Photos: Burning Effigies of Tories and Protesting About Austerity and PFI at the Bonfire of Cuts in Lewisham

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Burning Effigies of Tories at the Bonfire of Cuts in Lewisham, a set on Flickr.

On November 5, 2013 — Bonfire Night — I photographed effigies of members of the cabinet of the Tory-led coalition government — including David Cameron, George Osborne and others, as well as key Lib Dems and Labour politicians — as they were burned by activists in a brazier in the centre of Lewisham, in south east London. The caricatures were drawn by a member of the political group People Before Profit.

The activists in Lewisham were part of a day of action across the UK, in which numerous protestors held Bonfires of Austerity, initiated by the People’s Assembly Against Austerity, an anti-austerity coalition of activists, union members and MPs, to protest about the wretched Tory-led coalition government’s continued assault on the very fabric of the state, and on the most vulnerable members of society — particularly, the poor, the ill, the unemployed and the disabled.

The borough of Lewisham, where I live, is famous for successfully resisting the government’s plans to severely downgrade services at the local hospital, and on Bonfire Night activists marched from Catford to an open space in the centre of Lewisham (by the main roundabout, and affectionately known as “the grassy knoll”), where they burned effigies of David Cameron, George Osborne, Theresa May, Jeremy Hunt, Michael Gove, Iain Duncan Smith and Boris Johnson. The protestors also burned effigies of the Lib Dems Nick Clegg and Vince Cable, key members of the disastrous coalition government, and Labour’s Gordon Brown and Ed Balls, the shadow chancellor.

In many cases, those chosen to burn on Bonfire Night, when it is traditional to burn effigies of unpopular figures, had some involvement in the Private Finance Initiative (PFI), popularised by New Labour, whereby major projects for society as a whole — the building of schools and hospitals, for example — is farmed out to private companies, who make outrageous profits from the deals. In particular, Gordon Brown was included as “the architect of the PFI catastrophe,” and Ed Balls was included because, outrageously, he defended PFI as “good value for taxpayers’ money” in April this year.

PFI is no such thing, as Ed Balls should know. However, instead of having politicians who defend the need for pubic investment in projects that are of benefit to all — schools and hospitals, for example — all our politicians are enslaved by a corporate mentality, and are committed to handing over more and more of our common resources to private companies, who are not only unaccountable, but are also driven by profit, and not by the need for universal services.

The privatisation programme that Margaret Thatcher embarked upon, in which our utilities and social housing were privatised (and to which John Major later added the railways) literally robbed us of assets that were for the common good. The Tory-led coalition government has now added Royal Mail to that ignominious list, and, moreover, have made it clear that their mission is to destroy the state almost entirely, so that only their own salaries and a few other concerns will remain in public hands, and everything else will be privatised.

In a monstrous sleight of hand that reflects very badly on the British people’s ability to perceive when they are being played (and are, moreover, being played by a bunch of rich crooks), the Tories have been engaged, for the last four years, in painting the poor, the unemployed and the disabled as somehow being to blame for our financial problems, even though the truth is that it was caused by bankers in cahoots with politicians, and by corporate tax avoiders and tax evaders, the kind of people queuing up to profit, with taxpayers’ assistance, in taking over public sector occupations, maximising profits and driving down the quality of services.

In south east London, the cost of New Labour’s embrace of PFI can clearly be seen in the financial failures of the South London Hospital Trust, where two new hospitals, which cost £210 million to build, will have raked in £2.5 billion for the private companies who own them (Barclays, Innisfree and Taylor Woodrow) at the end of a 25-year period — unless someone in power decides that such profiteering ought to be illegal. Those debts contributed to the collapse of the trust, and the plans to make Lewisham Hospital, unconnected to the SLHT, pay for the failures of its neighbour — and its PFI albatross — by having its A&E closed down, its maternity services and other acute services decimated, and half its buildings sold.

That disaster has been averted — or at least delayed — but the costs of PFI continue to cripple other parts of the NHS, up and down the country, and continue to allow unqualified business people, at taxpayers’ expense, to run an ever-increasing number of schools.

What we need are politicians prepared to stand up to the lies that the public sector is bad, and the private sector good. In reality, the opposite is almost entirely true when it comes to public services, as doctors, nurses and teachers, for example, are motivated by something in addition to their salaries — something called “the public good,” which self-serving politicians and profit-maximising corporations have forgotten about.

Note: For further information about the outrageous profiteering in the South London Healthcare Trust PFI deal, see the article in the Independent last July entitled, “The funding timebomb that crippled an NHS healthcare trust.” For information about Innisfree, and a powerful critique of PFI, see “Private Finance Initiative: hospitals will bring taxpayers 60 years of pain,” a January 2011 article by Andrew Gilligan in the Daily Telegraph. Also see this Daily Mail article by John Ware of the BBC’s Panorama.

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer and film-maker. He is the co-founder of the “Close Guantánamo” campaign, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here – or here for the US).

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