Iraq War & Climate Change: Two separate protests on Saturday 29th March. The invasion of Iraq had begun nine days earlier and there were protests against it around the country including one I covered outside the BBC where a march from North London came to protest against the biased coverage on BBC radio and TV.
Broadcasters were carefully toeing the government line on the war and acting as its mouthpiece. The country was at war and accurate unbiased coverage appeared to be the first casualty.
I didn’t write much about the protest, but the pictures and the posters and placards told the story.
The BBC lost a great deal of credibility over its coverage and I don’t think it has ever recovered from this, And of course it has gone on with biased coverage of other situations including its coverage of the attacks on Jeremy Corbyn and of the Israeli government’s actions in Palestine over the years and particularly the genocidal attacks since the October 7th Hamas attack.
After the protest at the BBC I went on to cover an event calling for urgent action on Climate Change. Twenty two years ago there was still time to avoid its worst effects – if the world took urgent action, but instead most governments dragged their feet, driven by fossil fuel interests and making largely token changes if any. In the UK we are still thinking in a way that should be unthinkable about discovering and exploiting new oil resources such as Rosebank and BP has recently moved away from Green energy back to oil. Total madness.
The Kyoto Protocol had been agreed at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in December 1997 and set targets industrialized countries and the European Union to reduce their emissions by an average of 5% below 1990 levels during in 2008-2012. Some did, although largely by various ways of fiddling the figures, but the major polluters – India, China and the USA made no attempt to do. The main cause of its failure was that the United States never ratified the agreement.
Kyoto was largely replaced by the 2015 Paris agreement and we are now seeing the results of the failure of this to be properly implemented. But here is what I wrote about the ‘Kyoto march’ organised by the Campaign Against Climate Change on Saturday 29th March.
Marchers had started at the UK Esso HQ in Leatherhead and were marching to a party outside the US Embassy. I joined them at the Imperial War Museum to take photographs.
The march marked the the second anniversary of Bush’s decisive rejection of the Kyoto climate treaty. Esso (ExxonMobil) is a key partner in Bush’s energy policy and its opposition to controls on energy use. The per capita energy use of US citizens is dramatically higher than that of other advanced countries, with no incentives for its reduction and a policy of low tax on fuel that makes the US by far the worst polluter of the planet.
Bring the Troops Home: On Saturday 19th March 2005 I photographed the Stop the War march on the second anniversary of the invasion of Iraq. From Hyde Park it went past the US Embassy in Grosvenor Square on to a rally in Trafalgar Square. I published text and pictures on My London Diary.
Don’t unleash your missiles on Iran – No more Bush wars.
This is another slightly hard to find post from the early years of My London Diary before I redesigned the site with links to every post on top of each monthly page and discovered the Shift key. Then I felt it was somehow cool not to capitalise, but I now regard as an unfortunate affection – like those photographers who think turning their digital colour images to black and white somehow makes them more authentic.
Back in 2005 I was very critical of Stop The War – and I still feel they lost the initiative after the huge February 2003 protest against the invasion of Iraq and that a more radical approach could have prevented Blair taking Britain into the war beside the USA.
George Solomou with coffin representing Iraqis killed in the invasion and occupation
That protest and the many before and after showed our nation united in a way no other campaign has succeeded in doing, with protests in almost every town and village in the country. Even in Surrey where driver after driver hooted support as we stood at the side of our local bridge with posters during Friday evening rush hours.
I’m still sorry I had to miss that big one in 2003, which came just the day after I was discharged from hospital following a minor heart operation and I could only walk a few yards. My family went leaving me at home. But I did cover all of the other main protests in London against the invasion and they are recorded in My London Diary.
In my 2005 post I was also very critical of Stop the War’s attitude to photographers, which has mellowed slightly over the years. It can still be difficult to photograph the front of their marches though the stewards are generally much more friendly.
But for all their faults, Stop the War and other organisations they work with have kept up protests over many issues, particularly in recent times over the genocide taking place in Gaza. And have been doing so in defiance of Tory and Labour governments, laws restricting our right to protest and clearly political policing.
Bring the Troops Home – Stop the War March and Rally
I remember standing in Trafalgar Square listening to Tony Benn and Tariq Ali urging us all to take immediate and radical action should our troops invade Iraq. At the time a majority of the British people was clearly against the war, and we should have taken to the streets to stop it. Instead Stop the War organised marches and peaceful demonstrations the government could easily ignore. And they did.
So the latest in the series of anti-war demos was a sad case of déjà-vu from the blinkered dinosaur. Not least because again Tariq Ali (and doubtless Tony Benn) again urged radical action and again we cheered.
Tariq Ali has the perfect anarchist hair-style, and it’s hard to get a bad picture of him. Nenn wasn’t looking at his best, but there were plenty of others to photograph, including those who had made their stand as soldiers (and a diplomat.) And some very bubbly school students.
Stop the War are also tough on the press, or at least tough on photographers. Most demonstrations welcome publicity, but they train stewards to get in the way. One colleague was physically prevented from taking pictures at one point in the march, I was obstructed and threatened quite unnecessarily by a couple of stewards, and all of us were generally ordered around and hassled.
Troops Home from Iraq; Don’t Invade Iran: Saturday March 18th 2006 I went to the large protest on the third anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, photographing as the march gathered in Parliament Square and then as the march went along Victoria Street on its rather indirect route to a rally in Trafalgar Square. As often with large marches, by the time the end of the march had passed me I was too late for it to be worth going on to the rally.
Marchers in Guantanamo fatigues and chains leaving Parliament Square, March 18, 2006
Here – with the usual tidying of capitalisation and a few minor clarifications is the post I made on My London Diary at the time. Of course things have become much worse in various ways but particularly so far as civil liberties in the UK are concerned, the situation in Iraq has been dire and there remains a real threat of military action against Iran, an odious regime but whose people would still suffer greatly from any any invasion.
The Troops Home From Iraq; Don’t Invade Iran march on the 18th was another large event organised by Stop The War, part of an international protest in cities around Europe, North America, Latin America, Asia Pacific, Asia and Africa – a total of around a couple of hundred places. In London there were roughly 20,000 who walked out of Parliament Square past where I was taking pictures, although many like me will not have made it to Trafalgar Square, and others will have joined in later on the route.
The event marked three years since the invasion of Iraq on 20 march 2003. At the front of the march were Theatre Of War representing both Tony Blair and George Bush along with two police and two judges holding placards declaring the two leaders guilty.
Put your head in a sack, Guantanamo style…
Behind them were the march leaders, including representatives of families of soldiers killed in Iraq. They had a long, long yellow ribbon with the names – no ranks – of soldiers who have died so far in this illegal war and occupation. Of course many more Iraqis killed – more than 100,000 have died so far.
The invasion, doubtful on legal grounds, was justified on the basis of false information, including information that was known to be incorrect when it was presented to parliament and the people.
Already it has led to deaths in Britain; only a small handful of people (that’s Tony Blair and some of his cabinet) doubt that the London bombings would not have happened if Britain had not joined in the invasion plans. Actually it is hard to believe even they doubt it, but rather they just can’t bring themselves to admit it.
A protester from Glasgow is warned for using a megaphone in Parliament Square
We’ve also seen the passage of draconian measures that attack civil liberties in this country (and attempts still being made to get more.) Muslims in particular have been targeted, with a rise in Islamophobia.
At last the march moved off, with stewards pushing photographers away from the front
The expenditure in Iraq has been vast. If you want to know why there isn’t the money to raise pensions (and a week of pension protests was ending today with a conference in London) there is a simple 4 letter answer. IRAQ.
Another four letter country, Iran, is currently under threat. Perhaps most chilling are the denials from Blair and Straw, who state that invasion is not on the table. For too many of us that just seems to make it more likely.
Slavery, Climate, Stolen Goods & Santas: on Saturday 8th December 2018 I began with a march against African migrants being enslaved in Libya, photographed Buddhists meditating against climate change, went to the British Museum for a call to them to return indigenous Australian cultural objects and finally met hundreds of people in Santa costumes in Covent Garden.
Protest Slavery in Libya
There had been large protests a year earlier about slave auctions in Libya where many African migrants trying to reach Europe are captured by bandits, terrorists and jihadists – often funded by the EU and other outside countries – and sold as slaves.
The replacement of Gadaffi and his replacement by Western-backed puppets was a part of a continuing neo-colonialist attempt to control Africa’s natural resources which has led to the instability and mass migration from African countries to the south. Libya had begun a process of de-Africanisation and elimination of Black Libyans and the slave auctions are a simple extension of this policy.
Like many other issues, this had simply dropped out of the news despite the UK and other countries failing to take any action, perhaps why this protest was only by a small group. They met for a short rally outside the EU offices Europe House as the deals and actions of the EU to prevent migrants reaching Europe means many more of them are detained in Libya.
They then marched to protest outside the Foreign & Commonwealth Office, saying the UK had failed to do anything to help because the victims were African, then stopped briefly at the gates to Downing Street before marching on to the Libyan Embassy. I left them at Trafalgar Square
A small group from the Dharma Action Network meditated in Trafalgar Square as a call for people to take action, suggesting people move their money out of banks which invest in fossil fuels, get informed by reading the IPCC report on global warming and join them and other groups including Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace and take direct action with Extinction Rebellion.
I joined Indigenous Australian campaigner Rodney Kelly and others on the tour organised by BP or not BP? in the Kings Library of the British Museum in front of the glass case displaying the Gweagal shield stolen from his ancestor by Captain Cook at Botany Bay. Kelly is a 6th generation direct descendant of Cooman, whose Gweagal shield was taken when Captain Cook’s men on first landing in Australia opened fire with muskets, and the shield has a small hole caused by a musket round.
BP or not BP? activists came dressed as burglars in striped jumpers and black masks with sacks for swag.
Another, dressed as a ‘BP Executive’ explained how their sponsorship of art including exhibitions at the British Museum helps to clean up their reputation, tarnished by oil spills, the exploitation of oil fields around the globe with its associated environmental damage, the sale of climate change producing fossil fuels and more. It all looks much better with the nice glossy image of exhibitions such as those at the museum.
They then introduce Kelly who began (and ended) his talk by playing his didgeridoo, and then talked about how the British Museum had dismissed his earlier attempts to return the shield and other items, and had refused to take seriously the oral tradition of his people as it could not be confirmed by written records.
After retelling the story of how it was stolen and how the museum came to acquire it, he told the crowd now packing the room how the shield which few people stop to look at in the museum would reinvigorate the traditions of his people back in Australia and would be both the centrepiece of a museum of indigenous Australia and revive a great interest in traditional crafts.
The crowd then moved on to sit on the floor in front of the then current BP-sponsored Assyrian exhibition, where an Iraqi woman spoke, telling us that objects looted from Iraq during the invasion in 2003 and bought by the British Museum were on show which clearly should be returned to Iraq. Looting of cultural artifacts was considered respectable and normal back in the days of the British Empire (or at least by the British) but is no longer acceptable.
We moved on to a room devoted to objects taken from Polynesia where we heard about looted objects from the region and a statement from the Rapa Nui Pioneers on Easter Island calling for the return of their stolen Moai Head.
It was now time to visit the huge room containing the Parthenon Marbles, which Elgin claimed to have taken them with the permission of the Ottoman Empire, then rulers of Greece, but this now seems unlikely – and the marbles in any case surely belonged to the Greeks rather than thier occupiers.
Here one of the BP or Not BP? burglars, Danny Chivers, revealed himself to be part-Greek and talked about a recent visit to the Acropolis Museum, close to the Parthenon, where a room containing the marbles that Elgin left in Athens are displayed, complete with gaps in the appropriate places for those currently on display in the British Museum.
It seems clear that they should be returned to Athens, and it would now be possible – if expensive – to make a set of visually identical replicas to continue to display here. Perhaps in return for sending them back, the BM could receive replicas of those that remained in Athens – and so both cities could have a full set.
Finally I met Santacon in Covent Garden, with crowds of people dressed in Santa costumes, together with the odd elf and reindeer making their way to Trafalgar Square, spreading glad tidings as darkness fell, some following hand-pulled sound systems and dancing on the streets, though many groups were diverted into pubs and food shops on the way. This year the charity event was supporting ‘Christmas for Kids’ as well as having a great deal of fun.
St George’s Day – I’m not sure if I will be doing anything to celebrate St George’s Day today. Most of the celebrations around London seemed to be taking place on Sunday. I was planning to attend an event fairly close to where I live, but I started the day with one of my more impressive nose bleeds and decided to stay home rather than risk dripping blood over the streets.
Clink St, Southwark
So instead of pictures from a couple of days ago, today I’m posting some from 23rd April 2005, 19 years ago. I began that day with a visit to Tate Modern and a walk along to Clink Street where I photographed some stencilled graffiti -including one by Banksy – before crossing the river and heading to the celebrations taking place in Covent Garden.
‘IT HAPPENED ANYWAY’ – Millions on the street failed to stop the Iraq invasion
With the pictures is the rather tongue in cheek text that accompanied them in 2005 on My London Diary, edited to respect normal use of capital letters and any spelling errors. There are a few more pictures on My London Diary.
St George keeps busy as a patron saint of Canada, Catalonia, Georgia, Germany, Greece, Lithuania, Malta, Palestine and Portugal, as well as a number of cities including Moscow and Venice, a whole raft of trades including farmers and soldiers, as well as herpes and syphilis. It’s perhaps surprising he still has time for England, although until recently you would hardly have noticed it in any case.
St George Until recently was left to the nutters, football supporters and racists (three highly overlapping groups.) Those elites who run the country generally found patriotic display about Englishness rather beneath them – only our Celtic fringe and ethnic groups have a ‘culture’, the rest of us are too modern and intelligent for such primitivism.
London Town Crier Peter Moore talks to the President of the Royal Society of St George
Its the kind of thinking that led the Arts Council to refuse to support Morris Dancing, while pumping thousands into steel drums (as they should – but there is nothing wrong with supporting our English heritage as well.)
Pearly King and Queen
This year, the Royal Society Of St George (posh patriotic nutters with the Queen as their patron, started in our American colony around the 1770s) were organising celebrations in Covent Garden, and after a morning at Tate Modern I went to see.
Although I think Morris ought to be supported, I’m not a great fan of the dancers, though its OK outside the pub on a sunny day for half an hour a couple of times a year so long as I don’t have to take part.
The Moulton Morris, performing as a part of the event were more impressive than most, both for their costume and the dancing, and also for the half a dozen young people taking part. Somehow there seemed to be less beards and sandals than most sides.
In 2007 St Patrick’s Day, 17th March, fell on a Saturday and the parade in Willesden Green held on the day itself was well attended. I found it rather more interesting than the big London celebration with a march from Hyde Park to Trafalgar Square the following day, though I met some of the same peopleand groups again there.
It had been a busy day for me, starting with a protest about problems for young doctors in the NHS whose managers had managed to make a complete mess of their workforce planning with thousands of junior doctors likely to find themselves without a place to continue their careers in the coming August, and there being no consultant posts for thousands of registrars in 2010-11. Among the speakers was the then Leader of the Opposition, David Cameron who I found hard to photograph. More on this on My London Diary, with pictures starting here.
Next up was a protest four years after the invasion of Iraq, where 655,000 had by then died. My comment in 2007: “It is always easy to be right in hindsight, but the majority of the British people were right at the time of the invasion, and the government held its telescope firmly to its blind eye of mis-interpreted, faulty and partly invented intelligence. unfortunately both Britain and even more Iraq will suffer for Blair’s shameful mistake for many years to come.” And they are still suffering. It was a small protest in Trafalgar Square, mainly by Iraqis and there are just a few pictures here.
Also in Trafalgar Square, close to Canada House was a protest against the annual slaughter of seal cubs in Canada, clubbed to death in a way that “is certainly inhumane and a public relations disaster, with blood staining the ice and clubbed animals at times being skinned while still conscious.”
But then I took the underground to Willesden Green, where “a much happier event was taking place … the borough of Brent was celebrating St Patrick’s day with a parade and cultural activities.” Mainly but not exclusively Irish, but with many from Brent’s other communities taking part and watching.
“It’s great to photograph the people out on the street to celebrate, and wanting to have their pictures taken, and there was plenty to photograph, including of course St Patrick himself leading the procession, along with the mayor, Kensal Green councillor Bertha Joseph, in her second term as mayor.“
“She was brent’s first African Caribbean mayor in 1998. but of course the real stars of the event were the people of all ages who were taking part and having a fine time.”
“After the parade there was time for the culture – in the form of a pint of Guinness in a real Irish bar, after which I went to watch the band ‘Neck’ performing, and the people dancing to their music.“
It was a fine event, the band clearly setting out not just to play but to entertain the audience and doing so in great style.
March for Peace and Liberty – 2005 Eighteen years ago on Saturday 24th September around 50,000 of us were marching through London for peace and calling for the withdrawal of forces from Iraq.
The protest, called by Stop the War Coalition, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) and the Muslim Association of Britain (MAB) coincided with an even larger protest in Washington close to the White House.
Organisers of the Washington protest claimed that around 300,000 took part, while US police said the half that number was “as good a guess as any.” Police estimates of the London march were, as usual more political than based on any reality, and their figure of 10,000 was laughably low.
I had developed my own simple methods to assess numbers. For smaller protests I’d simply stop at a suitable point and count those passing. When numbers got a little larger I’d count in groups of roughly ten, larger still groups of hundreds. Though sometimes that hundred might only have been 80 or sometimes 125 the overall figure was probably within around ten percent of the actual total.
But with really large protests such as this, well over the police figure of 10,000, any form of counting is too time-consuming and tedious. I’d often still try to get a rough figure by counting for a minute where I was taking photographs a few times as the protest went part, and then make a rough estimate using the time the whole protest took to pass me. Typically the answer this gave me was around half the number claimed by the march organisers and anything around four to ten times the figure release by the police and often quoted by news media.
It’s a little difficult to find the text I wrote about the protest on My London Diary in 2005 as there are no headings in the text column on the September page, with headings and images in a separate unlinked column to the right – later I improved the site design to unite text and pictures and provided a list of links to stories which remains at the top of the monthly pages. Back in 2005 you simply had to scroll down a long page, and while the headings and text were simple to find, many viewers never managed to find the of text, which ends with a little art criticism. So here it is, with a few minor corrections:
“What a fine mess you’ve got us into” is probably the conclusion of most of the British people about Blair’s decision to join in with Bush’s Iraq invasion in 2003. Quite how many of them turned up on the 24th to march for a British pull-out is a matter of contention. Both police and organisers estimates – ten and a hundred thousand respectively – seem to me extremely unlikely.
So I was there with probably between twenty-five and fifty thousand people, walking across Parliament Square in front of the Houses of Parliament, despite it being a Saturday afternoon, with no business taking place inside, the ban on the use of amplification within a kilometre of parliament was still in force, so the event was a little quieter than usual. Some did choose to defy the ban and the police appeared not to notice.
Gate Gourmet supply in-flight meals for British Airways. It used to be a part of the company, but was separated out, then sold to American management. Rather like what is starting to happen in our National Health Service, and of course British Airways was also originally owned by the nation.
The company takes advantage of a largely Asian labour force living around the edge of the airport, paying them relatively low wages. The new management decided to cut labour costs even more by bringing in casual labour to do much of the work (while apparently employing more managers!) and when the employees held a meeting to protest, they were sacked.
Pressure from both BA and the union (TGWU) led to the company offering to take back some of the sacked workers, but not all, and the strike continues. Some of the strikers came to take part in the rally, to publicise their case as well as call for a withdrawal from Iraq.
Most of the usual people were there at the march, and I took their pictures again – and some are on the site. When the march started I hung around in Parliament Square to watch it go past before walking rather faster than the marchers up Whitehall.
By the time I’d reached Trafalgar Square and waited again for the end of the march to pass, my knee [I’d injured it earlier in the month] was beginning to ache and I didn’t feel up to walking to Hyde Park. I sat down and ate my sandwiches contemplating the new sculpture on the ‘fourth plinth’, ‘Alison Lapper Pregnant’ by Marc Quinn. This 15ft white marble shows Lapper, an artist born without arms, sitting naked and eight months pregnant, and will stay on the plinth until April 2007.
It is a striking piece of work and was obviously attracting a great deal of attention from the tourists in the square. I took my time sitting and looking at it while I was eating, and then walking round it from all sides (slightly impeded by the preparations for a juvenile TV show to be broadcast from the square the following day.) Lapper herself works with photographs of her body, and this statue is perhaps too like her black and white photographs, with a rather unpleasant surface, sometimes more soap than marble. I found myself thinking thank goodness for the pigeons who were perching on it and doubtless adding their contributions to it.
Its position up there on a plinth is not ideal. This is work that would be best seen from roughly the same level as its base. The other plinths in the square are occupied by men on horses, which raise their figures more suitably above the plinths. Perhaps when it leaves the square a more suitable display place can be found, but its present placing is a great for catalysing debate about disability. Of course another disabled figure dominates the square; Nelson has his back to her and does not need to call upon his blind eye not to see her.
Saturday 8th December 2018 was another busy day for me in London.
Protest Slavery in Libya – Saturday 8th December 2018
Campaigners held a short rally outside Europe House in Smith Square protesting over the lack of action by the EU over African migrants and refugees being sold or held against their will in Libya by terrorists and jihadists which the EU funds.
They then marched to protest at the Foreign & Commonwealth Office, saying the UK had failed to do anything to help because the victims were African, then stopped briefly at Downing St on their way to the Libyan Embassy.
Dharma meditation for climate – Trafalgar Square, Saturday 8th December 2018
In Trafalgar Square members of the Dharma Action Network were meditating and handing out flyers calling for people and governments to take effective actions to combat climate change. They urged people to move their money out of banks which invest in fossil fuels, get informed by reading the IPCC report on global warming and join them and other groups including Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace or take action with Extinction Rebellion.
British Museum Stolen Goods Tour – British Museum, Saturday 8th December 2018
News in the past weeks that the Horniman Museum is returning the Benin Bronzes and other items in its collection to Nigeria is a sign of the changing attitudes to museums holding on to looted objects. The museum handed over total of 72 bronzes and other objects to Nigeria. But the British Museum is full of thousands of questionably acquired objects, including over 900 from Benin.
BP or Not BP, a group opposed to the polluting oil company ‘greenwashing’ its dirty fossil fuel business by sponsoring artistic activities including major exhibitions in the British Museum had organised a tour of some of the more important stolen cultural artifacts in their collection, beginning with the Gweagal shield, stolen by Captain Cook when his men had first landed in Australia.
When they landed they were greeted by the indigenous inhabitants carrying spears and wooden shields; the sailors opened fire with muskets, with one musket ball going through the shield and wounding Cooman. The people dropped their weapons and fled, carrying the wounded man.
This shield is now on display in the British Museum and spears and other items are also in their collection, with some in other museums. This was the second time I had photographed Indigenous Australian campaigner Rodney Kelly, a 6th generation direct descendant of Cooman, standing in front of the glass-fronted cabinet containing the shield and talking about its history. His talks with the museum authorities have so far failed to get the property returned.
There was a packed audience listening to Kelly playing his didgeridoo and then telling the story of the shield and telling of the failure of the British Museum authorities to take seriously the oral tradition of his people as it could not be confirmed by written records. The Museum has gone to desperate lengths, including getting their own experts to cast doubt on the stories which the museum had previously featured about these objects.
From there we moved on, guided by BP or not BP campaigners some dressed as ‘burglars’ in striped black and white tops and carrying a sack for swag.
Another in a smart suit with a BP logo explained why BP gave the museum a relatively small amount in sponsorship which gave them huge rewards in making them seem a responsible company despite their reprehensible activities in countries around the world, despoiling resources, polluting the environment and severely aggravating global warming by encouraging fossil fuel use.
Outside the entrance to the BP-sponsored Assyrian show an Iraqi woman talked about BP’s role in her country and the looting which followed the invasion of Iraq including some of cultural artifacts which formed a part of this show.
By a large stone figure from Easter Island a speaker from Pacific Island arts group the Interisland Collective talked about the treatment by museums of Maori and Pacific Islands cultural items and read a statement from the Rapa Nui Pioneers on Easter Island calling for the return of this stolen Moai Head.
The final location for the tour was in the large room containing the Parthenon (Elgin) Marbles, where BP or not NBP’s Danny Chivers revealed his partly Greek ancestry and talked about his visit to the Parthenon and the museum there which has been built to exhibit its missing sculptures.
It seems inevitable that eventually the British Museum and other museums will have to return these objects, and to replace at least some of them by facsimiles would enable the museum to continue its educational function while restoring vital cultural objects to their proper homes.
London flooded with Santas – Covent Garden, Saturday 8th December 2018
Christmas was coming and so was Santacon, a huge annual charity event and excuse for a highly alcohol-fuelled stagger and dance through the streets of central London dresses as santas, elves and reindeer.
The event had started at various locations and large crowds were now converging on Trafalgar Square spreading glad tidings as darkness fell, some following hand-pulled sound systems and dancing on the streets, though many groups were diverted into pubs and food shops on the way.
I had fun dancing along with some of them and taking photographs close to the British Museum and then going through Covent Garden, but by the time I reached Trafalgar Square decided I’d photographed my fill of santas and took a bus to Waterloo.
Back in 2002, protests were still in black and white – or rather I was still using film for my photographs and the library I was putting pictures into was still only taking colour pictures as transparencies – something I had given up taking seventeen years earlier as I found colour negative far better to work with.
For the huge Stop The War protest on March 2nd, 2002 against the war in Afghanistan and the forthcoming invasion of Iraq I was actually working with three cameras, one with black and white film, a second with colour negative and the third a panoramic camera also loaded with colour negative film. Although I contact printed the developed films from all three, it was only selected images from the black and white work that was printed and went to the library.
Some day I hope to get around to printing some selected images from the seven or eight colour films I exposed on that day, but at the time I had no particular incentive to do so. It was difficult for me to use colour even on the web site, as my flatbed scanner at that time was a monochrome only scanner – and all the pictures on My London Diary from this event are black and white scans from the black and white prints I made to send to the library.
There are a few colour pictures from this era on my web sites, mainly those taken on a pocket-sized 2Mp digital camera I had begun to use as a notebook a year or two earlier, but the images were generally unsuitable for publication. Prints from them at much more than postcard size were poor quality.
Around this time I did get my first film scanner, but it was very slow to use and the quality wasn’t great. And at the end of 2002 I began using my first DSLR, the 6Mp Nikon D100, and soon began submitting digital images to agencies that would handle digital work.
Newspaper reports at the time rather followed the police in giving figures of 10-15,000 people at the protest, though I think the true number was at least twice this. As I reported, “people were still leaving hyde park at the start of the march when trafalgar square was full to overflowing two and a half hours later.” It takes more than 15,000 to fill Trafalgar Square and the tailback over the 2 mile route adds considerably to that number.
As I wrote back then:
police estimates of the number were risible as usual – and can only reflect an attempt to marginalise the significant body of opinion opposed to the war or a complete mathematical inability on behalf of the police.
In my comments I also quote Tony Benn telling us photographers at the start of the march that it wasn’t worth us taking his picture, “it won’t get in the papers unless i go and kick a policeman” and he was quite right. They didn’t report his speech either, in which he said that for the first time in his life he though the situation was so desperate that he was advocating non-violent resistance, calling for everyone to stop work for an hour at the moment the bombing begins. “Stop the buses. Stop the trains. Stop the schools. It’s all very well going to Downing Street, I’ve spent half my life at Downing Street, in, outside Downing Street. It has to be more than that, its got to be something we take up in every town and village.” This he said would get the debate going. His speech received a huge reception from the crowd.
It was hardly a very radical suggestion – and after the bombing started it would have been too late. But had ‘Stop The War’ called for similar action before the parliamentary debate – and not just another A to B march planned months in advance – it might have made a difference. The message that this was simply a war for control of oil resources and would be a disaster for the region was getting through – and there were regular protests in towns and villages across the nation, including in the true-blue town where I live, and more radical actions could have prevented the UK joining in the US action.
All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated, are taken by and copyright of Peter Marshall, and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.
Ahoy! Some years ago I let me younger son, then in his 30s, use me ‘puter while he was stayin’ wit’ us, ‘n afterwards found that he had changed t’ language on me Facebook t’ “Pirate”. It loot a wee while fer me t’ change it back ‘n certainly wasn’t made easier by havin’ all th’ menus ‘n explanations in ‘Pirate’.
Or to put that in English rather than blabberin’ on in Pirate;
Pirates in London
Some years ago I let my younger son, then in his 30s, use my computer while he was staying with us, and afterwards found that he had changed to language on my Facebook to “Pirate”. It took a little while for me to change it back and certainly wasn’t made easier by having all the menus and explanations in ‘Pirate’.
As you may know, though I didn’t afore now, there are several online English to Pirate translators should you ever for any reason (or unreason) wish to convey your thoughts in that medium. England’s fortune was of course largely plundered by pirates including such well-known names as Sir Walter Raleigh, though now instead of galleons our pirates sail in the plush offices of hedge funds often registered in those distant tax havens around which many of the older pirates sailed in search of vessels to board and rob – and in whose sands they may have buried a little of their stolen treasures. Arrhh Jim Lad!
But on Saturday 23 Feb 2008 I was with pirates in London, taking part in the ‘Hands off Iraqi Oil Piratical Action Tour of London’, part of an international campaign in solidarity with the Iraqi people against the corporate theft of Iraq’s oil. The real pirates were of course the largely US oil companies busy profiteering in Iraq following the illegal US and UK invasion of that country.
Saddam was a dictator and committed many crimes, though producing weapons of mass destruction as the invaders claimed largely in contravention of the evidence of their spies, to justify their invasion was not one of them. Far more important but not stated was the fact that as long as he remained dictator, oil would remain a public sector industry in Iraq. So obviously, to further the interests of Shell, BP and other majors in the oil business and capitalism generally he had to be removed.
The pirate-themed protest included a number of protesters in pirate dress along with a samba band to make a great deal of noise and draw attention to the banners, posters and placards calling for corporate killers to get out of Iraq along with a small group with blacked faces in a large black sheet representing Iraqi crude.
The protest marched to the premised of various companies involved in the invasion or seeking to exploit Iraqi oil, stopping at them to speak about their activities and protest noisily. Before I met them some had gone inside the National Portrait Gallery to protest inside against BP sponsorship of their major awards.
The tour visited Erinys International Limited, a private military security company with a reputation for using excessive force which provides security services in Iraq as well as training Iraq’s Oil Protection force, BP whose former CEOs worked as advisors to the Iraqi Oil Ministry telling them let companies like BP come in a make vast profits and helping to draft new Iraqi hydorcarbon laws, and the International Tax and Investment Centre, which is paid by the big oil companies to lobby for a free-market approach which would let them dominate Iraqi oil.
Running late, the tour missed the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, whose policies have largely been to run around in support of BP and Shell, employing former oil executives as advisers on economic policy in the Middle East. And Development Program Worldwide Ltd (previously Windrush Communications) has offices too far away in the City for the tour; it promotes the establishment of private capital enterprises in places such as conflict zones where there are few controls over their activities and no effective government to represent the public interest.
The pirates stormed up the Jubilee footbridge, crossing it to reach the Shell Centre for a longer rally to end the tour. Shell executives have played a leading role in the re-purposing of the Iraqi oil industry from a state asset to a multinational profit opportunity and plan for three major oil fields there.
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