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.
Climate Rush Protest Heathrow: On 4th September 2009 I joined Climate Rush at Sipson, one of the villages immediately north of Heathrow under threat from the plans to build a third runway.
Their 3 day stay here was their first stop on a one month tour of South West England and they were staying at the Sipson ‘Airplot’, bought by Greenpeace in what was planned to be the centre of the new runway. The legal owners of the plot were now “Oscar winning actress Emma Thompson, comedian Alistair McGowan and prospective Tory parliamentary candidate Zac Goldsmith and Greenpeace UK.”
Greenpeace had invited others to sign up to become ‘beneficial owners’ of small 1 metre square plots within the site and I was among the many who did so. They had hoped this would make it harder for the developers as they thought we would all need to be served with legal notices for the development to go ahead.
I’d long been opposed to the expansion of Heathrow. It remains clear that this is an airport that was set up in the wrong place, to close to London in a fairly densely populated area and with flight paths over the centre of London. And with the increasing threat of climate change and global extinction one of the last things we should be doing is increasing the carbon emissions and pollution from aviation; instead we should be looking at ways to cut down both the number of flights and the pollution from traffic and congestion in the area surrounding the airport.
I’ve lived most of my life close to Heathrow. As I wrote on My London Diary:
“I grew up under the main flight path in use for landing a couple of miles from touchdown. Although I was a plane spotter at an early age, all of us living there felt the disruption it caused in our lives, even back in the 1950s.
My teachers often had to stop and wait in mid-sentence for a plane to go over. We could often smell the fuel, and see and feel the oily grime although I don’t think the term “pollution” had then really entered normal vocabulary.
At a deeper level, I still sometimes have nightmares about planes going over in flames (as they sometimes did) and crashes, although since Terminal 4 blocked one of the existing runways (Heathrow was built with six though only two are now used) thankfully planes no longer shake my present house as they come in low on landing or take off. “
I wrote more about this back in 2009, as well as the continuing history of lies and deceit by which the airport was established and has since grown and grown. And also about the area as it was before the airport, rich agricultural land with market gardens and orchards. Of course I didn’t know it myself but my father did and cycled through it.
In the 1950s on my own bikes I cycled through the villages which would be destroyed by a third runway, particularly Harmondsworth which has retained much of its original charm, with a village green with a pub and church and, a few yards away, one of the finest medieval tithe barns (2 pictures at bottom of this page.) There is much more to read on My London Diary.
Climate Rush had organised a procession from the Sipson Airplot, led by local residents from NoTRAG, though most were at work today – more were expected later in the day and at the ‘Celebration of Community Resistance’ at Sipson the following day. “Suffragettes (including a ‘token’ male) wearing ‘Deeds Not Words ‘ and ‘Climate Rush’ red sashes carried three banners, Justice, Equity and Truth; Equity traveled on a horse-drawn cart along with a violinist. “
The banners read: JUSTICE: Rich Countries must recognise historic responsibility for climate change. EQUITY: Emission quotas must be per capita; the rich have no more right to pollute than the poor. TRUTH: Emission caps must be set in line with the latest climate science.
The procession went down the Heathrow and along the Northern Perimeter Road beside the perimeter fence, where we were joined by a police car, which stopped traffic for us before retuning to the Airplot.
There it was time to rest, and to eat some of the apples from the side of the plot. “A couple of the suffragettes climbed a tree to pick some more, but they turned out to be cookers. The kettle had been hanging over the embers of a wood fire and a few more sticks soon brought it to the boil for tea.”
I’d come to Sipson on the bike which I had ridden through there fifty years earlier – a present on my thirteenth birthday – and had got a puncture just a few hundred yards short of my destination.
“I sat down to mend my puncture. Unfortunately I its a while since I checked the repair kit in my pannier, and having found two largish holes found I didn’t have a large enough patch to cover the two of them and the rubber solution had dried up. It was time for me to walk the six miles home.”
Sipson Celebrates Third Runway Victory: On Saturday 28 August 2010 residents of Sipson and the neighbouring Middlesex villages of Harmondsworth and Harlington held a Family Fun Day to celebrate the successful end to their campaign against BAA’s plans to create a larger airport at London Heathrow by building a new runway and destroying their villages.
One of the first acts when the new Tory Lib-Dem coaltion came into power was to cancel the plans for the expansion of Heathrow by the building of a third runway, which had been agreed under New Labour. It was perhaps one of the few positive results from the coalition between the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats, with leading MPs from both parties at least those in the London area having earlier campaigned against the plans.
The fight against expansion had been long and hard, involving what leading campaigner John Stewart of HACAN described as ‘a ‘Victory Against All The Odds’, putting “success down to three main things: the building up of what it calls the largest and most diverse coalition ever to oppose expansion of an airport in the UK; a willingness to challenge the economic case for expansion; and a determination by the campaigners to set the agenda.”‘
Local MP John McDonnell talks with John Stewart of HACAN and then London Assembly member Murad Qureshi
In 1999 the owners of Heathrow, the largely Spanish owned BAA plc – the company formed by the privatisation of the British Airports Authority and now the Heathrow Airport Holdings Limited, had pledged at the Terminal 5 inquiry that they would never ask for a third runway. But only three years later they had brought forward massive plans for airport expansion, including a third runway.
And although again they had promised they would not call for a sixth terminal the plans soon included one, along with ground areas for standing aircraft and a relocated motorway spur that would cover most of Harlington, Sipson and Harmondsworth, as well as subjecting a further area of West London to increased aircraft noise and excessive pollution. BAA even declined to rule out making a request for a fourth major runway at Heathrow.
The first large-scale protest march took place in June 2003 and their were many further actions, including a mass protest at Heathrow in May 2008 and many smaller events, lobbies and meetings. The Climate Camp had come to Harmondsworth in 2007, Greenpeace who bought a local orchard as their ‘Airplot’ and direct action campaigners such as ‘Plane Stupid’, ‘Camp for Climate Action’ and ‘Climate Rush’ all gained publicity for the case against expansion.
John Stewart of HACAN
But Heathrow didn’t give up, and kept up the lobbying to persuade the Tories to give the project the go-ahead. The government set up an Airport Commission with a employee of one of Heathrow’s major owners having to leave his job with them to chair it. As intended this came up with preferring expansion at Heathrow in 2015, and this was adopted as government policy in 2016. But when it became clear that Heathrow would have to come up with the money, their plans were cut down – and in 2017 they dropped the plans for Terminal Six.
Geraldine Nicholson, Chair of NoTRAG
After a judicial review in 2020 ruled that the plans for expansion were unlawful because they had not taken into account the commitment to combat climate change, the government announced it would not appeal. But Heathrow did, took the case to the Supreme Court who in December 2020 lifted the ban so the planning application could go ahead.
Covid then came to the rescue, with the drop in passenger numbers meaning plans were put on hold. But according to Wikipedia, from which some of the above information comes, “as of June 2024 the third runway is still planned with a projected completion date around 2040.”
Back in 2010, although celebrating victory, campaigners and local residents were clear that the fight had to go one, and it has done. It seems rather unlikely giving the increasingly clear nature of our global climate catastrophe that Heathrow will ever get a third runway. Although the celebrations in 2010 may have been somewhat premature I think it was then that Heathrow really lost the battle. Since then we have been seeing the thrashings of a dying great beast.
You can read more about the Family Fun Day, organised by Hillingdon Council and NoTRAG on 28 August 2010 and see many more pictures on My London Diary at Sipson Celebrates Third Runway Victory.
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.
BP Greenwashing & Benefits Cuts – Thursday 19th May 2016 – Seven years ago today.
Greenpeace ‘Sinking Cities’ banners at BM/BP show – British Museum
There are some protests which are advertised well in advance and other actions which are kept highly secret with only a small group taking part being in the know. And the action on the opening day of the BP sposored exhibition Sinking Cities at the British Museum was definitely one of the latter.
I heard about it only as I was on my way up to London for another event close by, and detoured slightly to cover it. I live on the edge of London, just inside the M25 and can’t usually respond to ‘breaking news’ as it takes me too long to get there.
Clearly the BP sponsorship of ‘Sinking Cities’ was going to be controversial as there has been a long campaign, particularly by ‘BP or Not BP’ to get the British Museum to end the deal which has allowed BP to ‘greenwash’ their polluting and climate destroying activities, which have significantly contributed to global warming and so to recent floods in cities across the globe.
Greenpeace had come with very professionally produced large banners for ‘Sinking Cities’, naming some of the places which have been flooded recently by global warming induced climate change and had managed to come inside and hang this down the columns across the front of the museum’s Main entrance. At first glance they really looked as if they were a part of the Museum’s own publicity.
It really was impressive, and the Museum had been caught on the hop, reacting in panic they closed the whole museum for the day, dissapointing many who had come. This seemed unnecessary as the museum could simply have closed this front entrance to deal with the climbers and remove the banners. The climbers on the columns were obviously experienced and operating safely and apparently without damage to the museum structure.
It served as rather a good advertising stunt for the show, but of course was rather embarrassing for the sponsors BP which is why the Museum felt it necessary to remove them. Most other major arts organisations in London including the Tate Museums, the Royal Opera House and the National Portrait Gallery had dropped BP as a sponsor following pressure by protests such as these and pressure from artists, musicians and staff who work in them.
No More Deaths from Benefit Cuts – Tottenham Court Rd
I had come to London that morning as delegates at the TUC disabled workers conference led by activists from Disabled People Against Cuts (DPAC), Mental Health Resistance Network (MHRN) and Winvisible (Women with visible and invisible disabilities) were to hold a lunchtime protest which I had been invited to photograph.
They came out and marched, led by people in wheelchairs from Congress House to Tottenham Court Road calling for an end to government benefit cuts which have led to the deaths of many disabled people – including 2 DPAC members the previous day.
Two long banners gave the message ‘NO MORE DEATHS FROM BENEFIT CUTS’ and on arriving at Tottenham Court Road they held these across the road stopping traffic in both directions.
Another banner was full of the names of some of those known to have died because of sanctions and cuts in benefits, among them David Clapson, a diabetic ex-soldier who died penniless, alone and starving after being sanctioned. He didn’t even have enough money to keep the refrigerator to store his insulin running.
Another banner asked the question ‘IS THIS HOW 2 TREAT Disabled People?’. The protesters held a short and noisy rally, getting considerably support from many around including many workers also on their lunch breaks. There were a few short speeches before it was time for the protesters to march back for the afternoon session at Congress House, with a police officer arriving just as they were about to leave. As usual he is confused to find that no-one is in charge.
When the Tories got into power, at first in coalition in 2010, they determined they would save money by cutting benefits thinking the disabled would be an easy target. Groups such as DPAC and the others at this event have shown them how wrong they were. These people rely on benefits to live and to have a decent life and have organised and reacted to try to retain them against the government’s attacks.
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”.
Reuters reported recently that the big oil companies are set to make a record profits of $200billion thanks to high oil and gas prices following the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
This follows the previous year in which BP, Chevron, Exxon Mobil, Shell and Total delivered huge returns to shareholders with dividends and share buybacks. Shell has already announced what others have described as an ‘obscene’ £32billion, leading to calls for a higher level of windfall tax. BP is making similar excessive amounts, its 2022 profits at £23billion more than double the previous year, yet it is also reducing its climate committments.
The oil companies are making these profits from their sales of oil and gas, still by far the largest parts of their business, and areas they are hoping to increase through further exploration and exploitation of these climate killing results. Fossil fuels remain the background of their business, and they remain dirty businesses operating with much greater concern for their profits than for the environment, making relatively small gestures to switch from polluting and carbon intensive fuels to greener alternatives.
Greenwashing is very much the name of their game both in direct publicity which magnifies their relatively small activities in renewables and in the sponsorship of cultural organisations and activities such as the special exhibition on Troy which was taking place at the British Museum in 2020.
BP’s logo, introduced in 2000 is a good example of greenwashing, replacing the older long established shield emblazoned with the letters BP. They apparently paid a huge amount to San Francisco’s Landor Associates for the new design. The new logo has a sun-like shape, with a white centre and radiating out from this yellow, light green and dark green petals, clearly an attempt to suggest their business was green and environmentally friendly. Far from the truth.
The gap between logo and reality became stark in 2010, when a huge quantity of oil spilled from their Deepwater Horizon drilling station in the Gulf of Mexico. The spill had terrible impacts on plants, birds and marine species, quite opposed to the eco-friendly message of their new logo, and Greenpeace took out a full-page advert in The Guardian to invite readers to design a more appropriate version – and you can see a gallery of some of the submissions on The Guardian web site.
The winner, by French designer Laurent Hunziker shows a black silhouette of a seabird dripping oil superimposed on the centre of the BP logo, the lower part on which the bird is standing also blacked out to represent oil in what Hunsiker described as looking “like a fatal sunset for us.”
On Saturday 8th February 2020, BP or not BP? together with other groups including Extinction Rebellion organised the biggest ever protest against BP sponsorship at the British Museum, then showing the BP-sponsored exhibition called Troy: Myth and Reality.
As the organisers stated, the name was “horribly appropriate: we’re sick of the oil industry using our arts and culture as a Trojan Horse to hide its deadly activities. BP’s sponsorship may look like a gift, but death and destruction are lurking inside. The oil giant wants to associate itself with this famous myth but in reality, just 75 miles from the site of ancient Troy, it recently completed an enormous gas pipeline in partnership with the repressive Turkish government, locking us into using more fossil fuels when we should be ditching them.”
They also point out that the Chair of Trustees of the British Museum ‘recently called climate change “the great issue of our time”. Yet the museum continues to support and promote BP, one of the corporations most responsible for the crisis.’
The protest included a large Trojan Horse which they brought into the museum courtyard, a group of protesters dressed as Greek Gods and ancient Greeks and the XR mime group usually referred to as the ‘Red Brigade’ who were in black for the event, the colour of ‘black gold’ crude oil.
Also inside the museum were number of workshops and performances by ‘BP or not BP’ including protests calling for the return of stolen artifacts including the Parthenon marbles, and an indigenous campaigner from Free West Papua spoke about BP’s collusion with the Indonesian regime in denying his people their freedom – this is just one of a number of countries around the world where BP sides with repressive governments.
I left the museum at the end of the main performance in the museum’s great hall along with most of the 1500 protesters, but a small group remained there overnight making a new exhibit for the museum using plaster casts of limbs.
Another busy day for me in London on Saturday 2nd November 2013, though I spent quite a lot of it in a pub with zombies who were putting on a rather late Halloween appearance. But there were more serious things as well.
Free Kieron & Arctic 30 – Russian Embassy, Notting Hill. Sat 2 Nov 2013
Family, friends & supporters of freelance videojournalist Kieron Bryan, one of the 30 arrested on Greenpeace’s Arctic Sunrise, held a silent vigil at the Russian Embassy, delivering a petition signed by over 1000 journalists calling for his release.
There was intense media interest in the event, with several TV crews, radio journalists and photographers, perhaps because the imprisonment of a journalist is a threat to all journalists around the world. Unusually the Russian embassy had agreed to meet Kieron’s brother and take the petition, and although no photography is permitted in the private street in which it (and the Israeli embassy) are situated I was able to photograph him standing in the gate to the street holding it.
The Arctic 30 had sailed to the Russian Arctic on the Greenpeace ship Arctic Sunrise in September 2013 to protest peacefully against Gazprom’s plans to start oil production in the Arctic. The ship was seized and they were kept in custody for two months before being released on bail in November – after the Netherlands had filed a case at the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea which led to an order for the crew and Dutch-registered vessel to be released while the case was being considered. Although Russia ignored this ruling they did release the journalists, activists and crew, and six months later, the ship. Probably protests such as this helped to persuade them to do so.
The Dutch government filed complaints at the European Court against the unlawful detention of the Dutch-registered ship and the protesters also took a case claiming that hey had been detained unlawfully and their right to freedom of expression had been breached.
Gurkha Veterans Hunger Strike for Justice – Downing St, Sat 2 Nov 2013
Gurkha wives and widows support the campaign for justice
Although high-profile earlier campaigns supported by Joanna Lumley and others in the broadcast media have led to increased support for former Gurkha soldiers, elderly Gurkha veterans did not benefit from these and most live here in extreme poverty.
After submitting their petition to Prime Minister David Cameron and the Nepalese Prime Minister in April and getting no satisfactory result and they had “with a heavy heart” begun a series of hunger strikes. These had begun in late October with a “13 days relay hunger strike in the name of the 13 Ghurka VCs” which was in progress when I took these pictures, demanding equal pensions, compensation, a preserved pension for those made redundant, the right of settlement in the UK for their adult children and free medical treatment in Nepal.
Five days later some began a hunger strike until death, and after two weeks the government offered talks and this was halted.
I met with around a hundred zombies in Waxy O’Connor’s pub on Rupert St, where they were drinking for a couple of hours occasionally emerging into the dim daylight of Wardour St for a fag break.
Around 4pm as dusk was falling the multitude of undead staggered up the stairs to begin their crawl around Londinium in search of brains and booze. I left them to it.
Among those on Gerrard Street were a group of Zombie Police whose warrant cards carried the message ‘A pint of Cider and Black Please’.
Announced as the seventh consecutive year for this event, it followed on from some earlier ‘Crawls of the Dead’ which began in 2004.
Inside the pub the lighting was low and I needed to use flash. While the Nikon flash gun I was using in the hot-shoe of my camera is generally a great performer I had some problems. While it is OK with the camera in landscape mode, turning the setup through 90 degrees for portrait format images isn’t really very successful. And I also found myself unable to use the usually magical i-TTL mode, not because of some zombie spells, but as later searches through the fat manual at home revealed it is incompatible with the camera mode I had set for the dark interior. I think the camera and flash manual have a total of well over 500 pages – these things are just too complicated for mortals.
City Link & Cleaners at John Lewis – Oxford St, Sat 2 Nov 2013
As the final zombies staggered out of the pub to crawl Soho I rushed away to Oxford Street where cleaners were holding a protest outside the flagship John Lewis Store, and were today joined by City Link workers who deliver goods for the company.
City Link was sold off earlier in the year to Jon Moulton’s private equity group ‘Better Capital’ and face pay cuts, enforced overtime, loss of bonus scheme and other changes. They were protesting with John Lewis’s cleaners who are fighting to get a living wage and better working conditions. Unlike other staff in the store who are directly employed by the company as ‘partners’ and share in the profits through a bonus scheme, cleaners are outsourced to a cleaning company and paid less than a pittance, with unsocial hours and poor conditions of service. John Lewis management wash their hands and say it it nothing to do with them.
