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Daily Mail, Kurdistan, Muslim Brotherhood & Iraq – 2013

Daily Mail, Kurdistan, Muslim Brotherhood & Iraq: On Sunday 6th October 2013 I photographed a protest against the Daily Mail, Kurds marching calling for their leader to be released from Turkish jail, protests for and against the removal of President Morsi of Egypt and a protest calling for the release of hostages in Iraq.

Daily Mail You Told All the Lies – Kensington

The Daily Mail has a long history of publishing lies against the BBC, NHS, public sector workers, trade unionists, socialists, women, Muslims, travellers and others, but the protest came after people were outraged by their smears and distortion in an entirely unfair attack of Ralph Milliband.

Their campaign against the father of Ed Milliband was intended to discredit the then Labour leader and Leader of the Opposition and many felt the Daily Mail had gone over the line of what is acceptable in British politics with their headline ‘MAN WHO HATED BRITAIN’, based on an out of context adolescent observation. Of course things in our press have worsened since then, particularly in the orchestrated attacks on Jeremy Corbyn accusing him of anti-semitism.

Ralph Milliband had fled Belgium with his working class Polish Jewish family in 1940 aged 16 when Germany invaded the country and went on to serve in the Royal Navy during the war. He settled in London after the war and became a British subject in 1948. As a sociologist he became one of the most respected academics of the post-war period, respected by people across the political spectrum.

The Daily Mail had supported the Blackshirts and Hitler in the 1930s and continued after the war to express hate for most of those institutions that have truly made Britain great – like the welfare state, the NHS and the BBC and the public sector generally. And more recently it had backed French fascist Marine Le Pen.

The protest was organised by The People’s Assembly, a nationwide group set up in opposition to the current government’s austerity programme and to defend the provision of education, health and welfare from general taxation and available to all. Several hundred came to the show they were proud of Britain and its welfare state and there was a great deal of chanting against the Daily Mail and and some songs before two people delivered boxes of a petition to their offices and the speeches began.

Daily Mail You Told All the Lies

Freedom for Ocalan & Kurdistan – Wood Green

The speeches agains the Daily Mail were continuing as I rushed away to Wood Green in North London where Kurds were marching on the 15th anniversary of the kidnappping of their national leader Abdullah Ocalan by Turkey in 1998.

Since then Ocalan has been held, mainly in solitary confinement, in a Turkish prison.

I left the march as it went past Wood Green Station on its way to the Kurdish Community Centre in Haringey to make my way to Mayfair and the Egyptian Embassy

Freedom for Ocalan & Kurdistan

Egypt For & Against Muslim Brotherhood – Egyptian Embassy

Opposite the Embassy in South Street were a group of protesters supporting the Muslim Brotherhood and opposing what the military coup which had recently removed the Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi the suppression of protests in Egypt against this.

Many carried placards showing the R4BIA four finger and thumb on palm sign to show support, begun after a Muslim Brotherhood sit-in at the Rabaa Al-Adawiya Mosque in Cairo was violently attacked by the military in August 2013 – Rabaa is ‘four’ or ‘fourth’ in Arabic.

A short distance away a smaller group of Egyptians protested, many carrying pictures of Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, the Minister of Defense and Commander-in-Chief of the Egyptian Armed Forces who had led the coup and the massacres of protesters – a total of around 3,000 were killed and almost 19,000 arrested, They supported the removla of Morsi, who after a narrow win in the 2012 election had granted himself unlimited powers and issued an Islamist-backed draft constitution.

Sisi installed himself as leader and became president after elections in 2014, remaining in power as a dictator since then (including two further elections in which other candidates were barred from running or boycotted the election due to repression – said to be even worse than under Mubarak who had been forced to step down by the popular revolution in 2011.

Egypt For & Against Muslim Brotherhood

PMOI call for release of 7 Hostages in Iraq – Trafalgar Square

Finally in Trafalgar Square I photographed an elaborate display by the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran, the PMOI (aka MEK and MKO) which since 1986 had been exiled in Iraq (and is now in Albania.)

*Photographs of the 52 killed by Iraqi forces on 1st September*

After the 2003 Iraq invasion the MEK came to a ceasefire agreement with the USA, giving up their weapons – which included 19 British-made Chieftain tanks. When the USA left Iraq they were left at the mercy of the Iraqi authorities and have been subjected to a long history of attacks on their refugee camp.

*Seven hostages are sill held in Baghdad*

The latest of these, ordered by Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Mailki, was at Camp Ashraf on September 1, 2013 and killed 52 with 7 hostages taken and held in the Baghdad Green Zone. In response hunger strikes started at Camp Ashraf and in Geneva, Berlin, Ottawa, Melbourne as well as London where they set up a camp in front of the US Embassy in Grosvenor Square.

A line of hunger strikers, on the 36 day of their strike, was seated at the front of the audience at today’s rally, holding roses and taking an active part in the event, raising their fists and shouting.

The rally called for immediate release of the seven prisoners, and for UN forces to be stationed permanently at Camp Ashraf and Camp Liberty to provide the protection the PMOI, who the UN granted asylum status.

PMOI call for release of 7 Hostages in Iraq

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Sheds, Turnpike Lane, Saris & Shops – 1989

Sheds, Turnpike Lane, Saris & Shops: You can read the previous post on my walk which began on Sunday 12th November 1989 at Salvation, Statuettes, a Sexy Model, Spendel & More where it starts halfway down the page. It had begun in Walthamstow where I made about a dozen images before catching the tube and returning to Turnpike Lane where I had ended my walk the week before.

*Carr Portable Buildings, 66-68, Hoe St, Walthamstow, Waltham Forest, 1989 89-11c-44*

On my way to Walthamstow Central I took this picture on Hoe Street on the corner of Gaywood Road where sheds like these were still being sold by Carr Portable Buildings Ltd until around 2008 and a couple of years later by Garden Design Services, though the site gradually became empty and was looking derelict by 2014. Two floors of flats above a ground floor shop built in 2018 now occupy the site.

I liked the horizontal divide with its upper level of sheds and plant containers which seemed to be a new ground level above the lower sheds.

*Turnpike Lane Station, Turnpike Lane, Haringey 1989 89-11c-36*

On reaching Turnpike Lane I spent some time wandering around the station and bus station area. admiring the 1930s architecture designed by Charles Holden.

The station opened in 1932 and was the first Underground station in Tottenham. Previously the line had ended at Finsbury Park with further extension north having been vetoed by what had become the London and North Eastern Railway (LNER). But the LNER lacked the funds to introduce better services on their lines and a campaign by residents of North London together with the Underground in the 1920s eventually led to the extension to Cockfosters being approved by parliament in 1930.

At Turnpike Lane Station the development also included a tram terminus – later used as a bus station and a number of shops. I think it is probably the largest of Holden’s many fine station projects on the line.

*Saris, Shop Window, Westbury Ave, Turnpike Lane, Haringey 1989 89-11c-33*

One of the many shops in the area around Turnpike Lane station which caught my attention particularly for the stylized ‘hair’ and eyes of the three mannequins iin the shop window. I covered the window glass with my hands and arms to prevent reflections but the chimneys of the street opposite intrude slightly at top centre and there is a strip of light at far right. I quite like the effect.

*Shop window, High Rd, Wood Green, Haringey, 1989 89-11c-34*

This was a strange shop display and one which I still cannot quite understand, with at least one ghostly pillar as well as those more obvious ones, with the foreground brightly lit one having a dim but otherwise identical repeat to its left. It’s hard to tell from my image what the goods on display are, some looking like buttons and others like earrings and jewellery. wit at extreme right perhaps some clothing.

*Scales SuperMarket, West Green Rd, West Green, Haringey 1989 89-11c-22*

A rather more down-market shop on West Green Lane a little to the south in Duckett’s Green – one of the other names considered when Turnpike Lane station was in planning.

I particularly liked the hand=drawn partly 3D lettering of the shop sign. Clearly this shop has been visited by supporters of Newcastle United – probably lost on their way to or from White Hart Lane.

There are still many small shops along West Green Road, but I think this particular one has gone. I didn’t walk far down West Green Road before returning to Turnpike Lane where this short walk ended as I had a meeting to attend.

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March against police racism 2000

One of the earliest protests I put on My London Diary was a march in Wood Green to Tottenham Police Station organised by Movement For Justice on 22nd January 2000, and two years ago I posted come of the black and white images from this on this site in a post Marching For Justice.

At the time as well as working on black and white film I was also taking pictures with a consumer digital camera, the Fuji 2.2 Mp MX-2700. It had a fixed 35mm equivalent lens and was probably the best consumer digital of the time, though obviously rather limited.

The protest was organised by the Movement for Justice and the Lindo Campaign. Delroy Lindo started a campaign ofter his friend Winston Silcott was wrongly imprisoned for the murder of PC Keith Blakelock during the 1985 Broadwater Farm riots. The Winston Silcott Defence Campaign played an important part getting Silcott acquitted and released. Silcott had been convicted with two other men despite not being anywhere near where the murder took place.

Two police officers were later tried for fabricating evidence but were acquitted, despite the evidence against them. They had picked on Silcott because of his record and fabricated confessions by the three men.

Silcott was chosen because of his record and because the police could find no evidence over the murder of one of their officers. Six years earlier he had been acquitted in another murder trial and sentenced to six months after a nightclub brawl. When Blakelock was savagely killed he was on bail on another murder charge, for which he spent 18 years in jail after the jury did not believe that he had killed a night club bouncer in self-defence.

Later Silcott, much to the obvious disgust of the BBC and many politicians was awarded £17,000 compensation for wrongful conviction and a further £50,000 in an out-of-court settlement of his civil case for malicious prosecution.

Lindo and his wife were harassed by police after they began to campaign over the imprisonment of Silcott and other cases including the killing of Roger Sylvester and the harassment of Duwayne Brooks, a friend of Stephen Lawrence who had been with him when he was murdered in 1993. Instead of treating him as a witness, they treated him as a suspect and he suffered severe post-traumatic stress disorder.

Police arrested Brooks after he took part in an anti-racist march against the British National Party following the murder. and he was charged but the judge dismissed the case. Later he sued the Met Police and was awarded £100,000 compensation. The treatment of Brooks and the parents and other friends of Stephen Lawrence played an important role in the Macpherson report that concluded the Metropolitan Police Force was “institutionally racist“.

Roger Sylvester lived in Tottenham and worked for a drop-in mental health centre. He had suffered some mental health problems himself some years earlier and in January 1999 was detained outside of his home, under section 136 of the Mental Health Act 1983. Eight police officers restrained him “for his own safety” and took him to St Ann’s Hospital were he was further restrained, going limp after 20 minutes. An inquest jury found his death was caused by being restrained for too long in the wrong position, without sufficient medical attention, but their verdict was overturned and a judge replaced it with an open verdict.

Recent event have shown that the force remained a safe space for racists, misogynists and rapists, although of course many police officers are trying hard to do an honest and necessary job. It remains to be seen if the current head of London’s Metropolitan Police Service, Sir Mark Rowley, will be any more successful than his predecessors in turning the force around.

Back on the original post about the event there are six pictures, four in black and white and two colour. I took many more in black and white but very few have been digitised.

Haringey Residents protest housing sell-off

*Angry residentshold up placards and posterson the glass wall of the Civic Centre*

Haringey Residents protest housing sell-off – Wood Green, London. Monday 3 July 2017.

One of the London Labour councils whose housing policies were causing much local distress was Haringey, where the council was in process of setting up the Haringey Development Vehicle (HDV), Britain’s biggest collaboration yet between a local authority and a property developer, which will demolish a third of Haringey’s social housing, handing over half of an estimated £2 billion worth of publicly owned housing estates, schools, public facilities and private housing acquired through compulsory purchase orders to developer Lendlease.

Many feel that the cabinet system for local government is anti-democratic, removing decisions from the elected councillors as a whole to small highly selected groups for the convenience of administration. It means that ideas such as the HDV are not properly debated, and in this case it was about to be imposed without any real public consultation, and to many its only real purpose appeared to be to hand huge profits to the developer.

*Marching through Wood Green shopping centre*

The scheme to build 6,400 new homes would result in the demolition of many existing properties, and would have the consequence of driving many existing tenants and leaseholders out of the area as they would be unable to afford to buy the new properties or afford the rents. It would mean a massive wave of social cleansing.

*Police & security stop all but a few entering*

The formation of the HDV was opposed by many in the borough’s Labour Parties, trade unionists, Greens, tenants, small businesses and community groups and well over 500 of them came to make their opposition clear.

*A large crowd at the front of the CIvic Centre*

They had met at Ducketts Common and then marched through the centre of Wood Green, stopping briefly to block traffic on a road junction before moving on to the front of the Haringey Civic Centre where the council was meeting later to approve the HDV. They soon pushed aside the barriers which had been set up in front of the building to continue their noisy protest, with a row of police standing across the entrance.

*But others went around to protest in front of the large glass windows at the back*

After an angry and noisy protest outside some made a rush to get into the building though a side entrance. I decided not to try and enter with them, and security and police managed to stop all but a few and then locked the building, leaving even some of the councillors coming to attend the meeting unable to enter.

Many of the protesters moved the to the rear of the building and banged noisily on doors and large glass windows, and at one point the large glass panes began to flex by almost half an inch as people pushed against them and I moved back fearing they might shatter.

*Eventually police came and pushed the people away from the glass*

It looks from some of the pictures I took as if the protesters were actually inside, but they were on the outside of these large glass panels which gave a good view of the interior. Eventually police arrived and pushed the people back, forming a line in front of the glass.

*A rally continued in front of the building entrance*

I moved back to the front of the building where a rally was taking place with a number of mainly local speakers. This was still continuing as I left and the noise would have been very noticeable to councillors inside who were voting to go ahead with the scheme to give away around £2 billion to the Australian developers Lendlease.

Although this battle was lost, the war was at least partly won. The HDV was a major issue in the next set of council elections in the following May, with the many councillors from the left of the Labour Party strongly opposed to it getting elected, and the new council quickly voted to scrap the scheme to redevelop the Northumberland Park council estate with Lendlease. Instead Haringey set up its own housing company, Haringey Homes, and will carry out developments – including some with private developers such as Lendlease – in a way that avoids some of the social cleansing and retains more affordable and social rented properties. It has met some of the issues raised by the campaigners but by no means all.

The council’s new approach was in part made possible by a government decision to remove the cap on councils’ borrowing in their Housing Revenue Accounts (HRA) and also by a funding grant from the Mayor of London. But they still need to build some properties for market sale, though they state they are committed only to do this so they can deliver the “greatest possible number of council-rented homes.”

More at Haringey Residents protest housing sell-off.

Marching for Justice

21 years ago on 22 Jan 2000 I photographed a March against police racism organised by the Movement For Justice in Wood Green, and it is one of the earlier protests that I featured on my web site My London Diary.

It wasn’t of course the first protest that I had photographed, which had been around 25 years earlier, and through the 1990s I had increasingly begun to attend and photograph various political events, although the bulk of my work was still in other areas.

My London Diary didn’t exist in January 2000, but when I set up the site a year or two later I scanned some of my 8×10″ file prints from 1999 and 2000 to put some content on the site from the start.

At the time I was still working mainly in black and white and sending prints to the library that handled my work; they also worked with colour transparencies, but I had given up taking these 15 years earlier and moved to colour negative. The library then couldn’t handle digital files, and also my flatbed scanner was only black and white. At the start there was little or no colour work on My London Diary, though things soon changed as I first used a consumer digital camera as a personal notebook, then moved to working with a Nikon DSLR.

The earliest protest to be featured on My London Diary was from Brixton in February 1999, and over a similar issue, a National Civil Rights march calling for the release of Winston Silcott. So many years later things perhaps have changed very little – just the names, as the recent death of Mohamud Mohammed Hassan shows.

It wasn’t in 2000 easy to find out when and where protests other than the big national events organised by groups such as CND and the anti-war protests were taking place, but in June 1999 Indymedia had been founded around the global justice anticapitalist protest Carnival Against Capital and around this time many groups involved in protests were beginning to use the web to communicate through e-mail and web sites.

From around 2000 I began to cover many more protests, partly because I left full-time teaching and could attend more, but also because it became easier to find out about them. It was some time later that I began to put my pictures from protests on Indymedia, as a way of sharing my work with those I had photographed. I was also sending them to photo agencies in order to finance the work, as well as working as a writer on photography. I began My London Diary as a way to get my work to a wider audience, and hoped it would generate enough direct sales to at least cover the costs involved.

It has managed to do that and has also provided a great deal of feedback over the years, but hasn’t been a huge financial success.

My London Diary 2000

TQ31 – North London

There are many pictures on the fourth and last page of my album TQ31 London Cross-Section I’d like to show you and say a little about, though in most cases they need little text, but it can sometimes add interest. But my time is limited and I’ll leave you to discover most of them for yourselves.

Andreas, Hairdresser, Hornsey Rd, Lower Holloway, 1989 TQ3185-005

I think Andreas’s Barber Shop on the Hornsey Road had probably ceased trading by the time I took this picture, as there is no light bulb in the socket just to the left of the centre of the window. There is a notice in the door that gives its opening times, but where it says ‘Closed’ I think this may have been permanent.

As I was still working full-time, many of my pictures were made at the weekend, often like this one on Sunday mornings, when most shops would have been closed. The building is still there, but not the shop or its shopfront; the whole row of shops present when I was taking pictures has now been converted to residential use.

Hoo Hing Ltd, Drayton Park, Highbury, 1989 TQ3185-008

Rather to my surprise, this industrial/commercial building is still there on Drayton Park, and, at least until recently, the name ‘HOO HING LTD’ was still present above the doorway. The company still exists and is an importer of oriental food and catering products, but the site was reported as due to be cleared in 2006 for housing. However in 2019 it was still there; like many redevelopments it may have been halted by the financial crash.

Sisters Gowns, Seven Sisters Rd, Finsbury Park, 1989 TQ3186-015

Sisters Gowns was at the rear of a property at 216 Seven Sisters Road in Finsbury Park and this door was on Coleridge Rd. The property was demolished in 2008 (the sign had gone earlier), but the site was still empty in 2019.

Shop window, Fonthill Rd, Finsbury Park, 1989 TQ3186-021

Fonthill Rd in Finsbury Park, apparently known to locals as ‘The Font’ is possibly London’s best ‘fashion village’. On weekdays the trade is (or at least was) largely for the trade, but on Saturdays it becomes a busy retail fashion area, often packed with women on the lookout for a bargain. Fortunately most of the shops were closed when I went to take pictures on a Sunday morning.

Hairdresser, Turnpike Lane, 1989 TQ3189-015

A unisex hairdressers at Turnpike Lane excited me in my hunt for heads, with a couple of fine examples as well as some photographs. I think I took rather more pictures than the three you can see here. A recessed doorway meant I could work from several angles.

Reflection, shop window, West Green Rd, West Green, 1989, Haringey TQ3189-010

Close to Turnpike Lane, down West Green Road, I came across another interesting shop window for a tailor’s shop, offering best styles made to measure at local prices. Working with a single lens reflex camera with its through the lens view meant that I could clearly see how the reflection and direct view combined, and could make small movements and sometimes deliberate shading to control the effect.

TQ31 London Cross-Section includes almost 400 pictures made in a small sliver of London, just a kilometre wide, which reflect the different areas it passes through from Norwood in the south to Wood Green in the north. The pictures come from just one of around a dozen such albums containing colour pictures I took when working around London between 1986 and 1992.

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.