Goodbye and Good Riddance – March 2023: Continuing from yesterday’s post some more pictures from 2013, from my albums on Facebook from March 2003.
More pictures from these and other protests in March 2023 in my Facebook Albums.
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London’s Industrial Heritage – London Photos
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Today, 18th march is the UN Anti-Racism Day, and in 2017 it was also a Saturday, and tens of thousands marched through London, starting as they will today outside the BBC and ending with a large rally in Westminster.
Today’s march, as in 2017, is organised by Stand Up to Racism, Unite Against Fascism and Love Music, Hate Racism and the TUC and supported by many other groups, including football fans from around the country who will be wearing team colours.
This years march is perhaps even more important, with the UK Government pursuing clearly racist policies against immigrants in last year’s Nationality and Borders Act, its attempt to deport refugees to Rwanda and Suella Braverman’s recently announced Illegal Migration Bill.
Football fans have been energised by the BBC’s reaction to Gary Lineker’s tweet. He was clearly correct in observing the hostile anti-refugees language used by the government to language used in Germany in the 1930s. They say the government are trying to stir up division and racism to deflect attention from their multiple crises and turn refugees into scapegoats.
Unfortunately it isn’t just the government, but also the official opposition who continue to up the ante over immigration, refusing to stand up to the government with any real attempt to improve our treatment of refugees and asylum seekers. Real opposition to racism has been left to a few increasingly isolated figures on the left of the party – including many of those who have been ejected for supposed anti-semitism, increasingly being used to expel Jewish members who support the Palestinian people. And of course left to footballers or former footballers.
Even Theresa May, who the 2017 march was strongly opposed to for promoting racist measures against immigrants and in particular Muslims in concert with Donald Trump has found Braverman’s latest proposals which will break international law on the human rights of migrants a step too far.
The 2023 march organisers say:
In Britain we face a crisis-ridden government attempting to use racism to make ordinary people pay for the cost of living crisis. The ‘Rwanda plan’, the Nationality and Borders Act, racist deportations and the hostile environment for refugees and migrants are all about divide and rule.
The government deny the reality of institutional racism – despite massively disproportionate deaths in black communities during the pandemic – and the reality of deaths in police custody, racist stop and search and discrimination across society.
Internationally we are seeing the growth of the racist and fascist right and an alarming rise in Islamophobia, antisemitism, Sinophobia, anti East/South East Asian racism and attacks on Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities.
Despite a rail strike this Saturday I hope to be there later today, again taking photographs and marching with many thousands of others.
Much more from the 2017 march and rally on My London Diary: Thousands March Against Racism.
March 21st was established by the United Nations as a World Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination on the sixth anniversary of police opening fire and killing 69 peaceful protesters at Sharpeville, South Africa on March 21, 1960. Protests in the UK for UN Anti Racism Day take place close to the date and there will be large national marches today, 19th March in London and Glasgow and tomorrow in Cardiff. Today’s post is about events in London on March 19th 2016.
Thousands met at the BBC to march through London to a rally in Trafalgar Square in an event organised by Stand Up to Racism against racism, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism and fascism and to make it clear that refugees are welcome here.
Prominent on the march were Black Lives Matter protesters, wearing red in support of the ‘Justice for Sarah Reed’ campaign, chanting loudly “Say Her Name, Sarah Reed” and “Black Lives Matter”. She had died aged 31 in Holloway prison where she was held waiting for psychiatric reports following an attack on her, possibly an attempted rape, by fellow patient in a psychiatric hospital for which she was arrested and charged with grievious bodily harm with intent.
An inquest decided she had killed herself when her mind was unsound, and that unacceptable delays in medical care contributed to her death. Clearly too the prison staff had failed in their duty of care. Four years earlier she had been falsely arrested for shoplifting and seriously assaulted by the arresting officer who was later convicted and dismissed from the Metropolitan police for the offence.
There were also a number of groups on the march working with refugees trapped in the camps in Calais and Dunkirk, and some of those had lines drawn across their lips to remember some of the refugees on hunger strike there who have sewn up their lips.
Although the deaths of many refugees drowned in crossing the Mediterranean have led to widespread sympathy among the British people, there has been no compassion shown by our government, who have increasingly been driven by racists and bigots who oppose Britain taking in any refugees and want to abandon the Universal Declaration of Human Rights the UK helped to draw up in 1947-8.
There were a small number of these bigots, members of the far-right group ‘Britain First’ in their para-military uniforms, who came to shout insults and make offensive gestures at the marchers as they went through Piccadilly Circus. A large ring of police kept them away from the marchers and protected them from any attack by anti-fascists.
Stand Up to Racism – Refugees Welcome march
At the end of the march there was a rally in Trafalgar Square, with a long list of speakers. They included Vanessa Redgrave and Jeremy Hardy, MP Diane Abbott, MEPs Claude Moraes and Jean Lambert, journalist Journalist, writer Michael Rosen, leading trade unionists Dave Ward CWU, Christine Blower NUT, and Sally Hunt UCU, Marilyn Reed the mother of Sarah Reed, Stephanie Lightfoot-Bennett and Marcia Rigg, Maz Saleem daughter of the Mohammed Saleem who was killed in a racist attack, Talha Ahmad of the Muslim Council of Britain and a young refugee from Iraq.
Australian human rights protesters were holding protests at embassies around the world, including the Australian High Commission in London to condemn the Australian government’s racist immigration policy and treatment of refugees.
Refugees who try to claim asylum in Australia are locked up and detained indefinitely in contradiction to international law on remote Pacific Islands including Manus and Nauru in detention camps run by Serco and will never be allowed to resettle in Australia. The Australian protesters were joined by some of those from Movement for Justice which has led protests against the UK immigration detention centres, including that at Yarl’s Wood, run like the Australian camps by Serco, where detainees, also held indefinitely, have been sexually abused and denied proper health treatment. At least one prisoner in the Australian camps has been beaten to death by the prison guards.
Australians protest on UN Anti-Racism day
Finally on 19th March I went to Parliament Square for another human rights related event, where Disabled People Against Cuts (DPAC) were celebrating the resignation of Iain Duncan Smith, one of the chief architects of the brutal Tory welfare policy that has caused them so much suffering, harm and deaths to disabled people.
Though they were pleased that IDS has gone, his policies remained, and his successor, Stephen Crabb, proved top be equally be bigoted and lacking compassion and any understanding of the needs of the poor and disabled.
DPAC’s ‘IDS Resignation Party’
More on all these events on My London Diary:
DPAC’s ‘IDS Resignation Party’
Australians protest on UN Anti-Racism day
Refugees Welcome Rally
Stand Up to Racism – Refugees Welcome march
Fukushima, No to Racism & No to Assad. Three years ago on Saturday 16th March 2019 people marched in London 8 years after the Fukushima nuclear disaster, still spreading radioactivity, took part in a large demonstration on UN Anti-Racist Day chanting ‘No to Fascism’ and ‘Refugees are welcome’ here while Syrians calling for a peaceful, democratic Syria marched to a rally in Whitehall on the 8th anniversary of the start of the Syrian revolution.
Anti-nuclear campaigners met outside the Japanese Embassy on the eight anniversary of the meltdown of three nuclear reactors at Fukushima. Little progress has been made on cleaning up the site and large amounts of radioactive material are still being released.
50,000 people are still refugees and many are being given no alternative but to move back into areas still heavily contaminated. The clean-up is proving much more difficult than anticipated.
From the Japanese Embassy they marched down Piccadilly, where I left them to go to another protest, returning later to photograph them at a rally opposite Parliamen.
Park Lane was packed at the start of the march on UN Anti-Racism Day to show solidarity with the victims of racist attacks and oppose Islamophobic hate crimes and racist policies in the UK and elsewhere.
The march was joined by a wide range of groups, all agreed that ‘Refugees Are Welcome Here’ and opposed to fascism and racism. Many held large posters denouncing racist leaders from around the world, including Presidents Trump and Bolsonaro as well as fascist party leaders.
The march to a rally in Whitehall had an added significance after the previous day’s Christchurch mosque attack by a white supremacist terrorist who killed 51 people and injured 40.
I left the anti-racist march on Piccadilly and walked and ran back up to Marble Arch, close to which I met Syrians opposed to the Assad regime who were marching through London from Paddington Green to a rally in Whitehall on the 8th anniversary of the start of the Syrian revolution.
Unfortunately their revolution was sold out by Western leaders who failed to stand up to the Russian support for President Assad and his authoritarian regime, ending any real hope of Assad being defeated and a peaceful democratic Syria.
Although the fight continues in Syria, and there remain some autonomous areas such as Rojava, the revolution as a whole seems doomed to failure at least for the foreseeable future.
8th Anniversary of the Syrian Revolution
More on My London Diary about the three events:
8th Anniversary of the Syrian Revolution
No to Racism, No to Fascism
Remember Fukushima 8 years On
Before the march moved off from Park Lane, a group came to pose at the front carrying posters of politicians from countries across much of the world with the message ‘Wanted for Racism’, including President Bolsonaro from Brazil and the others in the picture above. It seemed rather strange to me to find that the UK representative, next to Donald Trump, was not Theresa May or even Nigel Farage but the unelected Tommy Robinson, who I hope will shortly be serving another jail sentence to add to his three previous terms.
It was of course Theresa May who set up the ‘hostile environment’ in her years at the Home Office, encouraging the demonisation of foreigners in general and sending out vans against them, as well as immigration raids, greatly beefing up the policies which had begun under Straw, Blumkett, Reid and the others. Policies which encouraged racist civil servants and the setting up of barriers including mountains of required paperwork which led to the deportation of many from the WIndrush generation.
Grenfell is another reason for nominating May. Although she made appropriate noises at the time of the fire, actions since then have largely been a way of protecting those responsible rather than seeking to bring them to justice. Her promises to those who survived the fire have not been met – over two years later there are still some who have not been found new homes.
There were many other issues raised by those on the march, particularly over the increasing Islamophobia across the country – for which Robinson must take a great deal of the blame, having inspired some to commit atrocities. He has also allied himself with Zionists groups against those calling for a fair deal for the Palestinians and opposing the ever-increasing take-over of Palestinian and Arab lands by the state of Israel. Among the marchers were several groups representing anti-Zionist Jews.
There were also those with more general but sometimes forcefully expressed views against racism and fascism, and you can see a number of these in my report on the march on My London Diary
No to Racism, No to Fascism
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