Tag: peace camp

Bonkersfest, Trade Justice & Brian Haw – 2007

Bonkersfest, Trade Justice & Brian Haw: On Saturday 2nd June 2007 I photographed three very different events, a festival to publicise mental health issues, a protest calling on G8 world leaders about to meet in Germany to get on with eliminating poverty and finally a visit to Brian Haw who was celebrating six years of his peace protest in Parliament Square.

Here I’ll copy – with a few corrections and clarifications – what I wrote back in 2007 about these events, along with a few of the pictures and links to the others which I posted then on My London Diary.

Bonkersfest – Camberwell Green

I felt rather sorry for the poor guy who got shut into the bottom of the cannon at Bonkersfest on Camberwell Green for the duration of Joe Brand’s opening speech, then deafened by the cannon going off. All to throw bananas out through the mouth of the giant gun, the first of which came as rather a surprise when it hit me on the head. I ate it later.

Bonkersfest has a more serious purpose, to make problems of mental health more visible and to rehabilitate offensive terms used about those with problems.

Jo Brand was once a psychiatric nurse

more pictures on My London Diary

The World Can’t Wait: Anti-Poverty Protest – Lambeth & Westminster

From Camberwell I caught a couple of buses to take me to Archbishop’s Park in Lambeth, where supporters of the many organisations united in the anti-poverty campaign were meeting to send the message ‘the world can’t wait’ to government leaders about to meet for the G8 talks in Germany.

From the park, supporters made their way down to the banks of the River Thames, stretching along both sides of the river (and in front of the Houses of Parliament themselves) between Westminster and Lambeth bridges, as well as on the bridges. It took rather a long time to assemble everyone for the several minutes of silence, after which there was much blowing of whistles, shouting and honking of horns.

more pictures on My London Diary

Brian Haw: 6 Years in Parliament Square

I strolled down to Parliament Square where a rather longer demonstration was still in progress. Today marked exactly 6 years since Brian Haw began his protest against the killing of children in Iraq (and later about the war more generally.)

Video and photography have been powerful in Brian’s stay in the square, with Rikki filming many of the clashes with police

That’s Six years of shame for Britain for supporting (and taking part in) the killing.
Six years of police harassment.
Six years of pressure by the government, including a whole section of an Act of Parliament designed to stop his and other protests.
Six years of shame for the New Labour government.

Although there were no police around at all during the couple of hours I was in the square, Brian told me that had been there this morning at 4 am, watching and taking no action as a group of hooligans attempted to provoke the Peace Camp protesters into retaliation. Waiting for it, to arrest not the hooligans but the peaceful protesters should they rise to the bait.

more pictures on My London Diary

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Election Day 2010

Thursday 6th May was also an election day in 2010 with a UK general election that saw Labour losing over 90 seats to end with 48 fewer MPs than the Conservatives. But back then we still had a Lib-Dem party with 57 MPs who, after five days of horse-trading agreed to form a coalition government with the Tories – a decision that condemned them to oblivion, losing all but 8 seats in the 2015 election.

I spent most of election day – after voting in the early morning – in and around Parliament Square, where there was also considerably politics taking place. Three distinct group were camping in the square.

Brian Haw

Brian Haw and the Parliament Square peace campaign had been there for 3260 days since 2nd June 2001 and was still there despite an Act of Parliament designed to remove him, attacks by individuals with connections to the police and security services, illegal police raids, provocations, assaults and arrests by police officers and more.

Barbara Tucker

A year earlier Haw had dissociated his Parliament Square Peace Campaign (PSPC) from the ‘Peace Strike’ protest in the adjoining area of the square led by Maria Gallestegui “by mutual consent”, wanting to end any confusion between the two campaigns. The Peace Strike had not been harassed by police to the same extent and was allowed a greater physical presence in the square, and were regarded by some, probably incorrectly, as being partners with the establishment to discredit the PSPC.

Since May Day the square had also been home to ‘Occupy Democracy’ who saw themselves as supporting the PSPC by their presence. But the PSPC suspected some of them too of being agent provocateurs in police pay to provide a pretext for more draconian police action against them. Certainly some of these more temporary occupiers were breaking the rules against drinking alcohol in Parliament Square, despite the Democracy Camp notices banning this.

In my account I wrote:

“At one point the dispute between the camp and the PSPC deteriorated with a man on the camp’s sound system making what were possibly intended as humorous put-downs of Barbara Tucker who was then attacking the Tory Party for the backing it receives from the oil giants. Clearly some of the campers were distressed by this and he was asked to desist, and some of those present tried to calm the situation.
But generally the camp’s activities were more positive, and while I was there considerable work was taking place making banners and placards, as well as people discussing and dancing.”

Election Day in Parliament Square

Shortly before I left around 6pm, people from Democracy Village walked with placards to College Green where the TV media have their tents and cameras to cover political events and had been conducting interviews about the election. There had been little if any media coverage of Democracy Village or the peace campaigns and they wanted to make a point of this. But most of the media simply ignored the protesters, and eventually police came to talk with them and they returned to Parliament Square.

Protests in the UK are almost never seen by the mass media as news – unless police are injured or property destroyed and they can run negative stories. Occasionally if a celebrity takes part they may get a mention, or some particularly quirky and preferably non-political event captures their whimsy. But political protests are largely only news if they take place overseas against regimes which our government disapproves of.

The government that resulted from the election was led by a party that got just under a third of the votes and once again demonstrated the iniquities of our first past the post electoral system. A year later we had a referendum on an alternative voting system, but this was largely scuppered by Conservative opposition and a lack of real support from Labour.

The 2010 election had left the Tories holding the whip hand in the coalition, and they certainly made use of it, both through imposing drastic and ill-considered cuts on public and in particular local authority expenditure and in attacks on protests such as those in Parliament Square. The current Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill takes these attacks on human and civil rights, the right to protest, migrants and Gypsy, Roma and Traveller people to new levels, incompatible with any free society.

Election Day in Parliament Square

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