lobbying | >Re-PHOTO

End NHS Privatisation, Kurds Call For Democracy – 2016

End NHS Privatisation, Kurds Call For Democracy: On Friday 4th November 2016 I photographed two unrelated protests. Opposite Parliament a rally supported the second reading of Labour MP Margaret Greenwood’s NHS Bill to end the creeping privatisation of our National Health Service, and from there I joined hundreds of Kurds as they marched through Parliament Square on their way to protest at the Turkish Embassy follow the arrest of leaders and MPs of the pro-Kurdish oppposition in Turkey earlier that morning.

Bill to reverse NHS Privatisation

Old Palace Yard, Westminster

End NHS Privatisation, Kurds Call For Democracy - 2016 — *Larry Sanders, Green Party Health spokesperson and Bernie’s brother speaking*

Labour MP Margaret Greenwood’s NHS Bill which proposes to fully restore the NHS as an accountable public service and to prevent further marketisation at the hands of the Tories stood little chance of actually being debated that day as it was low on the list. Of course had no chance of ever becoming law against a government and opposition majority including many MPs receiving donations or having interests in private healthcare.

The privatisation of NHS services was taking place under New Labour before the Tories came to power in the 2010 coalition but was accelerated by the Health and Social Care Act 2012 which allowed NHS services to be contracted out to ‘any qualified provider‘, including private companies – and increasingly Clinical Commissioning Groups have been under pressure to outsource.

In 2016 Sustainability and Transformation Plans were being developed in private for 44 areas covering the whole of England to be in place by Christmas. The NHS England director of strategy Michael McConnell had said that these STPs offer private sector companies an “enormous opportunity” but critics said that they could mean the end of the NHS as we have known it.

Private healthcare is parasitic on the NHS. Their contracts cherry-pick the more straightforward areas of provision – such as my annual diabetic eye photographs – while leaving the more difficult areas to the public sector. And where complications do happen, the private NHS badged providers are quick to pass on patients to the real NHS as they do not have the trained staff or resources to deal with them.

Only the NHS is there to cope with accidents and emergencies – the private sector offers no A&E services. And it is only the NHS that trains the doctors and other medical staff that keeps the private hospitals and the services that private healthcare contracts from the NHS running.

Of course there is no chance of Parliament reversing this trend while private healthcare makes huge donations to politicians to pursue their interests. ‘Every Doctor ‘ reported in April 2025 that “The Labour Party received four times as much in donations from donors connected to private healthcare than all other political parties combined … in 2023-2025“. Health Minister Wes Streeting alone has received “almost £167,000 from individuals and companies with ties to the private healthcare sector.” The total amount of donations to politicians from people and companies involved in private healthcare in that two year period was more than £2.7 million.

On Byline Times you can read a 2021 investigation “The Conservative Party’s Private Healthcare Patrons” which explores “the financial ties between Conservative MPs and private health companies“. It’s a remarkable list of MPs and Tory Peers with details of their connections and the amounts involved.

Although the Byline Times article is careful to point out that “There is no evidence that any of the companies have benefited due to their relationships with Conservative MPs or donors” it is hard to believe that these and the other donations have had no influence on the increasing takeover of NHS services by private healthcare companies. And although there do seem to be clear possibilities of conflicts of interest so far as I am aware no MP or Peer has ever abstained from a vote because of this.

The MP’s code of conduct is extremely weak on this matter, and simply relies on MPs to do the right thing – “Members must base their conduct on consideration of the public interest. They must avoid conflict between personal and public interest. If there is any conflict between the two, they must resolve it at once in favour of the public interest.”

This is one of the areas which have caused the current high levels of distrust of politics and politicians. We need much tighter controls on lobbying, an end the system which allows large political donations in cash or kind to MPs, and ensure that MPs who have conflicts of interest abstain from voting on these issues. MPs are paid to represent their constituents, not healthcare companies and not their own financial interests.

More about the protest on My London Diary at Bill to reverse NHS Privatisation

Kurds march for Peace & Democracy

I left the protest at Parliament when over 500 Kurds marched into Parliament Square protesting noisily against the arrest early that morning of two leaders of Turkey’s pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic party (HDP), along with at least 11 MPs.

They sat down briefly on the road in front of Parliament on their way to the Turkish Embassy in Belgrave Square.

At Belgrave Square police tried to stop them and keep them on the opposite side of the road to the Embassy, but they simply walked around the police line and crowded on the pavement and road in front of the Embassy door.

Eventually the police abandoned their attempts to push the protesters back and simply stood several lines deep in front of the doorway while the protest continued.

The rain came down heavily and we were all getting wet but the noisy protest and speeches continued. Eventually the protesters moved away from the embassy and I left them.

Many more pictures on My London Diary at Kurds march for Peace & Democracy.

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Heathrow Villages fight for survival – 2015

Heathrow Villages fight for survival: On Sunday 12th April 2015 in the run up to the 2015 General Election, campaigners launched a renewed fight against the expansion of Heathrow which threatens to swallow up much of the area, showing again the local determination to protect its historic community against a third runway.

As a fairly local resident although on the other side of Heathrow I’d been involved in the successful campaign a dozen years earlier against the expansion, which had eventually convinced all political parties that expansion at Heathrow was politically impossible. And when the 2010 election put a Tory Lib-Dem coalition into power plans were cancelled as the Lib-Dems had always strongly opposed them.

But Heathrow had not taken NO for an answer and had continued to spend a considerable amount lobbying for it, including setting up a heavily funded PR organisation called ‘Back Heathrow’ to come up with spurious survey results suggesting local backing for expansion.

In 2012 the coalition government set up an Airports Commission led by Sir Howard Davies who had held many leading roles as an economist for both governments and private companies and who when appointed resigned from his roles as an adviser to GIC Private Limited, formerly known as Government of Singapore Investment Corporation, a part owner of Heathrow.

Officially the commission’s role was to consider how the UK could “maintain its status as an international hub for aviation and immediate actions to improve the use of existing runway capacity in the next 5 years” but unofficially it was designed to produce a political consensus in its final report in Summer 2015 that would put Heathrow expansion back on track.

*The Polar Bears brought their banner ‘Any new runway is Plane Stupid’*

In October 2016 the Tories under Theresa May made a third runway and a new terminal a central Government policy, and in June 2018 the House of Commons voted by a large majority in favour, despite the opposition or abstention of most London MPs.

*Clifford Dixon (UKIP), Pearl Lewis (Conservative), John McDonnell (Labour) and Alick Munro (Green)*

The Supreme Court in 2020 ruled the government’s decision had been unlawful as they had not taken their committments to climate change under the Paris agreement into account. The government then accepted the judgement, but Heathrow appealed and won, with the ban being lifted.

*John Stewart of HACAN* *(Heathrow Association for the Control of Aircraft Noise)*

However the plans have so far not gone ahead, in part because governments have not agreed to pick up the huge infrastructure costs around the airport that would be required and that Heathrow were unwilling to finance.

*A war veteran plants a tree on the recreation ground against Heathrow expansion*

When the right-wing led Labour government came to power in 2024, they immediately set about making changes to the planning process that would enable developments like Heathrow to go ahead with little or no proper examination and inquiries. And in January 2025 they “confirmed it was the new Labour government’s plan to proceed with a third runway within the current parliamentary term.”

However the arguments against expansion continue to grow in strength, particularly on environmental grounds and the Trump-initiated slump in world trade seems likely to damage the economic arguments for expansion as well as increase the already huge costs of the project. So it still seems unlikely that it will happen, and certainly not by the “projected completion date around 2040.”

You can read more about the activities in Harmondsworth around the village centre back in April 2015 on My London Diary and see the strength of the local opposition back then. There were Morris Dancers performing outside the village pubs and inside the incredible Grade I listed Great Barn and a rally with the Plane Stupid polar bear, speeches from the general election candidates and protesters on what would be the new Heathrow boundary in the village centre.

Heathrow has of course promised the Great Barn would be protected along with the fine part 12th Century Parish Church, but they would not be the same without their context.

Heathrow represents a huge failure by successive governments over many years to set up a new major airport for London at some more suitable location. Even when opened as a civil airport in 1946 it was not a particularly suitable location, though when relatively small and quiet aircraft such as the DC3 were in use it was not a great problem. But once these began to be replaced by larger noisier and more polluting jets and passenger numbers and traffic in the surrounding area shot up the need to close it and move to a new location was clear. Heathrow’s answer was always to expand and make the problems worse, building new terminals (and actually closing runways that had become too short for the newer aircraft.) Heathrow should have been closed down years ago – and would have been a great site for a new town.

Heathrow Villages fight for survival.

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Free Speech & PFI Debt – 2013

Free Speech & PFI Debt – Ten years ago on Tuesday 8th October 2013 I photographed two protests in London, the first against a controversial law which prevents some campaigning by organisations in the year before a general election and the second over the effect of huge repayments of PFI debts that are severely affecting the ability to provide proper hospital services – a result of misguided policy decisions by previous governments and poor agreements made by civil servants.

Don’t Gag Free Speech – Parliament Square

Campaigners in Parliament Square opposed the Transparency of Lobbying, Non-party Campaigning and Trade Union Administration Bill which was being debated that day in Parliament in what was somewhere between a staged photo-opportunity and a protest.

The name of the Bill (and the Act which came into force in 2014) is something of a mouthful as it combined three quite different things. Establishing a register of consultant lobbyists seemed long overdue, although it seemed unlikely to reduce the scandalous effect of lobbying by groups such as fossil fuel companies on government policies – and clearly has not as recent decisions on Rosebank and other environmental issues has shown.

But the restrictions on the campaigning activities by charities and other “third party organisations” in the year before a general election was extremely controversial. So controversial that it was opposed by an incredibly wide range of voluntary organisations, “including Action for Blind People, Action for Children, the British Heart Foundation, the Campaign to Protect Rural England, the Countryside Alliance, Guide Dogs, Islamic Relief UK, Hope not Hate, the National Federation of Women’s Institutes, the Royal British Legion, the RSPB and the Salvation Army.” All saw that their legitimate activities in pursuing their charitable and other aims could be limited by the new legislation at least one year in four.

The third section of the bill would effect the ability of trade unions to play a full role in informing and advising members in ways that might influence how they should vote.

Many saw the bill as an attack on free speech and something that could be used to silence critics of the government in the run-up to general elections, while failing to address the problems of lobbying by vested interests which could continue so long as the lobbyists were registered.

Rather than the mouthful of its full name, the Bill was widely referred to as the “lobbying bill”, or by its many critics as the “gagging bill” and this was reflected in some of those protesting having tape across their mouths, as well as in posters and placards. Although the bill became law it has perhaps had less effect than many of the campaigners feared, probably because of its lack of clarity. But it remains in law as a failure to deal with lobbying and a threat to free speech.

More pictures at Don’t Gag Free Speech.

Scrap Royal London NHS PFI Debt – Royal London Hospital, Whitechapel

The Private Finance Initiative (PFI) was a disastrous system which enabled essential government expenditure to be taken off the books. Essentially it involved in disguising borrowing by the government to build schools and hospitals etc by getting money from the private sector for these works and then paying these back over long periods of time.

But rather than the government paying back the loans for new hospitals, these would be paid back by the NHS through the various health trusts. It made no real sense, but made the figures for government borrowing look better.

Things were made worse, firstly by the private sector negotiators of the agreements running rings around those from the public sector inexperienced in such things meaning the contracts are far too favourable to them. Then we had the financial crash and the Tory-imposed austerity. Health trusts found themselves in an impossible situation, which required some radical government action. Even the Tories were eventually forced to do something, and in 2020, over £13 billion of NHS debt was scrapped; this good news came together with a wider package of NHS reforms in part intended to allow them to cope with Covid, and I’m unclear of what the overall effect will be in the longer term.

The Barts Health Trust which covers much of East London, including Barts, The Royal London, Newham General, Whipps Cross and London Chest Hospital, as well as many smaller community facilities has been particularly badly hit, with PFI payments of £129m a year to a private consortium who financed the new (and much needed) Royal London Hospital.

Barts Health Trust needs to cut £78m from the services it provides and planned to do so by downgrading the posts of many of its staff, paying them less for doing the same work, or rather doing more work, as there will be increasing staff shortages with vacancies being deliberately left unfilled. In any case new staff will be unwilling to come and work for a trust that wants to pay them less than their experience and qualifications merit.

Barts were also proposing to close departments such as A&E at Whipps Cross or Newham and for the population of East London things are made worse by proposed closures in neighbouring health trusts.

The rally began on a narrow pavement on the busy Whitechapel Road outside the hospital but after police told the organisers it was too dangerous moved onto the access road in front of the new PFI financed hospital where they had previously been denied permission to protest.

Although the hospital has a new building, financial problems have prevented them from making use of the top two floors – and for two days recently had been unable to admit any new patients as no beds were available.

More at Scrap Royal London NHS PFI Debt.

Occupy Gandhi – Stop Fossil Fuel Criminals

Occupy Ghandi - Stop Fossil Fuel Criminals

Occupy Gandhi – Stop Fossil Fuel Criminals – on Monday 4th May 2015 Occupy Democracy were on the fourth day of their ‘Festival of Democracy’ in Parliament Square “building a movement for real democracy: free from corporate control, working for people and planet!”

Occupy had come to Parliament Square in defiance of the law criminalising the use of tarpaulins, tents and other protection in the square, and were making six key demands:

• reform of party funding so that members of parliament act in the interests of those who elect them rather than the 1% who bankroll them
• major democratic reform of the media to break the stranglehold of vested interests
• a fundamental overhaul of lobbying and the way powerful economic interests inhabit the corridors of power within government
• the introduction of proportional representation so that everyone’s vote counts
• that MPs should not have conflicts of interests from either paid employment or corporate shareholdings
• a citizen-led constitutional convention for real democracy.
Occupy Festival of Democracy

On Monday 4th they began a rally and meditation at the foot of the statue of Gandhi, noted for his direct action civil disobedience, calling for fossil fuel exploration and investment to be made a crime. Donnachadh McCarthy laid out a large blue banner with the message ‘Criminalise Fossil Fuel Exploration‘ and a mock tombstone with the inscription ‘RIP – 300,000 Dying from Climate Crisis Every Year Said Kofi Annan UN Gen Soc‘.

People then brought tarpaulins to sit on around these on the paved area in front of Ghandi’s statue and began a series of short speeches, meditation and songs about climate change and fossil fuel use.

They took a small blue tarp to the statue of Gandhi and wrapped it carefully around him. After a short pause two of the GLC’s private security heritage wardens who had been watching the event with a few police officers came up and removed the blue tarpaulin. A replacement was brought up and carefully held by two of the protesters without touching the statue (much) and the meditation continued.

There was another minor intervention by the heritage wardens who objected to burning incense sticks being placed in the flower beds. The protesters removed them and instead held them.

Donnachadh McCarthy then produced a blue folding tent and erected it, announcing that he was going to defy the ban on tents and inviting others who wished to join him.

People climbed in and after posing for a photograph with the tent the protest continues, with Donnachadh joining them inside as police approached. The police warned those inside the tent they were committing an offence and warned them they could be arrested – and then walked away.

Some minutes later, at exactly 2pm a larger group of police returned and surrounded the tent.

They gave those inside a final chance to leave without being arrested. Three people remained inside the tent, holding each other tight.

Finally they were arrested, handcuffed and taken away to waiting police vans. The whole police operation seemed a massive waste of public money enforcing a ridiculous law. The real criminals are not a few protesters with tents and tarpaulins in public squares, but those who sit in boardrooms and continue promote and produce fossil fuels which are driving us towards extinction, plotting actions to derail attempts to make the changes the planet needs in order to increase their profits.

More pictures at Occupy Gandhi – stop fossil fuel criminals.

Dirty Money Still Rules

Nine years ago on Wednesday 7th November 2012, the day that the election of Obama for a second term as President of the US was announced, the Campaign against Climate Change organised a series of protests in London urging him to stand up against the lobbying, dirty money and media lies funded by the Koch brothers and other fossil fuel companies.

Nine years later, after both the end of Obama’s presidency and four years of climate denier Trump, President Biden is still having problems in getting his plans to clean up the environment (and other policies) voted through because of opposition by a Senator who made a fortune from a coal brokerage business in which he owns more than a million dollars in shares and who receives more donations than any other senator from the coal, oil and gas industry.

*Campaign Against Climate Change, March 2003*

The Campaign against Climate Change was founded in 2001 as a response to President Bush’s rejection of the Kyoto Protocol, and I think I first photographed one of their marches back in March 2002 when they pushed a bed with Bush in bed with the Esso tiger from Esso’s UK HQ to Westminster. It was a long walk and the wheels fell off the bed as it came to Westminster Bridge, but in 2012, after a static protest at the HQ of giant US private company Koch International they chose sturdier wheels in the form of an open-top bus.

Koch Industries is the US’s largest private company and made its fortune through developing improved processes of oil refining, and this remains a major part of its widespread activities. It is owned by the Koch Brothers, who ‘have been a major source for funding disinformation on climate change and in instigating the wave of populist anti-science, anti-regulatory, right-wing extremism associated with the “Tea Party”.’

Both in the US and the UK, governments are hugely influenced by the lobbying of big business, with many politicians accepting large payouts for services rendered, as well as a large PR and lobbying industry aimed at law makers and the media. The truly shameful think about the current case of Owen Paterson is not that he was paid paid £100,000 and broke the rules, but that their are rules that exist which he claims to have kept within to allow such paid lobbying by MPs.

*Phil Thornhill at the front of the bus*

Although the bus didn’t lose its wheels, it was desperately cold as it went through London on a cold, wet and windy November evening, with Phil Thornhill of the CCC leaning over the top with a large megaphone informing the public about the reason for the protest. It was also extremely bumpy, which together with the low light made photography rather difficult, and most of the time I was too busy holding tight to the rail across the top of the seats to take pictures.

Finally after its journey through the rush-hour streets the bus arrived at the US Embassy in Grosvenor Square and we all alighted. At first police tried to push the protesters into a penned area in a dark corner of the square where it would be neither heard nor seen. The protesters sensibly refused and after some discussion were allowed to protest as usual in front of the locked front gates – protected outside by a thin line of police, and inside the tall fence by wandering armed officers.

*Barach Obama with David Koch on the top of the bus*

Protests such as this of course had no effect on Obama’s business-friendly administration, while Trump made climate denial core policy of his tweets. But these and other protests did raise awareness of the catastrophe the world is facing. Many of us had been aware of the coming crisis for many years – at least since the 1980s, though there were warnings from some scientists years earlier, but the wider public, often misinformed by the media was largely ignorant.

Without protests such as this around the world, it seems unlikely that their would have been an agreement reached at COP 21 in Paris in 2015, and since then, helped by the publicity given to Greta Thunberg and David Attenborough, not to mention various extreme climate events around the world, there is now a wide consensus that something needs to be done, and done urgently. But thanks to the huge continued efforts of big business in fossil fuels the politicians are still locked into doing too little too late.

More pictures: Stop Fossil Fuel Dirty Money takeover of US.