Netanyahu, Immigration & Shaker: On Wednesday 9th September 2015 groups came to Downing Street both to protest against and to support the Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu then making an official visit to David Cameron. And in Parliament Square there were protests supporting the parliamentary report on immigration detention which was being debated, as well as a weekly vigil calling for the release of Londoner Shaker Aamer, still then held in Guantanamo.
Netanyahu visit protests – Downing Street.
Over a thousand people had come to Downing Street to protest the official visit of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who they say should be arrested for war crimes in the attack on Gaza in 2014.
There were too many for the small penned area the police had allocated for the protest and many chose instead to stand in the area between the two carriageways, although police tried to clear the area.
A much smaller group who had come to support Israel were in another pen a short distnace down the road. They included supporters with a Union flag with the message UK CHRISTIANS LOVE ISRAEL.
Some of them had come with posters about other issues, including a woman holding a hand-written sign ‘THEY ARE CRUCIFYING CHRISTAINS IN IRAQ!’ But ISIS which has carried out such atrocities were encouraged by both Israel and the CIA and ISIS relies on Israeli money for the oil they smuggle out to Israel.
The pro-Israel supporters complained to police that they were not controlling the pro-Palestinian protesters, and one attempted to stop me photographing him as he did so. But I continued to photograph him.
By this time many from both sides were protesting on the pavement in front of Downing Street, and police had made a number of arrests, mainly of pro-Palestine activists. But others continued to complain to police.
Police managed to clear an area so that cars could still leave and enter Downing Street when the gates were opened, and people from both groups shouted at each other across the narrow divide. More police arrived and were able to keep this area clear.
Many protesters had remained on the far side of the road, and they were joined by anti-Zionist Neturei Karta orthodox Jews who held posters saying ‘State of “Israel” Do NOT Represent World Jewry’
Yet more police arrived and the protests continued with a great deal of noise from both sides. There were more complaints by the Zionists that a few of those at the protests were waving flags in support of the Lebanese Hezbollah. In 2008 the military wing of Hezbollah was proscribed but the parliamentary group which together with its allies had a majority in the Lebanese parliament was not – and both use the same flag.
So it was still legal to use the Hezbollah flag in 2015. But in 2019 Home Secretary Sajid Javid added Hezbollah’s political wing to the list of proscribed terrorist organisations making the flag now illegal to fly in Britain.
One of the pro-Israel protesters was holding a definitely legal Welsh flag, though I could not understand its relevance at this protest. The protest was still continuing very noisily when I left.
The Report of the Inquiry into the Use of Immigration Detention in the United Kingdom by the All Party Parliamentary Group on Refugees & the All Party Parliamentary Group on Migration was being debated in Parliament and Movement for Justice came to Parliament Square to support some of its conclusions and demand more radical action on immigration.
One of its key conclusions was that there should be a time limit of 28 days on immigration detention which is currently still indefinite. At least one person has been kept in our immigration prisons for three years (less one day) before being released, and none of those held know when or if they may be released or deported. They constantly face the risk of being forcibly deported to a country where their lives are at risk.
Some of those taking part in the protests had previously been held in detention centres for months or more, while MfJ were still calling for an end to the illegal ‘fast track’ system which is clearly designed to remove migrants and asylum seekers before they have a proper chance to prove their right to be here. They also called for a complete end to detention and immigration raids, the opening of the Calais border and an amnesty for migrants.
The report also called for “a whole-sale shift in approach, away from merely focusing on enforcement and towards quality engagement with individuals at all stages of their immigration process” which has been highly successful in other countries.
Needless to say, the Tory government failed to implement any of the changes suggested, and although Angela Rayner, now Deputy Prime Minister, was the only MP to come out and listen to the protest, there seems little chance of our Labour Government moving away from the current racist policies.
This was the first of a new series of weekly vigils opposite the Houses of Parliament calling for the release of Battersea resident Shaker Aamer, still held, abused and tortured in Guantanamo after more than 13 years despite never facing any charges and having been twice cleared for release.
Against Austerity, Cleaners Flash Mob, EDL & Falun Dafa: The main event on Saturday 16th July 2016 was a well-attended march and rally against austerity and racism following the Brexit referendum, but on the way there I came across a Falun Dafa march, and while people were marching manged to cover a ‘Flash Mob’ by cleaners and a small protest by the far-right EDL.
End Austerity, No to Racism, Tories Out!
The People’s Assembly and Stand Up To Racism had organised an emergency demonstration following the Brexit referendum against austerity and racism and calling for the Tories to be defeated at a General Election.
The protest assembled outside the BBC in the hope that they might for once notice and report on a large protest in London, but as usual they ignored it. It also showed huge popular support for then Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn – who only failed to defeat Theresa May the following year because of sabotage by Labour party officials and the right wing of the party.
Immigration had been a major issue in the Brexit referendum, exploited by the Leave campaign and this had resulted in an upsurge in racism and hate attacks. Brexit did result in lowering migration from the EU and since 2017 the number of those born in the EU living in Britain has slowly but slightly declined. But this has been more than matched by an increase of around a million in those born in non-EU countries.
Of course we need these people who fill many useful jobs here and pay taxes. We also need those who work in the shadow economy, estimated in total to be around 10% of the total economy. Although this is often said to be important in attracting undocumented migrants to the UK, our shadow economy is significantly smaller than the average for developed nations, and at a level around half that of Italy, Greece and Spain and a little below Germany and France according to free-market ‘think tank’ the Institute for Economic Affairs.
The UK had been one of the leaders in the establishment of the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted in 1948, and in the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) adopted by the Council of Europe, signed in 1950 which came into force in 1953, with a court to enforce it. Many felt that the Tory government’s proposal in 2022 to repeal the Human Rights Act 1998 and replace it by a Bill of Rights was reprehensible. Liz Truss’s one good thing was to stop its progress and in June 2023 Rishi Sunak’s Justice Secretary Alex Chalk confirmed it had been dropped.
As the end of the march left down Regent Street I rushed off to photograph a breakaway group from the march who had left to take part in a flash mob. Following that I trotted along Oxford Street to Park Lane where I photographed a short march by a few EDL supporters before rushing to the tube to make my way to the People’s Assembly and Stand Up To Racist rally in Parliament Square.
The Fire Brigades Union had brought their fire engine to the square to provide a platform for the speakers at the rally chaired by rally chaired by Romayne Phoenix of the People’s Assembly and Sabby Dhalu from Stand Up to Racism.
Islington councillor Michelline Safi Ngongo brought a message of support from Jeremy Corbyn. Other speakers included Green Party London Assembly member Caroline Russell, Weyman Bennett from Stand Up to Racism, Lindsey German of Stop the War, Sam Fairbairn the National Secretary of the People’s Assembly, Zita Holbourne of BARAC and PCS, Rob Williams of the NSSN, NUS Vice President (Further Education) Shakira Martin and Antonia Bright from Movement for Justice who brought an asylum seeker with her to speak.
Falun Dafa march against Chinese repression – Regent St
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, marched through London to protest the continuing torture and repression they have experience in China since 1999.
When the People’s Assembly / Stand Up To Racism march set off, a small group of striking cleaners from 100 Wood St and supporters left to stage a flash mob protest at the nearby HQ Offices of CBRE in Henrietta Place. The United Voices of the World strike at Wood St for the living wage and reinstatement of sacked workers was then in its 38th day.
Less than a hundred EDL supporters had turned up at Marble Arch to march a few yards down Park Lane and then into Hyde Park for a rally. A few anti-fascists who had turned up to oppose them had mainly left to join the People’s Assembly-Stand Up to Racism march by the time I arrived.
The Day After The Brexit Vote – Defend All migrants. On Friday 24th June 2016 almost half the nation woke up to hear with shock and some measure of disbelief to hear the news that a small majority had voted in favour of leaving Europe.
In any sensible democracy the result of 52% to 48% in an advisory referendum would not have been sufficient to cause such a major constitutional change, but Prime Minister David Cameron had stupidly promised to abide by the result and so we were now en route to Brexit.
Cameron had been confident that he would win the referendum with a vote to remain but he had severely underestimated the depths of lying and misrepresentation that the Leave campaign would sink to, with some of the leading figures likely to make huge personal profits from the break.
Brexit of course needn’t have been the major disaster it has been. We could have retained a much closer relationship with Europe, our largest trading partner. It needed the total incompetence of Boris Johnson to get us the worst of all deals, not least because he and his negotiators simply did not understand what negotiation meant, with the politicians largely restricting themselves to making clearly impossible demands and then blaming Europe.
I don’t expect we will return to Europe during my lifetime, but I hope the next government will make some sensible moves to restore our relationships, although rather avoiding the subject in the current election campaign. But surely we cannot continue being unable to staff our care and medical sectors and with crops rotting unpicked on the fields. And we do need at least some of those plumbers, electricians and other tradesmen.
The Leave campaign reached new lows with things like that £350 million on the side of a bus, which everyone who made the slightest investigation knew was a lie. But the media spread it around with some suggesting it was perhaps not correct, while all should have been deriding it as nonsense. And it was a figure that stuck in many peoples’ minds.
Immigration was an issue that both sides failed on – and at times Remain seemed determined to try and outflank Leave on the right suggesting racist policies. Migrants were attacked and scapegoated not only by both Remain and Leave campaigns but by all our mainstream parties and media over more than 20 years, stoking up hatred by insisting immigrants are a “problem”.
Migration has been and will remain vital to the growth of our economy, as well as enriching our cultural life. Walk through our high streets or page through the TV schedules and cross out the immigrants and the descendants of post-war immigration and what you would be left would be limited and rather boring.
Senior Conservatives are even proposing that we should leave the European Convention on Human Rights so they can deport asylum seekers to Rwanda, and although Labour has said it will end this policy it has not yet put forward plans for safe routes for asylum seekers.
The protest on 24th June by anarchists and socialists against racism and fascist violence had been some planned weeks in advance, called by Movement for Justice, rs21, London Antifascists and Jewdas, and supported by other groups including Brick Lane Debates, National Campaign Against Fees and Cuts (NCAFC), Right to Remain, Radical Assembly, Clapton Ultras, the Antiuniversity, English collective of prostitutes, sex workers open university, lesbians and gays support the migrants, Razem Londyn, London Anarchist Federation, Kent anti-racist network, dywizjon 161, colectivo anticapitalista Londres and Plan C London as well as others who brought banners and many individuals.
A camera team of three working for a right-wing US website arrived and tried to provoke groups in the crowd with silly questions and appearing to gloat over the Brexit decision. Eventually police stepped in to calm things and made sure the group left.
After a number of speeches the protesters set off to march on a roundabout route through the east of the city on their way to protest outside News International in Southwark. But I think they veered off course whenever it looked likely that the large police presence might try to kettle them. Eventually I got fed up with walking and went home.
More on the protest with many more pictures on My London Diary: Defend All Migrants.
Shut Down Yarl’s Wood – Saturday 12th March 2016 saw one of the largest protests outside the Immigration Detention Centre at Yarl’s Wood with well over a thousand people from around the country waving and shouting support to the women asylum seekers held indefinitely inside, who responded enthusiastically by shouting and waving back from the prison blocks behind the high fence, hindered by windows that hardly open. There were many among the protesters who had themselves been locked up in Yarls Wood or other detention centres.
My day began badly, with a cancelled train and then a coach driver for the five or six mile journey from Bedford Station to the isolated prison who got lost and took us for a 20 mile mystery tour through rural Bedfordshire, meaning we arrived rather late for the protest.
We arrived just in time for the final few minutes of the rally by Movement for Justice, the organisers of the protest, outside the locked gates of the Twinwoods Business Centre. An shortly after the protesters set off for the long march down the road and along a public footpath to a field on a slight rise adjoining the prison where the main protest was to take place.
It was dry and sunny, but there had been a week of rain and the fields we walked past were full of puddles and the rise in front of the 20 foot prison fence was extremely treacherous and hard to climb. Alongside the metal fence was a concrete path but then a few feet of churned up mud before the slippery slope.
At the bottom the lower 10ft of the fence is solid metal sheeting, so there you have no view of the prison. but can make a considerable noise by banging or kicking the fence. On top of the slope you can see the upper floors of the closest prison block, and from there we could make out those prisoners who had managed to get to the windows and were shouting greetings and some holding out notices though the small gap – just large enough for a hand to go through – that the windows open.
Unfortunately the windows reflect the sky and in the bright weather we could only see dimly those inside. Further along the rise we could see a little of the ground floor of the detention centre, and here the views were a little clearer. This part of the immigration prison was then being used for families, while the rest ws a women’s prison.
The regime in immigration detention differs from that in our other prisons and in one respect is worse. Those inside are held indefinitely and have no way of knowing when they might be released. And their detention can be very lengthy with one woman held there for three years less a couple of days. Many have seen this as totally unacceptable and called for a maximum length of detention of 28 days as is the case in some other countries.
But the detainees alhtough kept as prisoners are allowed to have mobile phones which they need to communicate with solicitors and others dealing with their immigration cases. And the protesters were able to phone some of the women inside and the calls could be linked to the public address system brought to the protest so they could tell something of their stories.
Those held in immigration detention are not criminals and few have or would commit any criminal offences. Many indeed have been victims of criminal attacks, violence and rape, or face these if they are deported back to their home countries. They all want to be allowed to live and work here, to contribute their skills to our country and pay our taxes. There is no need to keep them locked away. But we have a racist immigration regime that treats them as criminals and liars and shows little evidence of any humanity – but much of indifference, incompetence and unnecessary delays.
The goverment outsources their detention to private companies and various investigations and reports have shown the lack of care, mistreatment and even sexual harassment and violence in this and other centres. Rather than shutting them down and moving to a more humane system the government have now moved those who might otherwise been in Yarl’s Wood to a far more remote location to make protests harder to organise.
The pictures and text, including some captions, on My London Diary tell more about what what happened at the protest: Shut Down Yarl’s Wood.
Save Legal Aid – 2013: On Tuesday 30th July 2013, ten years ago today, the Save Legal Aid Campaign held a rally outside the Old Bailey in protest against proposed cuts in legal aid which they say would severely damage the UK justice system, removing legal aid completely for many and providing a poor quality cut-price service for others.
The proposals would bring in compulsory tendering on price, with legal aid services being provided by the lowest bidder and remove any choice by defendants of who should represent them. They say this would replace all the current specialist solicitors by groups such as Tesco and Eddie Stobart employing less qualified and experienced people and providing an inferior service for those unable to pay – and so choose – their solicitors.
The rally also celebrated the successes of the UK’s legal aid system, which speakers said had been the envy of the world since it was brought in on 30th July 1949, exactly 64 years earlier, an event celebrated with the singing of ‘Happy Birthday’ and the cutting of a cake by MP Diane Abbott.
For many of us those celebrations rang hollow. The legal aid system by 2013 was but a pale shadow of that brought in by the Legal Aid and Assistance Act on 30th July 1949. It was a skeleton that was being celebrated, although one that as several speakers who had benefited from it showed still had some effect. In the unlikely event we ever get a reforming Labour government it could perhaps still be revived, but more likely any future government will destroy it still more as New Labour did.
Legal cases in the UK are incredibly expensive in part because of the nature of our legal system which is an adversarial one, but also because of some traditional practices which render it less efficient and protect the interests of some of those who are a part of the system.
Probably the only sound legal advice is to stay away from the law unless you are very rich. Although its often said that the same law governs both rich and poor, in practice that is not really the case, and in particular those in the middle of society get screwed.
Legal Aid was first introduced in the UK in 1949 when the welfare state was attempting to make justice fair for all. It could be claimed for almost all criminal or civil matters except libel and defamation and around 80% of the UK population were eligible for some support, with those more able to pay receiving support on a sliding scale depending on their income.
It wasn’t then a great cost to the economy as then only a small fraction of the population gad access the the legal advice that might have led them to take action in the courts. If you were poor you seldom came to court except when arrested – and most cases were dealt with by magistrates with legal aid seldom being involved.
In the 1970s Law Centres were set up in many of the poorer areas of the country, giving free advice and explaining and aiding their clients to take matters of social welfare, housing and criminality to the courts. And in 1973 a ‘Green Form Scheme’ was set up to allow those of low incomes to get legal advice from solicitors. Both led to increases in cases and a corresponding increase in the overall cost of legal aid.
The Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1962, the Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1968, the The Immigration Act 1971 and the the British Nationality Act 1981 each led to a predictable and dramatic increase in the number of cases requiring legal aid to resolve disputes.
Various actions were taken to reduce the cost to the country of legal aid, with eligibility being drastically reduced both by income limits and by reducing the areas of work for which it was available.
New Labour reformed the system when they came to power, but their reforms proved a disaster and they piled a second disaster on top by privatising the system. By the time the coalition government came to power there wasn’t really a great deal left, but their Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012 (LASPO) saw off most of what remained.
Since then, to get legal aid you have to have a disposable income of less than £733 a month and less than £8000 of disposable capital. Those receiving universal credit and some other benefits also qualify. There are different income and asset qualification levels for criminal proceedings in Crown Court cases.
As well as these tests legal aid is only available if your case passes a “merits” test as defined by The Civil Legal Aid (Merits Criteria) Regulations 2013. It has to be assessed by the Director as being in the public interest and having at least a 50% chance of success.
Speakers at the protest included Raphael Rowe, wrongly imprisoned as one of the M25 three, Anne Hall the mother of Daniel Roque Hall, a man suffering from a rare condition who would have died in prison without legal aid which got him released to receive care, and Sally, the mother of a rape victim who police failed, as well as Sadiq Khan MP Labour’s Shadow Justice Secretary, Ian Lawrence of NAPO, activist, poet, co-founder and co-chair of BARAC Zita Holbourne, Shauneen Lambe of Just for Kids Law and criminal defence solicitor and Justice Alliance member Matt Foot, but the loudest applause was for a rousing speech by Shami Chakrabarti of Liberty. You can see pictures of all of them and more about the protest on My London at Save Legal Aid.
Divided Families, Undercover Police & Cyprus; Ten years ago today, on Tuesday 9th July 2013 I photographed a protest against the lack of humanity at the Home Office, another at New Scotland Yard against police use of undercover agents against legal protest groups and finally Cypriots still demanding to know the fate of their relatives who disappeared 39 years earlier during the Turkish invasion of their country.
Divided Families Day – Home Office
In 2012 the UK brought in new family immigration rules to prevent British Citizens and refugees earning less than £18,6000 (more if they have children) from bringing non-EU spouses to live here.
A High Court judgement had concluded that these restriction were legal but that the earnings threshold and the other requirements were “so onerous in effect as to be an unjustified and disproportionate interference with a genuine spousal relationship”. The judge suggested that the minimum income requirement should be reduced to around £13,000, around 2/3 of the current figure.
Home Secretary Theresa May responded to the court judgement by considering an appeal. The income threshold was not lowered and it remains at the same figure today. The rules still apply, but have been made more wide-ranging by Brexit.
Low paid workers are as entitled to family life as billionaires, and any income threshold seems totally unfair and inhumane. It discriminates against women, many of whom are in part-time work due to child-care responsibilities and are generally on lower pay than men. In 2013 over 60% of British women in employment were earning less than the amount needed to bring a partner to the UK.
The rules were then thought to be preventing around 18,000 families a year from living together in the UK. The protest took place on the first anniversary of them coming into force.
As I commented, “It seems a clear case of a measure that has been introduced merely to make the current government look ‘tough’ on immigration, while making no real contribution to reducing the reliance of any migrants on support from the taxpayer.”
Against Undercover Police in Protest Movement – Scotland Yard
Youth Against Racism in Europe (YRE) was a legal and democratic protest movement which organised mass protests against the BNP in the 1990s, succeeding in getting their south London HQ closed down after four racist murders within two miles of it – including that of Stephen Lawrence.
Undercover police officer Peter Francis joined the movement and acted as an ‘agent provocateur’. This was one of a number of similar abuses of other legal protest organisations and political groups carried out by the police, some of which are only now being brought to light by the Undercover Policing Inquiry which recently published its first report.
Police investigation of the Stephen Lawrence case has long known to have been sadly lacking, with some officers acting to protect his killers. Other undercover police actions included attempts to discredit the main witness of that murder, Duwayne Brooks, and the secret recording of meetings between the police and Brooks and his lawyers.
Francis was a member of the covert Special Demonstration Squad (SDS), founded in 1968 to infiltrate mainly left-wing groups which the police defined as ‘extremist’.
Mostly the information the squad gained went no further than could have been found by reading the groups leaflets and attending meetings, but Francis tried to push members of the YRE into vigilante actions against individual BNP members. But his efforts were unsuccessful as it was an open and democratic movement dedicated to mass campaigns and other legal actions.
Police Commissioner Sir Paul Condon claims he was not aware of the activities of the SDS, but Francis has claimed he gave him a bottle of whisky in appreciation of his work infiltrating the YRE.
Among the speakers at the event ,were several who had worked with Francis in the YRE and claim his information led to some of the illegal assaults made on members by police. You can read more about the protest and its demands on My London Diary.
Cypriots Demand details of 1974 Killings – Houses of Parliament
After Cyprus gained independence from Britain in 1960, bitter political differences between Greeks and Turks remained, with many Turks and Greeks being killed or missing. Events came to a head in 1974 when the Greek junta backed a Greek military coup in Cyprus and in response Turkey invaded Cyprus, taking over the north of the island.
A third of the Greek population were forced from their homes and fled to the south, with a slightly higher proportion of Turks moved to the north. The island remains divided, with the north of Cyprus under Turkish military occupation and the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus is only recognised as a state by Turkey.
Many Cypriots from both populations went missing in 1974 and are presumed dead, but little is known about what happened to some 1,500 Greek and 500 Turkish Cypriots.
The protesters from the Organisation of Relatives of Missing Cypriots (UK) held photographs of their missing relatives and urged the UK government to put pressure on Turkey to release information and allow investigation of their fate.
After the protest outside parliament they were going to attend a meeting organised by the National Federation of Cypriots in the UK in the House of Commons on ‘Cyprus: prospects for a reunited island‘ with a number of MPs and Lord Harris of Harringey. There seems to be little or no possibility of this until there is a very different regime in power in Turkey.
Back on Saturday 22nd March 2008 I had a rather varied day in London, meeting protesters cycling to Aldermaston on my way to photograph a march for freedom in Tibet, then going to a protest against the deportation of a gay man to Iran and finally to a pillow fight.
Bikes Not Bombs: London – Aldermaston
I was on foot and had just come out of Oxford Circus station when I saw the CND Bikes Not Bombs group of cyclists who had begun their ride in Trafalgar Square earlier and were on their way to ride to Aldermaston. Though when I took a few photographs as you can see from the bus they were cycling in exactly the wrong direction, east towards Ilford. Of course they weren’t lost, just trying to attract some attention to the protest, riding with a sound system along London’s busiest shopping street.
I’d thought briefly about taking part myself in the event, as I’d used a bike to get around since I was six, having graduated then from a first a pedal car and then a tricycle. I did own a car briefly when I was around 21, but soon realised it was impractical in cities, expensive, polluting and environmentally unsound and never made the same mistake again.
But for the reasons I listed on My London Diary – sloth, other events, lousy weather and a dislike of early rising – I didn’t join this official ride, though I did cycle on my own from Reading to Aldermaston and back on the following Monday to join the protesters there.
I was on my way to Park Crescent, a short walk north of the Chinese Embassy where Tibetans and supporters of freedom in Tibet were meeting to march through London on the 49th anniversary of the 1959 Tibetan uprising.
Tibet came under effective control of the Chinese government in 1951, when an agreement had been come to the status of Tibet within the recently established People’s Republic of China. In 1949 Tibetan protesters feared the Chinese were about to arrest the 14th Dalai Lama. Protests were at first peaceful but were brutally repressed by the People’s Liberation Army and there was heavy fighting which also involved Tibetan separatists who had been carrying out guerrilla warfare against Chinese forces.
The Dalai Lama fled the country and set up an independent Tibetan government in India, where he still lives – and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989. The Tibetan uprising had begun on 10th March 1959 and this day is celebrated each year as Tibetan Uprising Day and Women’s Uprising Day. Since 2009, following protests on 10th March 2008 in Lhasa, the Chinese-controlled authority in Tibet have celebrated the day they fully regained control, 28th March as the national anniversary of Serfs Emancipation Day.
The Tibetan Independence Movement who organise annual protests calling for freedom for Tibet was originally funded and trained by the CIA, but this was withdrawn following Richard Nixon’s visit to China in 1972. And the Dalai Lama who had originally backed it, and who appears as a large photograph carried reverently in the marches, also withdrew support for the independence movement in the 1970s.
It is clear from reports by Amnesty International and others is that there are considerable human rights abuses in Tibet. The 2021 US State Department report listing includes “unlawful or arbitrary killings, including extrajudicial killings by the government; torture and cases of cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment or punishment by the government; arbitrary arrest or detention; political prisoners; politically motivated reprisals against individuals located outside the country; serious problems with the independence of the judiciary; arbitrary or unlawful interference with privacy; serious restrictions on free expression and media, including censorship; serious restrictions on internet freedom including site blocking; substantial interference with the freedom of peaceful assembly and freedom of association; severe restrictions on religious freedom….”
But of course human rights are not always respected in this country, and we currently have a government which is proposing to withdraw from some international human rights conventions and proposing racist anti-immigrant policies which are deliberately in breach of them.
Back in 2008, the Labour government was also riding roughshod over the human rights of some immigrants, setting up a system of large-scale detention of asylum seekers and treating individuals unfairly in a bid to outflank the Tories on cutting immigration through blatantly right-wing policies.
Mehdi Kazemi had come to the UK to study after having been involved in a consensual homosexual relationship in Iran. After his boyfriend was executed for this he became a wanted man in Iran and he went to the Netherlands to apply for political asylum.
This was refused as he had come from the UK and so was not allowed under the 2003 Dublin Agreement. The Uk had refused him permission to stay in Britain and were proposing to deport him to Iran where he would be tried and executed.
His case was just one of many where the Home Office were failing to recognise the need for refugees to claim asylum on the grounds of persecution because of their sexual orientation, and for failing to have accurate and up-to-date information on homophobic persecution in countries to which LGBT asylum seekers might be deported.
Support for Kazemi at this protest and by a number of MPs, MEPs and human rights activists did eventually result in the Home Office agreeing to review his case and he was given leave to remain here in May 2008.
My day ended in very much lighter mood with a pillow fight in Leicester Square, one of many organised in capitals around the world due to kick off at 15.03PM.
I commented: “Of course its a trivial, silly event, but the idea and the kind of organisation involved I think represents something new and exciting, a kind of ‘Demo 2.0’ which we will surely see more of in the future.”
Perhaps this hasn’t had as much impact here in the UK as I had hoped, but I think may have been more important elsewhere in the world. To some extent it has been outgrown as Facebook, Twitter and other social media apps have become more important and even protests organised months and years in advance make use of them.
But it was interesting if rather tricky to photograph, and I got stuck in without a pillow and at some danger to my health, main not “from impact but suffocation when some pillows split open to fill the air with clouds of feathers and feather-dust. At times I wished I was wearing a mask to protect my lungs; keeping my mouth firmly closed and breathing though my nose only stopped the larger particles.“
And I also found the the autofocus on my DSLR was too efficient at focusing on feathers in the air, and until I turned it off and went manual many of my pictures failed to be sharp for the people and pillows behind the screen of feathers.
Later as the pixel count on DSLRs increased and full-frame cameras appeared I found it very useful to work in many situations using just the central ‘DX’ half-frame area of the viewfinder – which would have been very useful to let me see the people and pillows coming for me, but on this occasion I found “chaos really rules taking pictures becomes a press and hope situation. I think some of them do give an idea of what it was like to be there.
Immigration, Lions, Low Pay & Child Prisoners. I started my day on Friday 13th March 2015 in Feltham in outer London, outside an Immigration Tribunal before going in to cover three further protests in central London.
Let Ife Stay in the UK! York House Immigration Tribunal, Feltham
Immigration has been very much in the news lately, with the UK government introducing new legislation to attempt to evade its responsibilities under international obligations over the treatment of refugees, demonising those who have genuine asylum claims as “illegal” and refusing them the opportunity to make claims.
For years both our major political parties have vied with each other to produce more and more draconian measures to cut the number of migrants coming to the UK. A part of this has been the setting up of more and more Byzantine and understaffed systems to slow down the processing of claims by the Home Office. More and more people are kept in limbo for years before eventually being granted leave to stay in this country.
It’s our system that has led to the huge growth of people smugglers, at first using lorries and more recently concentrating on channel crossings in unsafe and expendable small boats.
The real basis for this trade is that there are no safe routes that most genuine asylum seekers can take to enter this country. Even the few country-specific schemes we have are not working properly. Were we to set up a system that worked fairly and efficiently it would largely put the people smugglers out of business, perhaps cutting the demand for their services by around three-quarters.
Setting up a system that rapidly – perhaps within 28 days – sorted out those with a probable case for asylum from those who were clearly economic migrants would not be difficult, and we could admit those who are likely in the end to be given asylum on a provisional basis, allowing them to work and contribute to our society while their cases were under more detailed scrutiny.
Lineker’s tweet “This is just an immeasurably cruel policy directed at the most vulnerable people in language that is not dissimilar to that used by Germany in the ’30s” was simply stating facts. It certainly is immeasurably cruel, and listening to speeches by Tory MPs and ministers both in Parliament and in media interviews we largely hear a complete lack of compassion from people claiming to be “compassionate“.
Perhaps it might have been politically more acceptable to call it something like Orwellian double-think but government policy often seems to be very accurately following the well-known quote “If you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it, and you will even come to believe it yourself.” And I probably don’t need to tell you who said that.
Obviously we should not refer to “invasions” or define people’s actions as illegal when their activities are legal under international law, and certainly even people breaking laws are not themselves illegal.
I didn’t know there was an Immigration Tribunal in Feltham before the protest here, rather hidden away on a small industrial estate a mile or two south of Heathrow. And clearly the staff working there didn’t want people to know, and attempted to get police to stop the protest – but were told by police it was legal. It wasn’t a big protest, calling for a 2 year old Ife and her mother and brotheer to be allowed to stay in Peckham where the Ife and continue the medical treatment she needs rather than be deported to Nigeria. You can read more about the protest at Let Ife Stay in the UK!
Save Our Lions – ban Canned Hunting – Trafalgar Square
It took me a little over an hour to travel by bus, train and tube to Trafalgar Square where I joined (a little late) several hundred people who were there to protest against ‘canned hunting’, where lions are bred and raised tame on farms in South Africa for rich visitors to pet, to ‘walk with lions’ and to shoot as trophy heads.
It’s a sordid business, degrading noble animals and threatening wild lions which are captured for farm breeding to improve the quality of the stock. Young females are often killed as soon as they have got too large for the petting zoos, as females are in little demand as hunting trophies.
After some speeches on the North Terrace I was invited to go across with a couple of protesters to South Africa House, where I took a few pictures as they posed in the entrance before security told us to leave.
Poverty pay at the Royal College of Art – RCA, Kensington Gore
IWGB members, supported by students, protested noisily at the Royal College of Art against low pay of outsourced workers, demanding they be paid the London Living Wage now, not from September as the college has offered; the workers need it now.
This was a noisy protest with trade union members and students banging on drums, whistling, blowing plastic horns and chanting slogans, mainly “Living Wage Now!” with RCA security and a couple of police looking on.
After protesting at the entrance to the RCA for some time they marched out on to the main road and held a short rally at the end of the college building close to the Albert Hall before going on a further noisy protest at a small enclosed yard next to a college dining area.
Finally I went to Victoria Street where protesters on the wide pavement outside the G4S offices were calling or the release of 5 young boys from Hares, held and tortured in Israeli jails which G4S helps to run.
They were arrested two years ago after they had been accused of throwing stones at an incident when an illegal settler crashed into the back of a truck. If they are ever tried, like most Palestinians in Israeli courts they are likely to be found guilty – even if there is little or no real evidence and could be sentenced to over 25 years in jail.
The protesters also called for the release of other Palestinian child prisoners, handing out leaflets and displaying banners which detailed some of the cases and the torture of children often tortured and held in isolation in small dark cells in the prisons for which G4S provides support.
Southall Black Sisters Protest Racist UKBA – Eaton House, Hounslow – Thu 24th Oct 2013
Although I grew up in Hounslow, ten miles west of the centre of London, I’ve not often returned there in recent years, and the protest organised by Southall Black Sisters outside the Hounslow Reporting Centre on Thursday 24th October 2013 was the only one I’ve so far photographed in the town.
The UK Borders Agency reporting centre is at the western edge of the town, opposite Hounslow Heath where highwaymen once roamed and was the aerodrome from where the British Empire’s first scheduled daily international commercial flights took off in 1919. The large brick block once housed the UK laboratory and factory of US chemical manufacture Parke-Davis, once the world’s largest pharmaceutical company, now a subsidiary of Pfizer, who had set up a dyestuffs factory here before the first world war, though the Research and Administration building in front of which the protest was held only dates from 1954.
Southall Black Sisters (SBS) say that after the Refugee & Migrant Forum East London (RAMFEL) succeeded in its legal challenge over Theresa May’s Home Office advertising vans (which were also criticised by the Advertising Standards Authority) “the UKBA has shifted the ’Go Home’ message to reporting centres in Glasgow, Croydon and Hounslow.”
Their protest against the Government’s anti-immigration campaigns outside the Hounslow reporting centre stated “We will not tolerate underhand tactics used to instil fear and divide us. Let us return to the streets and make our voices heard. We need to fight for our rights.”
I joined the group of around 30 people, mainly SBS members, most wearing t-shirts with the message ‘Do I look illegal?’, but they were joined by others from Sol-Fed and other groups who had brought a large banner with the message ‘F**K ALL RACISM – NO ONE IS ILLEGAL’.
And no person is illegal, but those called it lack permission to be here, though many will in time be granted it. In France, such people are said to be ‘without papers’, but none of us in the UK needs papers to live here, so an appropriate but less biased term might be ‘without status’. The term ‘illegal immigrants’, a deliberately biased description of people who do not currently have a legal right to live in this country.
The protesters blew plastic horns and whistles and generally made a lot of noise, as well as shouting a number of chants including ‘Theresa May, drop the pretence, Go home vans cause offence’, ‘We are humans not illegal, We want justice for our people’ and ‘Money for jobs and education, Not for racist deportation.’
3 Cosas Defy London University Protest Ban – Senate House, Thu 24th Oct 2013
The ‘3 Cosas’ campaign is for sickpay, holidays and pensions for all workers at the University of London, where many low paid workers are outsourced to companies who employ them often in the legal minimum wage and conditions of service, and also often employ bullying managers to overwork staff. They often fail to provide proper safety equipment to do the job.
The workers, many of whom are Spanish speaking, have for some years been demanding they should be directly employed by the university where they work rather than these contracting companies, and there have by now been many long and successful campaigns to achieve this.
The University management in 2013 had responded to their campaign with a ban of protests in and around Senate House, and threatened to bring police onto campus to prevent further protests and to bring charges of trespass against any protesters. This was seen by workers and staff and students as an attempt to prevent free speech and freedom of assembly at the university similar to that of of authoritarian regimes overseas, rightly condemned across academia and the rest of society.
On Thursday 24th October, staff students, the IWGB (Independent Workers of Great Britain) trade union which represents many cleaners and other trade unionists defied University management ban of protests by holding a noisy protest in and around Senate House.
After protesting on the streets around the Senate House, some of the protesters walked in around another building while others scaled the gates to protest at the bottom of Senate House. Eventually police came and tried to stop them walking out. But there were too few of them to be effective. The protesters walked out and ended their protest in front of SOAS.
Marikana, Bangladesh, Bahrain & Brazil – 2018. One of the joys of London is its multi-cultural nature with so many people from different countries and nationalities working here and many for various reasons choosing to make a new life in the city, and the four protests I photographed on Monday 13th August 2018 reflected that diversity.
London has long been a cosmopolitan place, and has a long history of welcoming people fleeing from persecution and oppression, certainly from the days of the Huguenots and in the late nineteenth century the Jews fleeing pogroms in Eastern Europe. London has also memorials to a number of the liberators of South America who were given refuge here, as well as European revolutionaries such as Karl Marx and Giuseppe Mazzini.
In the twentieth century things began to change, beginning with the Aliens Act 1905 which was aimed at denying entry to ‘undesirable’ Jewish and Eastern European immigrants. But subjects of the British Empire still had free movement, though restrictions were tightened up against those from South Asia after the First World War.
After the Second World War we needed immigrant workers to run public services but also began to set up tight barriers against immigration from the Commonwealth. In the current century we have clearly racist anti-immigrant policies and now even plans to forcibly deport asylum seekers to Rwanda.
There are now many different national communities living in London, often gathered mainly in particular areas of the city. And from these are many groups still highly concerned about events in their countries including some who have come here as political refugees. Often their concerns are shared with others on the left in the UK who come to protest with them.
Justice For Marikana – 6th Anniversary – City of London
South Africa was once a key part of the British Empire, and its mines in particular contributed greatly to the wealth of London and many mining companies are still based in the city. The earliest demonstrations I attended were against British companies and the UK government who supported Apartheid and these and the boycott continued for many years.
34 Striking miners were shot dead by South African police at Lonmin’s Marikana platinum mine in 2012, and three days before the 6th anniversary of the massacre the Marikana Solidarity Collective organised a tour of the City of London protesting outside the premises of investors, insurers and major shareholders profiting from the violence against people and nature in Marikana.
Lonmin plc was founded in London in 1909 as The London and Rhodesian Mining and Land Company Limited and became a huge company. As well as mines the company diversified its interests and for 12 years from 1981-93 was the owner of the Observer newspaper. Even Prime Minister Edward Heath described the company, then notorious as Lonrho, in 1973 as “an unpleasant and unacceptable face of capitalism” for its busting of sanctions against Rhodesia.
The protesters carried banners and large portraits of some of the murdered miners. They met up at St Paul’s Cathedral and then left to march to the offices of several investors, insurers and shareholders profiting from the violence at Marikana, calling for those responsible to be brought to justice and for reparations to be made to their dependents and to those survivors who were injured and arrested. The tour ended outside the London offices of BASF who are the major customers for the platinum mined at Marikana.
Release Bangladeshi opposition leader Khaleda Zia -Downing St
The Bangladeshi Nationalist Party UK protested opposite Downing St for the release of their party leader, Begum Khaleda Zia, jailed in February for five years for embezzlement of international funds donated to Zia Orphanage Trust.
Khaleda Zia was the First Lady of Bangladesh during the presidency of her husband Ziaur Rahman who founded the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) in the late 1970s, was Bangladesh’s first female head of government from 1991-6 after the BNP won the country’s first democratic election in 20 years, and served as prime minister later in 2001-6.
The BNP claim the charge against her was politically motivated. Her son has also been sentenced to 10 years in jail but remains in London. Some Bangladeshi friends say there is little to chose between Zia and her rival, Sheikh Hasina Wazed, leader of the Awami League and Prime Minister of Bangladesh since January 2009. They say both are corrupt and neither represents the interests of the people of their country.
Inminds Islamic human rights organisation protested outside the Bahrain embassy after an attack in the early hours of the previous morning on hunger striker Ali Mushaima who was on hunger strike there since the start of August to save the life of his father Hassan Mushaima, one of the leaders of the 2011 mass movement that peacefully called for human rights and democratic reforms in Bahrain.
Inminds had protested in support of the Ali Mushima three days earlier, calling for the release of his father and all the other 5000 Bahraini prisoners of conscience languishing in the Al-Khalifa regimes jails and for and end of the dictatorship’s crimes against the Bahraini people.
Police had failed to properly investigate the early morning attack when a bucket of an unknown liquid was thrown over the hunger striker on the pavement below from the Ambassador’s balcony, but came to harass the protesters, trying to prevent them protesting in front of the balcony.
The protesters refused to move and then performed a rather unrehearsed short play in which Theresa May sold arms to the Bahraini dictator which he used to shoot protesters, who were then chained up. Unlike in real life the International Criminal Court came to their rescue, released them and condemned the Bahraini regime for their crimes against humanity.
Free Lula – Brazilians for Democracy & Justice – Brazilian Embassy, Cockspur St, St. James’s
Brazilians protested outside the Brazilian embassy calling for the release of Lula – Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva – the former trade union leader who was President of Brazil from 2003-11 in order to enable him to stand for election again in October 2018.
The right-wing Brazilian government had brought highly dubious charges against both then President Dilma Rousseff and Lula to impeach Dilma in 2016 for what was not an impeachable offence and to send Lula to prison in an attempt to prevent the Worker’s Party (TP) winning in the forthcoming elections.
Unfortunately he was not able to stand in 2018, and the far-right Bolsonaro became President. But Lula was released pending appeal in November 2019 and in March 2021 the Brazil Supreme Court ruled the judge in his trial was biased and the following month restored his political rights and all his convictions were nullified. He is now the front runner for the 2022 presidential elections.