The Gambia & No Fracking: Two protests on Monday 26th January 2015 were both taking place at lunchtime in Old Palace Yard opposite the Houses of Parliament. One was by Gambians against the brutal repression in The Gambia and the other a protest against government support for fracking.
Gambians protest brutal repression
Old Palace Yard
The Gambia is the smallest country in mainland Africa, a long strip around 10 miles on each bank of the Gambia River for around 200 miles inland from its Atlantic mouth, surrounded on land by Senegal. Originally colonised by the Portuguese traders it later became a part of the British Empire, while inland from the river was under French control. After the UK 1807 act to abolish the slave trade, ships from the Royal Navy brought slaves from ships they intercepted to settle on the river. The Gambia became independent in 1965.
A military coup in 1994 led to Lieutenant Yahya Jammeh becoming President, and under his dictatorship any opposition “faced exile, harassment, arbitrary imprisonment, murder, and forced disappearance.”
The protest in January 2015 took place after the arbitrary arrests, detentions, tortures and summary executions of those who took part in the 30th Dec uprising against dictator Yahya Jammeh – and their innocent family and friends.
Despite the severe repression in the country in the following year Jammeh lost the December 2016 presidential election; his reluctance to leave the post led to military intervention which resulted in the victor Adama Barrow assuming power.
Hundreds of campaigners from across the country protested as MPs were due to vote on a proposal to ban fracking and also on a controversial proposal to allow fracking under people’s homes without permission in the Government’s Infrastructure Bill.
Tina-Louise Rothery with a Frack Free Lancashire poster
The protest was two days before Lancashire County Council were due to decide on whether to give the go ahead for Cuadrilla to frack in Lancashire which would set a precedent for the rest of the UK. Tina-Louise Rothery from Frack Free Lancashire was one of those who had come to speak at the protest.
Bianca Jagger
There were many other speakers too, including Bianca Jagger, Vivienne Westwood and Caroline Lucas MP, Vanessa Vine, the Founder of Frack Free Sussex and BIFF! (Britain & Ireland Frack Free), John Ashton, the Former UK Government Special Representative for Climate Change, Hannah Martin of Reclaim the Power, Norman Baker MP amd Labour MP Joan Walley, chair of parliament’s Environmental Audit Committee which that morning had come out against fracking .
Norman Baker, Bianca Jagger, Caroline Lucas and John Ashton with the ‘Frack-free Home’
Greenpeace had come with their model ‘Frack-free Home’ and a petition with 361,736 signatures to Parliament.
Puppet monster Mr Frackhead in front of Parliament
Despite the widespread opposition t it took several more years of campaigning before the UK government finally announced a moratorium on fracking in November 2019.
Global Climate Change March: On Saturday 8th December 2007 around 6,000 people came to march through London in an attempt to shake the government out of its complacency and get the real change in direction needed to avoid catastrophe. It was by then totally clear that our world was heading to disaster.
A mermaid at the front of the march points out the danger of rising sea levels
Eighteen years later we are still on course for human extinction, and for taking many other species with us. Although most governments have by now taken some measures to curb emissions together these have only resulted in a slight reduction of our rate of self-destruction. Tinkering at the margins is not going to save us and there will be no magic scientific solution, we need a dramatic system change.
Cyclists arrive to support picket at a Tesco Metro
The main driver of our impending disaster can be stated in one word: GROWTH. The incessant demand for more, more, more – when what we really should be valuing is better.
The cyclists rode around central London in the rain
We have a government that is committed to growth – and introducing climate killing policies such as Heathrow expansion. Protests such this in 2007 and many others managed to stop the third runway then but now it and other disastrous projects are back.
People come to Parliament Square to start the march to the US Embassy in Grosvenor Square
Of course it isn’t just our current government, but the whole political and economic system which calls for growth – and is dominated by the rich and powerful people and corporations who control the laws, the media and more. They aren’t our laws and our media but their laws and their media – and they lead to the obscenity of billionaires and to poverty in rich countries and across the world.
Polar bears support Friends of the Earth’s ‘The Big Ask’.
Below is my fairly lengthy account of the march in 2007 from My London Diary, where there are many more pictures of the event than the few here.
‘Can’t you stop climate change’
Global Climate Change March – Parliament – Grosvenor Square
The global climate change march on Saturday 8 December was intended to send a message to government that they need to produce an effective Climate Change bill and put themselves wholeheartedly behind saving the planet rather than backing projects such as the Heathrow expansion that will further increase the chaos.
The march went to the US Embassy in Grosvenor Square, because America is still refusing to ratify the Kyoto treaty and still sabotaging any progress on getting effective measures to cut carbon and energy use.
Cyclists were also out in force on a tour of central London before the march, visiting a picket at Tesco Metro in Lower Regent Street, where leaflets were handed to customers asking them to shop elsewhere so long as Tesco continues to promote bio-fuels.
It was a lousy day, with strong winds and intermittent heavy showers, but that didn’t stop more than 6000 marchers turning out for the event, many in fancy dress as santas, polar bears, reindeer, elves, penguins and more to highlight the problem of melting polar icecaps. At the front of the march was the ‘Statue of Taking Liberties’ with the Kyoto treaty, followed by the Earth in its greenhouse as in the Campaign against Climate Change logo. And Lucy, our favourite mermaid was there to remind us of the perils of rising sea levels.
It was hardly surprising to see such a great number of protesters and placards opposed to the expansion of Heathrow and the building of a third runway across the villages of Sipson and Harmondsworth. There also appeared to be an increasing realisation that to combat climate chaos we need to put into place changes in lifestyle and politics, with some protesters calling for an end to livestock farming – one of the main contributors to carbon emissions – and others for a revolution.
I tried hard to represent all the different groups on the march, but doubtless I will have missed some. One of the santas carried two placards, the more appropriate of which said “Santa says stop Global Warming. Its getting too wet and windy for Rudolph“; it was certainly too wet and windy for marchers and photographers, but we stuck it out
Climate March 2005 – people meet at the start in Lincolns Inn Fields
Twenty years ago on Saturday 3 December 2005 the Campaign Against Climate Change organised a march calling for urgent action over climate change. Among groups supporting the march were the Green Party, Friends of the Earth and socialist organisations.
Umbrellas came in very useful later when it poured with rain
But in 2005 there was no interest from the major charities and mainstream organisations that have since supported some major London marches pointing out the dangers of climate change and global extinction, like most governments they had yet to wake up to the very real dangers facing the future of human life on our planet.
Surfers Against Sewage were supporting the march
The Campaign Against Climate Change was one of the first organisations in the UK to serilsly begin organising against global warming – and I remember photographing them back in 2002 pushing an attractive ‘Tiger’ on a bed from the Esso headquarters in Leatherhead to the US Embassy in Grosvenor Square, Westminster. US President George W Bush had put the interests of climate-denying US Oil and fossil fuel companies, notably Esso, above the survival of our species with with his rejection of the Kyoto protocol, agreed in 1997 but only due to come into force in 2005.
The Tiger’s message: ‘Esso presents’ ‘Evicted by Climate Change’
Back in 2005, we needed governments to act with urgency, but they failed us and the world. One of those failing then was Tony Blair, whose New Labour government had also betrayed us over the invasion of Iraq as well as over climate change. And now in 2025 we have another Labour government, now under Keir Starmer, pressing ahead with new climate-destroying road schemes, oil exploration and extra runways rather than facing up to the need to change our assumptions and way of life in ways that would reduce CO2 emissions and slow global warming.
Death to Future Generations is the bleak prospect we face
Saturday 3rd December 2005 was an international day of climate protest but the march to the US Embassy in London achieved little media coverage – the billionaires who own and control most of our media have little interest in the subject (and probably large financial interests in fossil fuels and other drivers of climate change.) Even the BBC had been a hive of complacency, and have given a totally unwarranted level of coverage to those who continue to refuse the overwhelming scientific evidence. Though now they are perhaps beginning to realise that you cannot have ‘balance’ over scientific fact.
The ‘Statue of Taking Liberties’ was at the Front of the march to the US Embassy
Here – with minor corrections – is what I wrote about the march back in 2005 – and a few of the pictures I took at the event – you can see more on My London Diary at the link at the bottom of this page.
Kyoto was the first attempt to at least recognise the problem was global and take some concerted action, even if less than half-hearted. Thanks to George Bush and the oil companies he represents, the ineffectual has been made even more so.
Problems related to growth and pollution are inextricably linked with industry and trade. It is hard to see any possibility of their solution without the imposition of tariffs on the exports of countries that continue to pollute – such as the USA. It’s equally hard to envisage this happening while the USA is so dominant in the world bodies and conferences that set the rules on trade.
Rising Tide
There were around 10,000 of us on the streets of London on Saturday, and many more around the world in demonstrations elsewhere, all part of the International Day of Climate Protest, the march in London organised, as previous climate marches and protests, by the UK Campaign Against Climate Change.
A sit down in pouring rain in Parliament Square is not a good idea
Here in London the climate smiled on us for an hour or so, then the rain came as the march entered Parliament Square. It was pouring rain rather than the police that persuaded the students who sat down in front of the Houses of Parliament that it was a good idea to get up and move on.
My camera also began to suffer, and I needed to move inside to dry it out. My injured knee was beginning to hurt too, so I decided it was time to take a rest and go home.
COP29 March For Global Climate Justice: When this march was taking place on Saturday 16th November 2024, COP19 was just beginning in Baku, and there was still some small room for optimism, even though it seemed to be dominated by fossil fuel lobbyists, from its president Mukhtar Babayev, Minister of Ecology and Natural Resources of Azerbaijan Republic and previously been Vice-President for Ecology at Azerbaijan’s national oil company SOCAR, down.
London, UK. 16 Nov 2024. The start of the march.
But now we know the agreement reached after many hours of argument at the end of the meeting we can only conclude ‘TOO LITTLE, TOO LATE’. Even in the unlikely event of the wealthier countries actually keeping their promises we will see dramatic catastrophes in much of the Global South in the coming years.
And of course we in the wealthier countries whose industrialisation created the mess the world is in as we burnt coal and oil resulting in a huge increase in carbon dioxide levels blanketing the world will also suffer.
Increasingly chaotic weather patterns, more and more serious storms with more floods and greater wind damage. Greater droughts too and more forest fires. More disruption of agricultural production and higher food prices.
More loss of species too, aided by other of the ‘benefits’ of industrial production with new insecticides coming to support those currently decimating pollinating insects such as bees.
As many of the marchers pointed out with their placards and flags, war and militarisation are huge drivers of climate change, both from the production of weapons and their use. One poster pointed out that the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2023 produced roughly half as much CO2 as the UK’s emissions in the same year. War doesn’t just kill people but also is ecocide on a grand scale.
The continuing attacks by Israel on Gaza and Lebanon have also added huge amounts of carbon dioxide as well as killing many thousands of civilians both through direct bombing of homes, schools and hospitals but also through a deliberate policy of destroying infrastructure and preventing humanitarian supplies of food and medicines – for which the International Criminal Court recently issued arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and former defence minister Yoav Gallan.
Banners, posters and placards on the march rejected militarisation and called for an end to arming Israel. ‘THE CLIMATE MOVEMENT STANDS WITH PALESTINE – STOP FUELLING GENOCIDE AND CLIMATE BREAKDOWN’.
But however hopeless the world situation seems now, the election of Trump as US Pesident seems certainly to make things worse – already he has chosen Chris Wright, the CEO of Denver-based fracking company Liberty Energy as Energy Secretary to lead his promise of increasing US fossil fuel production under his campaign pledge “Drill, Baby, drill”.
The current world political system dominated by institutions such as the IMF and World Bank and by Western governments increasingly seems unable to come up with any effective solutions to the climate crisis – as COP 19 and the previous 28 UN climate Change Conferences have shown. As the placards carried by many of the marchers stated, we need system change.
March for Clean Water: On Sunday 3rd November 2024 I joined thousands of marchers gathering at Vauxhall overlooking the River Thames for a march demanding urgent action to end the pollution of our rivers and sea.
Much of this pollution is by illegal discharges of sewage by the privatised water companies who have failed to make the investments needed since the regional water authories were sold off to private companies in 1989.
Opinion polls then showed that just under 80% of the UK population were against water privatisation back then, and now over 80% are in favour of bringing them back into public ownership.
Back in 1884, Joseph Chamberlain got it right when he argued “It is difficult, if not impossible to combine the citizens’ rights and interests and the private enterprise’s interests, because the private enterprise aims at its natural and justified objective, the biggest possible profit.”
Private water companies were largely taken over by local authorities by the start of the 20th century and under the 1973 Water Act passed by a Tory government under Edward Heath these were amalgamated into the 10 Water Boards each based on the basin of one of our major rivers, “responsible for water extraction, water supply, sewage treatment and environmental pollution prevention,“
Unfortunately government failed to provide them with the money to properly carry out their functions, and the situation was made much worse after Margaret Thatcher came to power in 1979 when she made it very much harder for the water boards to borrow money for capital projects.
This left the water authorites unable to meet the new EU standards for “river, bathing, coastal, and drinking water quality” which would have required according to Wikipedia “from £24 to £30 billion.”
In light of this, the Conservatives went ahead with privatisation despite the huge public opinion against it. It was hardly a sale, more a getting rid of their liabilities at a token price of £7.6 billion, at the same time taking over the existing debts of £5 billion and gifting the companies a present of £1.5 billion. So the sale only raised £1.1 billion.
Privatisation made England & Wales the only countries in the world to have “a fully privatised water and sewage disposal system.” Something we have been both paying for and suffering from, SInce privatisation water prices have risen by 40% above inflation and in 2017 “research by the University of Greenwich suggested that consumers in England were paying £2.3 billion more every year for their water and sewerage bills than they would if the water companies had remained under state ownership.”
And while we have paid more, the shareholders of at least some of those water companies have done very well out of it – as have many of the top managers who have got huge bonuses despite the many failings of the companies they have run.
Since privatisation investment in the water industry has decreased by around 15% and the companies have built up debts of over £60 billion – rather less than their payouts to shareholders of £78 billion. Huge amounts of treated water is now lost through leaks as our water systems have not been properly maintained and expanded to meet new demand.
And sewage. More and more untreated raw sewage has been dumped in our rivers. What was supposed only to happen when unusual rainfall overwhelmed the sewers now appears to have become a normal occurence in some areas. We should have been investing in increasing separation between drainage and sewage, particularly in new developments but nothing has been done.
We are still largely working with a Victorian system of drainage with a hugely increased population, installed when few homes had baths, washing machines and showers were unheard of and far fewer homes had even one flushing toilet. Demand for water has increased greatly per person.
The march in London on 3rd November was organised by River Action, “an environmental charity on a mission to rescue Britain’s rivers from the deluge of pollution that has left the majority of our waterways in a severely degraded ecological condition” and it reflected this, backed by a long list of other organisations.
Although sewage outflows are the major source of this, agricultural wastes particularly from intensive animal farming are a huge source of pollution in our rural areas and there are still some other industries which pollute our rivers.
We need to bring the water companies under public control and also reform or replace Ofwat and the Environment Agency which have clearly failed in their roles.
Fracking, Congo & Caste: On Saturday 19th October 2013 I began work at a protest calling on the former boss of BP to resign from the House of Lords because of his vested interest in fracking, then photographed a protest against the atrocities being committed in the battles for mineral wealth in the DRC, Uganda and Rwanda before covering a march bringing a petition to Downing Street against the continuing delays in making caste discrimination illegal in the UK.
Global Frackdown: Lord Browne resign! Mayfair
Campaigners went to the offices of private equity firm Riverstone Holdings to call on its managing director Lord Brown of Madingley, a former boss of BP, to resign his seat in the House of Lords because of his vested interests in fracking.
John Browne joined BP in 1966 and worked his way up the company to become CEO in 1995. Knighted in 1998, he joined the House of Lords as Baron Browne of Madingley. in 2001 while still being BP CEO. In 2007 he resigned from BP when accused of perjury in atempting to stop newspapers publishing details of a former homosexual relationship and of alleged misuse of company funds.
In his time at BP he was responsible for a ruthless programme of cost-cutting that many feel compromised safety and contributed to the 2005 Texas City Refinery explosion and in 2010, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.
In 2013, Browne was Managing Director and Managing Partner (Europe) of Riverstone Holdings LLC, and more significantly for today’s protest the chairman of Britain’s only shale gas driller Cuadrilla Resources.
The protest outside Riverstone was a part of a day of a ‘Global Frackdown’ with protests against fracking in 26 countries and in other cities in the UK.
Friends of the Earth activists met on Oxford Street and walked to the office in Burlington Gardens, where after a brief speech about Lord Browne’s involvement in fracking people were invited to write messages and put them in a small brown rubbish bin which would be left at the offices for him.
People wrote messages and posed with them calling for an end to fracking at Balombe and elsewhere in the UK as well as showing support for the Elsipogtog First Nation who had a few days earlier been attacked by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police with live ammunition and tear gas while protesting against fracking in New Brunswick, Canada.
Fortunately police in London merely came to ask the protesters what they intended to do before saying ‘Fine, no problem’ though they did later ask them to ensure there was a free path along the pavement and remind them and photographers of the danger from the slow moving traffic.
The activists point out that fracking contaminates huge volumes of water with sand and toxic chemicals and also that any fossil fuel production should be avoided as using fossil fuels increases the climate crisis.
Don’t Be Blind to DR Congo Murders – Piccadilly Circus
Continuing battles over the mineral wealth of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda and Rwanda have led to the murder of more than 8 million people and over 500,000 men, women and children have been raped by the various armies funded by various European and African multinational companies.
Gold, diamonds, coltan, tungsten, tin and other ores should make these countries rich, but have led to huge devastation. Coltan, containing both niobium and tantalum is vital for the mobile phones, computers, missiles and other modern technology on which we rely. The fight for it has been the main incentive behind the genocidal wars that have waged in the area.
Despite various protests over the years by Congolese in London there has been little publicity to the atrocities and no action by our government. The ‘Don’t be Blind This Time’ campaigners came to Piccadilly Circus to raise public awareness, some posing in blindfolds and others handing out a thousand free flowers, with the message that that we need to demand justice and an end to the impunity and cover up around this conflict.
The wars continue in 2024 and have recently intensified. China now also being increasing involved as US companies have since 2013 sold their mines to Chinese companies who now own most of the mines in the DRC.
I don’t remember seeing any mention of this protest in the media, and we see few reports of the terrible situation continuing in the area. British editors seldom seem to regard this or conflicts in other areas of Africa such as Sudan as news.
Make Caste Discrimination Illegal Now – Hyde Park to Whitehall
Negative discrimination on the basis of caste, long a traditional part of Indian society, was banned by law there in 1948 and is a part of the 1950 constitution, though it still continues. In the UK The Equality Act 2010 passed under New Labour in 2010 gave our government the power to make caste discrimination illegal but they lost the election before doing so.
The incoming coalition government was reluctant to action, but pressure continued and in 2013 the Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Act 2013 mandated this to be done; instead the government set up a two year consultation, apparently as a result of lobbying by the Alliance of Hindu Organisations, (AHO) a body set up to oppose what they call “the threat posed by this proposed amendment to the Equality Act 2010.”
The consultation appears also to be only with established groups dominated by upper caste interests, and its length entirely unnecessary. It isn’t clear why a simple elimination of a clearly discriminatory practice should be regarded as a threat.
A report on the consultation was finally published in 2018. In it the government rejected the idea of a law against caste discrimination and instead concluded:
Having given careful and detailed consideration to the findings of the consultation, Government believes that the best way to provide the necessary protection against unlawful discrimination because of caste is by relying on emerging case-law as developed by courts and tribunals. In particular, we feel this is the more proportionate approach given the extremely low numbers of cases involved and the clearly controversial nature of introducing “caste”, as a self-standing element, into British domestic law.
They also state that any law would “as divisive as legislating for “class” to become a protected characteristic would be across British society more widely.” I don’t think this comparison has any merit. Not to act seems to me to be accepting a foreign practice, illegal in its country of origin, into British society, and the low number of cases they comment on surely means that case-law will only emerge at a snail’s pace. Our new Labour government should follow the example begun by New Labour in 2010 and make caste discrimination illegal in the UK.
Climate Rush Palm Oil Gala: On Wednesday 1st July 2009 Climate Rush protested outside the Millennium Hotel in Grosvenor Square where industries deforesting tropical forests to grow biofuel crops including palm oil were holding a Gala Dinner and Dance.
Palm oil production is causing a particular problems in Indonesia, where indigenous people have seen their traditional lands taken over by companies for palm oil production under unfair laws.
Primates not Palm Oil; Food not Fuel
The forests were their land and the living and many who have been moved off have been left in marginal land often without clean water supplies and the promises made by the palm oil companies to the people have not been kept, and the regulations which offer them some very limited protection have not been enforced by the authorities, with many sufferting violent attacks by armed security forces and police.
Police offer Tamsin Omond and Climate Rush a nice safe protest pen
Palm oil plantations disrupt natural drainage and bring problems of pollution and flooding. Destruction of their habitats eliminates most of the wildlife and species including the orangutan and the Sumatran tiger are under threat.
A detailed report, ‘Losing Ground’ for Friends of the Earth looked in particular at the human rights issues and concluded that “The EU target to increase agrofuel use is misguided, risking environmental damage and human rights abuses on an even bigger scale.“
Climate Rush’s flyer for the event stated “90% of orangutans have disappeared since the Suffragettes first appeared 100 years ago.“
They began their protest with a picnic in the park of Grosvenor Square opposite the hotel entrance, and people got ready for the protest.
When their Jazz Band began to play, people moved out onto the street and blocked it dancing outside the hotel. They rejected police requests to move into the pen which police told them was created “for your safety“.
The police concentrated their actions waiting for the expected “rush” to the hotel, protecting the hotel with a small line of officers.
After around half an hour of dancing on the street the “rush” came, though I think it was really only ever a token attempt to enter the building. Most of the police seemed fairly relaxe or even amused by it, but there were a few who reacted rather violently and a couple of protesters were rather roughly thrown to the ground when a small group of police charged into them.
After this, the protesters moved back and sat down on the road in front of the doorway for a while.
Eventually they decided to get up and briefly danced a conga, before deciding to go back into the park to continue their picnic, and I felt it was time to go home for my own dinner.
Topshop Tax Dodging & Zero Carbon March – UK Uncut protested on Oxford Street against tax dodging by Arcadia Group and Campaign Against Climate Change led a march to Parliament calling for urgent action including a Zero Carbon Britain by 2030.
UK Uncut protest Topshop Tax Dodge – Oxford St
Several hundred had come to UK Uncut’s protest against tax dodging by major UK companies which costs the UK £12 billion a year.
Arcadia Group is owned by the man UK Uncut describe as “Britain’s most notorious tax-avoider, Sir Philip Green, and his vast retail empire.”
Green’s brands include Topshop, Topman, Dorothy Perkins, Burton, Miss Selfridge, Wallis and British Home Stores. While Green himself pays tax on his salary, the companies are owned by a holding company in the tax haven of Jersey, which is owned by his wife and immediate family who live in Monaco, and pay no tax.
They say that in 2005 he awarded himself a huge dividend payment of £1.2 billion which went through various offshore accounts and tax dodges to his wife’s Monaco bank account, with a loss in tax to the UK of £285 million.
Green had recently been appointed by Prime Minister David Cameron to advise the government on how to slash public spending. But if he and others like him paid their UK tax these cuts would not be necessary. UK Uncut in 2010 put the losses from tax not paid by wealthy individuals as £13 billion and by large corporations as £12 billion.
Other companies being targeted by UK Uncut for high levels of tax avoidance include Vodaphone, Boots, HSBC and Barclays.
One of the government cuts has been in the budget of HMRC which will greatly affect its ability to investigate tax fraud, and even where fraud has been found, deals are often made that result in only very partial recovery of losses. In contrast the government spends large amounts on detecting much smaller amounts of benefit fraud.
We need to move to a system which levies tax on actual earnings in the UK and outlaws all the devious methods that can be used to avoid paying tax which currently form a large industry in the UK. Almost all of those who were handed leaflets at the protest were surprised and shocked to find that profits made on Oxford Street were not contributing tax to the UK.
I was late for the protest as my train had been held up by snow and around a hundred protesters had entered the Oxford Street branch of Topshop when I arrived. Police and store security by then had stopped anyone entering and were bringing the protesters out in ones and twos, sometimes rather roughly.
The protest continued noisily on the pavement, handing out leaflets and gaining considerable support from the shoppers passing. Even when it was possible to enter few went into Topshop and the neighbouring Miss Selfridge while the protest was continuing.
After around an hour the protesters went to protest at BHS, another of Green’s Oxford Street stores, before coming back to Topshop. Later they went to Dorothy Perkins and branches of other tax avoiders, Boots and Vodaphone.
I left and hour and a half after the protest had begun, returning briefly a couple of hours later on my way home to find it continuing.
March for Zero Carbon Britain 2030 – Hyde Park to Westminster
Several thousand marched from Hyde Park to Parliament calling for urgent action over the climate crisis including a call for a Zero Carbon Britain by 2030. Currently the government has committed to net zero by 2050, but is pursuing policies which will make if difficult if not impossible to meet this target, far too late.
The demand for urgent action and a 2030 target was based on the recently published in-depth report compiled for the Centre for Alternative Technology (CAT), ‘Zero Carbon Britain 2030: A new energy strategy’. More recent scientific reports have assessed the need as even more urgent.
The march was the seventh annual march organised by the Campaign Against Climate Change which has led the movement for action over climate change and was timed to coincide with the crucial Cancun climate talks. While the protest a year earlier had been supported by a number of major charities, many of these were absent at this event and appear to have abandoned major campaigning on the issue.
Among the groups which did take part were Friends of the Eath, Greenpeace, the World Development Movement, the Climate Rush, the Green Party and others including many local groups, trade union branches etc.
After posing for a photographer high up in a cherry-picker the march set off towards Parliament for a rally on Millbank – Parliament Square was still roped off and could not be used.
The rally had a very wide range of speakers in support, including Phil Thornhill, founder of the CACC, Caroline Lucas MP, Andy Atkins, Director of Friends of the Earth, Michael Meacher MP, Sophie Allain from the Climate Camp, Tony Kearns of the CWU, Ben Brangwyn, co-founder of the Transition Towns movement, Maryla Hart from Biofuelwatch and John Stewart of HACAN as well a Maria Souviron, the Ambassador of Bolivia, one of the few nations to have grasped the urgency of climate change and a leader in the call for effective world action.
Maria Souviron, the Ambassador of Bolivia
You can read more about some of the points that were made in the speeches in a more detailed article on My London Diary. Unfortunately the UK has made little progress to prevent the disastrous trends in global temperature in the 13 years since this march – and has gone backwards in some respects. We are now beginning to feel the effects, particularly in more erratic weather and some temperature records, while some other countries are now in desperate straits.
Food Sovereignty, Big IF & Naked Cyclists: Saturday 8th June 2013 was another varied day of protests in London.
Food Sovereignty not Food Security – Unilever House, Blackfriars
Friends of the Earth, War On Want and others held a protest outside Unilever House where David Cameron was addressing carefully picked delegates at his ‘Hunger Summit’. They were protesting against the ‘new alliance for food security and nutrition’, a special initiative launched by the G8 in 2012.
Cameron’s ‘summit’ and the protest came before a G8 meeting and Unilever’s iconic London offices overlooking the Thames at Blackfriars, was particularly appropriate as Unilever, along with other global agribusinesses such as Monsanto and Cargill are the major beneficiaries of the ‘new alliance.’
The G8 initiative will spend billions of dollars to finance the expansion of these agribusiness in Africa but damage existing landowners and farmers, who will either have to sign agreements to land grabs by the giant corporations and replace their traditional plants and seed with GM and other high-tech seeds and supplies or see their markets disappear.
The initiative will marginalise small African farmers, driving them from their traditionally owned land, increasing unemployment and the movement to cities. As in India some will be driven to suicide as their only solution. It should increase agricultural output in the short term but most of it will be food for export or biofuels, and hunger will increase – along with the profits of the mega-corporations. Almost certainly all these technological fixes will in the long term fail, leading to further desertification.
African farmers need support that increases their economic, social and cultural resilience, methods to increase their productivity through simple low-tech improvements in land use, that preserve and improve the soil, and increase water retention, that improve traditional crop varieties by proven old-fashioned methods. Various projects have demonstrated the success of these approaches – but they fail to increase the profits of multinational companies so do not attract support from the G8.
Almost 200 African groups signed a Statement By Civil Society In Africa which condemned the proposals, describing them as “a new wave of colonialism”, pointing out that they work to the benefit of the corporations and not for Africa.
This was a peaceful and family-friendly protest, with campaigners bringing containers with growing plants and baskets of fruit and vegetables to set up a small garden on the road island in front of the main entrance to Unilever House.
The second protest I photographed was also about global hunger, with thousands marching in solidarity with the one in eight people around the world who go hungry and to demand that the G8 world leaders tackle the root causes of global hunger.
The problem isn’t about producing food as “The world produces enough food for everyone, but more than two million children die every year because they can’t get enough to eat.” The problem is the unfair distribution of wealth and power which means many of those who need food don’t get it, while others have more they can eat.
The walk to send a message to the G8 was supported by a wide range of organisations including Christian Aid, Oxfam, Cafod, Save the Children and many more who work in countries around the world, and many had begun the event by attending a service in a packed Westminster Central Hall in Westminster, the Methodist church where the first meeting of the UN General Assembly was held in 1946.
This wasn’t a march but a walk, with people taking a rather circuitous route and walking in small groups on the pavements, which made it rather more difficult to photograph.
The World Naked Bike Ride is an annual protest against oil dependency and and the negative social and environmental impacts of a car dominated culture as well as a demonstration of the vulnerability of cyclists in traffic and to celebrate body freedom. It began in Spain in 2001 and has spread to London and round 70 other cities in over 30 countries.
In London it has usually attracted around a thousand cyclists, along with a few others on skateboards etc, and provides considerable interest, with crowds of tourists stopping to watch and to photograph, and although everyone around me seemed to be greatly amused, there seemed to be little or no appreciation of the reasons behind the protest.
Not all riders are naked for the event, some riding partially clothed. The dress code is that people should ride ‘as bare as they dare’ and only the wearing of footwear is compulsory for safety reasons. Many riders have some creative body paint, some with slogans on their body to promote the ideas behind the ride, and I’ve chosen images for this post that show these.
In 2013 the ride began at four different points, Marble Arch, West Norwood, Clapham Junction and near Kings Cross, with the routes converging on Westminster Bridge, from where they went on to ride to St Paul’s Cathedral and back through Holborn and Trafalgar Square to Hyde Park Corner.
I went to Marble Arch for the start of the event there and later took photographs on Westminster Bridge where the four groups were intended to meet up, but tho cyclists from Marble Arch were held up and arrived after the others had left.
It’s a ride that attracts considerably more men than women as riders, although my pictures might seem to suggest the opposite. There are several reasons why I find the women more interesting, partly because I think more of them make an effort with body painting and other ways to create an impression. It’s also rather harder to photograph nude male cyclists in ways that many publications would find acceptable, and my selection of images is largely for submission to agencies.
There are many more pictures on My London Diary at World Naked Bike Ride. At the top of each page of pictures I included the statement “These pictures include some nudity – don’t view them if this might offend you” above a long area of empty white space, with two links to either take viewers down the page to see them or back to the main June page.
March of the Beekeepers 26th April 2013: Where would we be without Bees? Personally as I’ve written before I wouldn’t be here at all. I owe my own very existence to them, as when my father as a young man decided to become a beekeeper he went to a class at the Twickenham and Thames Valley Beekeepers Association in Twickenham, given by a professional beekeeper, Alf. Fred and Alf became friends, and both had sisters (my father five of them, but Alf only one.) And so I grew up with an Uncle Alf, my mother’s brother and his wife Mabel was one of Dad’s sisters.
Alf and Dad were both beekeepers with prize certificates for honey etc to prove it. In our house, honey came in 28lb tins which I’d spent hours in a room sealed against bees sweating turning the handle of an extractor, and there were hives at the bottom of the garden against the factory wall, often surrounded by the sharp metal curls of swarf which came over, more dangerous than the bee stings.
My father had hives in several other gardens in the area, and looked after bees for at least one nearby middle-class resident, and for some years the hives at the Twickenham apiary, a job he took over from Alf. I think most of dad’s bees came from swarms which the police would regularly call and ask him to deal with – and he would get on his bike with a box to bring them back. He was something of a jack of all trades, growing vegetables to feed us and doing odd painting, decorating, plumbing and building work as well as selling a few jars of honey. Alf was a dedicated beekeeper and travelled further afield, with hives as far away as Gloucestershire, busily pollinating the orchards.
Somehow I never took up beekeeping, though I’d helped Dad for years. Living in various flats for around ten years took me out of the loop, and when I finally moved to a house with a garden I was too busy with other things, not least photography.
Bees are essential for all of our lives as one of the major pollinators of fruit and they are under great threats. Bee colonies have been dying, and a major cause of this has been the use of neonicotinoid pesticides. These can kill bees but also seriously weaken their resistance to other factors – including climate change and the Varroa mite.
Though there had been strong pressure particularly in the EU for these pesticides to be banned, the UK had abstained from a vote to ban them following a report by the European Food Safety Agency (EFSA). This was despite the decline in bee numbers being particularly drastic in England, with the number of colonies down to under half of those present in the 1980s. These pesticides don’t only kill bees they also kill other pollinating insects such as moths, which have also seen a huge decline in recent years.
The protest on Friday 26th May 2013 was supported by a wide range of organisations including Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace, Pesticide Action Network (PAN), RSPB, Soil Association, The Natural Beekeeping Trust, the Wildlife Trusts and 38 Degrees and urged Environment Secretary Owen Paterson to take urgent action and to support a further EU ban being debated the following Monday.
While the protesters stayed in Parliament Square I went with a small group led by fashion designers Dame Vivienne Westwood and Katharine Hamnett to take a petition with 300,000 signatures to Downing St.
A ban on the use of three neonicotinoids came into force in the UK and EU in 2018, but the UK government has since in the last three years running allowed a so-called emergency use of the banned pesticide thiamethoxam – a teaspoon of which is enough to kill around 1.25 billion bees on sugar beet crops. This is against the advice of the government’s own Expert Committee on Pesticides and would be unlawful were we still in the EU. Brexit means we can kill bees.
