Blizzard, Education and Hunger Strike – London hasn’t had a great deal of snow for some years, but when I got off the bus on Wednesday 28th February 2018 close to London University I found myself walking into a blizzard. There was a couple of inches of snow underfoot and the biting wind was driving dense snowflakes into my face making it both difficult to walk and hard to see where I was going.
I slipped a few times and almost fell as I walked through Byng Place, only just managing to stop myself and my camera bag falling into the snow, and for the first 15 or 20 minutes after I reached the meeting point for the march it was difficult to take pictures, with snowflakes landing on the lens surface as soon as I took away the cloth I had stuffed against it inside the lens hood and raised the camera to my eye.
Most of the pictures from the start of the protest were ruined by snow on the lens making some areas soft and diffuse. It might sometimes have been an arty effect but wasn’t what I wanted. Fortunately after a while the snow died down and I was able to work more normally, though the occasional flake kept coming and there were a few thick flurries later on the march.
HE and FE march for pensions and jobs
The UCU was on the fifth day of a strike to try and get the universities to talk with them about pay and pensions. On this march to a rally in Methodist Central Hall in Westminster, close to the Houses of Parliament, they were joined by staff from London FE colleges on the first day of a two-day strike over pay and conditions. And plenty of their students had come along to show their support.
Although students are now paying high fees for their university courses, the pay of university teachers has not benefited from this, and has not kept up with inflation. Much more teaching at universities is also being done by graduate students and others on part-time or often zero hours contracts.
What particularly inflamed the situation was the intention of the universities to end the long-established pension scheme, replacing it with one that would greatly reduce pensions, and their refusal to discuss this with their union, the UCU.
The 5 day strike was supported overwhelmingly by UCU members and had shut down 61 UK universities, despite draconian threats by the management at some of them such as Royal Holloway (RHUL). Pickets had stood in the freezing weather and few people had crossed the picket line.
The move away from the pension scheme was largely driven by a small number of universities, particularly the Oxbridge colleges. Many of these are extremely wealthy, some owning huge areas of land including large parts of London and having vast reserves, not least in their wine cellars. A number of college principals had given their support to the union.
The dispute between the employers and the UCU continued for five years and was only ended in October 2023 when the employer body UUK made an offer of full restoration. This came after 69 days of strikes by the UCU and was a historic victory for UCU members and reversed further cuts made in 2022.
University teachers continue to fight for better pay, more appropriate workloads and job security. FE teachers, marching because of the loss of 15,000 jobs in the sector particularly as adult education has been savaged by austerity, and whose wages had been cut by 21% since 2009, continue to be treated unfairly.
I went into the rally in Central Hall largely to try to get warm after the freezing march, and was fortunate to arrive early enough to get inside – many of the marchers were left outside the the cold where the speakers went outside to speak after making their contributions in the hall.
The event was running late because of the larger than expected number of people on the march, and by the time the main speakers, John McDonnell and Frances O’Grady had performed I’d missed the time for another event I’d planned to cover, the handing in of some NHS petitions at the Department of Health. I But I was pleased to be able to stay longer in the warm.
Solidarity with Yarl’s Wood hunger strikers – Home Office
I left the Methodist Central Hall and walked down to the Home Office where an emergency protest was taking place to support the hunger strike and refusal to work by the 120 women and a few men in immigration detention at Yarl’s Wood.
They had begun their action a week earlier to demand the Home Office respect the European Convention of Human Rights and end the separation of families, end indefinite detention with a 28 day maximum detention period, end charter flights which deport people without notice, and end the re-detention of those released from detention.
Their statement also called for an amnesty for those who have been in the UK for more than ten years and for the Home Office to stop deporting people before cases and appeals have been completed, as well as making full disclosure of all evidence to immigration tribunals.
They called for those in detention centres to be treated with dignity and respect and be given proper health care and an end to the detention of highly vulnerable people. They also want an end to employment in detention centres at ‘prison wages’ of £1 an hour.
Among the groups supporting the protest were the Movement for Justice, All African Women’s Group, Queer Strike and No Borders. Some of those taking part in the protest had previously served time in detention centres and knew first hand about the shameful way the UK treats them and some spoke at the event and several of those taking part in the hunger strike were able to speak to the protest from inside Yarls Wood by mobile phone.
No Third Runway, TTIP & Zombies: Saturday 10th October 2015 saw me in Parliament Square for a rally against building another runway at Heathrow, then outside the Dept of Business, Innovation and Skills against a secret US/EU trade deal and finally meeting charity zombies walking across the Jubilee Bridge.
No Third Runway – Parliament Square
Community protests and a little environmental common sense had defeated plans to expand Heathrow Airport which was cancelled by the coalition government in 2010, but the aviation industry didn’t take no for an answer. A biased commission was set up to look at airport growth and in July 2015 came out with its report putting a third runway back on the table.
Around a thousand people turned up a few months later on October 10th for a central London rally against the third runway at Heathrow as levels of noise and pollution across London were already unacceptable. They argued the Davies commission was flawed and airport expansion was both unnecessary and impractical.
Any expansion would be a catastrophe for those living around the airport whose land and homes would be lost, but huge areas around already suffer from noise and illegal levels of pollution due to Heathrow, including Chiswick, Hammersmith and Teddington. And we would all suffer from increasing carbon emissions leading to global heating as environmental groups including Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace pointed out.
As well as the flights and the problems they cause directly, Heathrow expansion would also increase traffic in the surrounding area, where roads including the M25 which are already often greatly overcrowded are already under stress, with minor incidents often bringing large areas to a standstill. Another runway would bring more road traffic with more pollution and more and more gridlock. The existing problems would also be made worse as the expansion would further disrupt traffic routes in the area.
The meeting was chaired by one of my least favourite media presenters Gyles Brandreth who introduced in his usual sick-making way a number of well-known speakers including Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell, MPs Andy Slaughter & Tania Mathias, four of London’s Mayoral candidates, Zac Goldsmith, Sadiq Khan, Sian Berry and Caroline Pidgeon, Richmond Council leader Lord True, campaigners John Sauven of Greenpeace, John Stewart of HACAN and others.
Also treated to his ingratiating manner was the star of the show, local resident Mrs Taylor who has lived in a house right on the edge of the proposed extension for 80 years and came on helped by her daughter and grand-daughter to be interviewed by Brandreth.
Although Parliament approved the expansion in 2018 and legal challenges were finally dismissed by the Supreme Court in 2020, given that we now feel so much more keenly the disastrous effects of carbon emissions on global temperatures it seems virtually impossible for it to take place – and if it did that it would become a massive white elephant, greater than even the current HS2 scandal.
A short distance away outside the Dept of Business, Innovation and Skills a part of an EU-wide protest against TTIP was taking place. The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership was a secret US/EU trade deal which puts company profits above democracy and over 3 million of us EU citizens had signed petitions against it.
TTIP would have forced us to accept US grown and processed foods, including GM crops and meat and dairy products from animals fed on GM, chickens that are washed in chlorine, meat containing high hormone levels and other chemical solutions to allow sloppy husbandry.
TTIP would also allow corporations to dictate government policies by taking them to courts where any policy might possibly impact on their profits, and would drive the rapid privatisation of the NHS and other public services.
Fortunately the secret negotiations ended without conclusion at the end of 2016, and the EU later declared that they were “obsolete and no longer relevant“. The documents detailing the negotiated proposals are still secret, only available to authorised persons.
Since Brexit, TTIP would not have directly applied to trade between the US and UK, but similar secret negotiations have been carrying on between the UK and the US. But the US has taken little interest in concluding these as the UK is less important as a trading partner.
Zombies crawl for St Mungo’s – Jubilee Bridge & Embankment Gardens
I was too late to see the start of the Zombie crawl at Leake Street,but was able to photograph them as they came up the steps from Jubilee Gardens onto the Jubilee Bridge and as they took a short break in Enbankment Gardens before their lengthy crawl around the West End.
This Zombie crawl was a fund-raising event for St Mungo’s Broadway, a charity which provides the homeless with emergency shelter, housing, healthcare and training, and the zombies were remarkably friendly. Perhaps a little less dramatically zombified than on some zombie crawls I’ve photographed in the past, and certainly rather less alcohol-fuelled than most.
Some zombie crawls have been overtly political, others just young people having a fun pub crawl. This one was for charity, and the fact we need to have charities to provide support for the homeless certainly shows a failure by government to provide support for some of the most needy in our society.
Back in the 1960s I remember going to Paris and seeing people sleeping on the streets and not understanding what a beggar who approached us was doing – I’d just not experienced this on the streets of London.
Of course there were some homeless people in our cities, and homeless men walking to the centre of London would sometimes come to our back door and ask my mother for a cup of tea (which she always provided, along with a few pence we couldn’t afford) but nothing on the scale we have seen over the past 20 or 30 years.
I didn’t spend long photographing the zombies. There were too many other people taking pictures for me to be able to work in the way I like, and it was even worse in the Embankment Gardens than on the bridge. I don’t often crop pictures, liking to work with the full-frame though occasionally making some minor adjustments, but on this occasion there were simply too many other people with cameras who I wanted to remove.
Workfare, Methodists & Grow Heathrow: Saturday 8th September 2012 was another day of travelling around London, with protests against forced unpaid work for benefit claimants in Camden and Brixton, Ghanaian Methodists celebrating at Victoria and then an open day at Grow Heathrow in Sipson from where a couple of buses took me home.
Day of Action Against Workfare – Camden & Brixton
Boycott Workfare held a UK day of action targeted against charities and shops that take part in the government scheme of forced unpaid work which treats the unemployed as criminals. They also celebrated companies and charities that have withdrawn from the scheme.
Although the scheme is described as voluntary those who refuse to take part or or whose participation is judged unsatisfactory face the loss of some or all of their benefits. Under harsh government targets the number of claimants being sanctioned had increased threefold over two years and in 2012 there were over half a million under sanctions. It’s work for nothing or lose your benefits.
As Boycott Workfare pointed out, the four week Mandatory Work Activity scheme is the equivalent of a medium level community service order – such as might be given to someone found guilty of assault or drunken driving. And while the longest community service order a judge can give is for 300 hours, under some workfare schemes claimants are being forced to work without pay for 780 hours.
Many claimants unable to find paid work do find useful unpaid community activities they can volunteer for – and then are forced to give these up by workfare schemes.
These schemes are supposed to provide work experience than can then lead to actual jobs, but many companies in the schemes use them simply as a source of free labour – which then then be replaced by new free workers when they come to and end of their period. Often there is no possibility of people on the schemes moving into paid work.
Among well known shops and charities making use of this unpaid labour in 2012 were Boots, Argos, Scope, Cancer Research UK, Poundland and British Heart Foundation, and the protests took place in front of a number of their shops. In Brixton protesters handed out leaflets inside Poundland.
Protests against workfare had already had some effect with groups including Burger King, Oxfam, Waterstones, Shelter, 99p Stores, Pizza Hut and Sainsbury’s pulling out from the scheme.
Ghanaian Methodists Celebrate 10 Years – Westminster Cathedral
Celebrations of 10 years of the Ghanaian Methodist Fellowship UK and its 16 churches were to end in a thanksgiving service the following day. On Saturday the met at Westminster Catholic Cathedral and then danced away down Victoria Street towards Methodist Central Hall.
Methodism in the UK tends to be worthy and rather rather less exuberant, though with loud singing of hymns and much drinking of tea. There was a very different atmosphere at these dancing celebrations.
A journey to the end of the Piccadilly line and a short bus ride took me to Sipson where over two years ago Transition Heathrow moved onto the local eyesore and dumping ground of the former Berkeley Nursery site. This was an open day for their Grow Heathrow project.
People had moved onto the site to fight against plans for a third runway at Heathrow, but realised the potential of the site to create a productive alternative off-grid home that would become a creative hub for the area.
They started by clearing the rubbish and getting the local council to take away around 30 tons of it, but much of the material on site was a valuable resource that with a great deal of ingenuity they recycled for there own uses. Many built there own small temporary houses in the wilder areas of the site, though some were still then living in tents. And patched up part-ruined greenhouses and a couple of cabins on the site became communal spaces including a comfortable sitting area, a library and a vistor’s room.
Their activities gained a great deal of support from the local residents and when the site owners gained permission to evict them they were granted leave to appeal on human rights grounds with the judge describing the site as as “much loved and well used” by the local community. The site was open to them and other visitors weekdays from 10am – 6pm and on Sunday afternoons.
There are regular events every week open to anyone, including bicycle workshops, art workshops and gardening, and some of the results were impressive. Were it just a little closer to my home I’d be tempted to come here more often, but although it might be a pleasant place in Summer I think I would miss the comforts of my own home rather too much in winter. The wood-burning shower did look rather draughty even if the water was very hot.
Among firm supporters of Grow Heathrow was local MP John McDonnell who stated “This inspirational project has not only dramatically improved this derelict site but it has lifted the morale of the whole local community in the campaign against the third runway and in planning a sustainable future for our area. We cannot lose this initiativeand I will do all I can to enable it to continue.”
And continue it did for some years, surviving a number of legal challenges. Half of the site was reclaimed by bailiffs in 2019, but the final eviction only came in March 2021.
BEIS Birthday Strike, Ecocide and XR Procession: Monday 15th July 2019
BEIS workers begin indefinite strike, Westminster
Low paid cleaning and catering workers at the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) on Victoria Street celebrated the third anniversary of their fight for proper pay and conditions with cakes as they walked out on the first ever indefinite strike at a government ministry.
The workers are demanding the London Living Wage and to be directly employed by the department rather than outsourcing companies ISS and Aramark.
As the workers came out on strike hey got a rousing reception from a crowd of around 100 with speeches from one of the strikers, PCS general secretary Mark Serwotka, RMT General Secretary Mick Cash, newly elected UCU general secretary Jo Grady , Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell, Labour MP Mary Glindon, National Vice-President of the PCS Zita Holbourne, Sam Gurney, TUC Regional Secretary, Kiri Tunks, Joint President of the NEU and Sandy Nicoll of SOAS Unison who led the succesful campaign to bring workers there back in-house. and one of the strikers.
I stayed long enough to eat a piece of one of the cakes which had been made for the protest, but then had to leave as the party continuned outside BEIS.
XR call for Ecocide Law – Royal Courts of Justice, Strand
Extinction Rebellion was beginning another series of protests in five major cities against the criminal inaction by the government on climate and ecological collapse.
The main theme of the day’s protest was to call for a law making ecocide a criminal offence.
The protesters brought a yacht named after Polly Higgins who fought for years for an Ecocide Law to the Royal Courts of Justice.
They continued her fight blocking the Strand all day with performances, discussions, speeches, music and ceremonies in front of the yacht.
We need urgent action and our government along with most others has failed, continuing with policies which seem designed to make the situation worse and bring life on earth to an end, and XR is certainly bringing that to people’s attention, even if our media are still largely ignoring it and concentrating on trivia. But although I fully support the aims of XR I do find some of XR’s activities – yachts and new-age mumbo jumbo – off putting. In part I guess it’s a class thing – much of their activity seems insufferably middle class. Its probably an age thing too.
Having occupied the street across the front of the Royal Courts of Justice all day, the protesters and their yacht moved on around afternoon tea time to their home for the next three days, on Waterloo Millennium Green, a park area just south of Waterloo Station.
At the front of the procession were banners and a large crowd of people with XR flags, more banners, posters and placards, as well a large pink dodo. Bringing up the rear was the blue yacht named for the late Ecocide Law protester Polly Higgins, on a boat trailer, escorted by police.
When the procession was all on Westminster Bridge it came to a halt and people sat down blocking the road for a short protest against the police violence towards peaceful protesters when they were arresting people during the ‘Garden Bridge‘ occupation of the bridge in April.
There were a few short speeches there and the procession moved on. It came to a halt a little further on after police tried to block it on from moving onto the Millennium Green.
By this time the back of the procession was on its way around the IMAX Waterloo roundabout, and the rush hour was beginning. I hung around for around half an hour before deciding it was time to get on a train home. But by stopping the protest police had brought a large area of south London quite unnecessarily to a standstill.
Wedding ‘Die-In’ Against Afghanistan Massacres: It was a cool and damp morning when I got on my bike to cycle the 19 or so miles to Northwood station on Wednesday 27th May 2009, my route though the outer western suburbs of London. I locked my bike at the Metropolitan line station and joined around 30 protesters, including two couples dressed as bride and groom waiting for the start of the march, watched by rather more police.
Two years earlier, on 27th May 2009, US forces had bombed a wedding party at Haji Nabu in Afghanistan killing 47 civilians; this was just one of a number of wedding parties massacred by NATO or US forces who killed thousands of civilians in Afghanistan – and three weeks before the protest another attack in Farah province had killed around 120 people, mainly women and children. Gatherings of civilians for any reason were too often misinterpreted as a threat to the occupying forces.
‘HMS Warrior’, the land-based Permanent Joint Headquarters in Northwood in London is the command centre for British and NATO forces in Afghanistan, and Voices in the Wilderness UK, Justice Not Vengeance and London and Oxford Catholic Workers had planned a ‘die-in’ as an act of non-violent civil disobedience at its main entrance.
John McDonnell MP speaks before the start of the march
Negotiations with police took place and eventually the police allowed the marchers to proceed along the roads towards the military base. The marchers were stopped several times on the way and had to threaten to block the road with a die-in if they were not allowed to proceed.
Around 200 metres from the main gate the road was firmly blocked by a line of police and the organisers decided to hold the die-in on the road there. Around half the protesters lay down on the road. Fortunately the organisers had come with a supply of black bin bags to put on the wet surface, but it was still cold and uncomfortable, and the rain, although light, was steady.
The rest of the protesters stayed on the wide verge and began reading out the names of civilians killed in Afghanistan. Among those taking part in the protest were Maya Evans and Milan Rai who were arrested in 2005 for reading out the names of Iraqis and British soldiers killed in the Iraq War, opposite the Cenotaph in Whitehall. For this Rai became the first person to be convicted under SOCPA for organising an unauthorised demonstration in the vicinity of Parliament. Also at the protest was Hillingdon MP John McDonnell.
Hertfordshire police had previously given the protesters a warning under Section 14 of the Public Order Act. They gave a further warning once people had ‘died’ on the roadway, but stood watching. After around 15 minutes, a second officer gave a warning that unless people cleared the road they would be moved, and said that they had 5 minutes to decide.
Twenty minutes later a final warning was issued, and then groups of police moved to each protester on the road in turn. Each was told they were committing an offence and that unless they moved they would be carried to the side of the road, and that if they attempted to move back on to the road they would be arrested.
At this point some protesters got up an moved, but most waited for the police to remove them. Most went limp and were fairly carefully lifted and deposited on the verge with a warning they would be arrested should they return to the road. I saw one man being arrested and taken away when he did so and was later told that there were five other arrests.
When the road was clear the press was also threatened with arrest and could only cover the event from the side of the road. Previously we had been allowed to cover the event without much interference, as I commented “For once I was only told to get out of the way when I was really in the way. There were some FIT officers from the Met present – let’s hope they take some intelligence back to their force about how to police protest.”
The protesters had only intended for the die-in to last an hour, and it was three-quarters of an hour before the road was finally cleared. After a short delay the police allowed the remaining protesters to march back down the road to the station. It was still raining as I unlocked my bike and rode home.
End outsourcing at University of London: Five years ago, on Wednesday 25th April 2018 I was with workers from the Independent Workers Union of Great Britain – IWGB on the first day of a two day strike at the University of London central administration by over 100 cleaners, porters, security officers, receptionists, gardeners, post room staff and audiovisual staff.
They were calling for an end to the outsourcing of their jobs in the university to various contracting companies and demanding to be directly employed by the University, and receive the same conditions and benefits as directly employed colleagues. As well as the workers, academics, students and other trade unionists came to support them in a lively rally outside the gates to Stewart House in Russell Square..
The rally was part of a successful campaign led by the IWGB which began in 2010 and ten years later the university central administration changed to directly employ porters, receptionists, post room and audio visual technicians, with cleaners following shortly after in November 2020.
The IWGB are still campaigning to bring workers in-house in other universities in London, including UCL, and they and other unions have been successful elsewhere. United Voices of the World are one of these and some of their members had come to the rally to show their support.
Cleaners and security staff at universities across London are organising for equality with directly-employed staff!
Outsourced workers suffer from far worse terms and conditions than directly-employed colleagues, facing no sick pay, bare minimum holiday entitlement and meagre pensions. Bullying, mismanagement and discrimination by unaccountable outsourced managers are common.
Workers in the IWGB union are leading the fightback. Through public campaigning and strike action we can end outsourcing at London universities!
Among the speakers at the gates of Senate House was Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell who also brought support from Jeremy Corbyn and promised a Labour government would bring in new trade union laws and end the unfairness of outsourcing. Unfortunately should we now get a Labour government at the next election its policies will be more about protecting company profits than protecting workers.
There were plenty of others as well as IWGB members who spoke, and one was a woman from UCU at Goldsmiths University who had come with a large donation from them to the strike fund.
Billy Bragg came to give his support, singing three songs, and got us joining in on some of them, and Archie Shuttlebrace sang with Rebecca Wade Morris. Chip Hamer (Grim Chip) and another of the poets from Poetry on the Picket Line performed some of their work.
Then it was time for a march around Russell Square, with over 200 people briefly holding up traffic. The march was lead by the yellow Precarious Workers Mobile three-wheeler and a samba band.
They returned to the gates of Stewart House and the rally continued with more music, poetry and dancing.
Hungry for Justice For Fast Food Workers – Oxford St
The Fast Food Rights Campaign to support and unionise workers in fast food outlets was launched by a national day of action, with a ‘Hungry For Justice’ protest on Oxford Street led by John McDonnell MP and Ian Hodson of the Bakers Food Allied Workers Union BFAWU.
The UK campaign followed on from strikes in around a hundred cities across the USA by food workers at the end of 2013, showing that it was possible to organise and unionise workers in an industry where it had been said to be impossible.
The BFAWU in the UK had led the fight against zero hours contracts, wining an important victory against Hovis in Wigan. Companies such as McDonalds are notable for their anti-union policies and generally rates of pay in fast food outlets are abysmal and working conditions often extremely poor.
The fast food chains in this country had sales of £6.9billion in 2012 and were making huge profits at the expense of their employees. In the UK the average wage of food workers in 2014 was only £5 an hour, below the minimum legal wage for adult workers – with many employees being below the age of 21.
In the USA over half the workers in the food industry rely on benefits to top up their incomes, and the situation in the UK is no better. Governments effectively subsidise these low-pay employers.
The campaign and this protest in the UK was supported by the BFAWU, Unite the Resistance, Disabled People Against Cuts (DPAC), Youth Fight for Jobs, the National Shop Stewards Network (NSSN) and other campaigning organisations.
I met the protesters outside a Burger King on the Tottenham Court Road where the protest began. As well as protesting outside, people went inside to hand out fliers to the customers and to the staff urging them to join the BWAFU.
The protest then moved on to two branches of McDonald’s on Oxford Street, where security staff prevented the protesters entering, although at the first one man was allowed to go in and give leaflets to the staff. There were were protests and speeches on the pavement outside the shops.
The protesters did walk in to two branches of Costa Coffee, behaving politely and handing out the leaflets, and after a brief discussion leaving quietly when asked to do so.
Anons 6th Anniversary at Scientology – Tottenham Court Road
Few turned up for the 6th anniversary of the Anonymous protest against Scientology against the threat to freedom of speech on the internet from personal and often underhand attacks on critics under Scientology’s so-called ‘fair game’ policy.
That protest in 2008, outside the Church of Scientology’s English HQ in Queen Victoria Street and their recruiting centre on the Tottenham Court Rd had been both the first UK protest to be organised solely over the web and the first time that the now-familiar ‘V for Vendetta’ Guy Fawkes masks, worn to hide identities because of the often savage recriminations against critics of the cult, had been used at a protest in the UK.
Perhaps the real reason for the low turnout was simply that there now appears to be very little interest in the cult which had been so widely exposed both in events such as that 2008 protest and in the media. It was now attracting very few new recruits and perhaps seemed hardly worth protesting about.
This was the 12th Reclaim Love Valentine Party at Piccadilly Circus, an event begun in 2003 by Venus CuMara.
This year it had been others who had attended previous events who decided at the last minute to organise the event as Venus had been away from the country. Rather to our surprise she returned and attended, playing her usual role in organising the circle at the centre of the event.
I’ve written about these events recently so won’t write anything new, but here is part of what I posted in 2014 on My London Diary:
“The idea behind the free party on the street was to celebrate love between people as the most important force in the world, and to do so in a way that counteracted the tremendous commercialisation of love in the annual media shopping promotion frenzy that now surrounds St Valentine’s Day. It was to be a free event, people making and having fun, sharing love, taking place in a public area in the centre of London’s West End shops and under the vast neon advertisements of Picadilly Circus.
“Venus also aimed to send a message of peace and love out across the world – and the London event spawned similar parties at the same time elsewhere across the world – by uniting us all in circles of love at the same time around the world. At 3.30pm everyone here – and at other Reclaim Love parties around the world – joined hands to chant many times ‘May All The Beings In All The Worlds Be Happy & At Peace’.”
I finished my post in 2014 with:
There are really very few such spontaneous events in London like this, and this is unique in central London. I’ve photographed most of these events and I hope that they will continue with others taking over the running in future years.
If you are in London on Saturday afternoon, 18th February 2023, some people plan to be there for a Reclaim Love party. And at 3.33pm to join their hands in a circle to chant.
December 5th 2012 was a fine winter’s day and I took advantage of the weather to try and walk around the area which had been fenced off for the London Olympics for around 5 years. In the evening I joined a protest in Westminster against the continuing cuts being aimed at the poorest and most vulnerable by George Osborne and the Conservative-led government.
Olympic Area Slightly Open – Stratford Marsh. Wed 5 Dec 2012
It was around April 2007 that an 11 mile long blue fence went up around the whole of the London Olympic site at Stratford, barring access to the whole site except for those working on it. Parts were replaced in 2012 with a 5,000 volt 4m tall electrified perimeter fence in 2012 for the games itself.
St Thomas’ Creek still blocked to boats
Even the public footpath along the Northern Sewage Outfall, the Greenway, had been closed in May 2012, but after I heard this had reopened on December 1st I had been wanting to visit the area again to walk along it.
Crossrail works
The View Tube, a cafe and viewing area set up on the Greenway had also reopened, under new management, and it was only signs for this that kept me going past a maze of fencing and hostile signage. The Greenway was still closed between Stratford High Street and the main railway lines because of ongoing work for Crossrail, and roads north of the railway were still fenced off.
Wire fences and yellow fences have replaced the blue
Despite it being a fine afternoon for a walk I was the only customer to enter the View Tube while I was there and the Greenway, normally a useful through route for cyclists and pedestrians, was still deserted.
I could see no signs of work going on to bring the area back into use. Ten years later the area is still largely a desert and most of the promises about the ‘Olympic Legacy’ have been reneged on. This is still an Olympic waste; though the developers have done well out of it, the people haven’t.
I walked along the Greenway, finding there was no access from it to any part of the area, with those electric wire fences still in place, and made my way along the Lea Navigation to Hackney Wick, making a number of pictures on my way.
Osborne’s Budget Cuts – Strand to Westminster, Wed 5 Dec 2012
I around 200 people outside Kings College at Aldwych who were meeting to march to join the rally at Downing St where Stop the War and CND were protesting against Osborne’s attacks on the vulnerable, continued in his autumn statement.
The march had been called by the UCU London Region, and was joined by students, trade unionists, socialists and others, and went down the Strand and into Whitehall shouting slogans against public service cuts, the rich, David Cameron and George Osborne in particular to join a similar number already protesting at Downing St.
Speakers at the rally pointed out the huge cost of military expenditure which was being poured into futile projects – and the pockets of the arms manufacturers:
“The Afghanistan war — which everyone knows is futile and lost — is costing around £6 billion a year. The yearly maintenance costs for Trident are £2.2 billion a year. The cost of renewing the Trident system — which this government is committed to do — would cost up to £130 billion. Two aircraft carriers are being built at a cost of £7 billion. Then there’s the £15 billion to be spent buying 150 F-35 jets from the US, each of which will cost £85 million plus an extra £16 million for the engine.”
John McDonnell MP
By now it was freezing, and when the speeches began the speakers were asked to cut their contributions short because of the extreme cold. Among those who spoke were John McDonnell MP, Kate Hudson of CND, author Owen Jones, Andy Greene of DPAC and Green Party leader Natalie Bennett.
Kate Hudson CND
We heard from a nurse about the campaign to keep Lewisham hospital open, where a few days earlier 15,000 had marched and formed a human chain around the hospital. The hospital is successful and well run, but huge PFI debts from another hospital in the area threaten its future.
Green Party Leader Natalie Bennett
A NUT member talked about the problems the cuts were making in education and campaigners had come from Connaught School in Waltham Forest where they are striking against the decision by school governors to pursue academy status despite the opposition of the teachers, parents, the local MP and councillors.
A speaker from UK Uncut urged people to join the protests against Starbucks the following Saturday and many of those who spoke called for trade unions to take action against the cuts, calling on union leaders to stop simply speaking against them and start organising strike action.
2005 seems a long time ago now, but some of the same names are still often in the news. At a rally at King’s Cross station about fire safety remembering the victims of the disastrous fire in the Underground station there in 1987 that killed 31 people there were speeches from trade unionists and politicians including MPs John McDonnell and Jeremy Corbyn.
RMT leader Bob Crow died in 2014 but since 2021 RMT General Secretary Mick Lynch has been very much in our minds recently – and like Crow putting the case for his members and the working classes effectively to the mass media, challenging the silly class-based observations of many reporters and interviewers and making clear the facts about the rail dispute.
John McDonnell
Trains were very much in my mind at the start of Saturday 26th November 2005, not because of strikes but because of the problems of our privatised rail system which led to me arriving in London half an hour later than anticipated. Privatisation only really made any sense when it could introduce real competition and that was never possible for the railways – and only by introducing an expensive and wasteful middle layer of companies for utilities such as gas, electricity and water. In all these sectors the results have been inefficienies, high prices and large profits at the expense of customers and taxpayers for the largely foreign companies who bought our ‘national silver’.
Kings Cross – never again! – 26th November 2005
So I arrived late, running up the escalators at King’s Cross and remembering the stories of those who had been caught up there in the terrible fire, thinking how hard it would be to find the way out in smoke-filled darkness. Even with good lighting and reasonably clear signage it’s sometimes difficult to take the correct route.
Outside I photographed the joint trade union protest in memory of the fire, made more urgent by the plans of the management to change safety rules which protect workers and public using the system in order to cut costs. As well as those mentioned earlier, there were also speakers from ASLEF, the Fire Brigades Union and others.
On the https://www.london-fire.gov.uk/museum/history-and-stories/historical-fires-and-incidents/the-kings-cross-fire-1987/ 18th November 1987 a fire started when a lit match was dropped on an escalator around the end of the evening rush hour, falling through a gap and setting fire to litter and grease beneath. The small fire this started quickly spread, engulfing the escalator. People were told to leave the station by an alternative escalator and trains were told not to stop at the station.
Then at exactly 7.45pm while the ticket hall was still crowded a fireball suddenly erupted from the escalator into the ticket hall, followed by dense black smoke which made it impossible to see the exits. The heat was intense, melting plastic wall and ceiling tiles which added to the blaze. It took two and a quarter hours to get the fire under control, and a further five hours to put it out completely. 31 people died in the fire including a senior fire officer who was in the ticket hall telling people to get out when the fireball burst in.
Government and management justify cutting safety as “getting rid of red tape” and simplifying procedures and 12 years after this protest we saw the terrifying consequences of their approach to safety at Grenfell Tower.
The inquiry into the fire established a previously unknown mechanism by which the fire had spread so rapidly and also found that an over-complacent management had not had sufficient concern for the dangers of fires underground. New regulations were introduced, smoking was banned and a programme of replacing wooden escalators begun (though it was only in 2014 that the last was taken out of service.) Heat detectors and sprinkler systems were installed and better communications systems, improvements in passenger flow and staff training meant that almost all of the reports recommendations were put into practice.
Things changed in later years as Government and management justified cutting safety as “getting rid of red tape” and simplifying procedures and 12 years after this protest we saw the terrifying consequences of their approach to safety at Grenfell Tower. Had the reports and the coroners recommendations following the Lakanal House fire in 2009 been implemented and the lessons learnt, the fire at Grenfell would have been a minor incident, confined to the flat inside which it started. There would have been no deaths and we would never have heard about it on the news.
Poppies and leaves in Whitehall
Workers and their unions saw clearly the dangers of this change in attitudes to safety in this 2005 protest.
I’d hoped to go from the safety protest at King’s Cross to a lecture at the ICA, but my work finished too late, and instead deciding first to go to Whitehall where I had expected to find another protest. There were still quite a few poppies from the Remembrance Sunday event, but I found nothing else to photograph in the area.
I decided the weather would be fine to take a trip to the Royal Victoria Dock and take some more photographs around there. It was a fairly quick journey now thanks to the Jubilee Line from Westminster to Canning Town and then a couple of stops on the DLR.
I got off at Custom House and walked past the entrance to the Excel Centre, making my way to the high level bridge across the dock, which had been closed on an earlier visit but was open now. And the lift was working.
I took rather a lot of pictures both on the dockside and from the bridge which has some interesting views of the buildings around the dock and further afield, including the Millennium Dome on the other side of the Thames, Canary Wharf and the London skyline in the far distance.
I took pictures with the full range of the lenses in my camera bag, from the 8mm fisheye to the a not very impressive telephoto zoom, which I think stretched to 125mm, equivalent on the DX camera I was then using to 187mm, which give a some quite different angles of view. I would now process these rather differently, partly because RAW software has improved significantly since 2005, but also because my own preferences have changed. Most of those fisheye images I would probably now partially ‘defish’ to render the verticals straight.
The camera I was using them, a Nikon D70 also now seems rather primitive, particularly as its images are only 6Mp and only offering a ISO 200 – 1600 range. But it did the job well, and the only real improvements in later models – unless you really want to make very large prints – were in the viewfinders. The D70 viewfinder was usable (and much better than the D100 which it replaced) but still not as good as those on film cameras.
Towards the end of the time I spent there, the sky turned orange, though perhaps the photographs slightly exaggerate the colour.
East London Against the Arms Trade – Musical Protest, Excel Centre, 26 Nov 2005
I’d photographed more or less everything I could see and was beginning to make my way back to the DLR station when “I heard the brassy notes of the red flag, and made my way towards them.”
Musicians from ‘East London Against the Arms Fair’ were treating visitors to the Excel centre to a musical welcome. They were calling for Excel to stop hosting the DSEI (Defence & Security Equipment International) arms fairs which attract visitors from around the world, including many repressive regimes to come to London and see and buy arms.
London’s then Mayor, Ken Livingstone had spoken against having the arms fair in London as have the nearby London boroughs, and local residents had voted 79% against them, but the arms fairs continue every other year – with several days of protest against them.
One had taken place here in October, and the musical protest was calling for those already booked for 2007, 2009 and 2011 to be dropped. But their protest fell on deaf ears so fast as Excel’s owners were concerned and they continue, supported by the government, to be held there.
As well as seeing more pictures on the links in this post you can also see the accounts I wrote back in 2005 by scrolling down the November 2005 page of My London Diary. You can see photographs of further protests against the DSEI arms fair by putting the four letters DSEI into the search on the front page of My London Diary.
Candlelit vigil for Justice for Ricky Reel – New Scotland Yard, Tue 21 Oct 2014
On Tuesday 21st October 2014, eight years ago, I photographed the vigil 17 years after the body of 20-year-old Ricky Reel, an Asian student was found in the River Thames, seven days after he went missing following a racist attack in Kingston upon Thames.
Sukhdev Reel
In 2014 evidence became public that the police had failed to take his disappearance seriously and rather than investingating and pursuing his attackers had spent time and resources on undercover agents investigating Ricky Reel’s family. Even after his body was found they failed to treat him as the victim of a racist attack.
Even now, 25 yearsafter Ricky Reel’s death, the Metropolitan Police are in denial over the incident, and in the last few weeks have issued a statement that the family was not spied on, despite the family, their MP and a public inquiry having been shown the evidence. In 2014 there were 77,000 signatures calling on then Met Police Commissioner Bernard Hogan-Howe to formally apologise and for a robust independent and transparent Public Inquiry into police spying on family campaigns. It didn’t happen.
Suresh Grover of the Southall Monitoring Group
I first met and photographed Ricky’s mother at the front of a protest at Downing St, fighting for justice back in 1997, and she continues her fight. Recently her book ‘Ricky Reel: Silence Is Not An Option‘ was published and she appeared on BBC News with Tish Reel to continue to seek justice.
The Police Complaints Authority investigated the case in 1998 and reported that weaknesses in the police organisation had led the investigating officers to neglect the case. But their report remains unpublished, although MP John McDonnell used parliamentary privilege to reveal its findings in the House of Commons soon after its completion – and you can read these in the Daily Mirror which also gives more details of the failures.
John McDonnell was one of the speakers at the 2014 vigil, along with others including Sukhdev Reel, Stafford Scott of Tottenham Rights, Suresh Grover of The Monitoring Group, Helen Steel, an activist who was deceived into a two-year relationship by an undercover police officer, a speaker from the Newham Monitoring Project, and Liz Fekete of the Institute of Race Relations.
You can hear more about the case in a YouTube video, Silence is not an option which includes contributions from Sukhdev Reel, John McDonnell, Suresh Grover and others. The recently appointed Met Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley has stated he wants to deal with racism and eliminate it from the force, and how he deals with this case will be an important indicator of whether this is just an empty promise.
Democracy Camp Fenced Out – Parliament Square, Tue 21 Oct 2014
Earlier in the day I’d called into Parliament Square where I found the Democracy campers had been removed from the central grass area which was now surrounded by fencing. A few people were still being arrested for being on the grass, but I could only photograph them through the fence.
Earlier, police had taken away the blue tarpaulins that protesters had been using to sit or lie on the wet grass, leading to the Democracy Camp gaining the name ‘Tarpaulin Revolution’ – #tarpaulinrevolution.
One enterprising protester had gone up to join Chuchill on his plinth shortly before I arrived, with a banner which read: ‘The Revolution Will Not Be Confiscated – #tarpaulinrevolution Parliament Square’. Rather to my surprise he was still up there when I returned briefly after attending the vigil for Ricky Reel.
Staines march for flood victim Zane – Staines, Spelthorne. Tue 21 Oct 2014
Before coming to London I had photographed a protest in Staines on what would have been Zane Gbangbola’s eighth birthday. The protesters demanded that Spelthorne Council test the landfill site next to his home which they believe generated the hydrogen cyanide gas that killed Zane when it was flooded earlier in the year.
The protesters marched the few hundred yards from Staines Leisure Centre to the Spelthorne Council officers to hand in a 38 Degrees petition. Council officers came to take the petition and express sympathy with Zane’s parents, both of who were also affected by the gas, his father being left a paraplegic.
So far investigations have failed to provide a conclusive answer for the cause of Zane’s death, with the pathologist later blaming carbon monoxide from a petrol-driven pump used to clear floodwater from the house. But his parents say it was never used inside the house. Surrey Police are reported to have submitted information regarding the faulty pump and the hire company which supplied it to the Crown Prosecution Service.
