UVW Protest Topshop & John Lewis – Saturday 16th April 2016 was a busy day for me in London with a large march and rally by the Peoples Assembly Against Austerity demanding an end to privatisation of the NHS, secure homes for all, rent control and an end to attacks on social housing, an end to insecure jobs and the scrapping of the Trade Union Bill, tuition fees and the marketisation of education and smaller protests against repression in Iran and Palestine, all of which you can read about on My London Diary.
After all that I went with the grass roots trade union United Voices of the World on their protest against Topshop, demanding the reinstatement of 2 workers there suspended by cleaning contractor Britannia for calling for the London Living Wage of £9.40 for Topshop cleaners. All of the pictures in this post come from the UVW protests at first outside Topshop on the Strand, and then at the Topshop at Oxford Circus.
On Strand the shop was protected by security but soon a large group of police arrived and tried to move the protesters away from the store. The protesters refused to move and police began pushing them around roughly, but soon stopped, perhaps because they were being photographed and filmed by a large group of press who like me had been at the Peoples Assembly rally.
Police pulled one protester to the side and started to ask questions and a large crowd formed around him; the man refused to answer police questions and eventually the officer concerned gave up.
There was a short rally on the pavement outside and Susanna, one of the two cleaners victimised by Britannia and Topshop spoke briefly but soon broke down in tears. After a couple of minutes she started again and was loudly applauded.
The protesters then marched off and I met them again on Oxford Street outside the flagship Topshop store close to Oxford Circus.
A squad of police rushed to stand in line to guard the main door on Oxford Street and pushed the protesters away. After a short while the UVW protesters marched around the block to other entrances, where police moved inside the store to meet them.
The UVW moved back to Oxford Street to continue the protest outside the main entrance, again blocked by police. Class War who were supporting the UVW moved their banner up to the police line and there was a standoff as the two groups eyed each other from a couple of feet away.
Class War then produced some yellow ‘Crime Scene’ tape and stretched it across in front of the police line, which left some officers looking rather perplexed.
The protesters then marched off towards John Lewis, where the UVW has long been The protesters then marched off towards John Lewis, where the UVW has long been holding protests calling for the cleaners to be treated equally with other workers in the store.
They walked towards the doors, but police pushed them back forcefully knocking one woman flying. Others rushed to help her, and UVW General Secretary Petros Elia protested angrily at the officer who had pushed her.
Eventually a senior officer came to see what had happened and listened to the complaint. To my surprise he then asked the officer to apologise for using excessive force – something I’ve never known to happen at a protest before.
There were a few speeches to explain to the shoppers walking by why the protest was taking place. Clearly many who listened felt that the cleaners were being shabbily treated by companies like Topshop and John Lewis who use outsourcing to get work done on the cheap with conditions that are greatly inferior to their directly employed workers.
The UVW left to return to continue their protest at Topshop, but I left them at Oxford Circus to take the tube – I was already late for dinner.
Class War Victory Over Qatari Royals – Thursday 8th February 2018 saw a remarkable victory for Class War against the one of the richest families in the world, the Qatari Royal Family with a $335 billion sovereign wealth fund who are now one of the biggest landowners in the United Kingdom.
In the morning I had gone to the Royal Courts of Justice on Strand where lawyers acting for the Qatari royal family were trying to prevent a Class War protest against the ten empty £50 million pound apartments in The Shard, the tallest building in the United Kingdom. The Qataris own 95% of the property with the remaining 5% retained by its original developers Sellar Property.
I hadn’t gone into the court but had waited outside, arriving in plenty of time to greet Ian Bone and his barrister Ian Brownhill as they emerged triumphant from the court.
Lawyers for the Qatari royals had tried to get an injunction against protests by Bone and “persons unknown” and to claim over £500 in legal costs from the 70 year-old south London pensioner for them doing so.
Brownhill had contacted Bone and offered to take up his case pro bono, and as soon as he contacted the Qataris’ lawyers they offered to drop the case if Class War ‘would stop attacking the Shard’. Class War would of course not agree to giving up their protest. The Qatari attempt to stifle protest led to articles in the national and international press and radio and TV coverage.
In the High Court the Qataris’ lawyers were forced to drop the attempt to ban protests and their demand for fees but Bone accepted a legal restriction on him going inside the Shard and its immediate vicinity.
Among documents supplied to the court for the Qataris were some clearly defamatory statments about another person connected with Class War but not named in the injunction and other information which had clearly been obtained from police sources. The Head of Security at the Shard got his job after retiring as a police commander.
Police have over the years carried out a number of clearly malicious arrests of people from Class War during protests, aimed at harassing people engaged in peaceful protest. The cases have either been dropped before coming to court or have been thrown out by the courts.
Class War’s protest went ahead as planned, pointing out that the ten £50 million pound apartments in the Shard have remained empty since the building was completed.
There appeared to be several times as many police as the protesters outside the Shard, as well as a large number of security men and plain clothes police, along with two men with search dogs when the protesters arrived. It seemed a huge overkill for what was always intended – and was – an entirely peaceful but noisy small protest.
Ian Bone’s health problems meant he would not in any case have attended the protest, and the other protesters were careful to remain outside the boundary of the Shard which is marked by a metal line in the pavement.
Despite this police still tried to move them away to the other side of the road, making the patently spurious claim that they were causing an obstruction to commuters attempting to enter London Bridge station. it was very clear that it was the police were obviously causing a rather larger obstruction than Class War.
The protesters pointed out that there are now a huge number of empty properties in London at the same time as a huge housing crisis – at the time including over 100 families from Grenfell who were in temporary accommodation.
There are large developments of high-prices flats taking place, totally unaffordable for those in housing need, many of which are bought simply as investments to take advantage of rising house prices and remain empty all or most of the year.
In 2018 there were plans to build 26,000 more flats costing over a million pounds each, including many on former council estates being redeveloped and replacing social housing – when thousands are sleeping on the streets and councils have huge housing lists. Currently in 2023 both Lambeth and Newham have over 35,000 waiting for housing and nine other boroughs have lists with over 10,000 names, with a total of over 323,000 over the whole of Greater London.
Grenfell Remembered in South Norwood. On the 14th of every month since the terrible fire on 14 June 2017 I remember Grenfell, though its something which has fallen out of the news. The Grenfell Inquiry dragged on – as it was meant to – until November 2022, and now its final report is not expected until some time in 2024. Such is the long grass which the UK excels in to protect the guilty, or at least the wealthy guilty who are an integral part of the establishment and corporate bodies.
Pictures are from South Norwood Stands With Grenfell march on November 14, 2018
It seems unlikely that there will ever be justice for the victims and their families or that any of the people or companies and other organisations responsible will ever be brought to trial. Probably at most there will be a few minor cases resulting in some fairly inconsequential fines.
Of course there have been some changes, with the similar cladding on some other towers being replaced by less flammable alternative, although there are still buildings with this dangerous cladding.
It didn’t take long for independent experts to produce extensive reports into the causes of the fire and publish these, and nothing that years of inquiry have produced adds much more than minor details and an increased list of those culpable. At one protest a few months after the fire we were told of a similar fire in Japan where those responsible were in court a matter of weeks after the disaster.
We also saw a concerted attempt in the first phase of the inquiry to push blame for the deaths onto the fire service, which was over-stressed due to cuts and which had been prevented from doing many of the things recommended in the report by a government programme of ‘reducing red tape’ in health and safety and building regulations which led those responsible only too literally get away with murder.
Jane Nicholl and Ian Bone
An earlier fire in Southwark had led to an inquest which had identified some of these problems and the coroner had made a number of recommendations, most of which had not been implemented.
What is clear is that on the night of the fire, firefighters had acted with incredible bravery despite lacking some essential equipment – such as the long ladders that had to be brought in from Surrey. And that as they were not aware of the conditions in this tower and some other blocks they had not realised until too late that the fire measures that should have contained the fire in the flat where it had started would not work.
A few weeks later there was a similar incident in a council block in East London which was contained and there was no loss of life. If Grenfell had been properly inspected and maintained the same would have been true, but it had been turned into a firebomb.
The march on Wednesday 14th November 2018 in South Norwood was prompted by a disgusting video being posted of a cardboard Grenfell tower being burnt by Conservative club members at a bonfire party in the area. It was a hateful video that shocked the nation by its callous treatment of a distaster that killed so many.
The South Norwood Tourist Board – and unofficial community group which has enriched the area by converting waste areas into public gardens and promoting local community events – organised a march to show solidarity with Grenfell, with several hundreds of local residents marching through the streets at the same time as the monthly silent march of remembrance in Notting Hill on the 14th of every month.
Those taking part included several former residents of Grenfell Tower and some who lost friends in the tragic fire, and several came with a Grenfell United banner to support South Norwood’s demonstration of solidarity. Leading members of the SNTB include Jane Nicholl and her partner Ian Bone of Class War. Ian had lived in Grenfell Tower when he first moved to London and it was from there that the first issued of Class War’s magazine were produced.
A relative of Sandra Ruiz of Grenfell United died in Grenfell Tower
Some shops along the route were decorated in support of Grenfell, and after the final speeches there was very welcome free hot soup provided by the Portland Arms pub.
Catalonia, Levitation and Robbing the Homeless: Another varied day for me on Saturday 21st October 2017, beginning with a march supporting independence for Catalonia, then going with Class War to levitate Kensington & Chelsea Town Hall and the Daily Mail, finally protesting against Camden Council and the police who had been taking tents away from homeless people in the area.
March in Solidarity with Catalonia – London
Several hundred people, many carrying Catalan flags met at Piccadilly Circus to march through London demanding the immediate release of Catalan politicians Jordi Cuixart and Jordi Sanchez and calling for the end of the repression.
They called for a dialogue to accept the mandate of the Catalan referendum which had been declared illegal by the Spanish constitutional court but which went ahead on 1st October. Although only 43% of the registered voters took part it had resulted in a resounding 92% saying ‘Yes’ to Catalonia becoming an independent republic.
Many people had been unable to take past as the following a High Court ruling police raided and forcibly closed some polling stations, with over a thousand civilians being injured. Around 15% of voters are thought to have been denied the chance to vote.
Both Cuixart and Sanchez were arrested on 16th October after leading protests although they had repeatedly called for these to be ‘peaceful’ and ‘civic’ and called for protesters to go home peacefully at the end of the protest. Both were sentenced to 9 years in jail in 2019 but were released following a pardon from the Spanish government in 2021.
The march paused briefly in Trafalgar Square for photographs and then continued down Whitehall for a rally in Parliament Square where I left them.
It was the 50th anniversary of the Yippee levitation of the Pentagon during anti-Vietnam War protests and Class War’s Ian Bone and shaman Jimmy Kunt (aka Adam Clifford) decided to celebrate by attempting a similar feat at Kensington Town Hall.
Standing on the steps of the entrance to the town hall of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, the council responsible for the disastrous fire at Grenfell Tower, Adam called out the demons of councillors including Nicholas Paget-Brown, Rock Feilding-Mellen & Elizabeth Campbell and attempted to levitate the town hall to a height of over 70 metres. “Out, demons, out! Out, demons, out!”
A security officer told them that they couldn’t do that here, but they told her it wasn’t possible to stop a levitation or exorcism and the ceremony went ahead.
Afterwards Ian Bone repeated a well-known quote from 1967 “You mean you didn’t see it, man?”
Inspired by their success at the town hall, Class War’s Levitation Brigade then moved on to Northcliffe House, the home of the Daily Mail.
Ian Bone and Adam Clifford marvel at the levitation
Security staff there reacted angrily to Class War calling out the demon of Paul Dacre and their attempt to raise the building by over 70 metres, perhaps fearing it might damage the Rolls-Royce parked outside, but the levitation ceremony went ahead despite considerable interference.
Although I took care to stand on the public highway secuirty staff tried a number of times to prevent me taking photographs of the event.
The message on the pavement was ‘How You Gonna Sleep Tonight’?’ But the Daily Mail lacks a conscience.
Stop Robbing the Homeless – Kentish Town Police Station
Rather than supporting people sleeping homeless on their streets, Camden Council and the Metropolitan Police have been carrying out a campaign of removing and stealing tents from homeless people ‘in the interest of public safety’.
Despite considerable evidence that this has been happening in the borough, both council and police have made statements to the press denying it.
A small group of protesters carrying tents went into Kentish Town Police Station and asked to be arrested for the offence of carrying illegal items. Police refused to arrest them.
The campaigners say the removal or tents is inhumane and clearly threatens the lives of homeless people in the borough and accuse the police of theft. Clearly Camden Council should be helping the homeless and not attempting to kill them though exposure to the elements.
LSE Resist – Working Class, Kidbrooke & Cleaners: in September 2016 then LSE research fellow Lisa McKenzie and a couple of students organised a series of discussions, films, lectures and exhibitions in the 3 day campus-wide 3-day free ‘Resist: Festival of Ideas and Actions’. The festival explored how political resistance is understood within academic research, the arts, grassroots activism campaigns, student debate and mainstream politics.
As a part of this festival LSE cleaners began a campaign for parity of treatment with other workers at the LSE. I had contributed some protest pictures to be used in publicity for the festival and attended some of the events on 28-29th September 2016.
The success of this festival was perhaps one of the reasons why Dr McKenzie was not given a further contract at the LSE. She has since worked at Middlesex University, Durham University and the University of Bedfordshire and is Board Chair of the Working Class Collective.
Working Class debate at LSE Resist – Wednesday 28th September 2016
There was a lively open debate around ideas of the working class at lunchtime on the steps in front of the LSE building in Lincoln’s Inn Fields led by LSE Professor of Anthropology David Graeber and Martin Wright of Class War with contributions from others including LSE research fellow Lisa McKenzie and Class War’s Ian Bone.
I arrived late, partly because the LSE then was a huge building site and the Facebook invitation to the event had included a map incorrectly suggesting it was taking place in Houghton Street, so unfortunately missed the some of the opening remarks by Graeber.
He was followed by Whitechapel anarchist Martin Wright, a working-class activist from East London who told us he was proud of his record of not working. He now regularly broadcasts his pithy comments on current affairs on the ‘Red and Black’ channel on You Tube.
Ian Bone, the founder of Class War, once described by the gutter press as the ‘The Most Dangerous Man in Britain‘ gave a typically witty and thought-provoking contribution.
And of course Lisa McKenzie spoke at some length and depth, and there was a great deal of discussion among the main speakers, with contributions from many of those sitting around on the steps, mainly LSE students. I took a great many pictures some of which you can see on My London Diary, but think I managed to keep my mouth shut and listen rather than speak.
The following day I was back on the same steps to hear Simon Elmer of Architects for Social Housing (ASH) give a lengthy and detailed indictment, ‘The Intellectual Bloodstain’ on a report by a group of LSE academics on Kidbrooke Village, a development by Berkeley Homes and Southern Housing, on the site of a council estate which was demolished between 2009 and 2012.
The Ferrier Estate had been built for the Greater London Council in 1968-72 on the site of a former RAF base. The first section had five 12 storey towers and three years later a second section six more were added. The estate had around 1,900 flats.
When the GLC was abolished in 1986 for having opposed the Thatcher government it was a sad day for London in general, with the capital being left without its essential city-wide authority, something it has not yet recovered from despite the setting up of the GLA in 2000. But for the Ferrier estate in was even worse news as the estate was transferred to the Royal Borough of Greenwich.
Greenwich made Ferrier a sink estate and failed to maintain the estate properly; its population were markedly multi-ethnic, including many refugees while most of the rest of the borough’s estates were predominantly white.
You can read Elmer’s talk in full on the ASH web site and it makes interesting reading. Perhaps the key fact is that the estate still had 1732 flats which were housing council tenants at social rents, but in the replacement Kidbrooke Village although there will be 4,763 new apartments, only 159 will be at social rent. Some of the others will be ‘affordable’, meaning at up to 80% of market rent, but that means completely unaffordable to those who previously lived there – or to almost all of the 15,000 on the council’s housing waiting list.
As a former member of Greenwich Council was quoted by Elmer as stating, ‘Ten years ago residents on the Ferrier Estate were told that they would have the right to come back. What Greenwich Council didn’t mention is that they would need to win the Lottery to do so.’
Elmer uses the case of Ferrier to ague about a key tropes behind the LSE produced report, the idea of ‘urban villages’ and also points out some of the omissions and inaccuracies of the report as well as attacking their use of inadequate and often misleading concepts such as ‘human scale‘, ‘unique identity‘, ‘social interaction‘ (which means going to shop at Sainsbury’s), ‘locally driven‘, ‘mixed communities‘ and more as well as pointing out some simple lies lifted directly from the developers’s marketing book.
His report points out “the white elephant standing in the middle of the living room of every one of these luxury apartments – that is, their complete failure to meet the housing needs of the local community” and went on to look more widely at housing issues in the UK before concluding his talk by convening a People’s Court for the indictment of the LSE Four, listing four charges and calling for their suitable punishment “in the name of Architects for Social Housing and on behalf of the former residents of the Ferrier Estate.” I think they were unanimously found guilty.
At the end of the meeting Petros Elia, General Secretary of the United Voices of the World trade union spoke briefly about the failure of LSE management to protect the interests of the LSE cleaners in outsourcing them to a cleaning contractor with no insistence on decent working conditions and conditions of service and inviting all present to a meeting later that do to discuss further action.
Later on Thursday I went to the meeting where cleaners at the LSE began their campaign for parity of treatment with other workers at the university.
The cleaners, employed by Noonan on a LSE contract, are paid the London Living Wage, but have only the statutory minimum holidays, sick pay and pension contributions, while workers directly employed by the LSE have more generous terms. They also complain they have lost rest facilities, are not allowed in the canteen with other workers, exposed to dangerous chemicals, not allowed to use lifts to move heavy equipment between floors and are generally treated like dirt.
We were all shocked when one of the cleaners stood up and told how she had been sacked by Noonan after 12 years of service at the LSE. The UVW will fight her unfair dismissal as well as pursuing their other claims.
Others attending the meeting included most of the students from a new graduate course at the LSE on issues of equality, something the LSE has a long history of campaigning for outside of the institution but seemed rather blind to on its own campus. Support for the cleaners was expressed by the LSE Students Union General Secretary and by several LSE staff members, and Sandy Nicoll from SOAS Unison told the meeting about their 10 year fight to bring cleaners there in-house.
Several of the cleaners spoke in Spanish, and their comments were translated for the benefit of the non-Spanish speaking in the audience,
There were suggestions for further actions to improve conditions and fight the unfair redundancy, and I was to photograph some of these in the months that followed, eventually leading the them being taken back in-house as LSE employees in 2017.
Reparations, North Woolwich & LouLou’s: Thursday 1st August 2019 was a long and busy day for me with an Afrikan Emancipation Day protest, finishing a walk in North Woolwich I’d begun six months earlier and photographing an evening protest outside the exclusive Mayfair club LouLou’s.
Afrikans demand reparations – Brixton, London.
People of African origin met in Windrush Square in the morning to demand an end of the Maangamizi, the continuing genocide and ecocide of African peoples and Africa on Afrikan Emancipation Day.
After speeches & libations they marched from Brixton to Westminster with a petition calling for an end to acts of violence by Britain, the misuse of taxes and the stolen legacy plundered from Afrika under the British Empire and European Imperialism and demanding reparations.
The protest was supported by Extinction Rebellion XR Connecting Communities who marched in an Ubuntu Non-Afrikan Allies bloc.
I left the march as it went past Brixton Police Station on its way to protest outside the Houses of Parliament so I could have some lunch before going to take pictures elsewhere.
I’d taken the tube back into central London to have a quick lunch before taking the DLR from Bank to London City to King George V Dock station for the final section of the walk I had begun in February but had run out of time to finish because I’d had to take a roundabout route to get there as the direct DLR services were suspended following an accident.
Bow Creek
This time the trains were running properly. They start from Bank and so come into the station empty and I was able to chose my seat and for once I found myself sitting next to a clean window on my way to North Woolwich and took a number of pictures.
Tate & Lyle
Later on my way back to Canary Wharf from King George V I was less lucky and the windows were rather grimy, but I still made a few images.
The footpath goes across these gates of the entrance lock to Albert Dock Basin
I took a few pictures as I walked from the elevated King George V station at North Woolwich to the King George V Dock entrance and joined the path by the river.
The lock here is huge, 243.8m long and 30.48m wide. I’d first photographed the area back in the 1980s as a part of a wider project on the Docklands following their closure, both in colour but mainly in black and white – in the album 1984 London Photographs. Although the docks themselves remain, much around them has changed, although there are still some derelict areas.
The riverside path here is part of the Capital Ring, and continues north and over lock at the Albert Dock entrance to the curiously desolate Armada Green Recreation Area.
Here the path ends, with beyond it the former site of the Beckton Gas Works, used as a location for at least 17 films and TV series since its closure, though best known as a stand-in for Vietnam in the 1987 Full Metal Jacket. Past that is the Beckton Sewage Treatment Works, set up in 1864 as part of Joseph Bazalgette’s scheme to treat London’s sewage and still receiving it from all of London north of the Thames.
I had to turn inland, through more recent development and the refurbished Gallions Hotel around Alber Dock Basin. I went briefly under the new bridge to see again the East London University student residences, then went back and across it, taking more pictures from the bridge and the road on my way back to King George V station.
Finally I joined the IWGB Cleaners and Facilities Branch outside the exclusive Mayfair private club LouLou’s where they were picketing and protesting for kitchen porters to be paid a living wage, be treated with dignity, respect and given decent terms and conditions including proper sick pay, holidays and pension contributions. Recently outsourced to ACT, porters want to be returned to direct employment.
Among those supporting them were Class War, and in the picture above Ian Bone confronts a police office asking why they protect and support the rich. Needless to say the officer had no answer to the question. In general the protesters were reasonably behaved and acting within the law, but police and security hired by the club worked together to try and prevent their protest being effective.
There were angry scenes as staff escorted wealthy clients of the £1800 a year club past the picket, particularly when some roughly pushed the protesters. Police repeatedly warned the protesters but not the security men or customers who had assaulted them. The security also tried to prevent the picket from handing their flier to the customers.
As at previous protests outside of the club, none of the security staff were wearing the visible SIA door supervisor licences required under the Private Security Industry Act 2001, but the police refused to take any action over this.
People’s Assembly, Class War, Anonymous, ENA & Dykes: Saturday 22nd Jone 2013, ten years ago today, was a rather odd day for me. It began with an event I didn’t go to and instead photographed groups outside, was followed by an meeting to which I had been invited by the extreme right English National Alliance who needed a police escort to lay flowers at the Cenotaph and ended with a Dyke March.
People’s Assembly – Methodist Central Hall, Westminster
I had decided not to attend the People’s Assembly being held in Methodist Central Hall. It was a large event but was being managed so that any criticisms of the Labour Party and trade unions were banned from the main event, with people including Ken Loach being relegated to a hall down the road.
Others had expressed the opinion that this event was intended to “disperse some of the head of steam that had built up among the rank and file” for more direct action against the government. It reminded me of events following the huge ‘Stop the War’ protest in Feb 2003, at which Tony Benn and others had called for decisive action, but Stop the War had failed to do more than call instead for just another protest a while after Blair had declared war. It was hardly surprising that this was much smaller than the previous event and had absolutely no effect.
I commented in 2013:
It was a feeling reinforced by the statement ‘We will work together with leading experts and campaigners both here and abroad, and friendly think tanks, to develop rapidly key policies and an alternative programme for a new anti-austerity government‘, which seemed to make it clear that after the assembly it was the long grass for any ideas, and an end to any action.
And there seems to have been nothing that has happened as a result of this event; for a few years Corbyn gave the Labour Party some hope, but he was stopped from winning a general election by the right in the party. Nothing in Labour policies now suggests they would offer any real alternative should the Tories lose the next election. Or that they can win if the Conservatives don’t defeat themselves.
One of several groups protesting outside was Class War. Ian Bone had called for “a f**king big mob outside” (my asterisks) the People’s Assembly, but as I wrote, only around enough for a football team turned up for their alternative event, though there were several other groups around also opposed to the “pointless jamboree” taking place inside the hall.
So although there were a series of speeches by Bone and others, all amusing and in parts thought-provoking and certainly more interesting than most inside the hall, these were largely made to a mainly empty street.
Outside The People’s Assembly – Anonymous Occupy the Grass
A small group of ‘Anonymous’ and Occupy London supporters handed out leaflets, offered free hugs, and had a picnic outside the People’s Assembly Against Austerity.
Police kept a close eye on them but didn’t interfere with them.
The English National Alliance is one of a number of small ‘patriotic’ groups on the extreme right who I’ve photographed over the years, with some members who have also been involved in other similar groups. Their leader is a former BNP member who was expelled from the EDL in 2011 apparently for extremist statements.
Although I’ve made no secret of my disagreements with their views, I’ve always tried to present them clearly and accurately as a journalist, as with other groups I’ve photographed. I’ve felt it was my job, and one that informs the wider public who I think can be trusted to see them for what they are.
Many in these groups complain about the unfair press they receive, and they had a particular gripe that some pictures of people at protests who were just waving being captioned as making Nazi salutes. It certainly has happened, but as they agreed there are also some people at protests by extreme-right groups who will make Nazi salutes.
The ENA had decided to march to the Cenotaph to lay flowers on the way to taking a statement of their views in to Downing Street and I had been invited to join them at the pub where they were meeting for the march. I was surprised how few of them had come, as was the event organiser, and there were a number of phone calls made to try to get more to turn up, but eventually they decided to march.
I was surprised when the small march and its police escort turned down in front of the hall where the People’s Assembly was taking place and small groups of left-wingers were still protesting outside. I’m not sure whether the marchers or police had decided to take this route, but the response was entirely predictable.
Some of the marchers shouted “No Surrender” and they were almost immediately surrounded by people shouting back at them “Fascist scum!”, “Racists!” and there were some minor scuffles. Police managed to push a way through for them and made one arrest before the ENA march, now accompanied by a few counter-protesters was able to continue towards the Cenotaph and Downing St.
By now it was time for me to be at another event, and said goodbye to the ENA and left, with a copy of the long statement they were about to take in addressed to David Cameron from the “Patriots of England who are supporters of every street activist and political party in the United Kingdom.”
Well, no. The last half mile had been clear about that. But you can read my précis of their statement with a number of quotes along with more about the march on My London Diary at ENA Meet Left Opposition.
Dykes March – Berkeley Square to Soho
The Dyke March the previous year in London had been the first such event for many years, and this year’s event was on a rather smaller scale, but there were still around 300 who turned out to march.
The event began with a rally with speakers who included Roz Kaveney, (above), writer, critic, poet and deputy editor of the trans digital magazine META who read one of her poems and long-standing LGBT activist and historian Sue Sanders who tested the crowd on their knowledge of lesbian icons including suffragette composer Dame Ethyl Smyth. I think I recognised more of them than most of the crowd.
The route the march took was based in part on that taken – though in the opposite direction and ending in Hyde park by the 1908 Votes For Women March.
The march was to end with a rally in Soho Square, but I left it to go home from Piccadilly Circus.
Grenfell and the Tory/DUP Alliance. Two things at the top of the news on Saturday 17th June 2017, the terrible fire at Grenfell Tower three days earlier and the agreement still being negotiated for the Northern Irish Democratic Unionist Party to go into coalition with the Conservative Party after the 2017 General Election had resulted in a hung Parliament.
Grenfell
I’d woken on the 14th June 2017 to the terrible news of the fire at Grenfell Tower in North Kensington, hearing with shock, anger and grief the terrible stories of those trapped and burnt to death in the upper floors of the building. Anger because from the outset it was clear that cuts in the London Fire Brigade made under Boris Johnson and the decisions made by governments , Greater London and the local council had made this and other buildings a fire trap.
I live a little over an hour’s journey from Grenfell, and knew that the area would already be swamped by the media so made the decision to keep away in the days that followed, though I spent some time in research on the web into the causes, particularly reading earlier blogs from some local residents which confirmed my immediate anger.
On 17th September I visited the area which I knew slightly before, waling with many others, some carrying flowers on our way to pay respect to the dead, to say a few prayers and to cry a few tears. I wasn’t going as a photographer but as a fellow human being, but I was carrying my camera bag as I was on my way to photograph other events, and I did take just a few pictures.
And I wrote that evening (I’ve corrected a couple of typos):
We don’t need an inquiry to tell us what happened – the various defects that came together are only too obvious, as a number of fire safety experts are concerned. Someone authorised the use of cheap cladding that contained flammable foam, someone let that cladding be applied without fire breaks to save money, Someone approved those unsafe gas lines, someone employed a consultant so the building didn’t get proper fire inspections and so on. Over the years people at Kensington & Chelsea Council (and the TMO they set up) turned an inherently safe building into a firetrap waiting to happen, because to them it was a place where people they didn’t see as people, just numbers who were a burden on the housing department.
Of course it wasn’t just the RBK&C. There were the various government ministers and others responsible for setting standards that let inherently unsafe materials pass – which when tested after Grenfell have given a 100% failure rate. The ministers who dismantled and privatised safety inspections, relaxed and got rid of safety regulations, failed to implement the lessons learnt from earlier fires and so on, most but not all of them under the previous Tory government. And all those pressure groups and ‘think tanks’ pushing the ideas of deregulation, of removing what they called ‘red tape’, the protections that would have saved the lives of those who died.
The victims of Grenfell – certainly a case of mass corporate manslaughter if not murder – deserve justice. They died because they were poor and in council housing and those in authority and the greedy super-rich didn’t think they deserved proper care and decent standards. They deserve justice – and that means fines and imprisonment for those responsible as well as changes in the way that we run things.
Six years on, with a huge and ponderous inquiry having made a fortune for the many lawyers, we have still to see justice. Just another example of our legal and judicial systems swinging into action to push Grenfell into the long grass and to protect the rich and guilty.
Class War protest Grenfell Murders – Downing St
Later that day I was with Class War at Downing Street where they had come to call for revenge over the Grenfell fire and action by the people rather than waiting for a whitewashing public inquiry to report.
Class War say Grenfell is an open declaration of class war by the wealthy elite against the working class, and they have a personal interest in the matter. Grenfell was where Ian Bone first lived when he moved to London and it was there that the first issues of the Class War magazine were written. He and others in the group still knew people who lived there.
This was only a small protest, with people taking it in turns to stand in front of the gates to Downing St holding their banner with a quotation from the US activist, labour organiser, radical socialist and anarchist Lucy Parsons (ca 1853-1942), who fought against racism and for the rights of workers and for freedom of speech from her early years until her death, “We must devastate the avenues where the wealthy live.“
The poster held up by Ian Bone stated “GRENFELL – WE AIN’T GONNA WAIT TWO YEARS FOR A PUBLIC INQUIRY TO COME UP WITH ANSWERS – WE’RE GONNA GET SOME NOW”. Most of the answers were published a month later in a lengthy report by Architects for Social Housing, but Class War seriously under-estimated the obfuscating power of the establishment. Its now SIX years with no justice.
We need fast-track inquiries with minimal legal involvement, perhaps only allowing those who are a part of the inquiry team rather than any representing parties under investigation.
No Tory DUP Coalition of Chaos – Downing St
The 2017 General election had been a close-run thing, and only a concerted effort by Labour officials and right wing MPs had prevented a Labour victory, though the huge extent of their machinations against Corbyn only emerged much later in an unpublished but widely available internal report. But as the results came in you could hear the relief of some leading Labour MPs when their candidates lost in some clearly winnable marginal constituencies.
The result was a hung Parliament with no party having an overall majority. Over the previous parliaments the Northern Irish Democratic Unionist Party had generally operated an informal agreement to vote with the Tories, but now they were able to demand concessions to enter into a formal coalition. Negotiations had begun which were finally agreed on 26 June 2017.
Protesters pointed out the DUP was a party intrinsically linked with Protestant terrorist groups and dominated by a homophobic church which represents a tiny minority of the Northern Irish population.
Speakers included Northern Irish women campaigning for abortion and other women’s rights enjoyed by women in the UK. DPAC spoke about the Tory assault on the disabled, and there were various others.
Among those who spoke were three Labour MPs, Marsha De Cordova who gained Battersea from the Conservatives, Rupa Huq who greatly increased her tiny majority and Shadow Education Secretary Angela Rayner.
There were also those present who had come to protest about the complicity of Theresa May and unseated Tory MP Gavin Barwell in the Grenfell outrage; Barwell had ignored a fire report made in 2013. Political artist Kaya Mar came with a painting of Theresa May playing the violin with one red-heeled shoe on a coffin labelled Grenfell.
The Tory-DUP agreement has had serious long-term consequences, in particular over Brexit, where it prevented a sensible agreement being reached. Johnson went ahead ignoring the problems and we are still suffering from this. Neither his or May’s agreement were supported by the DUP, but the coalition agreement had greatly increased the importance of their party’s views.
Bengali New Year and Levellers: I spent Sunday 12th May in East London, beginning at Weavers Fields in Bethnal Green for the Boishakhi Mela procession and then moving on to Wapping where a plaque was being unveiled at the burial place of Leveller Thomas Rainsborough. On my way there I was passed by a large group of motorcyclists out for a ride.
Boishakhi Mela Procession – Bethnal Green
The Bengali New Year is in the middle of April, but when the annual celebrations by the Bangladeshi community in Tower Hamlets began in 1997 they decided April in London was too cold and likely to rain and moved their celebration to a month later.
The celebration, which I’d photographed in 2006 and 2008, had been based around Brick Lane, but had by 2013 become a victim of its own popularity and had outgrown its original location, and had been moved to Victoria Park, well away from the centre of the Bangladeshi community. I think in later years it returned to its original location in the Brick Lane area, but I’ve not been back since.
The Mela is said to be the largest celebration of Boishaki outside of Bangladesh, and it was certainly very crowded when I was in Brick Lane in 2008. Tower Hamlets Council had that year banned it on safety grounds from using their parks, but later allowed them to use Weavers Fields for the main stage. It is said to be the second largest street festival in UK – though at around 80,000 taking part it is still an order of magnitude smaller than Notting Hill.
But as the pictures show it is a very colourful event. The council took over the management of the festival in 2009 when a record 95,000 people attended.
I walked with the procession to the gates of Victoria Park taking photographs, but left as they entered the park to go to Wapping.
The Boishakhi Mela Procession had been held up for a couple of minutes in Bethnal Green and had to wait as a large group of motorcyclists made its way down Old Ford Road where they were to go. I talked briefly with some of the bikers as they waited at the traffic lights, but conversation was rather difficult over the noise of perhaps a hundred poorly silenced engines. But I think they were simply a group from Dagenham and other parts of Essex out for a ride around London.
Leveller Thomas Rainsborough – St John’s Churchyard, Wapping
Although I had walked through and photographed the small park, saved from being built on by local campaigners, which had been the churchyard of St John’s in Wapping, I don’t think I had previously known it was where Thomas Rainsborough had been buried.
Colonel Thomas Rainsborough was a military leader in Cromwell’s New Model Army, fighting for Parliament against the king in the English Civil War. He was killed by a Royalist raising party during the siege of Pontefract on 29 October 1648 and buried at Wapping on 14th November.
Rainsborough is best remembered now for his statement in the Putney Debates in London in 1647 about all men being equal:
"For really I think that the poorest he that is in England hath a life to live as the greatest he; and therefore truly, sir, I think it’s clear that every man that is to live under a government ought first by his own consent to put himself under that government; and I do think that the poorest man in England is not bound in a strict sense to that government that he hath not had a voice to put himself under…"
It was truly a revolutionary idea at the time, and he was labelled as an extremist. He was the most senior officer to support the Levellers.
The four Royalists had entered his lodgings at night and attempted to arrest him. There was a huge funeral procession by Levellers from Tottenham to Wapping for his burial. His sea-green regimental standard (a replica of which was carried by the Sealed Knot’s ‘Colonel Rainsborough’s Regiment of Foote’ in today’s ceremonies) was torn into strips and the sea-green ribbons became a Leveller symbol.
He had been an important military leader, in command of 1500 musketeers, but today there just five from the Sealed Knot, along with an officer and some pikemen, but they put on an impressive performance for the hundred or so of us who had turned up for the event, with speeches by John Reese, Tony Benn and others before Tony Benn pulled the string to unveil the plaque. This included words from the inscription on his long lost tomb which proclaimed he had made ‘Kings, Lords, Commons, Judges shake, Cities and Committees quake‘.
After the official proceedings and while photographs were being taken Ian Bone of Class War seized the opportunity to speak against the appropriation of Rainsborough by members of the political establishment who had taken part in the ceremony, but would still be opposed to the radical ideas put forward by the Levellers.
Standing in front of a fine banner showing a red sleeping lion with the text ‘Who shall rouse him up’ he spoke about the more radical Fifth Monarchists, fifty of whom staged a brief and doomed insurrection following the restoration in 1661, led by Thomas Venner. They stormed St Paul’s Cathedral on January 1 and held parts of London for three days before all were killed or taken prisoner. Venner was captured after suffering 19 wounds, tried and then hanged, drawn and quartered on 19 January 1661.
On Wednesday 31st March 2010 I reported on three unrelated protests in London.
Ford/Visteon Workers March For Pension Justice
In 2000 Ford when split of some of its parts factories to Visteon, a company described as ‘An Enterprise of Ford Motor Company’ and initially with the same shareholders, promising the workers their conditions and pensions would remain exactly the same as they had been with Ford. Ford’s assurances were repeated by Visteon.
But in 2009 Visteon closed down and workers in their factories in Belfast, Enfield, Swansea and Basildon were given just six minutes to leave the sites. In Belfast and Enfield workers refused and occupied the sites for a month, but were let down by their union, Unite who failed to give them support. The occupations eventually forced Visteon/Ford to pay the redundancy pay they were entitled to under their agreements, but pensions were not covered and they only received the lesser amounts covered by Pension Protection Fund compensation.
Since then their fight for the pensions they were promised has continued. I met around 500 former Visteon workers outside the Unite Offices in Theobalds Road, Holborn, where many wore hats and t-shirts with the Ford logo, but with the name replaced by the word ‘Fraud’, which succinctly expressed their view of the company’s action.
I marched with them to Downing Street where they had problems in delivering a letter and petition. As I commented then: “it does now seem unnecessarily complicated and difficult to get access to our elected government, hiding away behind their tall gates and high security. Its both an expression of and doubtless fuels their paranoia over terrorism far in excess of the real threat.”
The marchers then went on to a rally in Parliament Square.
Their fight for a fair deal over their pensions went on for another four years, when eventually as the case was about to go to the High Court, Ford agreed to top up the Pension Protection Fund compensation so that they would receive the full value of benefits accrued when working for Ford. It didn’t cover the nine years they had worked for Visteon, but Unite recommended acceptance as it would settle the claim without the expense (and possible failure) of a court hearing.
Ethiopians Protest Bloodthirsty Tyrant – Downing St
Ethiopians came from across the UK to for a day of demonstration opposite Downing St where Prime Minister Meles Zenawi was co-chairing the UN climate finance group. They demanded the UK stop appeasing the Ethiopian dictator, and calling for the release of opposition leader Birtukan Mideksa and other political prisoners in Ethiopia.
Zenawi who became chair of one of the leading military groups fighting in the Ethiopian Civil War was the leader of a coalition that took power in 1991, becoming President then and was Prime Minister from 1995 until is death in 2012. His control of the military made Ethiopia an effective one-party state.
Although the country formally has democratic organisation and elections, elections have been rigged and oppostion politicians jailed, notably the leader of the main opposition Unity for Democracy and Justice (UDJ) party, Mideksa (or Midekssa), a former judge. Many other politicians and journalists have also been jailed and in 2007 the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) named the country as “the world’s worst backslider on press freedom over the previous five years.”
Human rights violations and corruption are rife in Ethiopia, and food aid, education and jobs all depend on membership of the ruling party. His opponents regard Zenawi as a bloodthirsty tyrant and call for him to be brought to trial at the ICC at The Hague on charges of genocide. Human Rights Watch (HRW) have accused it of war crimes in the Somali regions of Ethiopia and against the Anauk communities in Gambella in 2003-4. Human rights abuses have continued in Ethiopia since Zenawi’s death.
Ethiopia is one of the larger countries in Africa and has received large amounts of development aid and humanitarian support from the USA and the UK.
Rioters United! 20 Years Since the Poll Tax Riots – Trafalgar Square,
The largest protest against Margaret Thatcher’s Poll Tax was in central London on Saturday 31 March 1990, shortly before the tax was due to come into force. Unfortunately I had missed that event, probably deciding it was best to keep out of trouble. Back in 1990 I was photographing relatively few protests, mainly concentrating on urban landscapes and culture.
Around 30 people turned up for a rally to commemorate the occasion when “the London mob who brought Thatcher down … as well as to promise that the mob were still in business and to pronounce sentence on politicians.”
The ‘Carnival of Death‘ they were promising was not of course a literal death threat, but street theatre in which the effigies of George Brown, David Cameron, Nick Clegg and Nick Griffin were to be executed at a May Day Party. As Chris Knight reminded the gathering, “the only good politician, the only honest politician is a dead politician.”
Our police often fail to understand the difference between rhetoric and reality, and protests involving anarchist groups such as Class War are often ridiculously over-policed, sometimes with disastrous consequences, but almost always provoking more violence than they prevent. On April 1st 2009 for the G20 – Financial Fools Day they had turned up with squads of riot police psyched up to batter largely innocent and joyful protesters – and one of the police killed a newspaper seller simply walking home through the area.
So in my account of this event in Trafalgar Square I was at pains to tell them that the ‘Carnival Of Death’ was “called a carnival; if you want to take part, come ready to dance.”
Shortly after people began the commemoration, a PCSO came to tell those taking part they were not allowed to hold protests or other events in Trafalgar Square without permission. When he was laughed at, he brought over a Heritage Warden who told us the Square was the property of the GLA (Greater London Authority), and that permission was needed for events.
“Fine” said those present. “The GLA is a public body; we own it, this is a public place and we give ourselves permission and intend to continue.” As I pointed out in my account, Trafalgar Square is not just a public place, but one that since its building in the 1830s has been a traditional place for demonstrating radical dissent. It was a tradition that those present were determined to continue.
Fortunately the dozen or so police who arrived shortly after the PCSO had phoned to call for reinforcement simply stood and watched and had enough sense not to try and stop the commemoration, which ended after around 30 minutes when the organisers decided it was time to go down the pub.
At the end of the event, copies of an anti-Election manifesto and a suitably defaced poster showing the leaders of the Labour, Conservative, Liberal Democrat and BNP leaders were distributed by the Whitechapel Anarchist Group. They advised us to “Use your cross wisely”, under a picture of the four leaders in the cross-hairs of a gun sight, and attached to the bottom was a ‘Free Gift’ – a safety match, with the message ” Burn Your Ballot”.
As they wrote: “It’s time to end the unjust, corrupt system of terror and build a fair, equal society that will benefit the majority. We all know voting doesn’t change anything and our collective apathy allows this folly to continue. It’s time for REAL change. It’s time for revolution.”
