Posts Tagged ‘fair pay’

People’s March For The NHS And More – 2014

Tuesday, September 6th, 2022

On Saturday 6th September I was in London mainly to cover the final stage of the People’s March for the NHS which had begun in mid August in Jarrow, but also photographed Mourning Mothers of Iran, people on a Rolling Picket against Israeli violence and a protest against children being taken for families by social workers and family courts.


People’s March from Jarrow for NHS

When the NHS was founded back in 1948 it was an integral part of the welfare state, a social welfare policy to provide free and universal benefits. It was opposed at its start by the Conservative Party, and met with opposition from some doctors and other medical professionals worried that it would cut their earnings from private practice.

Particularly because of the opposition from doctors, the initial scheme had to be fairly drastically changed, with compromises being made by Minister for Health Aneurin Bevan. And dentistry was never really properly and fully brought withing the system.

Since 1948 much has changed. We’ve seen a huge growth in private hospitals, partly driven by many employers providing private healthcare schemes as a perk for their better paid employees, but also by public funding being used to pay for NHS services provided by the private sector.

We’ve also seen the introduction of charges for NHS prescriptions and more recently the NHS has decided on a fairly wide range of common conditions for which it will no longer provide treatment or prescriptions, sending people to the chemist for both advice and over the counter medicines.

There have been huge advances in medical science too, and more of us are living to a greater age than ever before, making more demands on the NHS. Our NHS is costing more, though still the total spending on health in the UK is significantly less than in many other countries as an OECD chart on Wikipedia shows – less than Japan, Ireland, Australia, France, Canada, Belgium, Luxembourg, Denmark, Sweden, Austria, Netherlands, Germany, Norway and Switzerland – and well under half of that in the USA.

Yet for some years many leading Conservatives have advocated the UK moving to a system based on the US model. It would not make our health any better, but would make it much more expensive. And lead to huge profits for healthcare companies – many of them US-based – which are already beginning to take large bites of our own NHS spending. Involving private companies in providing NHS services has not generally led to better services – and in some cases has certainly made them worse, unsurprisingly as it diverts money to shareholders rather than using it for patients. Some services have become more difficult to access.

GP surgeries have always been private businesses, but when these were run by the doctors they provided more personal services than those run by some private companies where patients are unlikely to see a ‘family doctor’ and far more likely to see a locum – if they can still get an appointment. The NHS also spends over £6bn a year on agency and bank staff which would be unnecessary if we were training enough staff.

The need to put services out to tender is time-consuming and wastes NHS resources, one of several things which has produced a top-heavy management. And accepting low tenders often leads to poorly performing services such as cleaning, as I found when I was in my local hospital and found staff simply were not allowed time to do the job properly.

The Health and Social Care Act 2012 was the most extensive reorganisation of the NHS to that date and Lansley has been widely seen as getting things wrong, and it replaced the duty on the NHS to provide services with one to promote them, with delivery possibly by others, opening up the entire health service to privatisation.

I walked with the marchers from a rally in Red Lion Square to Trafalgar Square where there was a final rally with speakers including Shadow Secretary of State for Health Andy Burnham and London Mayor Sadiq Kahn. In 1936 the Jarrow Crusade marchers in 1936 – who were shunned by the Labour Party but captured the hears of the British population – had been given a pound, along with a train ticket back to Jarrow, but failed to get any significant action from the government and Jarrow was left without jobs. Those marchers who had walked the whole 300 miles from Jarrow were presented with medals incorporating a pound coin.

People’s March from Jarrow for NHS


Mourning Mothers of Iran – Trafalgar Square

On the North Terrace of Trafalgar Square I found a group of mainly Iranian women standing in a silent vigil to support the Mourning Mothers of Iran.

Now renamed The Mothers of Laleh Park, these are women who hold vigils in the park in the centre of Tehran after their children were killed or imprisoned following a crackdown on members of the opposition after the 2009 Iranian election, and call for the release of political prisoners. Many of the women in Iran have been arrested for protesting and for talking to foreign journalists.

Mourning Mothers of Iran


Rolling Picket against Israeli violence – Downing St

At Downing Street I photographed a group protesting against Israeli violence towards Palestinians and clalling for a boycott of Israeli good.

After a brief protest at Downing St they marched up Whitehall and protested outside McDonalds before going for another short protest outside the Tesco facing Trafalgar Square. Police intervened to move them away when they tried to block the doorway there. I left them on their way to make further protests outside shops supporting Israel on their way to Tony Blair’s house off the Edgware Rd.

Rolling Picket against Israeli violence


Stolen Children of the UK – Parliament Square

This group say that many children in the UK are removed from families by social workers and family courts for no good reason. They allege that there is systematic, systemic institutional abuse of around a thousand children a month being removed in this way and then abused by paedophile rings. Although there may be children wrongly taken from families there appears to be no firm evidence for such abuse.

These conspiracy theories are a world-wide phenomenon and in 2017 became the core belief of QAnon, the US extreme right wing conspiracy theory political movement.

Stolen Children of the UK


A Bad Day Out

Saturday, February 20th, 2021

I didn’t much enjoy Thursday 20th Feb 2020, though I was pleased to be able to cover a protest by UVW Security guards working at St George’s University Hospital in Tooting. They had been on strike for 3 weeks demanding to be directly employed rather than outsourced to a private contractor and working under the minimum legal terms and conditions of service.

Although they belong to the United Voices of the World union, the university had refused recognise or talk with their union, and has called on the police to intimidate the workers and try to break their strike – and police even carried out an unlawful arrest of a UVW staff member and barrister. I’d arrived too late on that occasion to photograph the picket, when everyone had left the area.

On 20th Feb I arrived too early. Although when I had first been sent details of the protest planned to take place on an Open Day for postgraduate students they were planning to start at 4pm, the time had later been changed to 6pm and I’d not checked before setting out. So I arrived two hours early and was surprised to find that I was the only one there.

After a little checking on my phone I found out what was happening, and decided that rather than missing the event I’d go for a walk around the area. It wasn’t a bad day for February, and I enjoyed the walk by the Rover Wandle, but by the time the sun had gone down it did start to get rather cold.

There was still no sign of the protesters, but after a phone call I met up with them close to Tooting Broadway station, where they had a large number of balloons to give the protest a party theme, and were writing slogans on them, which proved a little difficult. After some short speeches on a rather dark street corner they marched down to the hospital. It was hard to take photographs as they marched as the street lighting was poor and they were moving at a fast walking pace.

At the hospital they walked in though the main doors to a corridor area; there were very few security staff on duty, perhaps because most were on strike. I think perhaps the change of time for the protest had misled the hospital management as well as me, as there were no police present, though I had seen some when I arrived around 4pm.

Once inside there were more speeches with the union making their demands for the security guards to be made direct employees of St George’s University London and for them to receive pay and T&Cs of employment in line with SGUL standards. Among those to speak in support was drill music star Drillmaster who is standing for London Mayor.


It was a noisy protest, with music and dancing as well as speeches. Police arrived and after some fairly terse discussion came to an agreement with the protesters that they would leave in a few minutes time.

My day was not over, though I was already a couple of hours later than expected. I ran across Clapham Junction to jump on a train for home just as it was leaving, only for it to make an unscheduled stop at the next station, Wandsworth Town. After around 15 minutes we were all told to get off as the train would be going no further as the line was closed at Barnes where someone had committed suicide by throwing themselves under a train. Despite this being an unfortunately common happening at Barnes, South West Trains appeared to have absolutely no contingency plans. Eventually I got a bus back to Clapham Junction, a well-staffed station but where nobody seemed to know what was happening, and joined hundreds of passengers going from platform to platform in search of a train that would take one of the two alternative routes that avoid the accident location.

I took a chance and jumped on a Kingston train. No one on the platform or on the train knew how far it was going, but I knew that if necessary I could catch a bus home from Kingston. At Kingston the guard thought they might get to Twickenham – where again I might get a bus. Eventually it reached Twickenham, where everyone was told to leave the train. Fortunately by that time – two hours after the incident – someone had the sense to
set up a shuttle service for stations further west, and eventually I arrived home, around five hours later than I had expected when I set out and fuming at the incompetence of South West Trains.

More at:
St Georges’s Hospital Security Guards
Wandle Wander


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.