PLEASE don’t forget to vote tomorrow – every abstention is essentially a vote for the BNP

I’m about to go away for a week, to take some photos , some audio and hopefully some video, which I hope will help me start learning about multimedia on my return. Normal service will resume shortly…

I contributed two features to The Big Issue in the North‘s environment special, out today, which I also helped to edit last week. My pieces are a scene-setter, above, and a look at the debate ranging over onshore wind farms, below. Other interesting features include a look at home brewing…I’d encourage anyone in the north to buy a copy – you’ll be helping a homeless person at the same time.

Speaking of the environment, there’s a fascinating mini-documentary on the Guardian website by filmmaker Nick Broomfield, looking at the story of the Kingsnorth Six – a group of very normal people who scaled a power station chimney in 2007 and managed to shut it down for a day. Their protest, for Greenpeace, aimed to highlight dangerous plans by the company and the government to build more coal-powered power stations in the UK…despite the government’s pledge to cut carbon emissions by 80 per cent by 2050. There’s some fabulous photography in this as well, as one of the protesters was a snapper…
Anyway, the full thing (20 mins) can be viewed here but the trailer can be seen below:

A piece I wrote and shot about Kolkata’s red light education centres (pictured above) has been published in this month’s New Start magazine. I wrote about Rambagan, the red light district I visited, on my blog here and here…….

After a decade of galloping economic growth, India’s child malnutrition rates are worse than in many sub-Saharan countries. A staggering 42.5 per cent of the country’s children under the age of five are underweight. Malnutrition makes children prone to illness, and stunts physical and mental development.
During my time in India in March, I spent a few days learning about this crisis from staff at the NGO Child in Need Institute. I also spent a day photographing at a clinic for the under-fives., where mothers take their children to be weighed, immunised and checked by doctors. They are also given advice on nutrition, family planning and sexual health.

“Malnutrition is a social problem, not a health problem” – CINI paediatrician, Dr Subho Pal, told me as we walked around the centre. “This is a cyclical problem that starts with early marriage. Girls are often uneducated and don’t know how to look after their children properly.
“Most are introducing artificial milk because they fear their milk is not enough for their babies. But these women are poor. 40 rupees buys enough milk for just four or five days so they dilute it more and more.”

Dr Pal believes the problem of child malnutrition is being ignored by politicians because it doesn’t fit their preferred image of a thrusting new India. In the worst cases, CINI admits children to its emergency ward for up to a month to ensure the reach a healthy weight. Mothers are taught how to prepare cheap, nutritious food. He would like to see wards like this built in public hospitals across the country.
He said: “The fact is that groups like ours are running a parallel health system. The government should be fulfilling this role. No one will admit these children to hospital because they aren’t sick – they are malnourished. But if India is become a truly developed nation we must have equality in health.”

“Photography for me is not looking, it’s feeling. If you can’t feel what you’re looking at, then you’re never going to get others to feel anything when they look at your pictures”

“I suppose I would have become a criminal if I hadn’t had discovered photography. It was my salvation.”

(both Don McCullin)

I just went to Bradford for the first time. It’s actually a very pleasant town centre, but the best thing about it – for me at least – is the National Media Museum, which has just opened a new Don McCullin exhibition (In England), to run September.
McCullin’s probably most famous for his pictures from conflicts like Vietnam and Lebanon, but his England images are just as wonderful. There are many iconic images from his time working for The Observer and Sunday Times, and showing the social division, poverty and squalor as well as the eccentricities of the British during the 1950s, 60s and 70s.
There are more recent pictures as well, but it’s the record of working class life in London, Bradford, Liverpool and other places that got me the most. There’s also a really interesting video interview with him as part of the show, which actually can be viewed online here.

Today, 15 May, is the anniversary of what Palestinians call al Nakba, or the catastrophe – the 1948 creation of Israel and campaign to drive them from their homes and appropriate Palestinian land.
More than 520 Palestinian villages were abandoned in amid a brutal military campaign and many thousands of residents sent fleeing to other parts of the country and into refugee camps over the borders in Jordan, Lebanon and Egypt.
I wrote at length about some of Israel’s ‘quirks’ when I was in the Holy Land last year. Like the doublespeak that exists regarding the very subject of the Nakba – something Israeli society won’t even discuss and which schools don’t cover. For Jewish residents this period of history is a glorious victory and even – for the more religious – a divine miracle. For the Palestinians it is a humilating disaster that still resonates today.
Then there are the various unfair laws which target the local Palestinian population – those who within what are now Israel’s borders (not even considering those in the occupied territories). There is for example the ‘present absentee’ law which means that any Arab property abandoned over a very short period that year became the property of the state – even if owners returned immediately after the fighting.
There are those are desperate to return to the sites of their old villages but who are prevented from doing so by the state.

I’m reading a great book at the moment, The Other Side of Israel by Susan Nathan, a British Jew who took up her ‘right of return’ to Israel but ended up living in an Arab town – a radical thing to do there, which sent shockwaves through Israeli society.
She quotes Eitan Bronstein, an activist I also met in Tel Aviv, who works to educate Jewish Israelis about the Nakba, as saying:

“I realised that there was a huge gap in terms of the understanding of the two sides about what had happened. One side, the Palestinians, was completely defeated, exiled and dispossessed – and that is how they see it. The other side, the Jews, won an incredible victory but they don’t therefore concede that the other side were the losers.
“Instead, they say things like, ‘It was the Palestinians’ fault that they chose to fight us,’ or ‘we didn’t start anything,’ or ‘we just wanted to be free and have a state’.
“When they do admit that their victory came at the expense of the Palestinians, such as in the case of terrible massacres like the one at Deir Yassin, a village where more than a hundred Palestinian citizens were butchered by Jewish militias, these are seen as exceptional incidents.
“‘That was carried out by a few bad apples’ or ‘That stuff happens in any war,’ they say.”

From yesterday’s Strangers into Citizens event in London, calling for a one-off amnesty of long-term irregular migrants in the UK.

I attended a very sobering meeting the other night, organised by the Hope not Hate campaign which is working to defeat the BNP at the forthcoming European elections on June 4th.
The extreme right party is putting forward a number of candidates, including its loathsome chairman Nick Griffin in the North West. Because the election is conducted under proportional representation – which favours smaller parties more than the first past the post system used in general elections – the party would only need to 8.5 per cent in some regions to secure seats. The apathy of most people towards elections in general – and particularly the European elections – could prove to be the party’s best friend.

As comedian Eddie Izzard said at Thursday’s meeting, a BNP MEP would be a disaster. A victory would bring the facists money and the political legitimacy they crave. The BBC, for example, has told the anti-nazi group Searchlight that Griffin would be given equal airtime on shows such as Newsnight and Question Time as the leaders of the mainstream parties if they were to win. More airtime would give them more ability to spread their poison and divide communities, as they have in so many areas over recent years.

“The BNP is a racist, Nazi party. It is not interested in fairness, but motivated only by hatred towards those it does not like. It thrives on conflict, mistrust and exploiting people’s genuine concerns. It is always looking for someone to blame, rather than getting on with the difficult job of sorting out complex problems.
“It is also a foul party. It is packed full of criminals, thugs and Nazis. It does not believe that a black person can ever be British and it would outlaw marriages between people of different ethnic backgrounds.” (Hope not Hate leaflet)

The only answer to this is for people to get out and vote. I am probably one of the only people I know who always votes, but this time people have got to make sure they are registered and actually get out and do it. The thought of Griffin being taken seriously by the mainstream media and given more public space in which to pedal his poison is frightening.
If you aren’t register, sort it out as soon as possible. There is information here about how to do so