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.
Refugee Rights & Stop Trident – On Saturday 27th February 2016 I photographed two large protest marches in London. The first was part of a protest across Europe calling for safe passage for refuges and the second was against government plans to replace the UK’s Trident nuclear weapons which recently for a second time failed a test launch in 2023.
European March for Refugee Rights – Hyde Park
Several hundred protesters, including many who had been to aid refugees in Lesvos and at the Calais camps and some who had volunteered in Syria with Medicins Sans Frontiers, marched from Hyde Park Corner to a rally at Speakers Corner before going on to Trafalgar Square as part of a day of protest in cities across Europe calling for safe and secure routes for all refugees and asylum seekers seeking protection in Europe.
They want an end to the deaths in sea crossings and other borders and for refugees to be allowed to keep their possessions and be reunited with their families.
Groups supporting the protest included the Syria Solidarity Campaign, Solidarity with Refugees, London2Calais, Migrants’ Rights Network, SOAS Solidarity with Refugees & Displaced People Soc, Wonder Foundation, Calais Action, UK Action for Refugees, Refugee Aid Initiative, No Borders and the Greece Solidarity Campaign.
A woman who had volunteered at Lesvos came a child’s life-jacket worn on the dangerous sea crossing to there, more suitable for a beach holiday; others wore similar life-jackets on the march which have become a symbol for the refugees and those who drown on the journey from Turkey to Lesvos. Refugee support groups from Brighton brought a splendid banner they had made based on Picasso’s Spanish Civil War painting ‘Guernica‘.
I marched with them through Hyde Park to Speakers Corner where there was a short rally before they marched on to Trafalgar Square in front of the CND Stop Trident march which was then beginning to march from Marble Arch.
Some then decided to join the CND march but others decided to march in front of it. CND stewards at first tried to stop them but then halted the Stop Trident march for around ten minutes to leave a gap between the two marches which were following the same route.
Stop Trident March – Marble Arch to Trafalgar Square
Around sixty thousand had come to Marble Arch to join the march to a rally in Trafalgar Square against government plans to replace the UK’s Trident nuclear weapons at a cost of £180 billion or more.
CND say Trident is immoral and using it would cause catastrophic global damage. These weapons of mass destruction don’t keep us safe and divert resources from essential spending on services like the NHS, schools and housing.
In 2024 CND estimates that the total cost of building and maintaining Trident has been £205 billion. The UK has hung on to nuclear weapons largely as a matter of prestige and to justify its position on the UN Security Council and it has never been an important deterrent – and the recent test failures make it even less of a credible threat to other countries.
I arrived late for the official photocall before the start of the march on Park Lane because the crowd of marchers was so dense and we were soon moved well away from the front banner and those holding it by stewards in the usual somewhat unfriendly ‘Stop the War’ manner.
At the southern end of Park Lane the march halted for around ten minutes to make a gap between it and the marchers for Refugee Rights who had come to join them. I went to take a few pictures of this march and then returned to the ‘Stop Trident’ march.
After taking some pictures of the marchers, working my way through the crowds I had to leave and take the tube from Green Park to Charing Cross for the start of the rally, meeting the head of the march as it arrived at Trafalgar Square.
It was a long rally with a long list of distinguished speakers including Nicola Sturgeon, Caroline Lucas, Leanne Wood, Vanessa Redgrave, Bruce Kent, Christine Blower, Mark Serwotka, Tariq Ali and many more including some younger activists, and you can see photographs of most of those who spoke. They all opposed the renewal of Trident which they dismissed as out of date, totally irrelevant to our defence and a complete waste of money which could be put to so much better use providing proper jobs and services.
The rally went on longer than expected as we were waiting for the final address by Jeremy Corbyn who was travelling down from Sheffield where he had been speaking at a conference. He arrived on the platform to an enormous round of cheering and applause and gave a rousing speech ending the protest on a high note.
Stop Bush National Demonstration – It seems so long ago; on Thursday 20th November 2003, 20 years ago today, I photographed the protest against then US President George Bush in London.
The protest came just 8 months after the US under Bush had led the invasion of Iraq, aided by Tony Blair who had lied to Parliament and presented a fake dossier to take Britain to war as well.
The US had claimed their action was necessary to “disarm Iraq of weapons of mass destruction, to end Saddam Hussein’s support for terrorism, and to free Iraqi people”. It wasn’t long before it became clear that those who had always said there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq were proved correct, and although Saddam was killed the invasion encouraged support for terrorists across much of the world, and rather than becoming free the people of Iraq were subjected to still continuing years of misery.
A 2023 report by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute comments that the invasion “ushered in years of chaos and civil war, as a variety of armed groups vied for power and territory and targeted coalition forces and the fledgling post-Ba’athist Iraqi Army. A period of relative calm in the early 2010s was broken by the rise of the extremist Islamic State group, which occupied large parts of the country from 2014 until it was largely defeated by Iraqi forces with the support of a US-led international coalition in 2017.”
It goes on to say that the country is now in 2023 at its most stable since the invasion, but “Armed violence persists in different forms, but it is sporadic, fragmented and localized. However, the country remains fragile and divided, and its people face an array of deepening challenges that the state is struggling to address.“
Twenty years ago I was just beginning to work using a digital camera. The Nikon D100 was one of the first affordable generation of digital SLRs, released in the USA at around the same time as the Canon EOS D60, both with a price tag of just under $2000, though I forget what I paid for it here in the UK.
It was still a rather primitive beast, with a 6Mp sensor roughly half the size of a 35mm film frame in what Nikon dubbed DX format. It’s viewfinder was small and dim, making working with it rather more difficult than the film cameras – both SLR and rangefinder – that I had been using.
And having spent so much on a camera, I also had to buy a lens. I’d long been using Olympus SLRs along with Leica and other cameras with the Leica-M mount and had a full range of lenses for these, but nothing with a Nikon mount. So along with the camera I’d bought what was the cheapest zoom in their range, a 24-85mm with a maximum aperture of around f3.5. On the D100 that worked as a 36-127mm equivalent.
It was a useful lens, and a very decent performer, but still rather limiting, with no real wide-angle capability. So alongside the D100 I would also be working most of the time with two other cameras, one loaded with colour negative film and the other black and white.
But there was a huge advantage with digital, in that I could send off files to an agency within hours of taking them, while with the black and white it was probably a day or two before I made prints to take or send. Publishing too had largely moved to colour and colour images were now wanted rather than black and white.
Although I developed and at least contact printed the films I took then, I think I’ve made very few if any prints from this or other events at the time. And any I have made since will have been printed digitally from scans of the negatives.
Digital gave an immediacy, but there were still problems with handling the files. Software to process the RAW images that were needed to get the most out of the digital files was still rather primitive by current standards, and most of the images I processed back then have a slightly muddy look. Nikon’s colour rendering was I think more to my taste than Canon, but still not up to that from film, though now we get far more accurate colour from digital. When Adobe introduced Lightroom in 2007 it was a little of a step backwards, but since then it has improved dramatically.
Those early sensors also were not too great with high contrast subjects and for some years I worked much of the time with fill-in flash on sunny days. Fortunately this was something that digital camera and modern flash systems made a simple routine.
On My London Diary I was still experimenting in how to present digital work on the web, and the thumbnail pages I created here were not the best of ideas. But the 80 images presented there – around a third of the exposures I made – perhaps give a good idea of how I worked. Clicking on any of them gives a page with slightly larger views of several of them.
Westminster Abbey has been home to some pretty bizarre events over the last thousand years or so since the site first became home to a small monastery on Thorney Island around 960 AD, and another will be taking place this weekend.
Possibly the most obscene and blasphemous service there took place on Friday 3rd May 2019, when a service was held there celebrating Britain’s weapons of mass destruction, giving thanks for 50 years of continuous nuclear threat by British submarines armed with nuclear missiles.
As protesters across the road pointed out, Britain was currently wasting £205 billion on the replacement of Trident, around a quarter of a year’s total government spending on a weapons system which can never be used as it would be totally catastrophic for the world.
The established church has of course a long record of taking the wrong side in history, supporting the rich and powerful, something Christianity inherited from older religions, which throughout history have been ways to subjugate the common people and keep them docile.
This weekend we see this again in action, with a ceremony taking place in which people around the country are to be invited to swear an oath of allegiance, though I think many will be swearing other things about this. It follows in a tradition established in 1066 when our Norman conquerors celebrated their victory with the first coronation there.
Reading the Bible and in particular the New Testament, supposedly the basis of Christianity, we find a very different religion, one in which swords shall be beaten into ploughshares and the love of power is seen as a sin. Certainly not one as the protesters pointed out one that would be thanksgiving for nuclear weapons.
CND and Christian CND protested opposite Westminster Abbey against the blasphemous and morally repugnant thanksgiving service celebrating Britain’s nuclear weapons. It was a much more Christian event than that taking place across the road, though the Christians there were joined by others including Buddhists.
Those present took part in a die-in after which there was a rally, but I left to go home, stopping briefly on my way to photograph a small group of Fridays For Future climate protesters in Parliament Square.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
For Refugee Rights and Against Trident. I covered two marches in London on 27th February 2016, the first calling for safe passage for refugees seeking protection in Europe and following this a much larger march against government plans to waste £180 billion or more on replacing the UK’s Trident nuclear weapons.
European March for Refugee Rights
The European March for Refugee Rights was part of a day of protests in cities across Europe demanding action by governments to provide secure safe passage routes for all refugees and asylum seekers seeking protection in Europe. They want an end to deaths at borders and drownings and for refugees to be allowed to keep their possessions and be reunited with their families.
Among those taking part were people who had been to aid refugees in Lesvos and at the Calais camps and others who had volunteered with Medicins Sans Frontiers in Syria. The protest was supported by many groups including the Syria Solidarity Campaign, Solidarity with Refugees, London2Calais, Migrants’ Rights Network, SOAS Solidarity with Refugees & Displaced People Soc, Wonder Foundation, Calais Action, UK Action for Refugees, Refugee Aid Initiative, No Borders and the Greece Solidarity Campaign.
This was a short march taking place unusually inside Hyde Park, gathering at Hyde Park Corner and walking up to Speakers Corner where there was a rally. This made it possible for those taking part to join the Stop Trident Rally which was starting from Marble Arch, and going down Park Lane on its way to Trafalgar Square. Some of the marchers decided to form a block to march in front of the main Stop Trident banner and march on to Trafalgar Square.
Stop Trident march stewards tried briefly to stop them but then gave up and halted their march for around ten minutes to create a gap between the two groups.
According to CND there were 60,000 people marching from Marble Arch to a mass rally in Trafalgar Square, and although their estimate may have been a little on the high side, this was definitely a very large protest, starting with a densely packed crowd on Park Lane. When the rally began in Trafalgar Square the tail of the march was still around half a mile away, and I think many gave up before reaching the rally as the streets leading to it became blocked.
Few people outside the military and arms manufacturers – probably the most powerful of all lobbies in the country can really believe the expenditure of £180 billion or more on replacing the UK’s Trident nuclear weapons is either necessary or cost-effective. The huge majority of nations in the world have no nuclear capability, and by December 2021, 59 states had ratified or acceded to the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) which entered into force on 22 January 2021.
Lindsey German, Stop the War, Kate Hudson, CND General Secretary, Nicola Sturgeon, SNP First Minister, Scotland and Green Party MP Caroline Lucas hold the Stop Trident banner
A national survey by Survation at the start of 2021 for CND showed 59% of the public supported the UK government signing up to the TPNW, including 50% of Conservative voters and 68% of Labour voters. An even higher 77% supported a ‘total ban on all nuclear weapons globally’ with majority support from young and old, in all regions of the country, from Conservative as well as Labour voters, leavers and remainers. The government remains resolutely opposed to the treaty.
This widespread opposition to nuclear weapons isn’t largely a matter of their cost but on both moral and pragmatic grounds. As CND say, using nuclear weapons would cause catastrophic global damage; these weapons of mass destruction don’t keep us safe and divert resources from essential spending on services like the NHS, schools and housing and “it is clearer than ever that real security for Britain requires addressing the risks posed by the climate emergency and pandemics on a global scale.“
Trafalgar square was unusually packed for the long rally that followed the march, with people listening and applauding a long list of speakers, including Nicola Sturgeon, Caroline Lucas, Leanne Wood, Vanessa Redgrave, Bruce Kent, Christine Blower, Mark Serwotka and Tariq Ali, as well as many less well-known names. There were many marchers who found it impossible to get into the square.
Nicola Sturgeon First Minister Scotland
All the speakers opposed the spending of an estimated £180 billion or more on renewal of Trident which they dismissed as out of date, totally irrelevant to our defence and a complete waste of money which could be put to so much better use providing proper jobs and services.
It was a long wait, around two hours standing in the cold for the final speech by Jeremy Corbyn who had earlier in the day been speaking in Sheffield and whose train had been a little delayed. He was greeted by a tremendous response from the crowd, and gave a rousing speech to end the protest on a high note. Despite the dismissive remarks from many political commentators on the media, Corbyn is one of the most powerful political speakers of current years.
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.
All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated, are taken by and copyright of Peter Marshall, and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.
Every year more people are killed at work than in wars. Most don’t die of mystery ailments, or in tragic “accidents”. They die because an employer decided their safety just wasn’t that important a priority. International Workers’ Memorial Day (IWMD) 28 April commemorates those workers.
The day is commemorated around the world and is officially recognised by the UK Government. It is a day both to remember those we have lost and importantly to organise in their memory. The motto is ‘Remember the dead, fight for the living‘.
Each year the International Trades Union Congress sets a theme for the day and for 2021 this is:
Health and Safety is a fundamental workers’ right
There is a dedicated web site for the day set up by the ITUC and Hazards magazine which gives information about IWMD events in over 25 countries and an annual hashtag – this year #iwmd21. The ILO estimates that there 2.3 million people worldwide die each year because of their work – and there are 340 million workplace injuries.
Covid has brought the need for health and safety protection for workers to the fore – in 2020/21 there were around 8,000 recorded deaths of workers from Covid-19. This year the TUC has organised a national zoom meting and there is an online memorial wall, but there are also various local mainly virtual events.
In most recent years before 2020 I managed to attend the main London event held at the statue of a building worker on Tower Hill, and occasionally to also cover other events around the capital.
An article by Annabelle Humphreys for Talint International lists the most dangerous jobs in the UK, based on information from the Health and Safety Executive. Fishing is the most dangerous of UK industries although the actual numbers of deaths is small. Seven fishermen lost their lives in 2018, but all were cases that were preventable. Waste and recycling also has a small workforce but a high level of ill-health and deaths. It’s hardly surprising also that oil and gas riggers have a high injury rate and that deep sea diving is also a dangerous occupation , though the numbers involved again are low.
What stands out is the construction industry, were 40 UK workers died in 2020 and around 81,000 suffered work-related ill health. Almost half the deaths were from falling from a height, while others died when trapped by things collapsing or overturning or by being hit by falling objects or struck by moving objects or vehicles or by electrocution.
But there are also high levels of deaths in other industries, particularly farming – often cited as the most dangerous of all – and manufacturing. And while Healthcare always has the highest sickness rate in the UK, Covid-19 will have greatly increased the number of deaths in this sector.
