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Ian Tomlinson Killing & Sri Lanka Genocide – 2009

Ian Tomlinson Killing & Sri Lanka Genocide: On Saturday 11th April 2009 people marched from Bethnal Green Police Station to the spot were news vendor died after an unprovoked attack by police officer Simon Harwood. I also photographed a much larger march by Tamils against the genocide taking place in Sri Lanka.

March in Memory of Ian Tomlinson – Bethnal Green Police Station & Bank

Ian Tomlinson Killing & Sri Lanka Genocide - 2009

G20 Meltdown, the organisers of the protest at Bank on April 1st 2009 where police officer Simon Harwood attacked Ian Tomlinson leading to his death, had organised a memorial march from Bethnal Green Police Station to the place where he died a few yards away from the attack.

Tomlinson was not involved in the protest, but simply trying to make his way home after having been working, selling newspapers in the City. The protest would probably have been over by the time he was killed, but police had turned what had been intended as a carnival party into something far more sinister, kettling and then attacking many demonstrators and killing Tomlinson. There were numerous injuries and one photographer had his teeth knocked out, but I had seen the kettle coming and had left the area to cover another event.

At the Tomlinson family’s request, the march was peaceful, silent and respectful. Before it started his stepson Paul King spoke briefly, describing the family’s trauma from the tragic death of his step-father, a “much-loved and warm-hearted man,” and pain at seeing the video of the assault, and he hoped that the investigation would be full and that “action will be taken against any police officer who contributed to Ian’s death through his conduct.”

As usual the investigation was carried out by the IPCC and the Crown Prosecution Service decided not to charge Harwood. After an inquest verdict of unlawful killing the CPS had to change their mind and charged him with manslaughter.

*The sisters of Sean Rigg, murdered by police at Brixton the previous August were on the march*

The jury was unable to hear evidence about his behaviour in previous incidents and was seriously misled both by some of Harwood’s own evidence and the evidence given by the first pathologist who had examined the body, Dr Freddy Patel. He had destroyed some vital evidence, puring away body fluids and had a long record of botched postmortems, having previously been suspended twice and finally was struck off the medical register in 2012.

After Harwood’s acquittal he was dismissed from the police. Tomlinson’s family took civil proceedings and in 2013, “the Metropolitan Police Service paid Tomlinson’s family an undisclosed sum and acknowledged that Harwood’s actions had caused Tomlinson’s death.

I left the march before it arrived at Bank, but returned the following day to photograph the flowers that had been left in Royal Exchange Buildings where the assault had taken place and a vigil was being held by Chris Knight, one of the G20 Meltdown organisers and a few others.

More at In Memory of Ian Tomlinson.

Tamils March – Stop Sri-Lanka Genocide – Temple to Hyde Park

A huge crowd had assembled on the Embankment at Temple, perhaps as many as 200,000, a very high proportion of Tamils in the UK who are thought to number around 300,000, around two thirds of them of Sri Lankan origin. It was a crowd with very few white faces.

Despite the size of the protest there appeared to be very little UK media interest and I saw no photographers or TV crews from major UK media covering the march to Hyde Park. Where there are usually a crowd of photographers in front at the start of large marches in London, for this one there was just me and three other freelances, none of whom get regular work for the mass media.

By April 2009 the civil war in Sri Lanka was clearly coming to an end, with the Tamil Tigers having been pushed back into a very small area. They had been defeated at a major battle at Aanandapuram on 5th April and the final assault by the government forces came at the end of the month with Sri Lanka declaring victory on May 16th.

Many of those taking part in the march were clearly supporting the “the LTTE, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. A few carried actual tigers, fortunately only large toys, but many more wore the colours or carried flags or portraits of the founder and leader of the Tamil Tigers, Velupillai Pirapaharan.“

The LTTE was proscribed in 2000 and they were clearly committing an offence under the Terrorism Act 2000 by supporting the group or wearing clothing which arouses the “reasonable suspicion that he is a member or supporter of a proscribed organisation.” But clearly the Tamils were not intending to cause any serious trouble and police sensibly made no attempt to arrest them all. Only three arrests were reported.

The Tamils had lost in Sri Lanka and many both civilians and combatants were killed during the civil war – possibly almost 150,000 in the last 8 months of the civil war. Around 300,000 were transferred into special closed camps, described by many as concentration camps – they were slowly released and the camps were closed by the end of September 2012.

Many more pictures at Stop Sri Lanka Genocide.

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Visteon, City & Fashion Victims – 2009

Visteon, City & Fashion Victims: On Saturday 4th April 2009 I went to protest in support of the Visteon factory occupation in Enfield, came back the the City but missed a protest over the police murder of newsvendor Ian Tomlinson and then photographed a fashion show protest on Oxford Street against the slave-like labour of workers in Bangladesh producing cheap clothes for Primark.

Solidarity at Visteon Enfield

I wrote a few days ago about the Visteon pensions scandal where former Ford workers who were transferred to parts manufacturer Visteon, ‘An Enterprise of Ford Motor Company‘, in 2000 had lost up to half of their pensions when Visteon went into administration on 31st March 2009 when administrators KPMG immediately closed the company down.

Together with workers at the Visteon Belfast site, the workers at Visteon Enfield had occupied their factories and were refusing to leave until Visteon and Ford made good on the firm promises made in 2000 they had that they would receive the same pensions and redundancy arrangements they had enjoyed previously.

Workers in Belfast had occupied their factory immediately after a 5 minute meeting had told them they had lost their jobs and that they had an hour to take any personal possessions and leave work immediately – without pay. Enfield workers occupied their factory the following day.

KPMG’s response was to go to the courts and secure a court order for repossession, while Ford simply denied all responsibility in the matter (though five years later were eventually forced by Unite to pay some compensation.)

I went to the factory at Ponders End, Enfield along with several hundred other trade unionists and others for a rally outside the plant to show our support for their case. A number of those who spoke at the rally had organised collections for the occupiers in their workplaces, reporting unanimous support for the dismissed workers, and others had also brought practical support – sleeping bags, food and money – to enable the occupation to continue.

More at Solidarity at Visteon Enfield

City Walk – Bank and Bishopsgate.

I was later than I had hoped by the time my train from Ponders End reached Liverpool Street and had missed the rally at Bank in memory of the news vendor Ian Tomlinson who died of a heart attack minutes after being attacked and violently pushed to the ground in an unprovoked attack by a riot policeman, dieing from a heart attack minutes after. The murder had been captured on video by an onlooker and The Guardian had published the video – still on their web site.

After the rally the protesters had marched away – and I could see and hear a police helicopter following them on the way towards Bethnal Green. I didn’t have time to try and catch up with them, but wandered through some of the streets in the City, including some that Tomlinson had wandered through as he tried to make his way home through the area where police were kettling and attacking the April 1st Financial Fools Day G20Meltdown protesters. On 4th April those streets were empty.

More pictures at City Walk.

Primark – Fashion on the Cheap from Sweatshops

War on Want and No Sweat were drawing attention to Primark profiting from selling clothes made by sweated labour in Bangladesh with a ‘fashion show’ outside the company’s flagship Oxford Street store.

Models used the pavement as a catwalk, walking in chains “to symbolise the slave labour conditions of the Bangladeshi workers who make the cut-price fashions on sale at Primark. Workers who make the clothes earn as little as 7p an hour and work up to 80 hours a week.”

The Primark store opened here in 2007 and flourished as the recession made people turn to cheaper suppliers with their profits in the year to September 2008 up by up by 17% at £233 million.

Notices in the store windows claimed they “care about the conditions of the workers who make their clothes, but the reports by War on Want tells a very different story. These clothes are only cheap because those who make them get poverty pay, work long hours and get sacked if they try to organise or ask for improvements in their dangerous and unhealthy working conditions.”

Although the links on the My London Diary post are now out of date, War on Want are still campaigning for garment workers around the world including in Bangladesh, as are No Sweat.

In 2009 I commented:

Primark and others could still have a moral and reasonably profitable business if they restrained their greed and ensured that the workers who make their clothes worked in reasonable conditions and got a living wage – which in Bangladesh is only around £45 a month. But that is over three times what workers making clothes for Primark are currently paid.

Primark’s profits continue to rise, and although it claims it has “improved working conditions and implemented ethical initiatives, reports and investigations suggest that worker exploitation in its supply chain, including issues like low wages and unsafe working conditions, unfortunately still persists” according to Google’s Generative AI.

More at Primark – Fashion from Sweatshops.

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Southall Rally For Unity Against Racism – 2019

Southall Rally For Unity Against Racism – On Saturday 27th April 2019 I joined with several thousand others to march through Southall, a town ten miles west of Central London callling for unity against racism. The date marked 40 years after the racist murder of New Zealand born East London teacher Blair Peach on St George’s Day, April 23rd 1979, 40 years before.

Peach had come to Southall with many others to protest against a National Front rally being held at Southall Town Hall, the venue chosen deliberately to inflame racial tensions in the area which had become the centre of a large Punjabi community, attracted by work in local factories and nearby Heathrow airport. Well over half of Southall’s roughly 70,000 inhabitants were of Asian origin and two thirds of the children were non-white.

I’d grown up in the local area though we didn’t go to Southall much as the bus route there was probably the least reliable in London, though I occasionally cycled there to watch the steam trains thundering through on the Great Western main line. My older sister taught at a school in the area and we had seen the population change over the years; our Irish neighbours were replaced by Indians and we got on well with both. The new immigrants to the area were hard working, revitalised many local businesses and generally improved the area, making it a more interesting and exciting place to live.

I wasn’t there in 1979 when Blair Peach was murdered, but the accounts published of the event were horrific, with several thousand police apparently running amok trying to disperse the protesters who fought back. Members of the specialist Special Patrol Group were reported by eye-witnesses as hitting everybody down Beachcroft Avenue where Peach and his companions had gone thinking wrongly it would enable them to leave the area. Wikipedia has a long article, The Death of Blair Peach.

Peach was badly injured by a severe blow to the head, almost certainly by an officer using wielding “not a police truncheon, but a “rubber ‘cosh’ or hosepipe filled with lead shot, or some like weapon“, and died a few hours later in hospital. Police in the squad which killed him made great attempts to avoid detection, one shaving off his moustache and another refusing to take part in identity parades; some uniforms were dry-cleaned before being offered for inspection and others withheld, and various attempts were made by police to obstruct justice and prevent the subsequent inquest establishing the truth.

Peach’s was not the only racist murder in Southall. Three years earlier Gurdip Singh Chaggar, an 18-year old Sikh student had been murdered by racist skinheads in June 1976 shortly after he left the Dominion Cinema, and the marchers gathered in a parking area close to there. His family had requested that the event begin with a karate display there, after which the march set off, halting for a minute’s silence on the street outside the cinema where Chaggar was murdered.

From there we marched to the Ramgarhia Sabha Gurdwara in Oswald Road which Chaggar and his family attended and prayers were said outside before the march moved on.

As we walked along the Broadway, red and white roses were handed out to the marchers, and the march turned off down Beechcroft Road to the corner of Orchard Ave, where they were laid at the spot where Blair Peach was murdered by an officer of the police Special Patrol Group.

The march moved on to Southall Town Hall on the corner of High Street and Lady Margaret Road. Blue plaques were put up here in 2019 honouring the deaths of Blair Peach and Gurdip Singh Chaggar, with a third in tribute to Southall’s prominent reggae band, Misty ‘n Roots. These plaques were stolen in June 2020, but were replaced the following year.

Speakers at the rally there included a number of people who had been there when the police rioted 40 years ago, as well as John McDonnell MP, Pragna Patel who was inspired by the event to form Southall Black Sisters, trade unionists, Anti Nazi league founder Paul Holborow, and local councillor Jaskiran Chohan. Notable by his absence was the local Labour MP.

You can seem many more pictures from the march and of the rally on My London Diary at Southall rally for unity against racism.

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