Trade Justice Parade

Trade Justice Parade: The Trade Justice Parade on Saturday 3rd November 2001 was one of the early events I put on My London Diary, but then I only posted two photographs from it along with a short text. The pictures there were in black and white although I had taken both in colour.

The images were also rather small, and here I’ll upload some larger versions of a few others that I took at the event. A wide range of organisations took part, calling for changes in trading arrangements in the world to make trade fairer for countries in the majority world. Agreements such as GATT, the post-war General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and the World Trade Organisation had worked well for the richer countries and for multinational companies but had led to a situation where many poorer countries were making huge debt repayments, often greater than the international aid they were getting.

Naomi Klein and Sergio Cobo, Trafalgar Square, 3 Nov 2001

The protest gathered south of the river in Geraldine Mary Harmsworth Park next to the Imperial War Museum and marched across Westminster Bridge and up Whitehall to a rally in Trafalgar Square. Back in 2001 I could only make some rather small and poor colour scans, but I’ve tidied these up a little and will post some here, along with the two black and white images. I hope soon to get around to re-scanning my colour images from the early years of this century at high resolution.

Here is the short piece I wrote on My London Dairy back in 2001:

The Trade Justice Parade was a serious event but also we were having some fun. The World Trade Organisation isn’t at all amusing, but i loved the t-shirt that said ‘WTO – unsuitable for anyone with a conscience’.