Sudan and Brunei Gay Sex: I began work on Saturday 6th April 2019 at the Sudanese Embassy and then left for the Dorchester Hotel in Mayfair where protesters had come after the Sultan of Brunei had announced death by stoning as a punishment for gay sex, adultery and blasphemy.
Sudanese for Freedom, Peace and Justice – Sudan Embassy
War is raging again now in Sudan between between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF).
Back in 2019 people were protesting against the extreme violence in Sudan against peaceful protests calling for for an end to the violent and corrupt Sudanese regime and for president Omar al-Bashir to ‘Just Fall’ and stand trial by the ICC for genocide in Darfur, the Nuba Mountains and South Blue Nile.
People in Sudan had been protesting for 17 weeks and over 70 protesters had been killed and thousands injured.
Five days later, Omar al-Bashir was deposed by the Sudanese Armed Forces and in May 2019 was charged al-Bashir with “inciting and participating in” the killing of protesters. Later other charges were brought, including of corruption and money laundering. Other trials followed and he has been accused of genocide. The prison in which he was being held has been overrun by the current fighting between forces led by the generals who deposed him and he is currently held in a military hospital in Khartoum.
I left the protesters still in and around the protest pen outside the embassy opposite St James Palace in Cleveland Row and rushed the three quarters of a mile or so to the Dorchester Hotel in Park Lane, where I knew the protest had already begun.
Brunei Sultan gay sex stoning protest – Dorchester Hotel
A large crowd had gathered on the streets in front of the Dorchester Hotel behind barriers that kept them out of the area directly in front of the entrance.
There were a number of speeches including those by Labour Shadow Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Emily Thornberry MP and activist Peter Tatchell condemining the announcement by the Sultan of Brunei of death by stoning as a punishment for gay sex, adultery and blasphemy.
It was a colourful protest with many from the gay community with some interesting posters and placards. Police continually harassed protesters to keep the roads open, although there were really too many people to make this sensible.
After an hour or so, Class War decided to move from behind the barriers and pushed some aside to protest directly in front of the hotel doors. They were followed by many of the other protesters and a noisy protest continued there.
CND Easter Monday Protest: On Easter Monday 2013 CND organised a large protest at the UK’s nuclear weapons establishment at Aldermaston, 12 miles to the west of Reading.
As this year, Easter Monday was also April Fool’s Day, and on Monday 1st April 2013 this was the Nuclear Fool’s Day – Scrap Trident rally. But Aldermaston is a huge site and the protesters were spread between the half dozen gates around its 5 mile fenced perimeter, with speakers travelling between the gates in a number of cars and lorries.
Pat Arrowsmith
I’d put my bike on the train to Reading, then cycled from there to the event. I found it quite a tiring ride with some long uphill sections against a prevailing westerly wind, and was rather tired by the time I arrived.
Natalie Bennett, then Leader of the Green Party
Every time I’ve been to Aldermaston I’ve always felt a slight tension in the air.I don’t really believe the air there is any more radioactive than around my home on the edge of London, and it’s certainly otherwise less pollution laden. And although it’s possible that many of the pictures I take are going to contravene our draconian Official Secrets Act 1911 (now replaced by the National Security Act 2023) I know that it is remotely unlikely I will have any problems reporting the event.
But having the bike with me enabled me to ride around to each of the gates in turn and take pictures of what was happening at them, as well as some people stretched out along the fences away from the gates. By the start of the protest at noon there were groups of between 50 and several hundred at each of half a dozen gates around the over 5 miles of the site perimeter, with others walking around the path around the site, attaching messages and banners to its tall security fence.
Gates had been allocated to different groups from around the country, and there was also a women’s gate and a faith gate, with Christians, Buddhists and others. Police were standing behind the gates, with a few mixing with the protesters, and others driving around the roads by the site.
Among the speakers I heard were CND Vice-Chairs Jeremy Corbyn MP and Bruce Kent, CND General Secretary Kate Hudson, Green Party Leader Natalie Bennett and South East Green MEP Keith Taylor, Stop the War’s Chris Nineham and CND founding member Pat Arrowsmith and another veteran Walter Wolfgang, as well as US activist Linda Pentz Gunter, the founder of ‘Beyond Nuclear’.
The ‘Allelulia’ is taken from the coffin where it was placed outside the Defence Ministry on Shrove Tuesday
At the ‘Faith Gate’ there was a short ‘Easter Resurrection Hope‘ service in which an ‘Alleluia’ which had been symbolically placed in a coffin at the Ministry of Defence in London on Shrove Tuesday at the beginning of Lent was lifted out and held aloft, with a call for ‘a new heaven and a new earth‘ and the hope that ‘light and love might overcome the shadow of destruction in this place.’ This was followed by some Buddhist prayers, and some statements from other faith groups about peace.
Walter Wolfgang
The event ended with everyone around the site making a loud noise and some had brought various musical instruments while others joined in banging pots and pans, whistling and shouting.
I still had 12 miles to cycle back to Reading Station, but at least this way much of it was downhill and I had the wind behind me.
Israeli Land Day Massacre & Afrin March – On Saturday 31st March 2018 two emergency protests in London condemned the cold-blooded shooting by the Israeli army of peaceful protesters near the separation wall in Gaza the previous day, Palestinian Land Day. The was also a march calling for an end to the invasion of Afrin by Turkey and al Qaeda-affiliated militias intended to destroy this peaceful state and eliminate the majority Kurdish population of the area.
Land Day protest against supporters of Israeli state – Oxford St
Protesters from the Revolutionary Communist Group have held regular protests outside the Marks and Spencer flagship store on Oxford Street for many years. They were met there this morning by others apalled by the news of the 17 unarmed Palestinian civilians shot dead by Israeli snipers.
Those murdered in cold blood were taking part in the first of a weekly series of marches, the ‘Great March of Return‘, beginning on Land Day, the anniversary of protests against the state confiscation of swathes of Palestinian land in Galilee in 1976 until Nakba Day on May 15, the anniversary of the expulsion of millions of Palestinians from their homes and villages in 1948.
The protesters went from M&S to protest outside other stores on Oxford St with business links with apartheid Israel, calling for shoppers to boycott them. While I was with them they also protested outside Selfridges, which sells Israeli wines, Adidas which supports the Israel football team, Boots which sells cosmetics made in Israel and Carphone Warehouse and were continuing along the street when I had to leave.
Turkey’s attack on Afrin in north-west Syria is a clear violation of international law, and air strikes have deliberately targeted civilian areas.
Turkey has NATO’s second largest army and much of its weapons come from European states including the UK which had recently signed a major arms deal. The UK government has expressed support for Turkey, claiming it has a right to defend it borders, but this attack is outside these and Turkey has clearly announce an intention to push far into Syria.
Turkish aims are clearly genocidal with Turkish president Erdogan having stated he intends to invade all the Kurdish areas of Syria and “cleanse” the area of its Kurdish people.
As well as calling for an immediate ceasefire and end to the Turkish invasion of Syrian and UK support for this, they called for an end of UK arms sales to all human rights abusing regimes in the Middle East and for humanitarian relief for Afrin and other areas of Syria and for an investigation into human rights abuses there. They also called on the UK government to demand Turkey return the body of YPJ volunteer Anna Campbell to her family in Sussex.
I joined others close to the Israeli embassy in Kensington for an emergency protest against the shooting of unarmed protesters several hundred yards from the Gaza separation wall by IDF snipers. 17 Civilians were killed and over 750 seriously injured by live fire, with others injured by rubber bullets and tear gas.
The massacre the previous day had shocked the world and led the UN to call for an independent investigation, which Israel have refused – just as they have refused calls for independent investigation into other massacres. The news had come too late for a large protest to be organised – which followed in April.
Coverage of the event in the UK media on the day had been surprisingly muted, with the BBC giving considerable air-time to Israeli state speakers shamefully claiming the massacre was reasonable and fully justified. The same thing has been happening over events in Gaza in recent months, though I think it has now become very much clearer that they have lost all credibility and even some presenters have sometimes challenged them.
Palestinian Land Day remembers the day in 1976 when unarmed protesters were killed when marches in Arab towns against the confiscation of land were confronted by Israeli army and police. Six unarmed Palestinians were killed around a hundred wounded and hundreds arrested. Most of the information here on Land Day is from Wikipedia.
The numbers involved now seem so small compared to the over 32,000 murdered in Gaza in recent months but it was a significant event as the marches were the first since 1948 in which Palestinians had organised nationally together against Israeli policies with these marches and a national strike.
The protests were against plans to confiscate Arab land and to expand Jewish settlements in Galilee were a part of an increasing seizure of Arab land.
In response to the planned strike and marches there had been a much increased police and military presence in the area, with armoured vehicles and tanks being driven “along the unpaved roads of various villages of the Galilee“. Some of these military convoys were attacked by youths with stones and even, according to Israeli government sources, Molotov cocktails.
The Israeli government had declared the strikes and all demonstrations illegal and some Palestinian leaders had voted against supporting them, but these actions seem only to have hardened the resolve of the Palestinians.
According to the Wikipedia article, quoting an academic source, the events led to “a new sense of national pride, together with anger toward the state and police and sorrow over the dead protesters, developed among the Arab community in Israel.” And in 1988, Land Day was announced as “a Palestinian-Israeli civil national day of commemoration and a day of identification with Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza, to be marked by yearly demonstrations and general strikes.“
The Freedom, justice & equality for Palestinians protest in London close to the Israeli Embassy in Kensington on Land Day, 30th March 2019 came a year after the 2018 Land Day Protest in Gaza, also known as The Great March of Return. On that day in Gaza, 30,0000 Palestinians took part in a largely peaceful march some distance from the border fence. But Israeli snipers in safe positions opened fire on those who approached the fence, some to burn tyres or through objects at the fence. 17 Palestinians were killed, including five Hamas members, and more than 1,400 injured.
A small group of Zionists had come to oppose the protest
Smaller marches in Gaza continued at weekly intervals and by Land Day 2019 a total of over 250 mainly unarmed protesters had been killed and thousands injured.
It’s hard to look back on history to Land Day (and beyond) and not see how Zionist right wing policies have failed both Israel and Palestine and are continuing to fall all those in the area. Balfour is often blamed for kicking the situation off, but had his “it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine” ever been taken seriously we would not be where we are now.
A line of police protects the Zionist pen
The Oslo Accords were another start to a possible peace process, but again firmly opposed by the right-wing Zionist parties – and Israeli prime minister Yitshak Rabin was assassinated for signing them. Leaders opposed to the accords – Ariel Sharon and current Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu came to power.
This man shouts repeatedly ‘There are no Palestinians in Gaza!’
On Land Day 2019, a group of Zionist extremists had come along to the Palestinian protest to try and shout down those speaking. Police kept them a short distance away and with a relatively powerful public address system their efforts were largely inaudible.
Some of the Palestinians took a large Palestine flag and hid the group behind it until police persuaded them back and other protesters moved in to argue with and shout at them. Police tried to move the Palestinians away with little success while I was present
Taking part in the Palestinian protest were as usual many Jews, including the ultra-orthodox Neturei Karta who see Zionism as diametrically opposed to Judiasm.
Rev Paul Nicholson & More: Many of us particularly in London have fond memories of the Rev Paul Nicolson (1932-2020), a redoubtable campaigner for the poorer members of our community. He appears somehow to have passed Wikipedia by but you can read more about his life from many online sources. On Saturday 29th March 2014 I photographed the Thousand Mothers March in Tottenham he and Taxpayers Against Poverty organised demanding demanding living incomes, decent truly affordable homes for all and rejecting the bedroom tax, the housing benefit cap, unfair taxes, hunger and cold homes.
Huff Post tells us Nicolson worked in the champagne trade from 1965 until he made a dramatic career change in 1967 and was ordained by the Church of England as a Minster in Secular Employment. This meant he had to find a job in the real world and he got a job at the ICI HQ in Millbank as a personnel officer. In 1975 he took one of the first Employment Trununals challenging ICIs redundancy procedures and was later involved in supporting other trade unionists elsewhere. In 1979 he ventured into politics becoming an Independent councillor where he then lived in North Herts.
After a long fight against the Poll Tax in 1997 he founded the charity Zacchaeus 2000 Trust (Z2K), based in London, a group who were were deeply concerned about the impact of the Thatcher Government’s ‘poll tax’ – a fixed payment from every adult, regardless of their income or circumstances. Z2K became a registerd charity in 2005 and Nicolson left it in 2012 withdrawing to found Taxpayers Against Poverty (TAP) to avoid the restrictions on political campaigning by charities.
Perhaps his most important action was to commission Minimum Income Standards research from the Family Budget Unity in 1999, which formed the basis of the London Living Wage, with Mayor Ken Livingstone setting up the Greater London Authority Living Wage Unit in 2005.
What would have been an ever greater achievement would have been the adoption by the authorities of the Memorandum to the Prime Minister on Unaffordable Housing he commissioned by Professor Peter Ambrose in 2005. New Labour read it but did nothing, continuing to concentrate on unaffordable housing. Had Corbyn been allowed to win by the Labour Party in 2017 we would have seen changes in the right direction – but policies like there were why thy fought hard to prevent his election.
Of course I’ve not mentioned the best-known fact about Nicolson. It was while he was living in Turville near High Wycombe that he allowed the BBC to take over his church to film The Vicar of Dibley. Dawn French was playing Grealdine Grainger as the Vicar, but the real vicar was Paul Nicolson, though I think he kept away from the cameras.
He retired and settle in Tottenham, becoming welll known for his campaigning in the area – and for a number of arrests and trials. He had called this march and its demands were neatly summarise on the placard hanging from a string around his neck: ‘We march for Freedom from Hunger, Cold, Outrageous Rents – Fight for a Living Wage’.
You can read a short article on him in the Guardian which contains around 30 of his letters which were published by the newspaper as well as links to many more. He truly was a great campaigner.
I left the march as it passed Tottenham Police Station with Carole Duggan walking in front of a large banner with the face of Mark Duggan, her nephew, murdered by police in Tottenham in 2011.
I was on my way to two further protests that day which you can read about on My London Diary:
At Kilburn Square was a Kilburn Uniform Day protest where the Counihan Battlebus Housing For All campaign, along with the TUSC Against Cuts and TUSC were calling for rents to be capped and for everyone to have a home.
And in Parliament Square, staff and students from Oasis Academy Hadley in Ponders End were protesting against the Home Office plans to deport fellow A-Level Student Yashika Bageerathi to Mauritius. She came here with her mother and two younger siblings in 2012 after physical abuse from a relative and claimed asylum in 2012. The application has been rejected and the whole family are under threat of deportation.
Yashika is now 19 and the Home Office decided they could deport her on her own and she had been in Yarl’s Wood immigration removal centre since March 19th. She and her fellow students want her to be allowed to stay – at least until she has taken her exams this summer. The #FightForYashica petition had attracted over 171,000 signatures.
Attempts by the Home Office to deport Yashika failed before this protest when pressure from campaigners led to British Airways refusing to take here. Ahe had been booked into an Air mAURITIUS flight for the day following this protest, but an avalanche of tweets led to them refusing to take her.
Finally she was deported on her own in April 2014 and fortunately was helped there to take her A-levels, receiving the grades she needed to go on to university and end her brief period in the public eye.
Hands Off Our Schools – For around 30 years I was a full-time teacher and a part-time photographer, then spent a few years as a photographer and writer and part-time teacher before giving up the teaching completely. Most of the time I liked teaching – and even went on doing some after they stopped paying me – but at times it was extremely taxing.
All of my teaching, apart from a few photography workshops, was within our public education system, beginning in one of the largest comprehensive schools in the country, then moving on to a sixth form and community college where I taught students from 16 to 90 years old.
Over the thirty-odd years I taught a wide range of subjects and levels, though my main interest was in photography, and our A-Level results – thanks to some great colleagues – were probably the best in the country. Starting with science and chemistry I soon branched out into photography and later into various computer-related courses, including setting up a Cisco Network Academy as well as several administrative roles. O Levels, A Levels, AS Levels, CSE, City and Guilds, RSA, CEE, BTEC and probably a few more I’ve forgotten, as well as non-exam course including the dreaded PSE which had me teaching about sex, drugs and more, though not rock’n’roll.
Schools and teaching changed dramatically over the years of my career. When I began teaching was a profession, but by the time I left we were largely just cogs in the machine administered by punitive inspections and governed from the Ministry of Education. In my early career I worked long hours during term-time, preparing lessons and marking work as well as the actual class contact time but all of it – often more than 60 hours a week – was directed at the students I was teaching. By the time I left most teachers were slaving long hours to meet the dictates of Ofsted and the National Curriculum as well as teaching students.
Of course we had inspection in the old day, but it was conducted with a very different intention and by Her Majesty’s Inspectors who all knew the education system and were colleagues whose role was largely to make helpful suggestions for improvement. Ofsted brought in inspectors with tick boxes and often no knowledge of education other than as students in earlier life whose job was to catch teachers out, often for trivial things. Rather than to help and improve, their role was to penalise.
I had also been the NUT Rep where I worked for many years and am still a Retired Member of the union (now the NEU) so I had a particular interest in a protest by the NUT and ATL on Wednesday 23rd March when they met in the yard in front of Westminster Cathedral to march past the Education Ministry and make their views clear to Education Minister Nicky Morgan.
The teachers were marching against government plans to convert all schools to academies. There is no evidence that academies improve the educational results of children and the plans remove all democratic controls from education as well as side-lining parents.
Many of the protesters stopped outside the Department for Education to shout and to call for Nicky Morgan to resign before marching off for a rally in the nearby Emmanuel Hall on Marsham St. I didn’t join them there as I had other things to do that day.
Invasion of Iraq Protest 2003 – On 22nd March 2003 several hundred thousand people marched through London against the invasion of Iraq which had begun four days earlier on on 19th March 2003.
I’d missed the huge worldwide protests the previous month, when on the weekend of 15-16th February according to the BBC, always conservative (I think a euphemism for deliberately lying) on protest numbers reported that a million people had marched in London on the Saturday among between six and ten million in 60 countries around the world.
George Galloway
I’d come out of hospital the previous day, February 14th, and was still very weak following a minor heart operation that had gone slightly wrong. So I could only wave to my wife and elder son as they set off to the station to join the other 1.5 or 2 million marchers.
I think it was March 6th that my doctor signed me off as fit to work, though I was still not back to normal, but I covered my first protest after the op two days later, cutting down the weight of my camera bag as much as I could to two cameras and five lenses – all primes.
Peter Tatchell
I’d spent some of my time recovering getting used to the Nikon D100 I had bought just a few weeks before going into hospital. It was the first digital camera I’d owned capable of professional results, and the first with interchangeable lenses, though I only then owned one in a Nikon fitting I’d bought with the camera, a 24-85mm.
As well as taking colour pictures on the D100, I was also taking black and white film using a rangefinder camera, probably a Konica Hexar RF, the kind of camera Leica should have produced but never did. It featured automatic film advance and rewind and had accurate auto-exposure and has been described as “the most powerful M mount camera there is.” And very much cheaper than a Leica. The nine pictures from the day I sent to the library I was then using were all black and white 8×10″ prints from the pictures made with the Hexar RF, as in 2003 they were still not taking digital files.
Here you can see some of the digital images I took on 22nd March 2003 with that single zoom lens. It was the first zoom lens I had used for over 25 years, having been rather disappointed with a telephoto zoom I bought soon after I got my Olympus OM1. The image quality on the Nikon zoom – about the cheapest lens in their range and light and relatively small – was fine if not quite up to the Leica lenses on the Hexar, but it gave some distortion – barrel at 24mm and pincushion at 85mm.
But the Nikon D100 was a DX format camera, and on this the widest angle of view marked as 24mm actually was equivalent to 35mm on my film camera. Hardly wide-angle at all, and on film I was often working with 15mm or 21mm lenses.
The digital images are shown here as I put them on-line in 2003, and I think I would get the colour rather better now. And of course digital cameras have improved tremendously since then, with much better dynamic range, and the software for processing digital images is also far better. Also with download speeds generally much lower in 2003 they were put on line at a much poorer jpeg quality so they would download faster – and also spread over a number of pages with perhaps just half a dozen images on each page.
The marchers met on the Embankment and marched to a rally in Hyde Park. I think I only used the D100 before and on the march and photographed the rally entirely in black and white. Probably this was a decision I made, but it could have been because the battery ran out. But I think I had decided just to use it to photograph people on the march.
We now know that Blair lied to take us to war and made use of the fake “dodgy dossier” to swing the vote in Parliament. There were no “Weapons of Mass Destruction” in Iraq – and the UN had found none because there was nothing to find. But the US had been gearing up to attack over the past year and were not going to let the facts put them off, and Blair was their lap dog.
You can read more about the Invasion of Iraq on Wikipedia. While the US had prepared for war, they had made little or no preparation for what was to follow after President George W Bush declared the “end of major combat operations” on May 1st. Iraq was still in a mess when the US troops finally withdrew in 2011 and remains so today. It was as I wrote in 2003, the wrong war at the wrong time – and by 2023 over 60% of US citizens were prepared to state that the U.S did not make the right decision by invading Iraq.
More on the March 2003 page of My London Diary where you can also find pictures of another protest against the war on Saturday 29th March calling for more balanced coverage by the BBC.
Dolce & Gabbana, Sanctions & Poor Doors Thursday 19th March 2015 -protests at a Mayfair fashion store, the Department of Work and Pensions and another of Class War’s long series of protests at One Commercial St, Aldgate.
Dolce & Gabbana Boycott – Old Bond St
Domenico Dolce and his business partner Stefano Gabbana are apparently well known fashion designers and have a range of over 200 shops in plush areas of cities in 41 countries dedicated exclusively to selling their overpriced clothing. In London I think they have one in Sloane Square as well as the Mayfair store this protest took place outside.
For some reason our media treats anything to do with fashion as important news, and there were more photographers and TV crews packing the narrow pavement than protesters when I arrived making covering the protest difficult, particularly for those of us who prefer to work at close range.
The Peter Tatchell Foundation and the Out and Proud Diamond Group had called the protest in support of the international boycott over homophobic statements by the two designers. Almost certainly a much higher proportion of the shop’s customers are gay than in the general population and Dolce & Gabbana have profited massively from sales to the gay community over the years.
Unite protest against Benefit Sanctions – Caxton House, Westminster
Gill Thompson, whose brother died after being sanctioned holds her 211,822 signature petition
Unite here and at Job Centres around the country were having a day of action against punitive benefit sanctions on over 2m people which had led to increased poverty, misery and even death. They say the are a ‘grotesque cruelty’ and are often imposed for trivial reasons.
People have been sanctioned because postal delays meant they never got notification of an appointment they missed, or because they were 5 minutes late as a bus was cancelled. Often job centre staff are under pressure to issue sanctions and may be penalised if they do not sanction enough of their clients.
At the protest was Gill Thompson, whose brother, David Clapson, a diabetic ex-soldier, died after being sanctioned. She had brought her 211,822 signature petition calling for an inquiry into benefit sanctions to the protest to present to the DWP.
Among others who spoke was Rev Paul Nicholson of Taxpayers Against Poverty.
Poor Doors Protest Blocks Rich Door – One Commercial St, Aldgate
When Class War read a newspaper article about the separate entrances for rich residents and those in social housing in a new block at One Commercial Street in July 2014 they were disgusted and decided to launch a series of weekly protests outside the block every Thursday evening.
I missed the first of these but you can find reports of almost all of the rest of them, at least 29 in all, on My London Diary. For an overview you can read John Bigger’s article on Freedom in which he gives an insider’s view and assesses the impact of these protests, and the ‘zine’ I published Class War: Rich Door, Poor Door with over 200 photographs from 29 protests is still available. But though this is reasonably priced, postage costs roughly double this – so you really need to buy half a dozen copies or more and give or sell some to your friends. Be warned the print quality in what Blurb calls a MAGAZINE is pretty low.
The protest on 19th March was a lively one and the management at One Commercial Street had locked the rich door and were I think telling the rich residents of that section to enter and leave instead through the hotel at the Commercial Street side of the building. Class War held up banners and posters and some stuck stickers onto the glass of door and large windows. Someone lit a red smoke flare and threw it onto the pavement. There was a lot of loud chanting and some short speeches.
Some younger anarchists present took plastic barriers from the works taking place on the pavement and piled them in front of the locked door. Others took them onto the busy Whitechapel High Street and blocked the traffic.
A man and a woman who had been watching suddenly grabbed one of those present, threw him to the floor and handcuffed him, holding up their warrant cards to show they were plain clothes police. I didn’t recognise the man they arrested who was not one of the regular Class War protesters, and as usual they refused to answer questions about why he was being arrested. But their arrest effectively blocked the only lane of the road which the protesters had not already blocked.
More uniformed police arrived and dragged the arrested man away to a police van, removed the barriers and protesters from the road and the protest continued with Class War holding up flaming torches in front of the rich door.
There were a few more short speeches and then the protesters left as usual after about an hour, leaving their posters attached to the glass on the front of the building by Class War stickers.
In 2007 St Patrick’s Day, 17th March, fell on a Saturday and the parade in Willesden Green held on the day itself was well attended. I found it rather more interesting than the big London celebration with a march from Hyde Park to Trafalgar Square the following day, though I met some of the same peopleand groups again there.
It had been a busy day for me, starting with a protest about problems for young doctors in the NHS whose managers had managed to make a complete mess of their workforce planning with thousands of junior doctors likely to find themselves without a place to continue their careers in the coming August, and there being no consultant posts for thousands of registrars in 2010-11. Among the speakers was the then Leader of the Opposition, David Cameron who I found hard to photograph. More on this on My London Diary, with pictures starting here.
Next up was a protest four years after the invasion of Iraq, where 655,000 had by then died. My comment in 2007: “It is always easy to be right in hindsight, but the majority of the British people were right at the time of the invasion, and the government held its telescope firmly to its blind eye of mis-interpreted, faulty and partly invented intelligence. unfortunately both Britain and even more Iraq will suffer for Blair’s shameful mistake for many years to come.” And they are still suffering. It was a small protest in Trafalgar Square, mainly by Iraqis and there are just a few pictures here.
Also in Trafalgar Square, close to Canada House was a protest against the annual slaughter of seal cubs in Canada, clubbed to death in a way that “is certainly inhumane and a public relations disaster, with blood staining the ice and clubbed animals at times being skinned while still conscious.”
But then I took the underground to Willesden Green, where “a much happier event was taking place … the borough of Brent was celebrating St Patrick’s day with a parade and cultural activities.” Mainly but not exclusively Irish, but with many from Brent’s other communities taking part and watching.
“It’s great to photograph the people out on the street to celebrate, and wanting to have their pictures taken, and there was plenty to photograph, including of course St Patrick himself leading the procession, along with the mayor, Kensal Green councillor Bertha Joseph, in her second term as mayor.“
“She was brent’s first African Caribbean mayor in 1998. but of course the real stars of the event were the people of all ages who were taking part and having a fine time.”
“After the parade there was time for the culture – in the form of a pint of Guinness in a real Irish bar, after which I went to watch the band ‘Neck’ performing, and the people dancing to their music.“
It was a fine event, the band clearly setting out not just to play but to entertain the audience and doing so in great style.
Whittington, Syria and St Patrick – Saturday 16th March 2013 saw me travelling around London to cover three events, starting at a march against hospital cuts, then a march supporting the Syrian revoltuion on its second anniversary and finally an Irish parade on the day before St Patrick’s Day.
Whittington Hospital March Against Cuts – Highbury & Islington
Dick Whittington, more formally Sir Richard Whittington (c1354 – 1423) was four times Lord Mayor of London and did a lot for the medieval city, including financing drainage systems in its poorer areas and setting up a hospital ward for unmarried mothers and leaving his considerable fortune to set up a charity which still 600 years later helps those in need.
He made his fortune as a mercer, importing luxury fabrics such as silk and velvet and exporting English woollen cloth and later as a money lender to wealthy noblemen and kings. It isn’t clear if he ever had a cat, but the legend about him fleeing London with one and turning back when he heard Bow Bells from Highgate Hill first made it to print in 1612.
The Whittington Stone was placed at the foot of Highgate Hill in 1821, though earlier it had been the base of a cross there; it only gained a cat on top in 1964. But Whittington’s name is remembered in a number of pubs across the country, including The Whittington & Cat on Highgate Hill, which closed in 2014. Islington Council and local residents fought to keep it, and prevented its demolition in 2012 by declaring it to be an asset of community value, but it became a flooring shop.
More importantly Whittington’s name became that of the major hospital formed when earlier hospitals on three nearby sites were amalgamated when the National Health Service was formed in 1948.
Three years before this march, huge local oppositin had forced the cancellation of plans to end Accident and Emergency, Paediatrics, Maternity and Intensive Care at the Whittington Hospital, but now it was threatened again by a new hospital trust with plans to reduce maternity services, close wards, provide fewer beds for the elderly, cut 570 jobs privatise some services and sell off around a third of the site, closing all onsite accommodation for nursing staff.
I met several thousand protesters close to Highbury & Islington Station where they were preparing to march to a rally outside the hospital. Among those marching were local MPs, Green Party Leader Natalie Bennett, Bruce Kent and various celebrity supporters of the campaign, as well as the truly remarkable Hetty Bower, born in 1905, who became a pacifist at the time of the ‘Great War’, and took part in the 1926 General Strike.
You can read more about the event and see my pictures of many of the marchers on My London Diary. I left the march shortly after it started to go to my next event. Whittington Hospital March Against Cuts.
Syria – Two Years Fight for Freedom
I arrived outside the Syrian Embassy in Belgrave Square while the rally before the march was taking place with members of the Syrian Community in Britain speaking.
Most of the speeches and chanting were not in English, and the Free Syria campaign appears to have little support from the British left who might have been expected to support their freedom fight. There were a few protests at the start, but often confused and mainly opposing any involvement in Syria by British forces.
The Syrian revolution against the Assad regime had also received little actual support from the UK Government and US support seemed halfhearted. When Assad began using chemical weapons against the Syrian rebel held areas there was strong condemnation but no action and any threats soon melted away once Russia became involved in supporting Assad.
One of the placards carried by marchers included a question which now seems particularly relevant in view of what has been happening in Gaza: ‘Hey World, How Many Kids Should Be Killed Before You Do Something?’
I walked with the marchers on their way to Downing Street as far as the Hyde Park underpass where it looked impressive as it made its way under the Hyde Park underpass, fairly densely packed and with flags waving it spread wide across the road, stretching back into Wilton Place over 200 yards away. Then left for Willesden Green.
For several years I had enjoyed the Brent St Patrick’s Day parade, sometimes going together with friends including John Benton-Harris who had photographed St Patrick’s Day here and across the USA as well as in Ireland over many years. The parade in Brent, usually on the day itself, had always seemed rather more authentically Irish than the larger London parade held on the nearest Sunday since Ken Livingstone introduced it in 2002 and I made some pictures.
Brent Council had a fine record of supporting cultural events celebrating its various communities including the Irish, but with government cuts since 2010 no longer had the funds to do so.
This year too, the main London event was taking place the following day, St Patrick’s Day itself, so the Brent event was on the day before. So the crowds were rather thinner than in previous years, and the poor weather may have put some off too.
