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.
Friday 21st April 2023 is the start of ‘The Big One‘, a four day action ending on Monday 24th April organised by Extinction Rebellion when people from a huge range of groups and movements, not just XR, will gather throughout Westminster and at the Houses of Parliament.
Emma Thompson at XR’ Sea of Protest, 19 Apr 2019
XR say “The climate, nature and humanity face disaster. We know it’s time to act. Do you trust politicians to do the right thing for us? For the planet? Join 100,000 people holding them to account.“
More than 200 organisations are supporting the action, including Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and PCS, although when I checked with a week to go only around 26,000 people had actually registered to come. I imagine many like me are loath to sign up publicly to protest, or just lazy or haven’t got around to it.
The events are planned by XR to be family friendly, accessible and welcoming, creative and engaging “with People’s Pickets outside government departments and a diverse programme of speakers, performers and workshops, awash with colour and culture. There will be art and music, talks from experts, places to listen and engage, and activities for the kids.”
I hope to be there and recording the events, though these days I’d having to take things a little easier than I used to and may need to rest, perhaps on the Sunday when The Big One’s Running Out of Time! coexists with the London Marathon. But please come if and when you can to join in. More at the Extinction Rebellion web site.
Four Years ago, Extinction Rebellion was coming to the end of a week of protests that shut down much of London, having occupied Waterloo Bridge, Oxford Circus, Mable Arch and other key sites on Monday 25th. I’d photographed a number of their actions and you can read about them and see pictures on My London Diary.
On Friday 19th April 2019 the ‘Sea of Protest’ was still occupying and blocking Oxford Circus with a large pink yacht named for the Honduran environmental activist Berta Cáceres assassinated in 2016. As a part of activities planned to show ‘Love For The Earth’ on the 5th day of the occupation there, actress Dame Emma Thompson arrived from New York to speak.
Parts of the press and media with interests in fossil fuels and giving support to climate deniers criticised here for flying here to speak. But though we need to drastically cut our dependence on aviation, this isn’t about ending journeys like these for which there is no real alternative, but for making huge cuts in the total numbers of flights. We need to end the subsidies to aviation and levy taxes on flying – a system with per person annual carbon allowances and heavy penalties for exceeding these would be more fair.
Police stood and watched the crowd as Thompson spoke, but a few minutes later after I had left the area for a short break, police surrounded the pink yacht and put a ring of officers around Oxford Circus.
Slowly police persuaded protesters to leave by threatening them with arrest and cutting off those who were locked on around the bottom of the yacht. There were a number of arrests of those who had refused to leave. XR organisers persuaded people not to physically oppose the police action as this went against the non-violent principles of Extinction Rebellion.
XR’s policy of non-violence and encouraging as many people as possible to get arrested has led to criticism from many more militant groups, and puts a great stress on those who give legal assistance, including Green and Black Cross, “an independent grassroots project set up in the spirit of mutual aid to support social and environmental struggles within the UK”.
Past Time To Act On Climate Change? Seven years ago on Saturday 7th March 2015, 20,000 or so protesters marched through London to remind government and the nation it was Time to Act on Climate Change. Seven years on, the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report released a week ago warns “that climate breakdown is happening faster than expected and that the window to take action is closing fast. The report is a call to governments and private sector players to take drastic action against climate change.”
It’s a report that has largely been lost to public sight, pushed together with the stories about Tory sleaze and lies out of the news by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, though it has even more far-reaching implications. Not that I want to in any way minimise Putin’s criminal action and its terrible consequences for the people of Ukraine, largely innocents caught up in a situation of others’ making.
Of course the invasion of Ukraine has now raised the spectre of a nuclear war, which would almost certainly lead to mass extinction rather more rapidly than climate change, but the very dramatic prospect fortunately makes this almost unthinkable. Were it to happen it would almost certainly be by accident, something we have come close to several times in the past. Even our maddest politicians realise there is nothing to be gained by mutually assured destruction, and there would be no profits in it for the oligarchs or billionaires.
Climate change doesn’t happen in a massive flash, but is relatively slow and insidious. Even in the richer countries we are just beginning to feel its effects, and some in the Global South have long been suffering extreme hardship. But unless we heed the report and take drastic action without delay it will be too late to stop; many systems are coming close to their tipping points, past which there is no chance of recovery.
Scientists have been warning about the dangers for many years. Even 50 years ago when I was a student I spoke about the need to change the way we used the Earth’s resources and move to renewable systems of energy and agriculture, as many aspects of our current way of life were unsustainable.
Over 50 years ago it was clear to me that we needed to cut our dependence on fossil fuels, not just because of the carbon emissions and other pollutants, but also because thinking in the longer term it seemed a waste to burn what was a limited resource and an important chemical resource for plastics and other materials. I sold the only car I’d owned in 1967 or 8, because we needed to move away from a society based around private cars. It was clear too that we needed to farm in ways that conserved the soil and that many modern agricultural practices destroyed it – my father had joined the Soil Association which was established in 1946.
But of course there were huge profits to be made from fossil fuels and other industries that were driving up global emissions – and huge campaigns of obfuscation and lobbying. Most politicians in most countries were doing very nicely out of exploiting our natural resources – and the workers, who needed to be kept happy by more and more consumer goods as well as a huge and almost universal media promoting consumerism. Bread and circuses is of course nothing new.
Countries around the world, whatever their politics, are almost entirely run by politicians who have prospered from ‘business as usual’, and usually business corruption which they have colluded in by allowing money laundering, allowing huge tax avoidance and evasion and more. They have now learnt to talk the talk about climate change, but, as Greta Thunberg pointed out, it has been all “blah, blah, blah”, promises but little or no action.
There were many different groups taking part in ‘Time To Act on Climate Change’, including the Campaign Against Climate Change who have organised regular protests in London since 2002, Friends of the Earth who I’ve supported since the 1970s, the Green Party, anti-fracking protesters including the fabulous ‘Nanas’ of Frack Free Lancashire, campaigners against Heathrow expansion – and I list a few more in Climate Change Rally, which also has pictures of some of the speakers.
At the end of the rally I went on to photograph a protest by ‘Art Not Oil’ who invaded the steps of Tate Britain with their ‘longship’ and ‘oil spills’ in a protest demanding the Tate give up taking sponsorship from BP, who used their support of the arts to give themselves a positive public image despite the pollution and climate change their activites cause. It’s time to end this ‘greenwashing’.
Viking longship invades Tate steps has a few pictures of the event. The Longship first sailed to the British Museum where BP had sponsored a show on the Vikings. As I commented, the plastic oil spills used by the protesters “are a lot easier to clean up than the real ones BP has created such as Deepwater Horizon in the Gulf of Mexico, and which could be truly catastrophic in theArctic.”
