On 8th April 1971 the first World Roma Congress met at Chelsfield in southeast London. It called for Roma self-determination and international unity and the delegates unanimously rejected all of the names given to them by outsiders, including Gypsy (or Gipsy), still often used in English, which the community viewed as insulting. Both Rom and Romany have also been in use in English since the 19th Century, but throughout Europe the term Roma is now officially used, though in German-speaking countries the name Sinti is common.
Waiting for the march outside St James Piccadilly
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romani_people Linguistic and more recent DNA studies show that Roma originated in northwestern India around 1500 years ago and later migrated to Europe, reaching the Balkans around 900 years ago. They have long been subject to persecution and in some central and east European countries were slaves until the 1840s and 50s.
In 1930s Germany Roma in Germany were stripped of their citizenship and many were interned and there was a programme of compulsory sterilisation. In 1942 the Porajmos or Romani Holocaust began, with Roma being sent to extermination camps. Estimates vary wildly of the number killed in Germany and German occupied territories, between 200,000 and 1,500,000.
Roma as well as Jews were victims in the Holocaust
Roma still suffer considerable persecution in some countries including Romania, and the end of communist control has led to an increase in prejudice and persecution there and elsewhere. And across all countries including our own there is still widespread denial about the persecution they still face.
8th April, the day of the first congress, was adopted in 1990 as the International Roma Day of Action. Perhaps because of that denial it has not received much attention.
Roma have generally taken on the predominant religions of the countries they have settled in and the London action began with a church service at St Jame’s Piccadilly before marching through central London. I photographed them outside the church and on the march, ending my pictures as they went up Charing Cross Road.
In my account on My London Diary in 2005 I used the term gypsy as this was still almost always used in the media and Roma was not widely understood. Commonly too, Roma are called ‘travellers’ although many Roma are settled and most ‘travellers‘ are not Roma. Here’s what I wrote in 2005:
After a church service commemorating the 500,000 Roma murdered in the Nazi holocaust, Roma from several countries marched across London against the ethnic-cleansing of 30,000 gypsies from their own land and in protest over threatened evictions at Dale Farm, Essex, Smithy Fen, Cambridgeshire, and elsewhere.
After the march, gypsy Richard Sheridan was to announce that he was standing against sitting Tory MP John Baron at Billericay in the general election on 5th May 2005 in order to make the travellers’ voice heard. [He did not actually stand, but did attract some media attention to the cause.]
Nurses, Coal, Art, Biafrans & Sunflowers – Saturday May 30th 2015 was another varied day of events and protests across London.
Filipino Nurses tell Daily Mail to apologise – Kensington.
I began the day travelling to High Street Kensington, just a short walk from the offices of the Daily Mail. It has the largest circulation of any UK newspaper but is also the UK’s least reliable source of information. Recently The Factual analysed 1,000 articles from each of 245 major news sources from around the world although mainly from the USA and including international news organisations such as Reuters and AP. The Mail came out with the third lowest score of any with a Factual Grade of 39.7% compared to the average of 61.9%. In a table listing all the results, even The Sun does a little better, as do the Daily Express and RT News, though all of these are way below average while The Guardian was above average along with the BBC, though neither among the top scorers.
We don’t have a free press in this country, we have a press largely controlled by a small number of billionaires who, as these figures show, use it largely as a source of disinformation and the promotion of their prejudices – including homophobia, racism and misogyny. Articles are more generally written as click-bait rather than with any desire to inform or educate, and it was hardly surprising when in 2016 it was sanctioned by the International Press Standards Organisation for violating professional norms for accuracy and in 2017 Wikipedia editors decided it was a “generally unreliable” source.
I was there for the start of a long protest by Filipino health workers outside the Daily Mail over its reporting of the Victoriano Chua case which insulted Filipino NHS workers as a whole despite the vital contribution they make to the NHS. The demanded the Daily Mail apologise for its racist comments and to recognise the contribution that they make, keeping our NHS afloat. As someone who a dozen years earlier had been looked after in intensive care by a Filipino nurse I feel very grateful to them, though angry at the UK government for not training enough nurses and doctors – and in particular for removing the training bursary for nurses which has now made the situation much worse. But I did feel they were asking the leopard to change its spots.
I left the Filipinos as their protest was still building up and journeyed across London to Peckham Rye where we were invited to take a tour of the proposed Peckham Coal Line elevated linear urban park between Peckham Rye and Queens Road Peckham stations as a distant part of the Chelsea Fringe Festival events – something vaguely related to the annual flower show.
The Coal Line was frankly hugely over-hyped, particularly in comparing it to New York’s ‘High Line’, and the walk was largely close to but not on the actual proposed line. The former coal sidings on the viaduct which inspired the project are next to a working rail line and could only be seen looking down from neighbouring buildings.
As I commented: “The walk is essentially an urban linear park that would make a useful short cut for some local walkers and cyclists, and could also be a part of a longer leisure walk from Brixton to the Thames. I hope it comes into existence, as the cost would be relatively low and it would be a useful addition to the area.“
But I still enjoyed an interesting walk, visiting both the Bussey Building in the former industrial estate Copeland Park south of the line and the multi-storey car park to the north which now houses a cafe, a local radio performance space and another rooftop bar next to the Derek Jarman memorial garden and has good views of Peckham and central London. And having followed the official route to Queens Road Peckham I walked back a different way vaguely along the Coal Line at ground level, finally travelling more closely along it in an Overground train that took me to Canada Water and the Jubilee Line to Waterloo.
UK Uncut met outside Waterloo station for their mystery protest taking direct action at an undisclosed location. Police liaison officers tried to find out where they were going and what they intended to do, but nobody was talking to them. Finally they set off and marched the short distance to Westminster Bridge where they spread a large piece of cloth on the roadway and painted a banner telling Parliament that collecting dodged taxes would bring in more than cutting public services.
They lifted up the banner and then ‘dropped’ it over the side of the bridge. It was a long run to take a picture of it hanging from the bridge, and I’m not sure worth the effort. It would have been better to have lowered it on the downstream side so as to get the Houses of Parliament in the background.
Another group of protesters in Parliament Square were protesting against the plans to get rid of the Human Rights Act, and some of the UK Uncut people had joined them before the end of the ‘Art’ protest. In May 2022 the government announced it was getting rid of the act and replacing it with a ‘British Bill of Rights’ which will allow the police to “perform freer functions“, Leading charities concerned with human rights have condemned the changes as affecting “the ability of individuals to hold the government and public bodies to account by bringing cases when their human rights have been breached.” They state “The Human Rights Act has greatly benefited a vast number of people from across society, improving their health and wellbeing; ensuring their dignity, autonomy, privacy, and family life; and overall improving their quality of life.” Many see the changes as yet another move towards fascism and a police state.
Biafra came from the Kingdom of Nri of the Igbo people, which lasted from the 10th century to 1911 and was one of Africa’s great civilisations before the European colonisation.
Biafra was incorporated into Southern Nigeria by the colonialists in the 1884 Berlin Conference and then became part of the united Nigeria in 1914. Biafrans declared independence from Nigeria in 1967, but lost the long and bloody civil war that followed, with many Biafran civilians dying of starvation.
Mass rally Supports National Gallery strikers – Trafalgar Square
After a large rally in Trafalgar Square, National Gallery staff striking against privatisation marched towards the Sainsbury Wing, holding a sit down and short rally outside after police blocked the doors to the gallery. The gallery doors were then locked.
Candy Udwin, a PCS rep at the National Gallery had been sacked for her trade union activities in connection with the plans to privatise gallery staff and the opposition to it by staff. Exhibitions in the Sainsbury wing have already been guarded by privatised staff, and the security there is also run by the private company. After 100 days of strike action the dispute was finally resolived in early October 2015 after the appointment of a new gallery director with terms and conditions of service protected and Udwin returning to work.
