Save Hospitals & Secular Europe: On Saturday 15th September 2012 almost two thousand people marched from Southall to meet others at a rally in Ealing to save Accident & Emergency Services at their local hospitals. Later I photographed humanists, atheists and others marching in Westminster.
Thousands March to Save Hospitals – Southall
A large crowd had come to Southall Park for the start of a march against the the closure of A&E and other departments at Ealing, Central Middlesex, Charing Cross and Hammersmith hospitals. Another march was going from Acton to the rally in Ealing.
A few days ago Keir Starmer talked about the crisis facing the NHS, and how it will take perhaps eight years to put it on a firmer footing for the future. He and Health Secretary Wes Streeting blamed its current parlous position on the reforms criticised by Lord Darzi as “disastrous” introduced by the coalition government in 2012 and the lack of investment in infrastructure under the Tory-led years of cuts since 2010.
Of course both these things are true, but not the whole picture and they say little that was not said by those working in the NHS and almost every commentator at the time about Andrew Lansley’s controversial Health and Social Care Act which came into force under his successor Jeremy Hunt, as well as lack of proper funding.
But they also leave out the disastrous effects of the many PFI schemes introduced under New Labour which landed the NHS with huge debts and continue to impose severe costs on many hospitals with excessive maintenance and other charges. PFI did provide much needed new hospitals, but did so at the expense of the NHS, transferring the costs away to make government finance look better; avoiding short-term public financing but creating much higher long-term costs.
New Labour also accelerated the privatisation of NHS services, which has of course increased greatly since the Tories came to power. Both parties became enamoured of a move away from the original NHS model to an insurance based system modelled on US Healthcare, a system that leaves many poorer US citizens with inadequate access to healthcare and is responsible for around 62% of the two million annual bankruptcies in the USA when for various reasons people’s insurance does not cover their treatment costs.
We in the UK spend almost a fifth less on health than the EU average, and only around a third of the per person spending in the USA – according to a 2010 article in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine comparing the two systems.
We all now have complaints about the level of service provided currently by our overloaded and cash-strapped NHS. Waiting times are sometimes ridiculously long and appointments hard to get. We need a better NHS, and to pay more for a better NHS, one that is better integrated rather than divided by Lansley’s competitive marketing-based model. But I have little confidence that our current government will make the right changes for either the NHS staff or the people.
We also need much better industrial relations, and the efforts by the new Labour government to sort out the disputes with healthcare workers deliberately engineered by the Tories which led to the strikes are encouraging. But many more changes to improve staff morale and retention are necessary. To remove the reliance on agency staff there needs to be an improvement in the treatment of NHS employed staff – and a number of simple measures including the removal of staff parking charges would help. And of course we also need to train more healthcare staff at all levels and in all specialities.
The rally on 15th September 2012 was supported by local councils and local MPs and there were many speakers with years of experience in the NHS who gave short speeches about the effects the closures would have – and the inevitable deaths that would result, particularly from the longer journey times through often highly congested streets to the remaining A&E services. Fortunately most of the politicians were told they would have to wait for the rally at the end of the march to speak. So I missed them as I walked a few hundred yards with the marchers along the main road towards Ealing and the rally, but then left them and walked to the station to take a train into central London.
Around 250 humanists, atheists and others marched from Storey’s Gate, next to Methodist Central Hall and across the road from Westminster Abbey, both in their different ways reminders of the links between the state and states and religion. And I presume the rally venue in Temple Place was chosen for the same reason.
They had come protest against the privileged status of religion and call for a truly secular society with freedom of religion, conscience and speech with equal rights for all in countries across the world, but particularly in Europe.
They demanded a secular Europe with complete separation between church and state and with no special status on grounds of religion, one law for all without execeptions.
The main banner read ‘For Universal Human Rights‘ and marchers chanted slogans including ‘2,4,6,8, Separate church and state‘ and of course ‘What do we want? A Secular Europe. When do we want it? Now‘, as well as stating that Women’s rights (and Gay Rights, Children’s Rights etc) are Human Rights.
But perhaps the most popular chant was one directed in particular against the Catholic Church, ‘Keep your rosaries Off my ovaries.” And at the rally in Temple Place Sue Cox of Survivors Voice, reminded us not just of sexual abuse of children by priests, but also of the continuing failure of the Catholic Church to deal with this, as well as the sinister power that that church still wields in countries including Italy.
As the march arrived at the rally there the London Humanist Choir performed some Monty Python songs before a number of speeches from Peter Tatchell and others. As he said, many people of faith also support both equality and the separation of religion and state, and that “for every bigot there are also people of faith who are with us.”
Decent Housing & Saving the NHS: Ten years ago today there were protests over two of the major issues which still face our incoming government today, but which I have no faith in them facing or improving.
Focus E15 March for Decent Housing – East Ham
The housing crisis largely stems from successive governments, largely starting with Thatcher prioritising private ownership above all other ways of providing homes for people. Thatcher gave away publicly owned social housing to tenants at knock-down prices and refused to allow councils to try to replace what had been lost.
Government housing policy since have been obsessed with the idea of the “housing ladder“; housing isn’t – or shouldn’t be – about ladders to increase personal wealth but about homes, and the ladder is very definitely that in “Pull up the ladder, Jack! We’re all right” and sod those left at the bottom below.
Private renting has also moved from being a way in which owners of properties derived and income from properties they owned, to a scheme where more and more tenants are paying high rents to buy properties for their landlords. It’s a crazy system and one which should be stopped.
We have also seen a huge growth in properties which are largely built to be bought as investments, particularly by overseas investors, often being left unoccupied for all or most of the time. Clearly this needs to be made economically nonviable, not only because of the effects it has on the shortage of homes, but also because of the way it is seriously distorting the development of our cities.
Second (and multiple) home ownership is also an increasing problem, particularly in the more desirable rural areas of the country and we need to find ways to reduce the impact of this, perhaps through taxation to provide a fund to build social housing in these areas.
But the basic solution to the country’s housing problems is simple. Build more social housing. Any government which comes in without this as the main thurst of their housing policy will fail to improve the housing crisis.
As I wrote ten years ago “We need a government – national and local – determined to act for the benefit of ordinary people, making a real attempt to build much more social housing, removing the huge subsidies currently given to private landlords through housing benefit, legislating to provide fair contracts for private tenants and give them decent security – and criminalising unfair evictions.” We haven’t got one.
You can read more about the march in East Ham organised by Focus E15 Mums to demand secure housing, free from the threats of eviction, soaring private rents, rogue landlords, letting agents illegally discriminating, insecure tenancies and unfair bedroom tax and benefit cap on My London Diary.
The march was supported by housing protest groups from Hackney, Brent and from South London and organisations including BARAC and TUSC. I was surprised to see the popular support it received on the streets with even some motorists stopping their cars to put money in the collection buckets.
Save our Surgeries on NHS 66th Birthday – Whitechapel
The National Health Service began on 5th July 1948 and on its 66th anniversary the Save our Surgeries campaign against health cuts in Tower Hamlets marched to Hackney in a show of opposition to health cuts, surgery closures and NHS privatisation.
The setting up of the NHS was opposed by the Conservatives and they and the doctors and dentists associations forced many compromises which led to it being a less than comprehensive health service, though still a great national achievement and one which for we are justly proud of.
Many doctors made – and some still make – large incomes from private practice and fought to keep these rather than back a universal system wholeheartedly. But in more recent years a huge private medical system has grown up alongside the NHS and more and more people are covered through work schemes providing private medical cover.
This private system has grown parasitically on the state medical system and all governments over the past thirty or more years have found ways to syphon off money to it, by allowing it to tender for various more straightforward aspects of NHS services.
Successive governments have also created huge administrative burdens on the NHS, setting up new levels of administrators which oversee and to some extent override clinical decisions. But financially the most disastrous impact on the NHS comes from the various PFI agreements, largely made under New Labour, which enabled the building of new hospitals without the costs appearing in the government’s debts, but tied the trusts running the hospitals into huge debt repayments and the kind of service contracts that make replacing a light bulb cost £1200.
General practice was set up in 1948 under doctor-owned surgeries but increasingly these are now owned by healthcare companies after New Labour in 2007 allowed larger companies to buy them up. Operose Health, part of US healthcare giant Centene Corporation in 2022 was running 70 practices and a BBC Panorama report showed they were only employing half as many doctors as average practices, while employing six times as many physician associates (who have only 2 years of medical training rather than the 10 for GPs) who were being inadequately supervised.
Unfortunately Labour policy appears to be to increase the reliance – and transfer of funds to the private sector rather than reduce it. You can read more about their position in the 2023 Tribune article Labour’s Love Affair with Private Healthcare by Tom Blackburn, which aslo sets out clearly the financial links of Wes Streeting to private healthcare. And of course he is not the only Labour MP with a financial interest. Labour might sort out a few of the problems but the creeping privatisation seems sure to accelerate.
The protest in East London was over changes in the funding of NHS surgeries which have failed to take into account the extra needs of deprived innner-city areas and were expected to lead the closure of some surgeries as well as other NHS cuts, particularly those happening because of the huge PFI debt from the new Royal London Hospital.
There was a brief rally in Altab Ali Park before the march with speeches by local politicians and health campaigners before the crowd of several hundreds set off down the Whitechapel Road on its way to London Fields in Hackney where it was to meet up with other protesters for a larger rally. But I left the march at Whitechapel Station.
Solidarity With Gaza, Save Lewisham Hospital – On Saturday morning, 24th November 2012 I joined marchers against the then recent Israeli attacks on Gaza and the continuing blockade which makes normal life there impossible. Although still a clearly disproportionate response, the death toll in 2012 was minuscule compared to the current ongoing destruction. In the afternoon I went to Lewisham for a march against proposals to close A&E and maternity services, and possibly also the the children’s wards, critical care unit and emergency surgery by the Trust Special Administrator Matthew Kershaw.
Solidarity With Gaza, End the Seige Now – Downing St
Despite persistent rain, several thousands turned up to protest at Downing Street before marching towards the Israeli Embassy following the start ten days earlier of ‘Operation Pillar of Defense‘ by the the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).
In the eight days before a ceasefire, Wikipedia states “the IDF claimed to have struck more than 1,500 sites in the Gaza Strip, including rocket launchpads, weapon depots, government facilities, and apartment blocks” with the UNHCR reporting “174 were killed and hundreds were wounded. Many families were displaced.”
There were also deaths and casualties among Israelis, but on a much smaller scale, with 6 Israelis being killed and 240 injured by rockets fired from Gaza.
As in this year, “Canada, Germany, the United Kingdom, the United States, and other Western countries expressed support for what they considered Israel’s right to defend itself” , or condemned the Hamas attacks, while some other countries condemned the Israel attacks. Human Rights Watch said both sites committed war crimes.
As in 2023, many of hose killed in Gaza in 2012 where children, and at the front of the march, ahead of the main banner were a group of children, each carrying a placard hanging around their neck with the names and ages of some of the dead children.
And as in the recent marches I’ve photographed, both the National Marches calling for a ceasefire in Gaza and those in Camden and Lewisham, among those taking part there were many individual Jews and Jewish groups including Jews Against the Siege of Gaza, Jews for Justice for Palestinians and a group of Jewish Socialists.
Before the march began 163 while balloons printed with the Palestinian flag – one for each of the Palestinians then known to have been killed – were released. The march then moved up Whitehall and I went with it as far as Trafalgar Square where I took pictures for the next 15 minutes or so as the crowd moved past before catching a train from Charing Cross to Lewisham.
Thousands of protesters – perhaps as many as 15,000 – formed a human chain to hold hands around Lewisham hospital after a march from the centre of Lewisham to oppose plans to close its A&E department to pay debts from mismanagement at other hospitals in south London, which have huge PFI debts.
The march had seemed rather smaller than expected when I arrived at the start close to Lewisham station, but the numbers grew greatly as we got closer to the hospital and Ladywell Fields, with the road still packed with people coming to join this as the human chain began to form.
At Ladywell Fields the march divided into two, with hospital workers making their way to the front of the hospital in an anti-clockwise direction and the others going clockwise to meet them. Soon people were filling the whole thre-quarters of a mile ring around the hospital and holding hands in a human chain. The organisers had asked people to go in single file, but there were far too many in most places for this and in some areas the pavements were filled ten deep.
Traffic around the hospital was brought to a stop with people still flooding in on the High Street and Ladywell Road and nothing was moving on the roads by the time I left and caught a train home, except for ambulances which police and stewards were ensuring could still reach the hospital, clearing a route through the crowds.
Lewisham Hospital is well run and well used by people in the area around, and has played no part in the financial problems faced by the South London Hospitals Trust, which were largely caused by disastrous private finance schemes entered into to build the trust’s hospitals in Orpington and Woolwich. The planned closures would drastically cut health services in the area and almost certainly lead to many deaths as well as huge inconvenience for millions and are driven entirely by the financial gain in selling off 60% of the site.
But even this makes little sense as the expected £17 million this would raise would be only a minor one-off contribution towards the over £60 million the Trust has to find each year for its PFI debts which were then expected to total around £1,200 million before they were paid off.
The problem of PFI debt is not of course limited to this trust. Government figures in 2018 were that the total value of PFI investments in the NHS was then £12.8 billion – and that by the time these were paid off the NHS will have paid over £80 billion for them – more than six times as much. The figures have worsened since then as many contracts include inflation-based cost increases – leading to an extra £264 million in payments in the past 2 years. Some trusts now have to spend 10-13% of their total income on their PFI debts, and these payments cannot be cut and are prioritised. over other expenditure such as than on staff costs and drugs.
Lewisham Hospital’s campaign against the cuts was successful. They were ruled unlawful by the High Court and eventually dropped by Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt after he lost an appeal.
Whitechapel & Illegal Dates; On Saturday 27th September 2014 I went to Whitechapel early to photograph campaigners who were to protest against Sainsbury’s who were selling dates and other goods from illegal Israeli settlements, in defiance of international law. Around two years earlier I had made a panoramic image of part of the new Royal London Hospital which interested me but I felt was not quite what I wanted.
Going back to re-take photographs is often disappointing, with key features having changed, but I think this time I did at least come up with an improvement. This was a more complex panorama than most of those I now make, and needed me to stitch together three separate exposures. It would perhaps be a little better with some slight cropping on the botton edge.
The Royal London Hospital has much great problems, all arising from the poor PFI deal that was used to finance its construction. All PFI schemes have turned out to be a mistake, but this was worse than most and I think has left the hospital group in financial trouble while providing excessive profits to the investors, with payments continuing for many, many years. The contract means they can charge silly prices for necessary services,
After several attempts at producing the picture I wanted I went for a short stroll around the area making a few more panoramic images before it was time to join th protest.
Sainsbury’s told Stop Selling Illegal Goods – Whitechapel High St
Campaigners from the Tower Hamlets & Jenin Friendship Association held a protest on the high Street close to Sainsbury’s, calling on the store to end selling dates and other goods from illegal Israeli settlements, in defiance of international law.
The protes was part of the international BDS campaign calling for a Boycott of Israeli goods, divestment from Israeli firms and sanctions against Israel until it ends the persecution of Palestinians and comes into line with international law and UN resolutions.
Similar protests earlier outside Co-op stores had led to the company in 2013 stating they would ‘no longer engage with any supplier of produce known to be sourcing from the Israeli settlements’.
The BDS campaign was given added impetus early in 2014 by the disproportionate use of force against the people of Gaza. During the recent Israeli attacks on Gaza over 2,100 Palestinians were killed, roughly 1500 of them civilians, among them over 500 children. 66 Israeli soldiers died, along with 5 Israeli civilians (including one child.) Over 500,000 people – roughly 30% of the population of the Gaza strip were displaced from their homes, and over 17,000 homes made uninhabitable, with over twice that number suffering less severe damage.
The raids also destoryed much of Gaza’s industry, including factories making biscuits, ice cream factory, plastics, sponges, cardboard boxes and plastic bags as well as the main electricity plant. Two sewage pumping stations were damaged, as were the main offices of the largest diary product importer and distributor.
The protesters had several tables on the pavement outside the library on Whitechapel High St ,one selling Palestinian olive oil, almonds and a range of decorated purses etc. Some handed out leaflets and a postcard ‘Sainsbury’s: Taste the Indifference’, while others held banners or collecting signatures for petitions. At intervals people made short speeches about the Palestinian situation and the campaign to get Sainsbury’s to stop selling illegal Israeli goods.
After an hour or so on the busy street, some of the protesters decided it was time to visit Sainsbury’s, just a couple of hundred yards away down a side-street. They folded up their banners and walked down to the store, where Sainsbury’s were ready and waiting for them with extra security on duty, and they were stopped in the very spacious lobby area in front to the store.
Here they opened up their banners and protested for a little over 10 minutes. There were a few moments of some tension, when store employees or security tried to grab one of the banners, but the whole protest and Sainsbury’s response was pretty civilised.
After 12 minutes, a man in casual dress arrived, and after asking the store manager to request the protesters to leave came across and talked with the the protesters, showing them his poolice warrant card and apologising that the police station didn’t have anyone in uniform available to send at the moment.
Having made their point by their protest, they decided to go quietly and a little exultantly back to the High Street, where others had been continuing the protest. Shortly after I decided it was time for me to leave.
Sainsbury’s appears still to refuse to follow its own ethical guidelines and still apparently sells some products from the occupied West Bank and to deal with suppliers who source goods from there, although probably rather less than in 2014. They have claimed not to source goods from the occupied territories but do still deal with wholesalers who deliberately mislable such produce.
NHS – Free, For All, Forever?. Five years ago on Saturday 30th June thousands marched through London to celebrate 70 years of the National Health Service, which began on 5th July 1948. In a few days we will celebrate the 75 anniversary. The pictures here are from that march.
A few days ago the Kings Fund published their report comparing the NHS to health care systems of other countries. It made depressing reading, but its findings were already well-known – and the result of government policies over the years.
Conservatives were opposed to the setting up of the NHS and voted against it on numerous occasions when Aneurin Bevan was campaigning for its setting up and taking the bill through parliament. Bevan established the three basic ideas, that it should benefit everyone, that healthcare would be free and that care would be provided on the basis of need rather than ability to pay.
Many doctors and dentists were opposed to the new system, which they saw as a threat to their lucrative private practices and this led to a number of compromises which have had serious consequences over the years.
Dentistry has never really been made properly a part of our health care system and now large areas of the country have few if any dentists who will take on NHS patients. Private medicine has continued and grown parasitically on the NHS – who train those working in it, while it now gets paid by the NHS to provide many of the simpler aspects of treatment while leaving the heavy lifting to our public service.
Both Conservative and Labour governments since its formation have made changes which have diluted Bevan’s principles. Contracting out of various services began under the Tories, sometimes resulting in disastrous lowering of standards. Proper cleaning services etc are essential in hospitals.
New Labour brought in Private Finance Initiative projects (they borrowed the idea from the Tories) which have led to huge ongoing debts for some NHS trusts – and closures of some vitally needed hospital departments to meet these.
Since the Coalition and then the Tories came back into power there has been a huge increase in the creeping privatisation of the NHS, with Andrew Lansley’s 2012 Health and Social Care Act forcing the NHS into a market-based model based on competitive tendering, which even his successor as Health Minister, Jeremy Hunt has described parts of as ‘frankly, completely ridiculous’. So much so that even the Tories have no had to row back a little.
The King’s Fund report makes clear that “The UK has below-average health spending per person compared to peer countries” and it “lags behind other countries in its capital investment, and has substantially fewer key physical resources than many of its peers, including CT and MRI scanners and hospital beds.”
Successive governments have prevented the training in the UK from expanding the numbers of university places for medical training, and a few years ago the Tories removed the bursaries available for nurses. Since the start of the NHS this had been a failure, and as the report states there are now “strikingly low levels of key clinical staff, including doctors and nurses” and the NHS is “heavily reliant on foreign-trained staff.” Only in recent days have we seen an effort by government to put forward plans to address the issue – and almost certainly one that is inadequate.
There is also the question of pay, brought to the fore in recent months by strikes by nurses and doctors. The government’s response has mainly been to refuse to enter into meaningful talks and mutter about the impossible demands being made.
Of course nobody expects junior doctors to get a 35% rise, but all that it would take to resolve the dispute is a much lower figure, combined with a commitment to make a small above inflation increase in a number of following years to reduce the gap that has opened up.
You can read more about the march and rally and some of the issues in my post on My London Diary from June 2018, which also includes some information about the interests or many MPs and peers in private healthcare and connections to those wanting to see the NHS abolished. It may be ‘OUR NHS’ but many of those who have power to determine its future want it to belong to them.
I took few pictures in the rest of the month after my walk on Sunday 9th April 1989, my time being taken up with other things. I did make a few pictures on a CND demonstration in Lambeth with family and friends which I’ve yet to digitise, and some when the photography adult class on which I was assisting went to photograph Twickenham’s famous ‘Naked Ladies’, who now have a beer named for them. Some of my pictures of this were made on large format 4×5″ film so I could contact print them using historic processes such as platinum and kallitype, and I helped make at least one on 8×10″ for the tutor.
And there were a few other pictures such as this, made on my way to the Photographers’ Gallery, then in Great Newport St, a short walk around the corner, or on my way to meetings in other parts of London, and a few closer to home.
But my next walk to take pictures came on Friday 5th May when I rushed out of college after around four hours of teaching and jumped on a train to Vauxhall and a bus to the Oval, walking down Foxley Road, then Vassal Rd to Cowley Rd, eager to continue to photograph in the area around Myatt’s Fields. I paused to take half a dozen pictures on the way, but have yet to digitise any of these.
The top end of Cowley Road is in the Vassall Rd conservation area and this terrace is a remnant of the Holland Town Estate development begun by Henry Richard Vassall, Third Baron Holland in 1818 when Camberwell New Road was laid out. This terrace is possibly from around 1830 and its Grade II listing describes it as Early-mid C19.
No 25 at the right of the previous picture is the last house in this section of the street. On the west side of the road, behind me as I took the picture is a large block of redbrick five-storey council housing, Knowlton House, built by the LCC as part of the Cowley estate in 1934-6. There is another similar block, Stodmarsh House further south on the street.
The park here appears to have had a number of names and is now Eythorne Park, though Google Maps hedges its bets by also calling it Myatt’s Field Common Park and on the old A-Z I used on my walks it was Mostyn Gardens, given to Lambeth Borough Council in 1925 who passed on the the LCC in 1958. They extended and renamed it Melbourne Fields. Parts of it were built on in the 1970s the low-rise Myatts Field North council estate in the 1970s and disastrously redeveloped under a Private Finance Initiative programme hit by various cost-cutting directives and carried out with little or no regard for the residents.
You can see these roofs over the mound in the park in the previous picture, though the park is now flat and surrounded by the redeveloped buildings. These buildings looked in good condition in 1989 and the estate looked well designed and a pleasant place to live. But years of neglect by the council meant that in 2004, as Zoe Williams wrote in The Guardian “Myatts Field North in Lambeth, south London, was a byword for what goes wrong on a housing estate. It had been poorly maintained; the interiors were shabby. Garages had become hazardous and were out of bounds; shared spaces were desolate and only teenagers and children used them, “engaged in nothing very positive”, according to a council report at the time.”
The state of the estate in 2004 led residents to vote by a fairly small majority for the council’s plans for regeneration, “demolishing and rebuilding 305 homes, refurbishing 172“, but work only began in 2012, by which time the plans had been considerably altered with cuts to the budget. Five years later when Williams wrote her article the problems with the regeneration were clear, with the refurbished homes poorly plannede and shoddily implemented and the residents many complaints largely simply ignored.
St John The Divine Junior Mixed and Infants School is still there on Camberwell New Road, though ILEA has long gone and the entrance to the school is now on Warham St, as it probably was when I took this picture. The church itself is a short distance away in Vassall St and is a good example of Victorian gothic by George Edmund Street. The parish was created in 1871.
The school, with buildings in Warham St (then James St) opened in 1872 for 400 children but this building on Camberwell New Road came some years later.
The school building in flanked on both sides by shops and is in the centre of a terrace. Edward Wells & Sons Ltd at 143-145 offered a wide range of printing services. I think the businesses closed soon after I made this and other pictures.
Olympic Park, Barts and Food Poverty. On Wednesday 16 April 2014 there were two events in the evening I wanted to photograph, the first in Whitechapel and another in Westminster. It was a fine Spring day and I decided to go out much earlier and take a long walk around the former Olympic site, much of which had just been opened to the public ten days earlier.
Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park Panoramics – Stratford
My walk got of to a poor start, as I followed the large signs in Stratford Station to the park and found myself hopelessly lost.
I retraced my steps and went through where I thought I had probably missed a turning and walked though Stratford Westfield past many shops I would never feel any desire to enter.
Emerging on the other side I could still find no way into the Park, keeping coming up to areas still blocked by fencing.
Google Maps wasn’t much help. Streetview, claimed to work on some streets in the area, “but actually carries out what seems a fairly random translocation to some varied London locations. All of them seemed more interesting than the actual topography I had found myself facing on the ground.”
Eventually I managed to access the park, though it didn’t seem much like a park to me. As I wrote back then, “It gives the impression that as little has been spent and done as possible post the Olympics and it largely remains a series of routes to the Olympic stadium, ready for the mass tramping feet of West Ham fans, though some might favour more direct routes. It is a complete contrast to what might be expected of a new park for – and there is a good example of one just a couple of miles away in Thames Barrier Park.”
It has improved a little in the nine years since this visit, but still in many areas seems more desert than park, and my conclusion that it was “a rather bleak area, enlivened occasionally by the odd art work” still seems apt for much of the area.
Of course I was comparing it to the same area before the Olympics, which I had often wandered and enjoyed, and had been a more exciting and much wilder area. Of course a part of its attraction had been its relative isolation and the new park will attract hugely greater numbers to its various attractions. The local schools were on holiday and there were areas in which children were playing which for various reasons don’t feature in my pictures.
Barts cuts Health Advocacy & Interpreting – Royal London Hospital, Whitechapel
From Stratford Marsh and Pudding Mill Lane Station it was a short journey to Whitechapel, with just a short walk in the middle from Bow Church DLR to Bow Road on the District Line.
The Royal London Hospital at Whitechapel is run by the Barts Health trust, who were proposing to make drastic cuts in advocacy and interpreting services.
The hospital is in the centre of a multiethnic community of great deprivation and need, a community desperate for an increase in these services,with an ageing population many of whom speak and understand little English but are now in much greater need of health care.
I was there to photograph the handing over of a petition by GPs and other health professionals as well as members of various parts of the BME community, including Somalis, Bangladeshis and Chinese. The Mayor of Tower Hamlets backed the campaign and had sent apologies and a representative to express his support, and a Labour councillor gave support from the Labour group.
The removal of the services at GP surgeries and community and hospital services would mean the loss of around 11 full-time Bengali/Sylheti Health Advocates and the languages affected would include Somali, Punjabi, Urdu, Hindi, Tamil and French.
Bart’s Health Trust has huge financial problems because of the huge PFI debt incurred in the building of the sorely needed new hospital in front of which we were meeting, with continuing huge payments that mean that they have been unable to fully use the new building and have cut other vital services. PFI was always a mistake and the civil servants who negotiated the terms were no match for the skilled and highly paid operators for the developers who ended up with terms that were hugely favourable to them – and which changes in the financial conditions since then have made even more so.
The hospital tried to restrict the publicity for the event, although they had agreed to accept the petition, they wanted to do so in private. Hospital security staff tried to stop most of those present from witnessing the handover, and to prevent photography, but without success.
End Hunger Fast Vigil against Food Poverty – Old Palace Yard
Over 600 leaders from all major Christian denominations, including 47 bishops had earlier in the day called for urgent government action on food poverty, and earlier in the month thousands had taken part in a 24 hour day of fasting, praying and reflecting on the hunger in the one of the world’s richest countries came to the vigil.
On 16th April, ‘End Hunger Fast’ campaigners held a vigil outside Parliament, lighting candles and breaking bread together.
Earlier in the day figures from the Trussell Trust and independent food banks had been released showing that one million food parcels were handed out over the previoUs year as the safety net for the poor and vulnerable in Britain was crumbling.
There were a number of speeches before a sharing of bread in a minute of silence before eating to reflect on the problem faced by those who cannot afford food. CanDles were then lit (with some difficulty because a a stiff breeze) for another period of silent contemplation before the final address by End Hunger Fast media spokesperson Keith Hebden. He was then going without food for 40 days and 40 nights to draw attention to food poverty, and stressed the importance of getting politicians to take action on the issue.
Save Lewisham Hospital March & Rally – Saturday 26 January 2013
On Saturday 26th January 2013 an estimated 25,000 people marched through Lewisham to save their hospital from closure and to protect the NHS, showing south London united against the closure on pure financial grounds of its highly successful and much needed A&E and maternity departments.
Now the whole NHS is facing a crisis, and a similar united response across the country is needed to save it. It becomes clearer and clearer that this crisis has been deliberately engineered in order to destroy our health service and hand it over to private providers, particularly the US health giants.
Two years ago, US health insurance giant Centene Corporation took over 49 NHS GP surgeries and practices. Now as Jeremy Corbyn posted a couple of days ago on Facebook, “US health insurance giant, Centene, is the single largest provider of NHS primary care in England. Privatisation is the cause of — not the solution to — the NHS crisis. Stop wasting money on private contracts and start investing in a fully-public NHS instead.“
Unfortunately both Tory and Labour parties have taken part in the move towards privatisation of the NHS, though Tories have been more open in their support of such changes as suggesting the introduction of charges to see a doctor. But both parties have introduced changes which have brought private companies into providing NHS services, have taken large donations from private health companies, and have leading members who profit from them.
It was under Labour that the NHS took on poorly thought out Private Finance Initiative contracts that have landed many local health trusts with huge debt repayments, many of which extend to the middle of the century, and it was these which led to the crisis in Lewisham.
The PFI contracts were negotiated by civil servants and were and are a bonanza for private companies. Under them we pay totally ridiculous charges for simple jobs – such as Hull and East Yorkshire Hospitals Trust paying £8,450 to install a dishwasher because they are locked into maintenance contracts. Changing a light bulb can cost a couple of hundred pounds.
Lewisham Hospital wasn’t directly affected by PFI, but it was in 2009 put into the South London Hospitals Trust, which had two hospitals at Orpington and Woolwich whose PFI contracts saddled the trust with debts of over £60 million a year until 2032.
Lewisham Hospital was successful both medically and financially, but Health Secretary Andrew Lansley appointed a special administrator to the trust with a remit to drastically cut the trusts costs. And Matthew Kershaw decided to do so by closing the highly successful and much needed A&E and maternity departments at Lewisham.
It was a decision that made no sense. There wasn’t the spare capacity at other hospitals to cope with those no longer able to get treatment at Lewisham – the system was actually working in the other direction, with these other hospitals having to send patients to Lewisham.
Financially it made no sense – the patients would still require treatment and this would cost more elsewhere. The small annual savings the closure would give would be more than offset by increases in costs elsewhere – though some of these might be in other trusts.
The proposal generated an incredible amount of local opposition, with the campaign to save the hospital supported by all local MPs and policitician both in the area and across south London. Community groups and organisations all came together to save the hospital – Millwall football club even changed their weekend fixture to Friday night so the team and supporters could join the march.
As I wrote back in 2013, “The fight to save Lewisham Hospital isn’t just a local issue, but very much a national one, with the provision of medical services that form the bedrock of the NHS under attack. If the government can close down services at Lewisham, no other successful hospital in the UK is safe in their hands.”
Nurses and ambulance workers are now striking not just for a better deal for themselves, but for the future of the NHS, which the Tories have deliberately run down with drastic underfunding and a deliberate failure to train and recruit staff. Perhaps their most obvious action was the removal of the bursary for nurse training, but as well there has been the continuing decrease in real salaries with below inflation wage rises over the years. Together with the failure to keep European staff in this country after Brexit and the impact of Covid the results have been disastrous – except for those private companies providing agency nurses and doctors, often at horrific cost to the NHS.
If the NHS is to be saved it will need the kind of public mobilisation that saved Lewisham Hospital, with the people as a whole getting behind the nurses and doctors and others who are fighting to save it. We need to fight the policies and greed of the Tories and of Labour and of the billionaire press to preserve the NHS as a national service free at the point of use and organised for the national good rather than for profit.
Save our Surgeries on NHS 66th Birthday – Whitechapel
The National Health Service came into operation in the UK on 5th July 1948, established by a Labour government despite considerable opposition from the Conservative Party and some doctors’ organisations. In most recent years there have been protests marking the anniversary against the increasing privatisation of the system, large parts of which have now moved away from being provided by the NHS itself to being provided by private companies, motivated by profits rather than public service.
The opposition to Aneurin Bevan’s plans in the 1940s led to a number of compromises, but the NHS was launched with three basic principles – to meet the needs of everyone, to be free at the point of delivery, and to be based on clinical need rather than the ability to pay. Although those principles remain, there are some respects in which they are not entirely met.
Prescription charges – currently £9.35 per item – were introduced in England in 1952, removed from 1965-8 but then re-introduced, remaining free for under-16s and over 60s, with some other exceptions. And we pay too for NHS dentistry, and many people find it impossible to get dental treatment under the NHS as no practice in their area will take them on.
Access to GPs and other services at surgeries around the country is also much more difficult for many, and it can be difficult or impossible to get an appointment in a timely fashion. Many services dealing with relatively minor medical issues are no longer available, and people have either to pay for them or continue to suffer. Some of these problems have been exacerbated by the take-over of many surgeries by healthcare companies as a part of the creeping privatisation of the NHS.
Twenty years ago, when I had a hospital stay of several weeks, hospitals have been forced to put some essential services – such as cleaning – out to tender, resulting in two of the three hospitals I was in being in filthy conditions.
In 2014, cuts in funding were threatening the closure of surgeries in Tower Hamlets as they failed to pay for the extra needs faced in inner-city areas. Local hospitals were also threatened, particularly because of the huge debts from PFI contracts for the building an management of new hospitals. The deals with the private sector made under New Labour have left the NHS with impossible levels of debt – and the companies involved with high profits, continuing in some cases for another 20 or 30 years.
After a short rally with speakers including the local mayor and MP as well as health campaigners including local GPs, there was a march by several hundreds to a larger rally in Hackney. But I left the marchers shortly after it passed Whitechapel Station.
Earlier I had been to photograph a march through East Ham and Upton Park in a protest over the terrible state of housing in England, and in London in particular. The event had been organised by Focus E15 Mums with the support of Fight Racism Fight Imperialism, but included many other protest groups from Hackney, from Brent and from South London on the march as well as groups including BARAC, TUSC and others.
They included a number of groups who had stood up and fought for their own housing against councils lacking in principles and compassion who had suggested they might move to privately rented accommodation in Birmingham, Hastings, Wales or further afield, but who had stood their ground and made some progress like the Focus E15 Mothers.
Many London councils are still involved with developers in demolishing social housing and replacing it with houses and flats mainly for high market rents or sale, with some “affordable” properties at rates few can afford, and with much lower numbers than before at social rents. Many former residents are forced to move to outer areas of London in what campaigners call ‘social cleansing’.
Families that councils are under a statutory duty to find homes for are often housed in single rooms or flats, sometimes infected by insects or with terrible damp, often far from their jobs or schools. Councils are under huge pressure and funding cuts sometimes make it impossible for them to find suitable properties, though often there are empty properties which could be used, particularly on estates such as the Caarpenters Estate in Stratford which Newham had been emptying since around 2004 in the hope of redeveloping.
Government policies and subsidies for housing have largely been a way of subsiding private landlords, and we need national and local governments – as I worte ” determined to act for the benefit of ordinary people, making a real attempt to build much more social housing, removing the huge subsidies currently given to private landlords through housing benefit, legislating to provide fair contracts for private tenants and give them decent security – and criminalising unfair evictions.” Housing really is a national emergency and needs emergency measaures.
Much of what is currently being built in London is sold to overseas buyers as investments and often left empty as its owners profit from the rapid rises in property values in London. We need to make this either illegal or to impose heavy duties on overseas owners including increased council taxes on empty properties.
The march attracted considerable attention on the streets of East London, and as I note several motorists stopped to put money in the collection buckets – something I’ve never seen happen before. I left the march as it reached East Ham Station to go to the NHS event.
NakNakba, NHS, Gitmo etc & Tamils – Saturday 18th May 2013 was another busy day for protests in London and I covered a number of demonstrations.
End Israeli Ethnic Cleansing – Old Palace Yard, Westminster
65 years after 700,000 Palestinians were driven out of their homes as refugees in the ‘Nakba’ (catastrophe) when the state of Israel was created, Palestinians and their supporters protested outside parliament calling for an end to the continuing ethnic cleansing and a boycott and sanctions until Israel complies with international law.
There had been protests in Jerusalem earlier in the week on Nabka Day against the continuing sanctions against Palestinians that have crowded them into an ever-decreasing area of land, diminishing almost daily as new Israeli settlements are created and new restrictions placed on the movement of Palestinians. Many of those protesting in London from Jewish or Palestinian backgrounds and as usual these included a group of extreme orthodox Neturei Karta Jews who had walked down from North London; they see themselves as guardians of the true Jewish faith, and reject Zionism.
London Marches to Defend NHS – South Bank to Whitehall
On the opposite side of the River Thames thousands were gathering by the Royal Festival Hall to march against cuts, closures and privatisation of the NHS, alarmed at the attack by the government on the principles that underlie our National Health Service and the threats of closure of Accident and Emergency facilities, maternity units and hospital wards which seem certain to lead to our health system being unable to cope with demand – and many lives put at risk.
Nine years later we are seeing the effect of these policies with ambulance services unable to cope with demand, lengthy delays in treating people in A&E, delays in diagnosing cancers leading to increased deaths and more. And although it was only a matter of time before we had a pandemic like Covid, and exercises had shown what needed to be done to prepare for this, the NHS had not been given the resources to prepare for this, leading to much higher death rates than some comparable countries.
Part of the problems of the NHS come from disastrous PFI agreements pushed through under the Labour government, landing NHS trusts with huge debts that will continue for many years. This forced NHS trusts into disastrous hospital closure plans, some of which were defeated by huge public campaigns. Many of those marching were those involved in these campaigns at Lewisham, Ealing, Charing Cross, Hammersmith, Central Middlesex, Whittington and other hospitals around London.
Guantánamo Murder Scene – US Embassy, Grosvenor Square
London Guantánamo Campaign staged a ‘murder scene’ at the US Embassy on the 101st day of the Guantánamo Hunger Strike in which over 100 of the 166 still held there are taking part, with many including Shaker Aamer now being forcibly fed.
More US Embassy Protests – US Embassy, Grosvenor Square
Other protesters outside the US Embassy included Narmeen Saleh Al Rubaye, born in the US and currently living in Birmingham, whose husband Shawki Ahmed Omar, an American citizen, was arrested in Iraq by American forces in 2004 and turned over to Iraqi custody in 2011. He was tortured by the Americans when they held him and was now being tortured by the Iraqis and also was on hunger strike. She has protested with her daughter Zeinab outside the US Embassy for a number of weekends and on this occasion was joined by a small group of Muslims who had come to protest against Guantanamo, appalled by the actions of the US waging a war against Islam and Muslims.
Shawki Ahmed Omar is still held in Iraq; before he died in 2021 former US Attorney General Ramsey Clark recorded a video calling for his release which was posted to YouTube in with the comment by another US lawyer “This case is one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in recent United States history. It is a case where the US government essentially lied to the US Supreme Court to cover up torture and to be able to turn an American citizen over to people who they knew would torture him.”
A few yards away, kept separate by police, a group of supporters of the Syrian regime, including some from the minor Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist) was also holding a protest in favour of the Assad regime and against western intervention in Syria.
Tamils protest Sri Lankan Genocide – Hyde Park to Waterloo Place
I met thousands of British Tamils and dignitaries and politicians from India, Sri Lanka and the UK as they marched through London on the 4th anniversary of the Mullivaikkal Massacre, many dressed in black in memory of the continuing genocide in Sri Lanka. Many wore the tiger emblem and called for a Tamil homeland – Tamil Eelam.
Although it was a large protest, with perhaps around 5,000 marchers I think it received absolutely no coverage in UK media, and I seemed to be the only non-Tamil photographer present. Tamils were rightly disgusted at the lack of response by the UK, the Commonwealth and the world to the organised genocide that took place in Sri Lanka, of which the massacre at Mullivaikkal four years ago was a climax.
The march had started from Hyde Park, and I caught up with it on Piccadilly and went with it taking photographs to Waterloo Place where there was to be a rally. But it had been a long day for me and I left just before this started.