Lord Dubs | >Re-PHOTO

UN Anti-Racism Day & IDS Gone – 2016

UN Anti-Racism Day & IDS Gone: Saturday 19th March 2016 was UN Anti-Racism Day and was celebrated with a Refugees Welcome march and rally, and by Australians and others protesting at the Australian High Commission in London to condemn the Australian government’s treatment of refugees. Later in Parliament Square I joined disabled people and friends celebrating the resignation of Iain Duncan Smith whose policies had caused them so much suffering and harm.

Stand Up to Racism – Refugees Welcome March

BBC to Piccadilly Circus

Thousands met outside the BBC for a national demonstration called by Stand Up to Racism against racism, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism and fascism and to make the point that refugees are welcome here.

They had started at the BBC pointing out that it should have a much more positive attitude to refugees. It gives much air time to the views of racists and extreme right groups and personalities and fails to adequately represent the view of the majority of the British population shown in protests such as this.

The BBC often minimises the positive contributions of migrants and refugees to the British economy and keeping vital services such as the NHS running and fails to criticise the increasingly racist government policies.

As well as a large ‘Black Lives Matter’ bloc led by Lee Jasper and Zita Holbourne, there were also groups working with refugees trapped in the camps in Calais and Dunkirk by the failure of our government to set up legal routes for refugees, demanding our government take a much more positive and humanitarian approach to refugees. Apart from a small concession for children, forced on them by Lord Dubs with massive public support, which was very grudgingly administered and prematurely ended, successive governments have responded with increasingly draconian measures.

What I wrote in 2016 is now even more apposite: “Of course there are racists and bigots who oppose Britain taking in any refugees, and those who would want to abandon the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which Britain played a major role in drawing up in 1947-8. Winston Churchill – who many on the far right look on as a symbol of all things British – proposed a European Charter of Human Rights in 1947 and we were the first country to ratify it in 1951.”

A very small group of members of the far-right group ‘Britain First’ in their para-military uniforms stood guarded by several times as many police on the steps around Eros as the march past, shouting their hate and insults and making derisory and threatening gestures. Most of the marchers simply ignored them, but a few rushed towards them but were held back by police.

Stand Up to Racism – Refugees Welcome march

Refugees Welcome Rally

Trafalgar Square

*Marcia Rigg whose brother Sean Rigg was killed by Brixton police in 2008,*

A long list of speakers came to the microphone in Trafalgar Square and I photographed most although I left before the end of the rally.

There are pictures of the following as well as Marcia Rigg on My London Diary:

Vanessa Redgrave;
Sabby Dhalu of Stand up to Racism;
Maz Saleem, daughter of Mohammed Saleem killed in a racist attack;
Stephanie Lightfoot, Bennett Co-Chair, United Friends and Families;
Dave Ward CWU General Secretary;
Sally Hunt UCU General Secretary;
Christine Blower NUT General Secretary;
Gary Younge Journalist;
Gloria Mills, Chair of the TUC Race Relations Committee;
Marilyn Reed, the mother of Sarah Reed who died in Holloway Prison;
Lee Jasper, Movement Against Xenophobia and BARAC;
Jeremy Hardy, Comedian;
Diane Abbott MP;
Michael Rosen Children’s novelist and poet;
Claude Moraes MEP;
Jean Lambert MEP;
Amna, a refugee from Mosul, Iraq;
Talha Ahmad National Council member,Muslim Council of Britain

Refugees Welcome Rally

Australians Protest on UN Anti-Racism Day

Australia House

Australians were protesting at home & at embassies around the world against their country’s racist immigration policy.

Many who try to claim asylum in Australia are locked up and detained indefinitely in contradiction to international law on remote Pacific Islands including Manus and Nauru in detention camps run by Serco and will never be allowed to resettle in Australia.

Detainees in these camps have been sexually abused, denied proper health treatment, and in at least one case, that of a young man called Reza Berati, beaten to death by the prison guards.

Serco also run detention centres such as Yarl’s Wood in the UK, where detainees have also been mistreated, sexually abused and denied proper health treatment. The Australian protesters were joined by members of Movement for Justice, which has held many protests at UK detention centres including Yarl’s Wood and Harmondsworth.

No UK newspapers, TV or Radio media had even sent reporters to this protest. The only other photographer taking pictures at the event had been commissioned by a Sydney newspaper.

Australians protest on UN Anti-Racism day

DPAC’s ‘IDS Resignation Party’

Parliament Square

IDS, Iain Duncan Smith, was Secretary of State for Work and Pensions from 2010 to 2016 and responsible for brutal cuts in welfare polices in those years.

In particular he decided to save money by making it harder for sick and disabled people to claim benefits, introducing new eligibility tests and benefit sanctions, incentivising DWP staff to strip claimants of their benefits often for trivial reasons or for matters beyond their control such as the late arrival of official letters or cancellation of buses and trains making them arrive late for appointments.

In 2015 the statistics showed that 2,380 people died in a 3-year period shortly after a work capability assessment declared them fit for work.

The poorly thought out nature of the introduction of Universal Credit also brought suffering to many, left for weeks without financial support. He introduced disastrous schemes to force the disabled into work and cut the support which had enabled some disabled people to work.

His period as a minister had combined a total lack of empathy with a peculiar incompetence and the National Audit Office accused the DWP of ‘”weak management, ineffective control and poor governance” and of wasting £34 million on inadequate computer systems.’

So naturally DPAC were pleased to see him go, and celebrated at this party – though with Prosecco rather than the Champagne some media reports stated. And perhaps their celebrations were a little muted by the knowledge that his successor Stephen Crabb had shown himself to be equally bigoted and lacking compassion and understanding of the needs of the poor and disabled.

Strangely, despite his long record of cutting disablity benefits, IDS’s stated reason for his resignation was that he was unable to accept the government’s planned cuts to disability benefits, later describing the policies he had spent six years putting into effect of “balancing the books on the backs of the poor and vulnerable” as divisive and “deeply unfair“.

DPAC’s ‘IDS Resignation Party’

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Refugee Children, Dead Cyclists & A Squat

Refugee Children, Dead Cyclists & A Squat – 11th February 2017

Dubs Now – Shame on May

Five years ago, on Saturday 11th February 2017, a crowd of supporters of Citizens UK and Safe Passage joined Lord Alf Dubs at Downing St to take a petition to Theresa May urging her to reverse the decision to stop offering legal sanctuary to unaccompanied refugee children.

The Tory government had been forced into an unusual humanitarian response when Parliment passed the Dubs amendment, and they were then given a list of over 800 eligible children – although there were known to be more whose details were not recorded. And because of Lord Dubs, around 300 have been allowed into the UK. But although twice that number remain in limbo, many in the Calais camps, Prime Minister Theresa May decided to end the scheme.

Among those who spoke at the protest before an emergency petition with over 40,000 signatures was taken to Downing St were speakers from four London Labour councils who all said they had told the government they would take more children but their offers had not been taken up.

Dubs Now – Shame on May

Invest in Cycling – Stop Killing Cyclists

Cyclists and supporters met in Trafalgar Square to march to the Treasury on the edge of Parliament Square to call for a significant increase in spending on infrastructure for cyclists and pedestrians on our streets.

That week five people were killed on London streets as a result of careless or dangerous driving – accidents are rare, but such deaths are made much more likely by a road system engineered around the needs of car and other vehicle drivers and cutting their journey times through the city. Facilities for cyclists and pedestrians have long been treated as secondary and chronically underfunded.

But these 5 killed, who were remembered in the protest and die-in are a small fraction of the numbers who die prematurely each week in London as a result of high and often illegal levels of air pollution – estimated at around 180 per week, as well as the much higher number of those whose lives are seriously affected by health problems – both figures including many who drive. Powerful lobbies for motorists and vehicle manufacturers have led to the domination of our cities by cars and lorries.

There are huge health benefits from cleaning the air by cutting down traffic and congestion, and also by encouraging healthy activities including walking and cycling. And the main factor discouraging people from taking to bikes for journeys to school, work and shopping etc is the danger from cars and lorries. Better public transport also helps, particularly in cutting pollution levels, and anything that cuts the use of petrol and diesel vehicles will reduce the major contribution this makes to global warming.

Invest in Cycling – Stop Killing Cyclists

ANAL squat in Belgravia

My final event that day was a visit to 4 Grosvenor Gardens, a rather grand house short distance from Buckingham Palace (and more relevant to me, from Victoria Station.) Squatting collective the Autonomous Nation of Anarchist Libertarians (ANAL) had taken over this house on February 1st after having been evicted from the Belgrave Square house owned by Russian oligarch Andrey Goncharenko which they occupied for a week.

I’d meant to go there a week earlier, but a domestic emergency had called me away earlier in the day from a protest at the US Embassy before a programme of workshops and seminars in the seven-storey squat had begun. There was nothing special happening on the afternoon I visited (though some things were happening in the evening) but I was welcomed by the occupiers, several of whom recognised me, and they were happy for me to wander around the building and take photographs.

Apart from being careful to respect the privacy of some of the occupiers who were sleeping or resting in a couple of the rooms I was able to go everywhere from the basement to the top floor, but the door leading onto the roof was locked, probably to stop any possible access from there by bailiffs. Like many other houses and hotels in the area it has a view into the grounds of Buckingham Palace, but I had to make do with the view from a rather dusty window, or the less interesting view from lower down where windows could be opened.

Few squats have blue plaques – this one for soldier and archaeologist Lieutenant General Augustus Henry Lane Fox Pitt-Rivers, but more recently it has been in use for offices, business meetings and conferences. The squatters have tried hard to cause no serious damage and had last week turned out some people who had come to make a mess of the place.

There are around 1.5 million empty buildings in the UK, many like this deliberately kept empty as investments, their value increasing year on year. The number is enough to enough to house the homeless many times over. ANAL say that properties like this should be used for short-term accommodation while they remain empty and they have opened it as a temporary homeless shelter for rough-sleepers.

It remained in use for almost month, with the squat finally evicted at 8am on 27th February. As I ended my post, “There clearly does need to be some way to bring empty properties back into use, and councils should have much greater powers than at present to do so. Until that happens, squatting seems to be the only possible solution.”

ANAL squat in Belgravia

COP23 & Calais – 24th October 2017

Guardians of the Forest

Four years ago today we were waiting for the start of the COP23 UN Climate Change Conference in Bonn, though for various reasons it didn’t get the same publicity as COP26 coming up shortly in Glasgow. There were certainly fewer hopes of anything positive emerging as it was the first such meeting since Donald Trump had stated he was going to pull the US out of the Paris Agreement.

Those talks were unusual in that although held in Germany (who did most of the organising) they were actually the first hosted by a small-island developing state, with Fiji taking the Presidency.

As usual at such events, not a lot was achieved, with the US decision dominating much of the business in various ways. Syria announced that it would sign up to Paris during the event, leaving the US as the only country in the world saying it would not honour the agreement. And the US withdrawal made China a rather more important player.

Britain actually took part in the one major positive outcome, coming together with Canada to launch the ‘Powering Past Coal Alliance’, calling for the phasing out of coal in OEC and EU countries by 2030 and in the rest of the world before 2050. Unfortunately none of the major coal producing countries signed the pledge.

The Guardians of the Forest, indigenous leaders from Latin America, Indonesia and Africa, had stopped off in London on their way to Bonn and held a rally in Parliament Square to commemorate those who have lost their lives defending the forests against mining, the cutting down of forests for palm oil production and other crops and other threats to the forests and those who live in them.

Many companies listed on the London Stock Exchange are among those responsible for damage to the forests and the murder of indigenous people in search of profits, with whole tribes forcibly removed from their homes and their rights to the land they have lived in for many generations ignored.

Increasingly we are becoming aware of the importance of forests as sources of oxygen and in removing carbon dioxide and so combating global heating and the need for proper stewardship of these huge natural resources – rather than their destruction for short-term profit. Indigenous people have maintained them for hundreds or thousands of years in a renewable manner and their knowledge and continuing maintenance has a vital part to play in the fight against climate change.

Safe Passage

Earlier I’d photographed a rally by Safe Passage on the anniversary of the destruction of the Calais Jungle. Although around 750 child refugees had been brought here from France, they urged the government to provide safe and legal routes for the hundreds of refugees still living in Calais, many sleeping rough in terrible conditions.

In particular they called on them to fill the remaining 280 places allocated under the Dubs law to children but not yet filled 18 months after Parliament passed the law. Many of those still in France are entitled to come here to be reunited with their family and they called on the Home Office to have an official in France to aid their transfers.

More at:
Guardians of the Forest – COP23
Safe Passage for the Children of Calais