There seems to have been no sensible reason why we should, but Tony Blair had made a promise to George Bush and was prepared to lie and mislead the country and parliament to keep it.
The major pretext for the invasion was to disarm Iraq of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), but the UN inspection team led by Hans Blix had found no evidence that Iraq had any – and none were found following the invasion.
The USA also claimed it was to end Saddam Hussein’s support for terrorism, and US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had ordered the Pentagon to make plans for the invasion before the dust had settled on September 11th 2001 despite being told that the attack had been carried out by al-Qaeda with no cooperation from Iraq.
Finally the US had claimed they were “going in to free the Iraqi people“, but they appear to have done little or no planning as to what could replace Saddam Hussein to keep the country from descending into chaos, a process they accelerated after their victory by disbanding the Iraqi army and disbarring from public office all of the civil service, teachers and others in public sector jobs for whom membership of the Ba’ath Party had been obligatory.
The US Institute of Peace has a useful timeline of events in Iraq since the war which has an introduction which ends “Iraq suffered through a civil war, political turmoil, widespread corruption, sectarian tensions and an extremist insurgency that seized a third of the country. Iraq has evolved through four rocky phases.”
The coalition forces – three quarters from the USA, a quarter from the UK and a handful of military from Australia and Poland, with a little support from Iraqi Kurds were still busy fighting across Iraq on April 5th, capturing Baghdad on the 9th and the war ended on May 1st, though US forces remained in occupation until 2011. Saddam was only found and captured in December 2003 and was eventually tried, found guilty of crimes against humanity and executed on 30th December 2006.
Of course the Iraq War has also had a great influence on British politics. In particular it has led to a huge distrust for politicians and our political system because both of the fact that our prime minister and other leading politicians in both parties lied to us, but the failure of huge protests over serveral years to have any effect on policy showed a failure to take any notice of the views of the people. Politics needs to be a politics of consensus and the Iraq war showed it was one of disdain.
April started with the country at war, invading Iraq together with the USA.
In Saturday 5th I went to a march to protest against this and to call for proper reporting of the events in the media, especially the BBC.
I walked to the march past the Houses of Parliament and a small group of protesters in Whitehall who were pointing out the number of Iraqi civilians already killed by the allied forces.
The main thrust of the demonstration now was that the civilian population of Iraq should be respected. The use of weapons such as depleted uranium shells and cluster bombs will mean the deaths continue for generations after the end of the fighting.
The march started opposite the old BBC building in Portland Place and went to Grosvenor Square, close to the US Embassy. There were perhaps five thousand marchers, and several hundred police surrounding them most of the time. As the speakers pointed out, it was difficult not to see the war as a US takeover of the country when plans were already in place for Americans to run the country after the war.
The killing of Iraqis must stop, and rapid progress should be made to hand control of the country back to its people.
On Saturday 1th February 2005 I went to two events in London, a march calling for action on climate change and a street party to reclaim Valentine’s Day from commercial exploitation and to celebrate the power of love.
Campaign against Climate Change Kyoto Climate March
It’s depressing to look back at the pictures of this event and see how many of the placards and posters are still relevant 18 years later. Still leaders around the world are failing to commit to the actions needed to avoid global disaster.
Perhaps we are just a little closer to some real movement, but in the UK things have started to go backwards with a government now in thrall to the fossil fuel companies and promoting new oil exploration in the North Sea, a new coal mine and even going back to fracking.
Sometimes it seems the main changes have been that the Prime Minister is now Sunak rather than Blair and that the US Embassy to which the march was heading is now on the other side of the Thames in Nine Elms rather than in Grosvenor Square.
Back in 2005 it was President Bush in the White House who was the major villain, standing up for US oil interests and their mission to fatally pollute the world. Biden has talked a better talk than Trump, but hasn’t committed to the shift in policies that is essential for the planet to have a future that will support human life.
The march was organised by the Campaign Against Climate Change, back then almost a lone voice in actively raising the issues around global warming, though the Green Party was there too. At least since then many other groups have become involved, notably in recent years Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil, bringing rather different tactics to bear.
It was a longish march, from Lincoln’s Inn Fields to Trafalgar Square and then on to the US Embassy, and I left the marchers as they went past Piccadilly Circus to join another event taking place there.
O-I-L One in Love, Reclaim Love, Eros, Picadilly Circus
I’d missed the first of these Valentine street parties organised by Irish poet Venus CúMara in 2004, as I had only heard of it too late to attend. Appropriately that year I had gone with my wife to Paris for Valentine’s Day and her birthday a few years later.
Since 2005 I’ve been there and taken photographs most years. She believes that “the human race could potentially be a humane race if we were to step away from the value of money to the value of Life” and this event celebrates this.
Venus celebrates as the prayer ends
‘Reclaim Love’ is a global movement Venus began to unite people all over the earth with a common prayer for peace. And during the street party here and at other similar parties in othe places around the world people joined hands at 3.30pm in a “Massive Healing Reclaim Love Meditation Circle beaming Love and Happiness and our Vision for world peace out into the cosmos” to recite that prayer, “MAY ALL THE BEINGS IN ALL THE WORLDS BE HAPPY AND AT PEACE“.
Venus dances
I wrote about the 16th annual party at some length on this site in Valentine for Venus, posted in 2019, so I won’t go into more details again. As well as that post you can also find posts every February on My London Diary from 2005 to 2019 except for 2016, when I was too ill to go, and 2017 when I was in Hull (both celbrating the city of culture and again my wife’s birthday.)
Housing Crisis & the Carpenters Estate: Like many other areas, the 1945 Labour government laid the foundations of a sensible policy on housing which has now been lost. Among other things the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act brought in the need for planning permission and included a charge on developers which was assessed as the difference between the cost of the undeveloped land and its value after it had been developed. It gave local authorities the power to use compulsory purchase and either develop land themselves or lease it for private developers, and provided government grants to authorities for major redevelopment.
Focus E15 Mums protest at empty properties on the Carpenters Estate
Times were hard after the war, and there were shortages of material with so much needing to be done. Even so around 600,000 new council homes were built in the first five years, and built to high standards. One of the election-winning pledges made by the Conservatives for the 1951 election was that they would build 300,000 houses a year – something they managed under Housing Minister Harold Macmillan in 1953, including both private and council houses, but it was achieved in part by reducing the standards of properties.
All pictures in this post come from the Focus E15 Mums protest on 9th June 2014
The Tories made other changes, including removing the development charge and limiting government subsidies, which in 1956 became limited to the building of high rise flats. While Labour had seen council housing as a way to provide good quality housing affordably to all, the Conservatives increasing limited its scope to providing only for the least well off, with private development and private leasing providing good profits for building firms and private landlords at the expense of house buyers and tenants of private rented properties.
The Focus E15 mothers had brought life-size colour portraits of themselves
Although it was Labour who had first proposed the idea of ‘right to buy’ it was of course Thatcher who made it policy and introduced it in a way which was intended to severely reduce the amount of council housing, in particular forbidding the use of the receipts from sales to build new council homes. Cash-starved local authorities were often unable to keep up proper maintenance of their housing stock and much was allowed to deteriorate.
Jessica
Labour under Blair and Brown continued the Tory policies, including the transfer of council run properties to housing associations, and amplified their effects with their programme of ‘regeneration’ which led to the wholesale replacement of large council estates – most still in sound condition which could have cheaply been repaired and brought up to current standards. But developers profited hugely from demolition and redevelopment for private sale and councils hoped also to cash in, though in some cases they made a significant loss, as at the Heygate in Southwark, where around 1200 council homes were demolished, the tenants and leaseholders displaced largely outside the area, and the two and a half thousand new properties built included only around 80 at social rents. Other Labour policies, including the disastrous Private Finance Initiative also worsened the housing crisis.
The young mothers of Focus E15 came up against the the housing crisis when their Labour Council in Newham decided they should be evicted from their hostel. Most were told they had to move into private rented properties with little or no security of tenure miles away from families, friends and facilities in the Stratford area, some in Wales or the north of England. They got together and decided to fight the council, then run by elected Mayor Robin Wales and its policy of removing the poor from the area – social cleansing.
Newham is a borough with one of the worst housing problems in the country, and although there has been a huge building programme, partly around the 2012 Olympic site, this is largely student housing or private development. But one council estate close to the centre of Stratford had been largely empty for around ten years. Newham had ‘decanted’ the residents beginning in 2004 hoping to cash in on what would be a prime development site. The Carpenters Estate was a very popular estate, with low rise housing and three tower blocks overlooking the Olympic Park, a stone’s throw from the excellent transport links of Stratford Station and the town centre.
For some years Newham had hoped to sell off the area as a new campus for University College London, but local opposition and protests by students and academics at UCL led to the college abandoning the plans. In 2020 the council handed over the regeneration project its Housing Company Populo Living.
Jasmin Stone
Focus E15 came to the Carpenters Estate on Monday 9th June 2014 to highlight the scandal of the empty homes, bringing with them life-size or larger colour portraits of the mothers which they pasted on the shuttered windows of a small block of flats at the centre of the estate, along with posters stating ‘We Could be Here’, ‘This home needs a family’, ‘These homes need people’, ‘You could be here’.
Sam Middleton
The protest gained some publicity for their campaign, which had moved on from being simply about the mothers to a much more general ‘Housing For All’ campaign, which still continues, with the group holding a weekly Saturday Morning stall on Stratford Broadway, supporting homeless families in getting proper treatment from the council and preventing evictions in the area.
I returned with Focus E15 to the Carpenters Estate a few months later in September when on the first anniversary of the start of their campaign they occupied this low-rise block of flats on ‘Open House Day, gaining national publicity, staying in occupation for around two weeks, and have photographed various other of their events.
Six years ago I posted about a march through Stratford on Saturday 19th September against social cleansing in Newham, where the council has been rehousing people in private rented properties outside the borough, sometimes as far away as Wales or Liverpool. The directly elected Mayor of this almost monolithically Labour borough until 2018, Robin Wales, made clear his views that if people couldn’t afford to live in London they shouldn’t expect to live there, and council policies appear to reflect this. But Newham – and London generally – needs large numbers of relatively low paid workers – and Covid has helped us appreciate their contribution. Many, even those in jobs well above the London Living Wage, can’t afford market rents and certainly not to buy homes.
Local people, many of whom have lived in the area for years and have developed connections in the area – friends, families, schools etc – who for any reason become homeless want to be rehoused close to these people and services and demand that local resources be used to house local people.
Newham currently in 2021 has 27,000 people on its housing waiting list and 7,000 children in temporary accommodation. Until very recently the few social homes that were available were allocated using a system that gave priority to those in work and the new system will instead focus on health, need and overcrowding.
But the real problem that there is simply not enough social housing remains, and this is more the fault of national government policies over the years, under both Tory and New Labour. The most obvious and and damaging was of course Thatcher’s ‘right to buy’ which has drastically reduced to number of social housing homes, and in particular removed many of the more desirable properties, but councils have also been largely prevented by successive governments from building new and much needed social housing, as well as being starved of the cash needed to properly maintain existing properties and estates.
Many existing council estates were transferred to housing associations, which increasingly seem to be catering for those able to afford the very high ‘market’ rents in London. Councils too, thanks to New Labour housing policies have been demolishing council estates and developing the sites together with private developers to produce mainly homes for sale at high market prices, with often a great reduction in the number of social housing homes available.
Newham has seen a huge amount of building housing in recent years, both on the former Olympic site and elsewhere, with more tower blocks every time I visit the area, but almost all are high rent properties suited to young professionals, mainly working outside the borough, residencies for wealthier students, or expenive investment properties – usually bought with no intention of being lived in but simply to benefit from the increases in London property prices.
In 2013, Newham announced it was going to close a hostel for young single mothers who would then be dispersed in rented flats across England. The women decided to fight and the Focus E15 campaign began. Backed by members of the Revolutionary Communist Group and others who supported them in direct actions that often gained media coverage their fight succeeded and they became well-known nationally and developed into a much wider campaign for proper housing, particularly supporting others in the area with housing problems. As well as holding a street stall in the centre of Stratford every Saturday they accompanied people to the housing offices, gathered to prevent evictions and more.
The march in 2015, two years after the start of their campaign attracted the support of over 40 other organisations, mainly small local groups from around London and the South-East also fighting housing problems. Fortunately not all of them had speakers at the rally before the march but there were quite a few before it moved off from Stratford Park to march around the Town Centre.
As the ‘Housing for All’ march passed Foxton’s estate agency in the centre of Stratford, Class War rushed inside with their ‘New Homes for the Rich’ banner and staged a brief occupation while most of the marchers supported them from outside. They caused no damage and left after a few minutes for the march to continue.
There was another brief halt outside LB Newham’s Housing Office at Bridge House, which was closed. The marchers held banners and posed for photographs and Focus E15 spoke briefly about how their interventions here have prevented homless people from being sent to unsuitable private rented accomodation hundreds of miles away, getting them re-housed in London.
The march ended in the square on the Carpenters Estate in front of the block of four flats which Focus E15 occupied for four weeks as a protest a year earlier. This had made the national news and had ended with the council promising to bring some homes back into occupation – though a year later only 28 of around the 400 empty homes had been re-let. There were a few more speeches and then a party began.
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.
