Posts Tagged ‘mothers’

Santas Protest For Justice – 2004

Monday, December 18th, 2023

Santas Protest For Justice: On Saturday 18th December 2004 I photographed a Christmas-themed protest with most of those taking part wearing Santa outfits.

Fathers4Justice Santas Protest, West End

Santas Protest For Justice

Fathers4Justice had been in the news in recent months in 2004 with a number of high-profile protests including a couple of men dressed as Batman and Robin who got into the grounds of Buckingham Palace in September 2004. Robin was stopped by police, but Batman managed to shin up a drainpipe and sit on the roof for several hours.

Santas Protest For Justice

Their protest didn’t get the results they desired, but did lead to a tightening of the law regarding trespass on royal property and other protected sites in the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act (SOCPA) 2005 and 16 royal, governmental and parliamentary sites were designated in 2007. Robin was charged for carrying a bladed weapon as he was found to have a bladed weapon – a Stanley Knife – in his pocket.

Santas Protest For Justice

Family courts have a difficult job, and have to deal with some very bitter disputes after relationships have broken up. They do so behind closed doors to protect the children involved, and often the decisions they come to are hard to understand and impossible for some of those concerned to accept. At times they don’t appear to have the wisdom of Solomon!

Santas Protest For Justice

Since 2004 there have been some changes in the family court system, with the Family Procedure Rules 2010 allowing accredited media representatives to attend – with some exceptions and subject to strict rules on what they can report. And in 2023 a pilot scheme was begun in court in Cardiff, Leeds and Carlisle allowing journalists and legal bloggers to report from Family Courts subject to rules of anonymity.

Fathers4Justice were campaigning for access rights for parents and grandparents to see children after the breakup of relationships. As I wrote in 2004 “although courts may grant this at the moment, where they feel it is in the best interests of the child, there is seldom any enforcement of such decisions. so currently access depends entirely on the cooperation of whichever parent was granted custody.”

Fathers4Justice (and they also include mothers, though fewer than fathers as courts largely award custody to the mothers) want access rights to be enforced and argue that there should be a permanent relationship between children and both parents.

Many of the Santas carried placards with the message “PUT THE FATHER BACK INTO XMAS” and some carried photographs of the children they were being prevented from seeing. There was also a picture of David Blunkett in a Santa Hat, as the protest came four days after the then Home Secretary was forced to resign following revelations over his affair with Kimberly Quinn, then the publisher of The Spectator. He was forced to resign after having speeded up the visa application by her nanny. Their affair had ended but Blunkett had gone to court to demand access to her two-year-old child, claiming he was the father. He also claimed to be the father of a second child she was then expecting, but later DNA tests showed this was not the case.

Fathers4 Justice met in Green Park close to the Underground station and I was able to talk with them and take photographs before the march set off along Piccadilly. Along with the Santas there were also some elves and a Spiderman. I took some more pictures and left them at Piccadilly Circus.

Scroll down the December 2004 page on My London Diary for pictures and text.

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Climate, Universal Credit and Boycott Israel

Thursday, December 1st, 2022

Three protests in London four years ago on Saturday 1st December 2018

Stop Universal Credit day of action – Camden Town, Saturday 1st December 2018

Climate, Universal Credit and Boycott Israel

Protests were taking place across the country called by Unite Community in a day of action against the continuing problems of Universal Credit, a reform and simplification of benefits. The main drive behind the move to this was to cut the amount that benefits cost the country and its implementation has been extremely badly thought out and managed, largely under the control of IDS, the widely detested Iain Duncan Smith, Secretary of State for Work and Pensions from 2010 to 2016.

I chose to photograph the protest at Camden largely because it was taking place next to an Underground station which I could conveniently travel to and then back to the main event I was covering. I could have taken similar pictures at other locations across London or elsewhere.

Climate, Universal Credit and Boycott Israel

The campaigners want an end to the long wait which leaves claimants penniless for six weeks or more before UC kicks in and for them to be able to make their applications in person at job centres as well as online, which causes difficulties for many, either because they lack the equipment and connection or particularly among older people competence on-line. They point to UC having created incredible hardship, pushing many into extreme poverty and destitution, making them reliant on food banks and street food distributions and greatly increasing the number of homeless and rough sleepers. Thanks to Tory policies, more than 120,000-plus homeless children in Britain will spend Christmas in hostels and B&Bs, many without the means or facilities to provide a Christmas meal.

Climate, Universal Credit and Boycott Israel

Academic studies suggest that UC is a part of a “state euthanasia” system for the poor, with academic estimates that it and other benefit cuts and sanctions since the 2010 elections having caused 110,000 early deaths, including many suicides. A cross party committee has called for its rollout to be halted until improvements are made, but the government has dismissed virtually all criticism of the system, making only insignificant changes.

Partly the problem obviously comes from the complete failure of IDS and others planning the system to understand what it is like to be poor. They have savings and resources – families with money and the ability to get loans and overdrafts, well-stocked cupboards, quarterly energy bills rather than having to pay in advance and so on. They are used to being paid their larger salaries on a monthly basis. Most of those claiming benefits have no savings and no one to help them tide over even a few days without money.

Stop Universal Credit day of action

Together for Climate Justice – Saturday 1st December 2018

The Campaign against Climate Change has organised marches, protests and rallies since its formation in 2001 when it protested against Bush’s rejection of the Kyoto treaty, including an annual event around the time of the UN Climate talks since 2005, and I’ve photographed most of these. Particularly in recent years they have been joined by many other groups as concern over the climate disaster has convinced a wider audience of the need for urgent action to save our life on Earth.

In 2018 they were extremely worried that the UN climate talks in Katowice, Poland, taking place the following week, were being sponsored by leading firms in Poland’s fossil fuel industry. Several thousand marchers gathered outside the Polish embassy for a rally before marching through central London to Downing St.

Outside the embassy we listened to a whole raft of speakers including ncluding Labour MP Clive Lewis, Green Party co-leader Sian Berry, Anna Gretton from Extinction Rebellion, UCU Vice President Nita Sanghera, Neil Keveren of the No 3rd Runway Coalition, Paul Allen from Zero Carbon Britain, Beatriz Ratton of Brazilian Women Against Fascism, Asad Rehman of War on Want who all expressed solidarity with protesters in Poland and stressed the urgent need to cut CO2 and methane emissions.


We then learnt and practised a few Polish slogans, some of which were on the placards for the protest including ‘Razem dla klimatu’ (Together for the Climate) which appeared on a number of placards, and the rather less pronounceable Polish for ‘Time to limit to 1.5’, as well as for ‘Climate, jobs, justice!’.

We got more speeches at a rally at the end of the march opposite Downing St, with Labour MP Barry Gardiner, Liz Hutchins of Friends of the Earth, a woman from Frack Free United, In the final speech Claire James of Campaign against Climate Change introduced a speaker on behalf of the Global South, where people are already dying because of climate change.

Together for Climate Justice

BBC Boycott Eurovision Israel 2019 – Broadcasting House, Sat 1 Dec 2018

Finally after the climate rally ended I rushed up to Broadcasting House where the Palestine Solidarity Campaign and others were calling on the BBC to withdraw from the 2019 Eurovision Song Contest hosted by Israel, to avoid being complicit in Israel’s ongoing violations of Palestinian human rights.

Campaigners said that the contest was being used to ‘artwash’ Israel’s human rights record as a state whose laws have created an apartheid system in Israel and Palestine, and whose forces in the last eight months since protests began in Gaza have killed over 200 Palestinians.

As well as the PSC, the protest and the #BoycottEurovision2019 was supported by the Stop The War Coalition, Palestinian Forum UK and Friends of Al-Aqsa (FOA). Also present in a pen a few yards away were around 15 Zionist counter-protesters who waved Israeli flags and shouted insults and lies, with one man loudly insistent that Palestine had never existed.

I’m happy to boycott Eurovision wherever it is taking place, and have been doing so ever since it began.

BBC Boycott Eurovision Israel 2019

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Focus E15 Mums at City Hall 2014

Monday, February 21st, 2022

Focus E15 Mums at City Hall 2014. Focus E15 mothers and children, threatened with eviction from the Mother and Baby Unit at the Focus E15 hostel in Stratford came on a decorated bus to City Hall, holding a party outside and trying to hand in a petition and card to then city Mayor Boris Johnson.

I’d met the Focus E15 Mums the previous month when they partied inside the Stratford offices of East Thames Housing Association who run the hostel, but the eviction notices had come in October 2013 because Newham Council had decided to cut the funding for the hostel.

Newham was then at the centre of a post-Olympic housing boom, with both private developers and East Thames building large blocks of flats around the area. But the great majority of these are for sale or rent at market prices, and many were being bought not to live in but by overseas investors keen to cash in on the steeply rising prices of housing in London. Even housing associations build mainly for those on good salaries who can afford shared ownership schemes, with minimal homes at council-level rents.

Newham Council Mayor Robin Wales told the mothers there were no properties available in the area at council rents. He made it clear than if you are poor, Newham doesn’t want you, and they were offered rented accommodation far outside of London, in Birmingham, Manchester, Hastings and even Wales – “expensive, sometimes poor quality, insecure one year private rents” – with the threat that anyone who turned down the offers would be regarded as having made themselves intentionally homeless and get no help from the council.

The mothers in the hostel decided to stand together and fight the council, demanding they be placed within suitable socially rented accommodation in Newham. Among other areas they point out that there is good quality council-owned housing on the Carpenters Estate, a short walk from their hostel, which Newham council have left empty, in some cases for ten years, as they try to sell off the area for development – despite having the highest waiting list for social housing in London.

As I wrote in 2014, London Mayor Boris Johnson Boris Johnson “has made it clear that he is opposed to the gentrification of London, stating: ‘The last thing we want to have in our city is a situation such as Paris where the less well-off are pushed out to the suburbs’ and promising ‘I’ll emphatically resist any attempt to recreate a London where the rich and poor cannot live together…’ But these turned out to be typically Johnsonian empty words and during his time as London Mayor he did nothing to help those in housing need and stop those cleared from council estates having to move miles further out.

The card Boris Johnson wouldn’t accept

On the day of the protest the mothers tried to deliver a card to him, but his office simply refused to take it. The assistant director of the affordable homes programme in London, Jamie Ratcliff did come down to meet them and took their petition, but had little to say to them, giving them his card and telling them to email him.

Mothers go in to deliver the card but no-one would accept it

More on the event on My London Diary at Focus E15 Mums at City Hall.

The Focus E15 Campaign eventually got all or most of the mothers and children rehoused locally, and they continue to compaign in Newham for Fair Housing For All, holding a street stall despite harassment from council and police every Saturday on Stratford Broadway, helping homeless families get proper treatment from the council, protesting for those in terrible conditions in temporary accomodation and stopping evictions, and taking part in protests and campaigns for social housing in London and elsewhere.

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Hunger, Housing and Injustice

Monday, March 29th, 2021

My work on Saturday 29th March 2019 began in north London at Bruce Castle Park in Tottenham, where the indefatigable Rev Paul Nicolson of Taxpayers Against Poverty had organised a march demanding living incomes and decent truly affordable homes, calling for an end to the bedroom tax, the housing benefit cap, unfair taxes, hunger and cold homes.

The Reverend Paul Nicolson who died peacefully on Thursday 5th March 2020 aged 87 had long campaigned on these issues, and had commissioned the work on poverty that helped groups such as London Citizens and Unison to persuade the Mayor of London Ken Livingstone to introduce the London Living Wage.

His Christian principles led Nicolson to found the Zacchaeus Trust, an anti-poverty charity providing frontline services on Social Security benefits, housing and homelessness as well as the campaigning organisation TAP, and he supported and spoke at many protests calling for justice for disabled and others on low wages and often inadequate benefits.

I left the march as it passed Tottenham Police Station on its way to a rally at Tottenham Green to make my way to Kilburn, where the Counihan Battlebus Housing For All campaign, along with the TUSC Against Cuts and Unite Community were holding a protest in Kilburn Square over child hunger and housing problems, calling for rents to be capped and for everyone to have a home.

Children played a large part in the protest and were having fun, but also making a serious point, with placards “Going to school hungry is not fair!” As I pointed out in my rather long article on the protest:

Children going to school hungry is a direct result of government policy and its inhumane (they call it ‘tough’ to make it sound positive) sanctions policy. What we need is not this kind of vindictive approach but more jobs and an end to poverty wages. And it would be far more productive to attack the huge sums involved in tax evasion and tightening up the rules on tax avoidance than the relatively small amounts of benefit fraud or the largely mythical workshy.

The journey from Kilburn to Parliament Square was fortunately a simple one on the tube and I arrived as students and staff from Oasis Academy Hadley came from Enfield to protest against the planned deportation of one of their students, 19-year-old Yashika Bageerathi. She had come to the UK with her family in 2011 to escape a dangerous situation in Mauritius and was in the final year of her A level course, in which she was expected to get high grades.

The Home Office decided that since she was 19 she could be deported without her family, and had already detained her in Yarl’s Wood ten days earlier. Two deportation attempts failed when both British Airways and Air Mauritius refused to fly her to Mauritius, possibly because of the huge public campaign to allow her to stay and complete her exams.

It was impossible to see why Home Office minister Theresa May was so keen on this deportation – other than wanting to seem to have a tough policy on immigration, and as I wrote, morally their position seemed indefensible. But deport her they finally did.

Despite spells in Yarl’s Wood which disrupted here education and the deportation which took place six weeks before her A Level exams, she was able to take the exams and passed with straight A grades. She then issued a statement thanking everyone – both in the UK and on her return in Mauritius for their support, and clearly stating “I have no desire for a life in the public eye any longer” and that she wished to begin a new chapter in her life.

More at:
Fellow Students Fight for Yashika
Kilburn Uniform Day
Mothers march for justice

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Mothers’ Day March

Monday, September 23rd, 2019

Apparently according to Mothers Rise Up, 95 countries celebrate Mothers’ Day on 12 May, (although in the UK we traditionally celebrate our mothers on Mothering Sunday in March, on the 4th Sunday in Lent, a rather more low key event.)

Or rather people celebrate Mother’s Day, as Anna Jarvis trademarked the event in 1912 saying it should “be a singular possessive, for each family to honor its own mother, not a plural possessive commemorating all mothers in the world.”

Jarvis had begun campaigning for a day to honour mothers after the death of her own mother in 1905. Ann Maria Reeves Jarvis (1832 1905) had been a community activist and had established Mother’s Day Work Clubs in several West Virginia towns to assist and educate people to improve sanitation and reduce infant mortality and disease. During the US Civil War she had controversially insisted these clubs provide food, clothing and nursing to soldiers in need on both sides.

Mother’s Day in the USA rapidly developed, much against Anna Jarvis’s wishes into a commercial jamboree; she organised boycotts against sending mass-produced cards and gifts, urging people instead to mark the day and honour their mothers by writing them letters expressing their love and gratitude.

According to Wikipedia, Jarvis protested against the commercialisation of the event at a “candy makers’ convention” in Philadelphia in 1923, and at a meeting of the American War Mothers in 1925. The War Mothers were selling white carnations for Mother’s Day to raise funds, and this so enraged Jarvis that she protested and “was pulled away screaming and arrested for disturbing the peace.”

So it was very appropriate that Mothers Rise Up had chosen Mother’s Day to protest and “stand in solidarity with the #youthclimatestrikes” emphasising the urgent action needed to avoid disastrous climate breakdown, with scientists telling us we have only a few years to act. Perhaps as long as 11 years to take really decisive measures, although it may already be to late to prevent global human extinction. Already as they pointed out, people in parts of the Global South “are already suffering and dying as a result of climate chaos.”

Their call out for the protest began:

We will come together and rise as a maternal force to be reckoned with. With pushchairs and song, we will march from Hyde Park Corner to Parliament Square and demand that our government take immediate, drastic action for a just transition to a sustainable way of life.

I hope my pictures capture something of this “maternal force”, though the giant pushchairs did present something of a problem photographically. For once I walked with the protest the whole distance to Parliament Square (stopping off briefly to photograph another protest at Downing St) and stayed for a part of the rally.

One of the speakers there was the leading international climate lawyer and diplomat Farhana Yamin; I had arrived too late a few weeks earlier to photograph her arrest when protesting with Extinction Rebellion at Shell’s London HQ in April.

More pictures from the march: XR International Mothers’ Day March

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