Windrush & Climate – On Saturday 8th September 2018 after photographing a protest against the continuing hounding of Windrush generation migrants to the UK in Brixton I went to a Climate Change protest outside Tate Modern.
Justice for Windrush descendants – Brixton
A rally and march hosted by Movement for Justice called for the Windrush scheme to be widened to include all families and descendants of the Windrush Generation and for an end to the racist hostile environment for all immigrants.
The Windrush scandal first came to public attention in 2017 and 2018 when we heard that hundreds of migrants including those who had been urged to come and help Britain rebuild after the Second World War and who were then given the right to live and work in this country permanently where being hounded by the Home Office and some had already been deported.
Much of the information came from the work of Guardian journalist Amelia Gentleman publishing the experiences of these people. The Home Office in 2012 under Theresa May had introduced a ‘Hostile Environment’ law which required people to produce at least one official document from every year they had lived in the UK to prove they had the right to stay here.
Many were of course unable to do this, and the Home Office itself had destroyed many of the official records which would have proved their case. Many were declared to be ‘undocumented migrants’ (or as the politicians and press racistly and inaccurately labelled them, ‘illegal immigrants’.
They “began to lose their access to housing, healthcare, bank accounts and driving licenses. Many were placed in immigration detention, prevented from travelling abroad and threatened with forcible removal, while others were deported to countries they hadn’t seen since they were children.“
The government promised to correct the matter and in May 2018 the then Home Secretary Saji Javid set up a ‘Windrush Lessons Learned Review’ under Wendy Williams. When published in 2020 it showed that the Windrush scandal was the deliberate and inevitable result of Tory government policies.
Home Secretary Priti Patel then said she accepted the reports recommendations but in 2023 Suella Braverman decided to ditch three of of them. In June 2024 the High Court ruled that her actions in abandoning the promise to establish a migrants’ commssioner and to increase the powers of the independent chief examiner of borders and immigration was unlawful.
The scandal continues, and the replacement by 2025 of physical residence permits by digital e-visas for the roughly half a million non-EU immigrants with leave to remain in the UK seems almost certain to generate a similar scandal.
After a rally in Windrush Square which included Eulalee, a Jamaican grandmother who has been fighting for 17 years to stay in the UK with her Windrush generation husband, daughter and grandchildren as well as others affected by the scandal there was a march around the centre of Brixton, with several stops for short speeches in the more crowded parts.
Eulalee and Michael Groce on the march
Also on the march was Michael Groce, poet, community worker and Green Party candidate as councillor in Brixton, holds a poster ‘Yes, It’s Racist’. The 1985 Brixton riots began after police shot and seriously wounded his mother, putting her in hospital for a year. Later they paid her over £500,000 in damages without admitting any liability.
On the railway bridge across Brixton Road was the graffitied message ‘CLAPHAM THAT WAY YOU 2D FLAT WHITE TEPID COLONIALIST WANKER”, with Brixton gentrification now taking away much of the unique character of the area where many who arrived on the Empire Windrush in 1948 settled after having been initially housed in a giant wartime underground shelter on Clapham Common.
After marching around the centre of Brixton spreading their message with megaphones and posters the campaigners returned for a further rally in Windrush Square.
Climate Reality, a global and diverse group of activists, community leaders, organisers, scientists, storytellers and others united to act over global warming was supported by the UK Campaign Against Climate Change, Fossil Free UK and the Green Party in one of thousands of rallies around the world demanding urgent action by government leaders to leaders commit to a fossil free world that works for all of us.
They called for people to take personal actions to reduce their own contribution to climate change but more importantly to join together to press for action at local, national and international level.
In particular they called for the government to end its support for fracking and for local authorities to divest from fracking and fossil fuels.
Croydon, Abortion & Windrush – I began work on Saturday 5th of May with a late May Day march in Croydon, then came to Westminster where abortion rights protesters were meeting to oppose a ‘March for Life’ anti-abortion march and rally. At Downing Street there was a rally against the racist attacks by Theresa May against the Windrush generation, which later marched to continue at the Home Office, where I ended the day after photographing the anti-abortion march.
Croydon march for May Day – Saturday 5th May 2018
Although International Workers Day is celebrated internationally on May 1st, in Croydon there was a march and rally on the following Saturday.
Croydon is just 15 minutes by public transport from the centre of London, and those who were able to do so had probably joined the main London march on May Day, while others will have had to wait for the weekend to celebrate, so the march and rally on Saturday made sense.
It wasn’t a huge march, though doubtless more made their way to the rally later at Rusking House, where the speakers were to include Ted Knight, once the leader of Lambeth council and then one of the best-known Labour politicians, derided in the press of the day as ‘Red Ted’. One of the largest groups on the march was the supporters of the local Keep Our St Helier Hospital campaign fighting against proposed cuts there.
Women protest anti-abortion march – Parliament Square
Feminists in the abortion rights campaign held a rally in Parliament Square before the annual March for Life UK by pro-life anti-abortion campaigners was to arrive for their rally.
They opposed any increase of restrictions on abortion and called for an end to the harassment of women going into clinics and called for women in Northern Ireland to be given the same rights as those in the rest of the UK, as well as supporting the Irish referendum to repeal the 8th amendment to the constitution dating from 1983 which effectively banned abortion in Ireland.
I walked up Whitehall to meet the several thousand anti-abortion campaigners, mainly Catholics, marching to their rally in Parliament Square.
They argue that even at conception the fertilised egg should be awarded an equal right to life as the woman whose body it is in, and call legalised abortion the greatest violation to human rights in history.
This was the first London march by ‘March for Life UK’ who had previously held marches in Birmingham and came a few weeks an Irish vote was expected to repeal the 8th amendment and allow abortion in Ireland, and some posters and placards called for a ‘No’ vote in this.
I remained on Whitehall to join a rally at Downing St organised by Stand Up to Racism calling for Theresa May’s racist 2014 Immigration Act to be repealed and an immediate end to the deportation and detention of Commonwealth citizens, with those already deported to be bought back to the UK.
It demanded guaranteed protection or all Commonwealth citizens and for those affected to be compensated for deportation, threats of deportation, detention, loss of housing, jobs, benefits and denial of NHS treatment and an end to the ‘hostile environment’ introduced by Theresa May.
Speakers also condemned the unusual moves by the Tories in ways that threaten the normal working of Parliament to try and keep information about the Windrush scandal secret. Aong those speaking were Shadow Home Secretary Diane Abbott, trade unionists, and people from organisations standing up for immigrants and opposing immigration detention including Movement for Justice who brought two women who had been held in Yarl’s Wood to speak.
After the rally at Downing Street protesters marched to the Home Office for a further rally there.
Bread & Roses, Morales & Russian anti-fascists: Three events I photographed on Saturday 19th January 2019.
Bread & Roses is again relevant now in January 2024, with the release of a new version of the song a few days ago by the ‘Orchestra of Cardboard‘, part of the amazing ‘Every street a POWER STATION campaign‘, a project of Walthamstow’s community interest company Optimistic Foundation CIC set up by artist and filmmaker Hilary Powell and filmmaker and musician Dan Edelstyn. The recording is a part of their fundraising campaign and your can read, see and hear more about it and their other campaigns which are already having an effect in the area on their crowdfunder page.
But back to January 2019, five years ago today.
Women’s Bread & Roses protest
Inspired by the Bread & Roses protests which revolutionised workers’ rights for women in 1912, Women’s March London marched from the BBC to a rally in Trafalgar Square against economic oppression, violence against women, gender pay gap, racism, fascism, institutional sexual harassment and hostile environment in the UK, and called for a government dedicated to equality and working for all of us rather than the few.
The London march was part of an international day with women marching in many countries around the world, particularly in cities across the USA.
At the start of the march was opposite the BBC on the steps of Langham Place a few of the women organising the event were being directed and filmed by a BBC film crew. Supposedly this was a documentary but it seemed to be more a scripted drama closely controlled by the director and with the women involved holding orange folders from which they read.
But there were a rather larger group of women (and just a few men with them) standing around outside the BBC building and largely ignoring the filming that was taking place. Many had made placards especially for the event, with some using words from the poem ‘Bread and Roses‘ written by James Oppenheim and published at the end of 1911. The phrase ‘Bread and Roses’ came from a speech the previous year by Helen Todd, speaking about the need for laws to regulate wages, working hours and conditions.
A few days later a strike was started by textile workers, largely immigrants, in Lawrence, Massachusetts. The strike was organised by the IWW, the Industrial Workers of the World, led largely by women and they took up Oppenheims poem and sang it at their meetings and marches, as well as apparently marching with a banner ‘We want Bread, and Roses too!’ during their three-month strike.
Eventually, when the BBC had finished making their movie the women gathered for a march and I walked with them to Trafalgar Square.
Bolivians protest against Morales – Trafalgar Square
A small group of Bolivians had come to protest following a decision in December by the Electoral Commission that President Evo Morales could stand for a fourth term in office in the October 2019 elections which were starting with primaries at the end of January 2019. But I was not convinced that this was truly a protest about democracy rather than simply against his socialist policies.
Morales, Bolivia’s first president to come from the indigenous population was first elected in 2005. He supported the 2009 constitution which allowed only two consecutive terms in office but was able to stand for a third term as his first term had been before the limit was imposed. In 2016 tried to increase the limit to three terms by a referendum which was narrowly defeated. But after this the courts ruled that the limitation infringed the human rights of citizens, allowing him to stand for a further term.
Morales won the October 2019 but their were widespread protests alleging electoral fraud, although later investigations suggested he had indeed gained the 10% lead required for a first-round victory. But the protests grew and he was endangered by armed groups; eventually he resigned on 10th November 2019, fleeing to Mexico where he was granted political asylum. Allegations made against him of sedition and terrorism were later found to be politically motivated and in 2020 a Bolivian court found his rights had been violated and judicial procedures breached.
His successful policies which reduced poverty and illiteracy and combated the influence of the USA and multinational companies made him very unpopular among the middle class and particularly the groups accustomed to running the country. Many in the USA encouraged and financed the opposition to him as he was widely seen to have shown a successful alternative to the growth of international capitalism.
Solidarity with Russian anti-fascists – Whitechapel
Finally I went east to the Cable Street Mural where anarchists and anti-fascists were meeting l to oppose racism, xenophobia, fascism and the upsurge of far-right populism and to show solidarity with Russian anti-fascists who have been arrested, framed and tortured in a brutal wave of repression.
Russian and Ukranian comrades spoke at the rally. telling us of the persecution taking place. The Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) arrested six in Penza in 2017, charging them with belonging to a non-existent organisation, ‘The Network’. Beatings and torture before their trial were used to make them give false confessions.
Two others were arrested in 2018 in St Petersburg and charged with belonging to the same fictional network and again tortured into making confessions and further similar arrests have followed. A total of 11 where then in prison for belonging to’The Network’, facing 5 to 25 years in jail.
The date for the protest was chosen as the anniversary of the brutal murder of two Russian anti-fascists, journalist Anastasia Baburova and lawyer Stanislav Markelov, by fascists in broad daylight on the streets of Moscow on January 19th 2009. Russian anarchists and anti-fascists hold events to remember them on this day every year.
There was then a march to a further rally in Altab Ali Park, named for the 24-year-old clothing worker murdered in a nearby street on 4 May 1978.
Movement For Justice at Yarls Wood – On Saturday 7th November 2015 Movement for Justice organised a large protest with other groups to show solidarity with the women locked up inside Yarl’s Wood immigration detention centre and to demand that all such detention prisons be shut down.
MFJ Meet To March to Yarl’s Wood – Twinwoods Business Park
Yarl’s Wood was built on a former wartime airfield in remote countryside five or six miles from the centre of Bedford, perhaps chosen in part for its remoteness, which makes it difficult for visitors or protesters to get there.
But Movement for Justice – MfJ – and others had organised coaches from around the country, including eight from London as well as one from Bedford Station to bring people with others arriving by car, taxi or bicycle. The road leading to the prison is private, but people were able to meet on a public road around a mile away outside the main entrance to the business park there.
While we were waiting for everyone to arrive there was lively rally with a great deal of dancing, singing and chanting, keeping everyone’s spirits high, and keeping us warm as a chilly wind with occasional spots of rain swept across the open site on top of a high plateau.
Among those at the protest were many immigrants who had themselves been detained at this or other detention centres around the country while waiting for a decision to be taken on their asylum claims. Sometimes this takes several years and those who are taken to prisons such as these are held indefinitely, never knowing if or when they will be released or taken under guard to be forcibly deported.
Many inside have fled their countries after violent attacks including sexual assault and rape and deserve humane treatment not imprisonment. Few if any pose any real threat and could be housed outside, often with friends or relatives in this country. If they were allowed to work many would make a positive contribution. They would also be much more able to contact their solicitors and collect information to support their asylum cases than from inside the detention centres where access is limited.
Instead the Home Office locks them away and sometimes seems to have forgotten them and lost the key. One woman was detained for a couple of days less than three years before being released – after which she returned with the MfJ and spoke at protests which give those still inside some hope and remind them that they have not entirely been forgotten.
As well as MfJ, Sisters Uncut, Lesbians & Gays support the Migrants, All Africans Women’s Groups, Glasgow Unity and others had come to join in the protest. Eventually with around a thousand people gathered it was time to march, though a few coaches had not yet arrived.
We set off on the long walk to the detention centre, with banners and placards, a short distance along the road and then down the public footpath which runs through a couple of fields and across another track, and into a field on the north side of the prison, about a mile from where the campaigners had gathered.
Here there was a fairly steep rise a few feet up a hill from the 20 foot high fence around the detention centre and from the top of this we could see the upper floor windows, some of which had women at them, though only through the dense thick wire grid of the upper half of the fence.
The windows do not have bars, but only open a few inches, but this was enough for the women inside to put their hands through and hold towels and clothing to greet the protesters. Some managed to hold out messages: one read ‘We came to seek Refuge. Not to be locked up’ and another ‘We are from torture. We Need Freedom’.
The lower 10 feet of the fence is made of stout metal panels, and beating or kicking on these makes a very loud noise. Later some protesters brought up rope ladders so they could hold placards and banners on the more open top of the fence so they could be seen by the women inside.
The prisoners are allowed to have phones which they need to contact their solicitors and advisers over their cases and some were able to use these to communicate with the protesters and to have their voices relayed over the PA system the protesters had brought.
There was a heavy rain shower during the protest, and the ground which was already muddy and with large puddles became very treacherous and getting up from the concrete and narrow flat area at the bottom of the fence became difficult. But soon the sun was back out again.
Most of those who spoke at the event were former detainees, some of whom had friends who were still inside the immigration prison.
The protest was still continuing when I had to leave and the low winter sun was beginning to make photography more difficult. It seemed a long and rather lonely journed as I made my way back to the road, boots heavy with mud. But I was free to go, while women who had come to this country seeking asylum from danger and violence in their own countries were still locked up by a hostile and unfeeling government.
Today, 18th march is the UN Anti-Racism Day, and in 2017 it was also a Saturday, and tens of thousands marched through London, starting as they will today outside the BBC and ending with a large rally in Westminster.
Today’s march, as in 2017, is organised by Stand Up to Racism, Unite Against Fascism and Love Music, Hate Racism and the TUC and supported by many other groups, including football fans from around the country who will be wearing team colours.
This years march is perhaps even more important, with the UK Government pursuing clearly racist policies against immigrants in last year’s Nationality and Borders Act, its attempt to deport refugees to Rwanda and Suella Braverman’s recently announced Illegal Migration Bill.
Phyll Opoku of PCS ‘Stand Up to Racism’
Football fans have been energised by the BBC’s reaction to Gary Lineker’s tweet. He was clearly correct in observing the hostile anti-refugees language used by the government to language used in Germany in the 1930s. They say the government are trying to stir up division and racism to deflect attention from their multiple crises and turn refugees into scapegoats.
Unfortunately it isn’t just the government, but also the official opposition who continue to up the ante over immigration, refusing to stand up to the government with any real attempt to improve our treatment of refugees and asylum seekers. Real opposition to racism has been left to a few increasingly isolated figures on the left of the party – including many of those who have been ejected for supposed anti-semitism, increasingly being used to expel Jewish members who support the Palestinian people. And of course left to footballers or former footballers.
Even Theresa May, who the 2017 march was strongly opposed to for promoting racist measures against immigrants and in particular Muslims in concert with Donald Trump has found Braverman’s latest proposals which will break international law on the human rights of migrants a step too far.
The 2023 march organisers say:
In Britain we face a crisis-ridden government attempting to use racism to make ordinary people pay for the cost of living crisis. The ‘Rwanda plan’, the Nationality and Borders Act, racist deportations and the hostile environment for refugees and migrants are all about divide and rule.
The government deny the reality of institutional racism – despite massively disproportionate deaths in black communities during the pandemic – and the reality of deaths in police custody, racist stop and search and discrimination across society.
Internationally we are seeing the growth of the racist and fascist right and an alarming rise in Islamophobia, antisemitism, Sinophobia, anti East/South East Asian racism and attacks on Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities.
Despite a rail strike this Saturday I hope to be there later today, again taking photographs and marching with many thousands of others.
Earlier this week I took a walk with a couple of friends in Peckham, one of my favourite parts of south London, and currently on this site I’ve been making a number of illustrated posts about walks I made there back in 1989, the latest, a couple od days ago being Bird in Bush, Wood Dene, Asylum and a School. But I’ve also photographed other events in Peckham, including the first Peckham Pride, seven years ago on Saturday 20th February 2016.
Peckham Pride
LGSMigrants and Movement for Justice organised the event to put the politics of resistance which has for many years been sidelined by the growing commercialisation of Pride marches and events back into Pride.
Peckham’s FIRST EVER Pride march is for everyone with and without citizenship, papers or no papers. We REFUSE to accept stigma or discrimination over the colour of our passports, the colour of our skin, our gender, our sexuality or our ability.
They had chosen to come to Peckham for this event as the area had become a major target for anti-immigration raids, racist go-home vans, and street harassment by the Home Office.
The are has a large Nigerian and Ghanaian community which makes it a convenient target for racist raids leading to brutal deportations on cattle-like charter flights to Nigeria and Ghana. But its residents have also made it a focus of growing popular resistance on the streets to these illegal and immoral activities.
Several hundred supporters of the event met on the square by Peckham Library – now threatened along with the Peckham Arch by Southwark Council who are eager to build on much of the area – and perhaps to end the community events which gather there, sometimes critical of council activities.
At a rally there were speeches calling for refugees to be welcomed in Britain and to find here a safe haven where they can enjoy freedom, oppourtunity and education. Instead they are faced with a government which is increasingly making the country a hostile environment both for them and for the majority of citizens. The speakers emphasized the need to organise and act together to oppose and defeat these polices.
From the arch on Peckham High Street Peckham Pride marched down the major shopping street of Rye Lane, attracting attention and some encouraging gestures and comments with some loud chanting and a samba band.
They stopped again a little past Rye Lane station where there were more speeches, including by another former Yarl’s Wood detainee who told how they had organised and held together to stop a fellow detainee being forcibly deported. A local shopkeeper came to talk about the Border Force raids, including one on his premises and the community opposition close to them, and there was a powerful speech from a local resident about the need to organise resistance and oppose these raids.
Local resistance is both effective and appropriate, as the Home Office employees who carry them out are generally acting in abuse of the law. I had to leave before the end of the march and missed the performances which were to follow it at the Bussey Centre at the centre of Peckham.
A protest at the Home Office on Wednesday 5th September 2012 called for international students at London Met University to be allowed to complete their studies and not face deportation after having invested heavily in getting a degree in the UK. Some then marched to Downing St.
The decision to revoke London Met University’s licence to sponsor non-EU students taken on 29 August 2012 taken by the UK Border Agency was an example of petty-minded racism by the Home Office at its worst. It was made after a limited investigation had found that some students studying there had no leave to remain in the UK.
It was a totally disproportionate reaction to the findings, which should have been dealt with on an individual basis and with discussions over the procedures in place at the university tightening them where necessary. But Home Secretary Theresa May had declared a ‘hostile environment’ three months earlier and this was something to show the public that she meant business.
It was a decision which caused unnecessary disruption and costs to the majority of international students who were legitimately pursuing their studies at the university and which seriously damaged the UK’s reputation as a country for students to come from abroad to study.
The licence was reinstated the following April, following further discussions and inspections at London Met, though they were only allowed to admit new students from abroad on a limited scale for the next 12 months. The actions taken by the Home Office could clearly have been taken without penalising students who were studying on courses at the university, and served to emphasise the callous disregard of the revocation.
Universities Minister David Willis had clearly also been embarrassed by the Home Office decision, setting up a task force to provide a clearing house for the displaced London Met students, and two weeks after the revocation the government launched a £2 million fund to “help legitimate students to meet additional costs they may incur by moving to another institution to finish their studies. These include: covering the cost of any fee for a repeat visa application and discretionary payments to cover, for example, lost deposits on accommodation due to having to move somewhere else to study.”
I’m not sure how adequately this fund recompensed students for their extra costs, but clearly they were subjected to considerable disruption in their studies and also in their personal lives, breaking the many relationships they will have had with fellow students and tutors, and being transferred onto courses with different approaches and areas of study. Even courses with the same titles will have significant differences and students may well find they were repeating some studies already made while missing out on others.
Students march to Downing St
The UK Border Agency had long been criticised for its actions and poor service, with an increasing number of complaints to the Parliamentary Ombudsman over asylum, residence status and immigration issue – and in 2009-10 all but 3% were decided in favour of the complainants. In 2013 a report by the Home Affairs Select Committee was so damning about its incompetence that Home Secretary Theresa May was forced to abolish it, replacing the agency by three new organisations, UK Visas and Immigration, Immigration Enforcement and Border Force.
Close Down Yarl’s Wood – Yarl’s Wood Immigration prison, near Bedford
Saturday 8th August 2015 saw a large protest outside the immigration jail at Yarl’s Wood where asylum seekers are locked up indefinitely by our racist immigration system without trial, a prison run for profit by a private company where detainees are subjected to abuse and sexual harassment.
Yarl’s Wood was used to detain women, many of whom had fled abuse and violence in their own countries only to arrive in this country and be locked up and further abused here. The detention centre is in a remote location in a business park on a former wartime airfield around five miles from Bedford.
The protest was one of a long series organised by Movement for Justice, but was supported by a large number of other groups, particularly many women’s groups including Sisters Uncut. In my post on My London Diary I listed 25 of them, but there were others too. This was only the second protest they had organised at Yarls Wood, but it came after a series I’d photographed at the Harmondsworth and Colnbrook detention centres.
MfJ is a small Trotskyist group which has been one of the most active UK groups organising against racism and for civil rights in the UK since it was formed by students in North London in 1995. This protest came a couple of years before a bitter dispute led many other groups to end cooperation with them, but MfJ continue their active role, in particular in opposition to deportation charter flights and the shameful Rwanda plan.
The main entrance to the detention centre is on a private road which is gated some distance from the centre. The coaches bringing people from across the country, and me and others from Bedford Station were parked in a long line at the side of a public road around a mile to the north, close to the locked entrance to the business park. The protest began on an area of grass here as we waited for everyone to arrive, and there were speeches and much chanting and dancing.
Finally the protest began its march, setting off around 300 metres along the road to a bridleway which eventually after around a mile of walking led to a hilly field beside the 20ft high fence around the prison. The lower 10ft of this is solid metal sheeting, but the upper 10ft a sturdy metal gauze, and from the hill we could see women at many of the windows waving to greet the protesters. Those held inside feel isolated and forgotten, though there are a few prison visitors and they are allowed some phone contact with solicitors and others to pursue their asylum cases.
Protesters made a great noise, kicking and banging on the metal sheeting of the fence as well as shouting, and had brought a sound system so that they could speak to the women outside. They were also able to make phone contact with some of them and amplify their voices too.
The windows of the centre only open a couple of inches, but some were able to squeeze their arms through the gap and wave cloths or articles of clothing, while others held up messages to the glass. One carefully drawn one read ‘We Want Freedom – No Human Is Illegal – Close Yarls Wood’ while another simply read ‘Help’. Others wrote their mobile numbers large enough to be read by the protesters to contact them.
A group of people wearing face masks began to write slogans on the fence, and soon a long length of it was covered with them ‘No Borders’, ‘No One is Illegal’ ‘#SetHerFree’, ‘Shut it Down’, ‘Gaza 2 Yarls Wood Destroy Apartheid Walls’, ‘Racist Walls’ and more.
The speakers on the hill facing the prison included several who had been held inside Yarls Wood and could see women inside they knew, and others who had been in other detention centres. Most people who are held in this way are finally released and allowed to stay in the UK – sometimes after several years of imprisonment – and their seems no justification for locking them up in this way.
Here’s the final paragraph I wrote back in 2015:
Too soon we had to leave. And they had to stay. As I walked away to catch the coach back to Bedford station I felt ashamed at the way that my country treats asylum seekers. They deserve support and humanity and get treated worse than criminals.
End Austerity, No to Racism, Tories Out! The main event I covered on Saturday 16th July was a march and rally organised by the the People’s Assembly and Stand Up To Racism as an emergency demonstration after the Brexit referendum result a few weeks earlier. But I also photographed three other events, two on the edges of this and the first totally unrelated.
Falun Dafa march against Chinese repression – Regent St
I hadn’t been aware that practitioners of Falun Dafa (also known as Falun Gong), an advanced Buddhist practice of moral rectitude, meditation and exercise founded by Mr Li Hongzhi in 1992, were to be marching through London to protest the continuing torture and repression they have experience in China since 1999, and simply came across them as I walked up Regent Street towards the BBC where the People’s Assembly march was gathering.
I think I had first photographed Falun Gong when they took part in the Westminster New http://mylondondiary.co.uk/2004/01/jan.htm Year’s Day Parade back in 2004 but I had taken pictures of them quite a few times since then, both at major events and the regular protests that they hold. They have maintained a small permanent 24 hour protest opposite the Chinese Embassy in Portland Place for many years.
In China, Falun Dafa have been subjected to forced labour, psychiatric abuse, torture and even execution to supply human organs for Chinese transplant operations since they were targeted in an antireligious campaign by the Chinese Communist Party in 1999. In earlier years the party had encouraged the movement and the spiritual practices from which Falung Dafa emerged as an extremist form. While Falun Dafa is a cult with some beliefs that endanger its adherents and many would find abhorrent this in no way justifies their criminal persecution in China.
End Austerity, No to Racism, Tories Out! – BBC, Regent St
The People’s Assembly and Stand Up To Racism march had chosen to start outside the BBC, as I wrote “in the forlorn hope that they might for once cover a protest in Britain properly. Many marching and at the rally showed great support for Jeremy Corbyn as our next prime minister – and the only hope of a future for the Labour Party.” Unfortunately that was not to be – and we are suffering now.
Many of those urging the public to vote to leave Europe in the months leading up to the referendum had represented this as a way we could control immigration to this country, and had deliberately stirred up racist fears. The result had been an increase in racist and other hate attacks, particularly directed against refugees and asylum seekers. Many were on the march to support the human and civil rights and show solidarity with refugees and asylum seekers against the upsurge in racism and hate attacks.
The Home Office’s ‘hostile environment’ policy, first announced in 2012 by then Home Secretary Theresa May was cited, according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_Office_hostile_environment_policy Wikipedia, “as one of the harshest immigration policies in the history of the United Kingdom, and has been widely criticised as inhumane, ineffective, and unlawful” with the UN Human Rights Council finding it fostered xenophobia and the Equality and Human Rights Commission finding it broke equalities law – and of course it led to the Windrush scandal.
I took pictures of the people preparing to march and walked with it a short distance down Regent Street before leaving to cover two other events before returning to the rally at the end of the march.
One of the groups taking part in the march were United Voices of the World supporters including some of those taking part in the long strike – then on its 38th day – at 100 Wood Street in the City of London.
Ian Hodson, BFAWU
They had told me they were going to leave the march for a short ‘flash mob’ at the headquarters of the CBRE who run 100 Wood Street which was around a quarter of a mile from the march route.
I’d stayed behind for a few minutes photographing the marchers before I left to run after them. When I arrived they had already gone into t he office foyer and were protesting inside, but the doors had been locked. I took a few pictures through the large glass doors but was then able to get inside for a minute or two as some started to leave. After taking a few pictures of the group in front of the offices I ran off to find a small protest by the EDL which had been organised to oppose the day’s big march with a rally in Hyde Park.
Few EDL members had turned up for the event, well under a hundred, but they were easy to find as there were several times as many police who had turned up to prevent any trouble between them and anti-fascists and were marching as a loose cordon around them down Park Lane.
A few anti-fascist had come to oppose them, but most had left to join the main march after seeing how few of the EDL had turned up. Police escorted the EDL into the park, where they had set up a pen for their protest, but they refused to march into it. After some heated arguments with police the the EDL stewards calmed down the others and they agreed to hold their rally in front of the pen instead of in it.
There was a small incident when a woman walked past on the opposite side of the protest to me and shouted ‘Black Lives Matter’; stewards rushed towards her and manhandled her rather roughly away while a large group of police stood by watching but failed to intervene.
Peoples Assembly/Stand Up to Racism rally – Parliament Square
Jeremy Corbyn was there on a hat
I took the tube to Westminster and joined the crowd relaxing after the march in a sunny Parliament Square. Whereas the Hyde Park rally had been full of bitterness and hate, here the mood was much warmer and positive, though there was considerable anger expressed against government policies by the many speakers.
Zita Holbourne of BARAC and PCS holds up her ‘We Stand with Jeremy Corbyn’ poster
But while I’d been kept out out the small crowd in Hyde Park by police and stewards, here I was free to walk around and people were happy to be photographed. It was a totally different atmosphere.
I didn’t photograph every speaker, but you can see I think thirteen of them in my pictures from the event, as well as many pictures of the others standing or sitting on the grass to listen to them. Perhaps the most interesting was an asylum seeker, brought to the microphone by Antonia Bright from Movement for Justice, who spoke briefly about her experiences in our racist asylum system.
Windrush, Missile Defence and Rathayatra – 2008 On Sunday 22 June 2008 I photographed two events celebrating anniversaries in London as well as a protest supporting Czech hunger strikers who – like 70% of the Czech people – were opposing the building of an American radar base near Prague – part of the US Missile Defence system.
Empire Windrush – 60th Anniversary – Clapham Common
Sixty years previously, on June 22, 1948, the SS Empire Windrush docked at Tilbury, bringing 492 Caribbeans – many of who had served in the British armed forces during the war – from Jamaica to start a new life in England. They had paid £28 10s (£28.50) for the passage and were the first large group of settlers from the Empire to come to live in the ‘Mother Country’.
The events celebrating this in 2008 now seem very low key and that at the bandstand close to the Clapham South deep level shelter on the edge of Clapham Common where many of them were given temporary housing was one of several organised by Christian Aid, together with the Windrush Trust and Churches Together in South London.
Next year will be the 75th anniversary and it will be interesting to see how this is celebrated. The years since 2008 have been marked by revelations about the terrible treatment by our government of the Windrush generation and their families, suffering from the hostile environment, deportations and racism promoted by the Home Office. Whatever celebrations there are will I think be rather more political, and probably better attended.
In 2008 the event celebrated the great contribution made by the Caribbean community to life in this country, and were reminded of the contribution of Clapham to the fight against slavery, but began with relatively little about the racist treatment they had received here, and which was about to be ratcheted up officially when the Tories came to power.
This changed towards the end of the event when Mark Sturge, former director of African Caribbean Evangelical Alliance, talked about the contribution black majority churches had made in the UK. He reminded us that Black immigrants were faced with discrimination at almost every turn, with notices “No Blacks, No Irish, No dogs” and other insults. Many came from religious backgrounds and turned to the largely white churches, and also found they were seldom welcome there. They became the pioneers of black-led churches, which provided an important support, not just religion, but also in education and other areas of life, helping them to face up to and fight against discrimination.
We had also got a taste of how it had been when Jacqueline Walker, who arrived in Britain as a young child a few years later in 1959, gave us an insight into what arriving in the country felt like, with readings from her book ‘Pilgrim State’.
40th Rathayatra Chariot Festival in London – Hyde Park to Trafalgar Square
Two men carry Jagannatha from the car to the chariot.
The day was also the 40th annual Rathayatra Chariots Festival in London, which saw Krishna in the form of Jagannatha, his half-sister Subhadra, and Balarama her brother carried on huge chariots pulled through the streets of London by Hare Krishna devotees.
The effigy of the founder of ISKCON, A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada is lifted onto one of the chariots.
No to US Missile Defence – Support Czech Hunger Strike – Downing St
Although I condemn the Russian invasion of Ukraine both in 2014 when the war there began and its escalation since February, activities by the West including the setting up of an American radar base near Prague as a part of the US Missile Defence system do provide some explanation for the Russian fears that have led to the current terrible situation.
70% of the Czech people apparently were against the building of the radar base, and some had gone on a hunger strike against it. CND held a rally and all-day fast on Whitehall opposite Downing Street to show their support. They included well-known peace campaigners such as CND chair Kate Hudson and veteran protester Pat Arrowsmith.
