Posts Tagged ‘Tony Blair’

London Pride & Climate Change Rally – 2007

Sunday, June 30th, 2024

London Pride & Climate Change Rally; My working day on Saturday 30th June 2007 began at a rather damp Baker Street where people were meeting for the London Pride Parade and I was able to wander freely and take photographs. I left before the parade moved off and went to Parliament Square where a rally reminded Gordon Brown – then prime minister for 3 days – that climate change remains the major challenge facing the world – and the new government.


London Pride Parade – Baker Street

London Pride & Climate Change Rally

There seemed to be only two things that distinguished the 2007 Pride from the previous year’s event. One was the weather and so many of the pictures are of people holding umbrellas.

London Pride & Climate Change Rally

The second was a large group in the self-styled ‘Bird Parade‘, the ‘Bird Club‘ with their messages including ‘Aren’t Birds Brilliant‘ and ‘Femme Invisibility – So last Year‘.

London Pride & Climate Change Rally

There were quite a few overhanging shop fronts and other places that people could shelter under but taking pictures mainly involved me staind in the rain and getting rather wet.

London Pride & Climate Change Rally

I’m not afraid of rain but cameras and lenses need to kept dry. I really needed an assistant with an umbrella but I was working on my own. Its difficult to hold an umbrella and a camera and while I’ve tried various special plastic camera protectors none really solve the problem.

The cameras I use are reasonably water resistant and given he occasional wipe with a cloth and keeping them under my jacket when not in use are fine. But lenses need to have a glass front element to let the light in, and this acts as a powerful magnet for raindrops. Long lenses can have lens hoods which protect them, but when like me you work with wide and ultra-wide lenses they are totally ineffectual, except for allowing me to walk around with a chamois leather balled up into them. But of course I have to hold this clear to frame, focus and take the image, and those raindrops too often manage to sneak their way in that second or so.

I’ve shared too often my thoughts on the presence of corporates and military groups in Pride to bother to say more.

But at least there were some, like Peter Tatchell determined to retain it as a protest, with his wedding cake placard and poster ‘END THE BAN ON GAY MARRIAGE’.

Many more photographs beginning here


Climate Change Rally – Parliament Square

It was still raining for the rally in Parliament Square and my favourite mermaid seemed to be in her natural habitat unless I carefully kept wiping the lens front.

But there was some shelter under the trees and rather fewer people had managed to attend the protest called at short notice by the Campaign Against Climate Change.

Under Blair’s government UK carbon emissions had risen by 2%, but it was now clear to scientists around the world that we needed to drastically cut them. Blair had resigned as New Labour leader on 24 June 2007 and Gordon Brown had become Prime Minister only three days before this protest on 27 June 2007.

Back in 2007 it was clear that climate change remained the major challenge facing the world – and the new government. But in 2008 we had the financial crash and Gordon Brown was diverted into saving the bankers and successive governments since have failed to make the kind of radical changes that are needed to save the planet.

In 2007 I wrote “if you ain’t got a planet, you ain’t in business is the simple message, though some of the speakers had some rather more complex graphs and charts. Blair and Brown were only there in effigy, but we did have a rather more convincing mermaid to warn about the dangers of rising sea levels.” Of course sea levels are only one aspect of the problem with our increasing climate instability and other effects of global heating. The need to take action is even more important for our next government – and for all governments around the world.

more pictures


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Invasion of Iraq Protest 2003

Friday, March 22nd, 2024

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.

Invasion of Iraq Protest 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.

Invasion of Iraq Protest 2003
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.

Invasion of Iraq Protest 2003

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.

Invasion of Iraq Protest 2003
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.


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All photographs on this page are copyright © Peter Marshall.
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Armistice Day Protests 2006

Saturday, November 11th, 2023

Armistice Day Protests – Today I hope to be photographing a huge protest calling for a ceasefire in Gaza and peace in the Middle East as it makes its way from Hyde Park to the US Embassy. It’s an event some Tory politicians have tried to arouse controversy around, aided by some of the media in their lies. Armistice Day has always been an occasion for protests for peace and making it out as some huge national celebration we all share in is untrue as this post shows.

Armistice Day Protests

Both the BBC and the Tories seized on the fact that some people at a protest in London shouted ‘Jihad!’ but lie in saying it was an offshoot from the huge march taking place in London calling for peace and justice for Palestine.

It’s a lie that the BBC continues to let them promulgate without question, although their journalists must surely know that this was at an entirely separate protest organised by Hizb ut-Tahrir Britain, an Islamic fundamentalist political organisation dedicated to the establishment of an Islamic caliphate, whose lead banner at their protest read “Muslim Armies! Rescue the People of Palestine!”.

Armistice Day Protests

I’ve photographed many protests by Hizb ut-Tahrir in London since I first came across them in 2004 and they are very different and entirley separate from those organised by mainstream Muslim organisations, Stop The War, CND and the others now leading the protests by hundreds of thousands across the country calling for an end to the killing of civilians – whether Palestinian or Israelis – in Palestine and Israel. Most are particularly enraged by the killing of so many children in Gaza by air strikes which Israel claims are targeted, but are targeted on places where many people live and so die in them.

I think most of us who march – and the many more who support the marches but are unable to attend – want peace and the justice that can only come if there is a thriving country where Palestinians can live normal lives in peace and not under military rule and an apartheid regime.

Armistice Day Protests

Probably that can only come about with a two-state solution and a massive world aid programme to restore the incredible damage in Gaza as well as establishing rational borders for Palestine with the removal of many of the illegal settlements.

I grew up in a largely working class area on the outskirts of London in the 1950s, and then I think it was true that virtually the whole of the country paused to celebrate and commemorate the armistice, joining in with the minute’s silence in schools, shops, works and offices and traffic on the roads coming to a halt.

Armistice Day Protests

But even then relatively few joined in the military style parades on Remembrance Sunday, with most of my friend’s parents who had fought in WW2 having had more than enough of that kind of thing. My attendance was compulsory as a Wolf Cub and Boy Scout but I resented it and my freezing legs as cold November winds blew up my shorts – and the derision from friends who weren’t members. And by the time I was a Senior Scout we collectively refused to take part.

The idea that Armistice Day is not a suitable day for a peaceful protest calling for an end to the fighting and peace in the Middle East seems to me to be beyond absurd – yet again is taken seriously and promoted by the BBC. Armistice Day has I think always seen protests for peace – and November 11th 2006 was no exception.

On that day I began on Park Lane, where there was a brief ceremony in front of the sculpture commemorating animals who died in war in the central area there at 11 am. There were only a small group there, wearing poppies they described as purple, though to me they seemed more lilac or mauve. In 2018, the Peace Pledge Union sold 122,385 white poppies: more than any year since white poppies were first worn in 1933, and many keep their white poppies to wear in following years, as unlike the red poppies their sale is not intended to raise funds but they are simply worn as a symbol of remembrance and peace.

I moved on to Grosvenor Square and the US Embassy where School Students Against The War had scheduled a ‘die-in’. Unfortunately only around 20 had turned up for it – probably now many work on Saturdays or prefer to enjoy a lie-in at home.

Another short walk took me to Marks & Spencer on Oxford Street, where a protest was taking place as a part of the fourth International Week of Action against the Apartheid Wall in Palestine.

Fight Racism, Fight Imperialism who had organised this event also hold regular vigils outside M&S every Thursday evening, calling for a boycott of the company as part of a wider Boycott Israel campaign. M&S sell goods including those coming illegally from the occupied territories of Palestine and give financial and moral support to Israel.

School Students Against The War came from the US Embassy to join them and staged their die-in on the wide pavement in front of M&S. This certainly generated a great deal of attention and they made some short speeches to the the crowds milling past M&S before marching off down Oxford Street with their megaphones and banner. They staged a second ‘die-in’ further down the street, again attracting the attention of shoppers, although perhaps surprisingly, not the police none of whom seemed to be around.

I went on to Trafalgar Square where I hoped to photograph the fountains filled with red poppies, but I arrived a little late to find a man in waders fishing them out with a shrimp net. It was bizarre if not surreal, although not quite what I’d been hoping for.

My main event of the day was taking place on Whitehall, at the Cenotaph. Not the military parade ‘at the eleventh hour‘ which I had refused to cover, but a commemoration by some of the families of servicemen killed in Iraq.

Led by a piper they marched solemnly to stand in front of it, while they came up to read out the names of the 121 dead British servicemen killed in the Iraq war. A small selection of names of Iraqi civilians killed was also read out. It’s difficult to estimate the exact number who have died, and more deaths have occured since 2006. The US Brown University Watson Institute now states “we know that between 280,771-315,190 have died from direct war related violence caused by the U.S., its allies, the Iraqi military and police, and opposition forces from the time of the invasion through March 2023.”

A deputation then took a letter in to Downing Street for Prime Minister Tony Blair who had misled parliament and ignored the largest protest ever seen in the UK to take the country into a misguided invasion together with the USA.

Among those taking part in what was an extremely moving ceremony were Rose Gentle of Military Families Against The War, and others who have lost sons or partners in Iraq, including Ann Lawrence, Roger Bacon, Natasha Mclellan, Maureen Bacon as well as Lance Corporal George Solomou, from the London Regiment of the Territorial Army who refused to go to fight in Iraq. Families of some serving soldiers also took part.

Also there and supporting the event among others were Kate Hudson of CND, Yvonne Ridley and Lindsey German of Respect and Stop The War, fashion designer Katherine Hamnett, and Jeremy Corbyn MP.

This was an event that attracted considerable media attention; there is a delicate balance between intruding on private grief, but those there had chosen to make their grief public, and we had to record it for them.

More Pictures on My London Dairy – Scroll down the page there for links.


At War With Iraq – 2003

Wednesday, April 5th, 2023

At War With Iraq

20 years ago we were at war with Iran, despite the largest ever protests in this country. I’d missed the big protest on 15 February when 1.5 million people were on the streets of London – including the rest of my family, as I’d only come out of hospital the previous day and was still very weak following slight complications after a minor operation following a heart attack. But I’d covered all the main protests in London before that, as well as taking part in our local protests every Friday night.

At War With Iraq

Of course it hadn’t just been in London that there had been protests that weekend, and there were others in at least 600 major cities around the world – the largest of all in Rome – combining to make this “the largest protest event in human history” with the BBC estimating around 6-10 million taking part around the world. And in the two and a half months leading up to the invasion on March 20th there are thought to have been 3,000 protests involving 36 million people around the world – though I think even that number fails to include small local protests like our series on Staines Bridge.

At War With Iraq

Of course it had been clear for at least a year that the USA would go ahead with its invasion whatever and had been preparing its military for it. More at stake was whether other countries would join them, and for us whether Britain would. There seems to have been no sensible reason why we should, but Tony Blair had made a promise to George Bush and was prepared to lie and mislead the country and parliament to keep it.

At War With Iraq

The major pretext for the invasion was to disarm Iraq of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), but the UN inspection team led by Hans Blix had found no evidence that Iraq had any – and none were found following the invasion.

The USA also claimed it was to end Saddam Hussein’s support for terrorism, and US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had ordered the Pentagon to make plans for the invasion before the dust had settled on September 11th 2001 despite being told that the attack had been carried out by al-Qaeda with no cooperation from Iraq.

Finally the US had claimed they were “going in to free the Iraqi people“, but they appear to have done little or no planning as to what could replace Saddam Hussein to keep the country from descending into chaos, a process they accelerated after their victory by disbanding the Iraqi army and disbarring from public office all of the civil service, teachers and others in public sector jobs for whom membership of the Ba’ath Party had been obligatory.

The US Institute of Peace has a useful timeline of events in Iraq since the war which has an introduction which ends “Iraq suffered through a civil war, political turmoil, widespread corruption, sectarian tensions and an extremist insurgency that seized a third of the country. Iraq has evolved through four rocky phases.”

The coalition forces – three quarters from the USA, a quarter from the UK and a handful of military from Australia and Poland, with a little support from Iraqi Kurds were still busy fighting across Iraq on April 5th, capturing Baghdad on the 9th and the war ended on May 1st, though US forces remained in occupation until 2011. Saddam was only found and captured in December 2003 and was eventually tried, found guilty of crimes against humanity and executed on 30th December 2006.

Of course the Iraq War has also had a great influence on British politics. In particular it has led to a huge distrust for politicians and our political system because both of the fact that our prime minister and other leading politicians in both parties lied to us, but the failure of huge protests over serveral years to have any effect on policy showed a failure to take any notice of the views of the people. Politics needs to be a politics of consensus and the Iraq war showed it was one of disdain.

Here’s the short piece I wrote on My London Diary in April 2003 – with minor correcttions of capitalisation etc:

April started with the country at war, invading Iraq together with the USA.

In Saturday 5th I went to a march to protest against this and to call for proper reporting of the events in the media, especially the BBC.

I walked to the march past the Houses of Parliament and a small group of protesters in Whitehall who were pointing out the number of Iraqi civilians already killed by the allied forces.

The main thrust of the demonstration now was that the civilian population of Iraq should be respected. The use of weapons such as depleted uranium shells and cluster bombs will mean the deaths continue for generations after the end of the fighting.

The march started opposite the old BBC building in Portland Place and went to Grosvenor Square, close to the US Embassy. There were perhaps five thousand marchers, and several hundred police surrounding them most of the time. As the speakers pointed out, it was difficult not to see the war as a US takeover of the country when plans were already in place for Americans to run the country after the war.

The killing of Iraqis must stop, and rapid progress should be made to hand control of the country back to its people.


Guantanamo – America’s Shameful Prison

Tuesday, January 11th, 2022

Amnesty International protesters close to the US Embassy

January 11th was for quite a few years a busy day for protests; it marked the anniversary of the setting up by the United States of a military prison as a torture camp at the disputed US Guantanamo Bay naval camp on the island of Cuba.

Prisoners’ had taken turns in the cage overnight

Set up in the aftermath of the 9/11 attack as a part of George W Bush’s ‘War on Terror’, the camp and the activities which took place there destroyed any final vestige of higher moral ground America could lay claim to in its role of world policeman, something that its various largely clandestine involvements in various South American American coups and activities in the Middle East and elsewhere had already largely laid waste.

Guantanamo is still there, still open, though the great majority of the 779 men brought there have been released. Most were totally innocent, victims of a US policy of offering $5,000 rewards for the capture of ‘terrorists’ to Pakistani and Afghan groups, who took the money for turning in anyone they felt would get them the money.

In October 2021, there were still 39 men held at Guantanamo, including ten who had long been cleared for release. Very few of those held over the years have faced trails trials and very few were involved in any acts of terrorism. Bush and Obama acted slowly but together released well over 700 of the prisoners, but Trump only released one, effectively stopping the process.

Protests continue in the UK, but on a much smaller scale, particularly since the last British resident, Shaker Aamer was released without charge or trial after 13 years of imprisonment and torture in 2015.

In 2008 Amnesty International organised a large protest in Grosvenor Square, a few yards from the US Embassy, though the street in front of the embassy had been closed to prevent protests there. They brought with them two cages, similar to those in which the prisoners were imprisoned outdoors at Guantanamo, with a large group of people wearing the orange jumpsuits which they are made to wear there. Protesters dressed as guards in military style uniforms harassed the ‘prisoners’ interrogating them and threatening them with violence and with aggressive-looking dogs.

From Grosvenor Square I went up to the Regents Park Mosque, where activists from Cageprisoners and the London Guantánamo Campaign, some also in those orange jumpsuits and one manacled hand and foot. There they were handing out leaflets to those attending Friday Prayers.

Later I went with them to Paddington Green Police station, where terrorist suspects are detained and questioned in this country. They were going on to continue to protest in Parliament Square, but I returned first to the US Embassy, where the London Catholic Worker Community was holding a two hour vigil closed to the corner of the Embassy, holding placards and lighting candles for those still held and several who had died there. Several were alleged to have committed suicide, but later evidence emerged strongly suggesting they had died during torture.

The final event of the day was a rally in Parliament Square organised by Cageprisoners and the London Guantánamo Campaign with a number of speakers including Victoria Brittain, former Guantanamo prisoner Moazzam Begg, laywers including Gareth Peirce, Bruce Kent, Yvonne Ridley and Jean Lambert MEP.

It was dark, cold and wet, but those present were cheered by the announcement at the end of the rally that Scotland Yard were investigating allegations of 14 criminal offences committed by Tony Blair and Lord Goldsmith and others which resulted in the deaths of Iraqi citizens during the armed invasion and occupation of Iraq.

Unfortunately and predictably these investigations came to nothing, and though the Chilcot report was damning in parts, Blair not only got off scot-free but this New Year was awarded a knighthood. A few days ago one of several petitions to have his “Knight Companion of the Most Noble Order of the Garter” rescinded reached over a million signatures. Mine was one of them.

Six years of Guantanamo: Amnesty
London Guantanamo Campaign / Cageprisoners
Guantanamo – London Catholic Worker
Guantanamo – Parliament Square Rally


Blair lied, Millions Died – 6th July 2016

Tuesday, July 6th, 2021

Labour scraped in at Batley and Spen by a few hundred votes, which was enough to take the pressure of calls for a replacement for Keir Starmer off the boil for at least a few months. And for the media to call upon some of the more grisly figures from the Labour past to come on and repeat their vilification of Jeremy Corbyn, and call for a return to those policies which had made Labour – New Labour – unelectable.

It had started with a great burst of support and enthusiasm in May 1997, when we really believed that ‘Things Can Only Get Better‘, but soon the disillusion set in. One of the major early problems came with PFI, launched by John Major in 1992, but taken up and expanded greatly under New Labour. Private companies were contracted to build and manage major public projects, enabling some very flashy announcements but failing to say we would be paying through the nose for them for many, many years – and in many cases for another 20 years or more from now.

‘Blair’ and ‘Bush’s’ bloody hands – and the cash.

It essentially privatised many public projects, with often poor negotiating skills by civil servants unschooled in such matters resulting in excessive profits for the companies involved. There were many critics of PFI at the time, and in 2011 a critical Treasury report. In 2018 then Chancellor Philip Hammond stopped any new PFI projects.

PFI has been particularly disastrous for the NHS, causing huge financial problems and leading to the cutting down an closures of hospitals. The 127 PFI schemes had a total repayment cost (according to Wikipedia) of £2.1m in 2017 and continuing to rise until 2029. In 2012 seven NHS Trusts had to be given emergency financial support as even with cuts they were unable to meet their PFI repayments.

But, as the recent death of Donald Rumsfield reminded us, the most clear public failure of New Labour was to support what was largely his personal vendetta in the disastrous invasion of Iraq. Richard Wolffe, writing in he Guardian headlined his article ‘Rumsfeld’s much-vaunted ‘courage’ was a smokescreen for lies, crime and death‘ – and Blair colluded whole-heartedly in the deception, with the ‘dodgy dossier’ and various other statements and decisions. His was a special relationship with Bush most politely described as brown-nosing.

This of course is Britain, so instead of taking action we eventually had an inquiry, with Chilcot taking over seven years to allow the long grass to grow. Set up by Gordon Brown in 2009, six years after the invasion, it produced its report on 6 July 2016, when the protest here took place. Wikipedia quotes Richard Norton-Taylor of The Guardian as describing it as “an unprecedented, devastating indictment of how a prime minister was allowed to make decisions by discarding all pretence at cabinet government, subverting the intelligence agencies, and making exaggerated claims about threats to Britain’s national security”.

A banner uderestimates Blairs crime – there were millions who died

Clearly Blair was a war criminal. But of course no legal action followed – and that war criminal and proven liar continues to be invited to give his opinions in the media – and there are even those who suggest he should be brought back to lead the Labour Party. Financially he has done well out of his time as Prime Minister – and probably even better from his property investments, with an estimated net worth according to some of £100m. But as the placards say, ‘Blair lied, Millions Died’ and if there was any justice he should have gone to jail.

More at Blair lied, Millions Died – Chilcot


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