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Budget, Mugabe & Turkish Gays 2017

Budget, Mugabe & Turkish Gays: Wednesday 22 November 2017 was Budget Day and as usual there were protests around Parliament, and I photographed people protesting about Brexit, housing, student fees and the NHS. Outside the Zibabwe Embassy there were people celebrating the resignation of President Mugabe, while people came to the Turkish Embassy in a protest against a ban on LGBTI cultural events in Ankara.

Budget Day Brexit Protests – Old Palace Yard

The usual Remainers had come to protest with some new Budget Day slogans, ‘What’s the Budget for Brexit’ and the punning ‘Brexit spreads Sheet Everywhere’, a reference to Chancellor Philip Hammond’s nickname ‘Spreadsheet Phil’. New independent analysis published in 2024 tells us that Brexit has cost the British economy almost £140 billion.

They had EU flags and also that curiously discreet sign of distress, the upside-down Union Jack (for pedants Union Flag). The opposing Brexiteers accused them of being unaware of which way up to fly the flag.

Political artist Kaya Mar joined them briefly hold his painting of the Chancellor sitting on a floating mine with his computer holding up a sinking Theresa May as the ship of Britain sinks in the background.

Budget Day Brexit Protests

Homes for All Budget and Others – Parliament Square

Housing campaigners from various groups had come to a protest called by ‘Homes For All‘ demanding the government commit to building more homes to be let at social rents. After a long rally in Parliament Square they marched briefly to Downing Street.

The housing crisis is worst for the poorest in society but almost all the schemes brought in by governments this century have been aimed at subsiding those on middle incomes to become home owners. As well as not building social housing there had been a failure to bring in the regulations needed to control the private rental sector to provide greater security of tenure, control rents and ensure properties are kept in habitable condition. Perhaps because many MPs are also landlords.

Only a programme that allows local authorities to borrow money and build home can deliver housing at a cost that those on lower incomes can afford to live in – and that still provide a good return on investments – they point out that by 2010-2011 councils were paying more than £700 million to government in surpluses from council housing.

As well as attacking the government’s record on housing they also blamed the Labour Party for allowing Labour councils to demolish council housing and combining with developers and housing associations to provide new housing at market prices, unaffordable so called “affordable’ properties and and high rents without long-term security of tenure.

They pointed out the need for government funding for necessary fire safety work to avoid another Grenfell disaster including the replacement of dangerous cladding on all tall blocks, the enforcement of fire regulations and a return to proper fire safety inspections which had been abandoned as unnecessary ‘red tape’.

New Labour and London Labour Councils were blamed for demolishing council housing and combining with developers and housing associations to provide new housing with a great reduction in properties at social rents, with homes for sale at market prices, unaffordable so called “affordable‘ properties and at high market rents without long-term security of tenure.

A speaker from Haringey told us the Labour council is giving away £2 billion of council property to a private developer who will build properties the current council tenants and leaseholders will not be able to afford – with a small amount of high-priced ‘affordable properties‘. Like on previous schemes he was confident the developers will get accountants to arrange the books and get them out of most of their obligations to include low-cost social housing. Opposition to the scheme led to some Labour councillors losing their seats and the plans being stopped, though the future remained unclear.

In College Green there were a few people with placards calling for greater funding for the NHS who would also have been disappointed by the budget. Some of them came to join the housing rally, as also did some who had come to protest against the cuts and student fees.

There was also a man with a bell and placards about public debt, though it wasn’t quite clear exactly why he thought ‘The End Is Nigh’.

More on My London Diary at Homes for All Budget protest.

Zimbabweans celebrate Mugabe’s resignation – Strand

Zimbabweans had come to the London embassy where they had been protesting every week for over 15 years to celebrate the resignation of President Mugabe.

But although there was much dancing and singing with joyful delight at his going they had no trust in his likely successor Emmerson Mnangagwa. Regular protests still continue at the Embassy and they have vowed they will continue until there are free and fair elections in Zimbabwe

Zimbabweans celebrate Mugabe’s resignation

Protest at Turkish LGBTI+ ban – Turkish Embassy

Protesters met at the Turkish Embassy in Belgrave Square to read a statement in solidarity with Turkish LGBTI+ people after Turkey last Sunday imposed an indefinite ban on all LGBTI+ cultural events in its capital, Ankara.

They say the ban is illegal, homophobic and transphobic and which they say risks criminalising LGBTI existence and endangering public safety and that it is based on an extremist Islamic morality and violates the Turkish constitution.

Homosexuality has been legal in Turkey since the last half of the century under the Ottoman Empire and under the modern Turkish Republic which came into existence in 1923.

Protest at Turkish LGBTI+ ban

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Haringey Development & Ritzy Strike – 2017

Haringey Development & Ritzy Strike: On Saturday 23rd September 2017 hundreds marched from a rally in North London against the council’s plans to make a huge transfer of council housing to Australian multinational Lendlease, which would result in the demolition of thousands of council homes, replacing them largely by private housing. I left the march close to its end taking the tube to Brixton where strikers at the were marking a year of action with a rally.

Haringey Against Council Housing Sell-Off

People had come to a rally and march against Haringey Council’s ‘Haringey Development Vehicle’, HDV, which proposed a £2 billion giveaway of council housing and assets to a private corporation run by Australian multinational Lendlease.

This would result in the speedy demolition of over 1,300 council homes on the Northumberland Park estate, followed by similar loss of social housing across the whole of the borough.

Similar ‘regeneration’ schemes in other boroughs such as Southwark, Lambeth and Barnet had resulted in the loss of truly affordable housing, with the result of social cleansing with many of the poorer residents of the redeveloped estates being forced to move out of these boroughs to areas with cheaper private housing on the outskirts of London and beyond.

London’s housing crisis has been made much worse by the activities of wealthy foreign investors buying the new properties and keeping them empty or only occasionally used as their values rise. Among the groups on the march were those such as Class War and Focus E15 who have down much to bring this to public attention.

In London it is mainly Labour Councils who are in charge and responsible for the social cleansing of the poor and the loss of social housing that is taking place on a huge scale.

Along with speakers from estates across London where similar schemes are already taking place there were those from Grenfell Tower where cost cutting and ignoring building safety and residents’ complaints by private sector companies including the TMO set up by the council created the disaster just waiting to happen.

On My London Diary I quoted part of a speech by then Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn a few days later at the Labour Party conference which condemned current practice on estate ‘regeneration’ and housing of which the HDV is the prime example.

“The disdain for the powerless and the poor has made our society more brutal and less caring. Now that degraded regime has a tragic monument: the chilling wreckage of Grenfell Tower, a horrifying fire in which dozens perished. An entirely avoidable human disaster, one which is an indictment not just of decades of failed housing policies and privatisation and the yawning inequality in one of the wealthiest boroughs and cities in the world, it is also a damning indictment of a whole outlook which values council tax refunds for the wealthy above decent provision for all and which has contempt for working class communities.”

You can hear the speech in full on the article by Architects For Social Housing on the conference, where they give their comments and more detail on the section I quoted above:

“Indeed it has. And high in the list of that brutality is the estate regeneration programme that threatens, is currently being implemented against, or which has already privatised, demolished or socially cleansed 237 London housing estates, 195 of them in boroughs run by Labour councils, which vie with each other for the title of ‘least caring’, and among which the councils of Hackney, Southwark, Tower Hamlets, Lambeth and Haringey could give the Conservative-run Kensington and Chelsea council a lesson in disdain, privatisation, failed housing policies and the inequality they produce. But it’s good to hear Corbyn discard the Tories’ contemptuous terminology of ‘hardworking families’ and ‘ordinary people’ and finally – if belatedly – refer to the ‘working class’.“

They go on to comment less favourably on Corbyn who they say had ignored “the estate regeneration programme that is at the heart of London’s transformation into a Dubai-on-Thames for the world’s dirty money” and so had failed to perceive that “every estate undergoing demolition and redevelopment could produce a similar testimony of inept and incompetent local authorities, bad political decisions and a failed and broken system of democratic accountability.”

The grass roots revolt against the HDV plans resulted in a political change and the scrapping of the plans. But the Labour Party has also changed radically, and those very people responsible for those ‘least caring’ local authorities in London and across the country are now in government.

More pictures at Haringey against council housing sell-off.

One year of Ritzy strike – Brixton

A quite different vehicle was the star of the show in Brixton, where BECTU strikers at the Ritzy Cinema were celebrating a year of strike action with a rally supported by other trade unionists, including the United Voices of the World and the IWGB and other union branches.

The strikers continued to demand the London Living Wage, sick pay, maternity and paternity pay, for managers, supervisors, chefs and technical staff to be properly valued for their work, and for the four sacked union reps to be reinstated.

After speeches in English and Spanish, came the surprise. The vehicle in Brixton was the newly acquired ‘Precarious Workers Mobile’, a bright yellow Reliant Robin, equipped with a powerful amplifier and loudspeaker, and after more speeches this led the protesters in a slow march around central Brixton.

Various actions at the Ritzy had started three years before this, when workers called for a boycott of the cinema. In 2019, after an industrial tribunal had won some of their claims BECTU suspended the boycott and the Living Staff Living Wage campaign although still continuing to fight for equal pay and against other dismissals.

More pictures at One year of Ritzy strike.

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Housing For Need Not Greed

Housing For Need Not Greed: Mostly my posts here look at old work, either from a few years ago or my work on London back in the 1980s and 90s. But I’m still goining out at taking pctures if not quite as often as I once did. So this post is about one of the two events I photographed last weekend.

Last Saturday, 8th July 2023 was National Housing Action Day, and a march from the Elephant to the Aylesbury Estate was one of 16 across the country on National Housing Day. Others were taking place in Lambeth, Islington, Kensington, Cardiff, Glasgow, Abbey Wood, Wandsworth, Harlow, Merton, Ealing, Cornwall, Folkestone, Devon, Birmingham, and Hastings.

Housing For Need Not Greed -Tanya Murat - Southwark Defend Council Housing — *Tanya Murat – Southwark Defend Council Housing*

The Southwark protest demanded Southwark Council stop demolishing council homes and refurbish and repopulate estates to house people and end the huge carbon footprint of demolish and rebuild. They demanded housing for need not corporate greed, refurbishment not demolition, filling of empty homes and an end to the leasehold system.

Housing For Need Not Greed — *Marchers at the Elephant on their way to the Aylesbury Estate*

Demolition and rebuilding of housing produces huge amounts of CO2, and whenever possible should be avoided now we are aware of the real dangers of global warming. Instead existing buildings should be insulated, retrofitted and refurbished and properly maintained.

Southwark Council’s estates have for well over 20 years been deliberately run down and demonised with some being demolished and replaced. Around 1000 council homes on the Aylesbury Estate have already been demolished buy around 1,700 are still occupied but currently scheduled for demolition.

*Marchers on Walworth Road on their way to the Aylesbury Estate*.

These homes were well built for the time to higher standards than their replacement and could easily and relatively cheaply be brought up to modern levels of services and insulation with at least another 50 years of life. The estate was carefully designed with open spaces, natural daylight and a range of properties, many with some private outdoor space. The planned replacements are at higher density, less spacious and unlikely to last as long – and only include a small proportion at social rents. Current tenants are more secure and the properties are far more affordable.

*People on the street watch and video the march*

Many of those whose homes have already been demolished here and on the neighbouring Heygate estate have been forced to move outside the area, some far from London as they can no longer afford to live here.

*Bubbles and Marchers on Walworth Road on their way to the Aylesbury Estate.*

Although the developers have profited greatly from their work with Southwark Council here and in other estates, and some officers and councillors involved have personally landed well-paying corporate jobs and enjoyed lavish corporate hospitality, the schemes have largely been financial disasters for the council and council tax payers.

Fight4Aylesbury was formed in 199 as Aylesbury Tenants and Residents First, and has been fighting Southwark Council’s plans to demolish the estate since then. While these schemes – part of New Labour’s regeneration initiative – have always been destructive of local communities and disastrous for many of those whose homes have been demolished, we now see that they are also environmentally unsupportable.

You can watch a video on YouTube of Aysen Dennis, Fight4Aylesbury and Tanya Murat, Southwark Defend Council Housing talking about the protest, and FIght4Aylesbury recently released a newsletter, The Future of the Aylesbury with more details on the estate and their proposals. A few more of my pictures from the event are in the album Housing For Need Not Greed – National Action Day, London, UK and are available for editorial use on Alamy.