Third Runway Protest
I just happened (honest…) to be in Whitehall this evening, and caught a protest opposite Downing Street against the proposed building of a third runway at London Heathrow airport – check the gallery at the bottom of this post.
Two MPs (Labour’s John McDonnell, and the Lib Dem Susan Kramer) and one MEP (Jean Lambert, the Green Party MEP for London) attended and spoke to the sizeable crowd; a counter-protest was scheduled for the same time down in Parliament Square, but by all accounts it had only about 35 people compared to (at my random estimate) around 150 in Whitehall, so I didn’t bother going down. The crowd on Whitehall provided more than enough interest to shoot for a full two hours, although I’ve only selected about one in ten shots to be shown here.
Nothing really happened apart from some chanting (and singing of Jerusalem at one point), although two of what seemed to be the organisers did receive formal cautions for the use of the loud hailer – although, of course, you can see from the galley that both MPs and the MEP all used it too. Some of the chanting was quite poor, but then ‘Third Runway’ is a bit of a clumsy phrase, metrically.
What did strike me was some of the crowd’s reaction to the presence of the police photographer. Some attempted to hide from him – having just posed for the press. Some called him a disgrace, and one woman told him that, in fact (and erroneously), she owns the copyright to photographs of her – as if, even were it true, that would stop him. He was carrying an impressive piece of kit – Canon EOS 1D with flash and a video camera with a lamp all bolted to one rig – so it must have been fairly intimidating, but then by the same argument so must have been the sheer number of press cameras thrust in their faces too.
Anyway – here are the shots from the protest.
