A Year of Protest - The NHS, Disabled Rights, Guantánamo, Bradley Manning and the Occupy Movement

A year ago yesterday, I embarked on a huge and ongoing project -- to photograph the whole of London by bike. A year and a day later, I have taken around 13,000 photos, and have published nearly 1,700 on Flickr. As it happens, my time has been so consumed of late with my ongoing campaign to close Guantánamo -- where the prison-wide hunger strike, now in its fourth month, has finally awoken the world to the ongoing horrors of the prison -- that I have not had time recently to publish photos from this project, although I have continued to take photos on an almost daily basis.

However, I realised that today -- May 12 -- is the first anniversary of an event organised by the worldwide Occupy movement (inspired by the Occupy Wall Street movement in New York), and that I had photographed the event that took place in London, and so, to coincide with that anniversary, I've put together a selection of photos from the various political campaigns and protests I've been involved in over the last year.

These involve campaigns to save the NHS (including Lewisham Hospital, in my home borough in south east London) and to protect disabled people from the cruelty of the Tory-led government, campaigns in the US and the UK to close Guantánamo and free Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison, and the campaign to defend Bradley Manning, the alleged US military whistleblower responsible for providing WikiLeaks with an unprecedented number of classified documents.

For more on Andy Worthington, see: www.andyworthington.co.uk/
For my most interesting photos, see: www.flickriver.com/photos/andyworthington/popular-interes...