Report and Photos: The Massive March for Refugees in London – and Jeremy Corbyn’s Victory

See my photos on Flickr of the huge march in London calling for more refugees to be welcomed in the UK.

For anyone not in thrall to a cruel and self-serving neo-liberal worldview, in which the rich get richer and the poor get poorer until we return to some sort of feudal nightmare, yesterday was a truly inspirational day. In the morning, Jeremy Corbyn won the Labour leadership campaign, with an astonishing 251,000 votes — 59.5% of the total, and 49% of the votes cast by full-time party members, rather than those like me who paid £3 to vote for him (and who didn’t get “purged”). Jeremy’s nearest rival, Andy Burnham, got just 19% of the vote, Yvette Cooper got 17% and Liz Kendall got just 4.5%. Read about Jeremy’s vision for the future of the Labour Party and of the UK in an exclusive article in the Observer today.

As I mentioned on Facebook just after the result was announced, “The people have spoken. It’s time for a renewed Labour Party — of the people for the people. This is the most hopeful moment for politics in the UK since before Thatcher’s baleful victory in May 1979. I’m honoured to have got to know Jeremy through his support of the We Stand With Shaker campaign, and look forward to doing whatever I can to support him and to take on and defeat this wretched Tory government.”

In May, before he entered the leadership race, Jeremy visited Washington D.C. as part of a delegation of MPs from the cross-party Shaker Aamer Parliamentary Group, set up by his close friend and campaign manager John McDonnell MP last November, but working to close Guantánamo and to get Shaker Aamer released is just one of Jeremy’s — and John’s — many interests that have long coincided with my own views.

Jeremy entered the leadership race as an anti-austerity candidate, and a rank outsider, as he himself would have acknowledged, but it soon turned out that there was a huge appetite for an antidote not only to the Tory government, but also to its echo in the Labour Party, the right-wingers, or the centre-right that, to far too many people, is largely indistinguishable from the Tories.

Fundamentally honest, Jeremy also refused to play the game of the personality cult, insisting that at the campaign needed to be about the issues rather than image or spin or “branding.” His meetings around the country were packed out, and he encouraged nearly 90,000 people to become involved in the Party, and to vote for him as registered supporters, many of whom will now be joining the Party as full members.

A month ago, on the 70th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, I saw Jeremy speak at a CND event in Tavistock Square. A member of CND since he was 15, he opposes nuclear weapons, wants to scrap the insanely expensive Trident programme, and is, essentially, an anti-war candidate — a pacifist — seeking the highest office in the land, who, of course, joined the rest of us on the side of sanity when Tony Blair, New Labour, the Tories and 86% of the media took us into an illegal war in Iraq in 2003.

Jeremy’s anti-austerity stance is also an area where he is taking a necessary fight to the establishment, and where, I hope, all of us who put the needs of the people before the profits of the rapacious banks and corporations — and the Tories’ (and New Labour’s) obscene pandering to the global super-rich — will be able to get involved in making the case for radical change.

One area where change is urgently needed is to combat the rise of the precariat — those trapped in insecure, low-paid jobs without rights — and another is to urgently tackle the housing crisis, which includes an obscene housing bubble (in London and the south east in particular), private rents out of control, and social housing under threat, and which needs a massive social housebuilding programme to restore some semblance of sanity.

For anyone who wants to help, and who hasn’t already joined the Labour Party, you can do so here, to support Jeremy, who has already asked people to let him know what questions they would like him to ask David Cameron at his first Prime Minister’s Question Time on Wednesday. Tomorrow, I expect, we will hear who is in his shadow cabinet, and very soon, I expect, we will be hearing much more about how we can get involved with the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn, to change politics for the better, and to begin to get some of the 15.7 million people who didn’t vote in the General Election in May to get involved in this new, resurgent socialist alternative to the dreadful neo-liberal status quo.

Yesterday was also the day that a huge march in support of refugees took place in central London — echoed elsewhere in the country — following up on the extraordinary support that has been building over recent weeks as tens of thousands of refugees have entered Europe — from Syria in particular, via Turkey,  but also from other countries ruined by war and/or brutal totalitarian regimes — Afghanistan, for example, and Eritrea, which currently has the world’s worst human rights record.

The march consisted of two separate events whose organisers agreed to make their two separate events into a single event — Refugees Welcome Here and Solidarity with Refugees, organised by Stand up to Racism, the People’s Assembly Against Austerity, the Stop the War Coalition, the Syria Solidarity Movement, the Refugee Council, Refugee Action, Amnesty International, Black Activists Rising Against Cuts (BARAC), Migrant Rights Network, War on Want, Movement Against Xenophobia, Unite Against Fascism, Love Music Hate Racism, Black Out London, Emergency UK, Student Action for Refugees, London2Calais, the British Syrian Medical Society and Avaaz.

For my photos of the day, see my photo set on Flickr here, where I described the day as follows:

Today was a great day for the millions of us who want to see a better world, and are fed up with the existing power structure — the election, by a landslide, of Jeremy Corbyn as the new Labour Party leader, and the march in central London, which was attended by around 100,000 people in solidarity with the refugees fleeing Syria and other countries in numbers not seen since the Second World War.

The existing power structure presides over a hard-hearted and increasingly unequal vision of the UK, in which the rich get richer, the poor get poorer, austerity is cynically used by the Tories to try and destroy the state provision of almost all services, and the refugee crisis is sidelined — and all this by a government that, although it has provided significant financial aid, is only accepting 20,000 refugees, over five years and on a temporary basis, and is now gunning for war, which will only create more refugees, and trying to justify that through the disturbing extrajudicial execution of two British citizens in Syria via an RAF-led drone attack.

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose debut album, ‘Love and War,’ was released in July 2015). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign, the co-director of We Stand With Shaker, calling for the immediate release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by the University of Chicago Press in the US, and available from Amazon, including a Kindle edition — 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).

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, and The Complete Guantánamo Files, an ongoing, 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011. Also see the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

Please also consider joining the Close Guantánamo campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.