Still Not In My Name (Part Two)

OK, so on a purely personal level I am glad that I joined that march back in February 03 simply to have experienced it first hand, because the experience was like the best music festival I've ever been to, combined with the best football match I've ever been at, with a whole load of street theatre and a lifetime subscription to Private Eye thrown in for good measure. The thrill of adding your voice to a million others and hearing your words echo around the streets of the nations capital for a day, is not to be underestimated!

Have you ever been involved in anything anywhere near that big that wasn't sponsored by a piss-weak lager brand or a multinational bank? I am pretty sure that the vast majority of people who were there felt it too, that sense of exhilaration, and of affirmation, and I strongly suspect a lot of them would really, really like to do it again. Its definitely the kind of thing you could develop a taste for, and I think the March for the Alternative ticks all of the boxes for being the next "big one".

February 15th was an educational experience for me too! I'm part of a generation that spent its childhood watching the police beat up rioting Brixtonians, picketing miners, poll tax protesters or England fans on BBC Newsround with John Craven - I thought I knew how those things went! When riot police go looking for trouble, they never seem to have much trouble finding it. That day was different, it was well organised, well stewarded, mind-bogglingly well attended and thoroughly well behaved! It was also extremely heavily policed, and at times that was a little intimidating, until I realised that "we" outnumbered "them" by hundreds to one and that this brought about a fundamental shift in the relationship between police and protester. It was clear that confrontational tactics would be of no use to anybody that day. In any crowd there will always be black clad hotheads and fanatics of all varieties, but this was a family event and they were on their best behaviour too. The graffiti artist Banksy had been at work along the route with tape and barricades stating "Polite Line - Do Not Get Cross" and far as I could tell, nobody did.

There was passion for sure, many questions, much anger, and a kind of collective mass incredulity that they could possibly expect us to swallow this bullshit justification for a war. An invasion we knew would not liberate anybody, would not bring democracy, would not make the world a safer place, would kill hundreds of thousands of innocent people, destroy the lives of millions more, would further destabilise the middle-east and would be an all singing, all dancing, recruitment campaign par excellence for radical extremism at home and abroad. We knew no that no WMDs would be found, we knew it was all about oil, we knew it was about selling the bombs to raise the country to the ground then making billions on the no-bid reconstruction contracts. We knew that measures taken in the name of security ran the risk of robbing us of the very freedoms we supposedly fought to uphold.

And we were right!

Tragically, history has born us out on almost every single point!

But did we actually do any good?

We didn't Stop The War of course, but I think most people there saw the invasion as a foregone conclusion anyway. It was pretty obvious that we were as inextricably tied to America's crackpot foreign policy as it later turned we were to their crackpot financial practices. What is impossible to say though, is how much worse things might have been if instead of a global day of action with record breaking mass protests in dozens of cities around the world, everybody had just stayed at home and carried on moaning about it? In a way its almost heartening that they bothered even trying to sell us their justification for oil, sorry I mean justification for war. We should take the fact that they even felt the need to lie to us about freedom, and democracy, when in the days of empire all they ever felt the need to say was "they've got it, we want it, they can't stop us from taking taking it, it's our god given right" as a sign of how much things have changed in the last hundred years or so.

It is my opinion that our political leaders, whatever their party, will try and get away with just about as much as they think the population will let them get away with. A population tuned in to whatever prime-time Z-list-celebrity phone-in talent show is clogging up my news feed at the moment sends them a very clear message that they can get away with pretty much anything they like. A city full of hundreds of thousands of protesters sends a very different message altogether. I believe quite firmly that in the absence of a concerted anti-war movement, the horrors in Iraq and Afghanistan would have been worse, the inhumanities taking place inside Camp X-Ray and Abu Ghraib would never have been exposed and our civil liberties at home would have been eroded even more quickly than they have been.

Now at the time of the Iraq invasion the Blair government had a solid majority in the House of Commons, a majority the likes of which it would never enjoy again in fact. David Cameron does not have a majority, no one voted for this Coalition of the Shilling (they represent old money) and they have no clear mandate for the radical and extreme changes to our society that they have initiated. More to the point, while Stop The War asked people to protest about the plight of strangers in a foreign land, a high-flung idealistic principle at the best of times, the March for the Alternative asks people to protest against against public spending cuts, and the political ideology behind them, that directly affect the majority of the people in the country. People whose jobs are being destroyed, whose pay is frozen while the cost of living creeps inexorably upwards, whose services are being cut and whose social security is being taken away. People whose educational aspirations have been dashed on the rocks while their futures are stunted by the burden of paying off debts incurred bailing out bankers who have increased their own wages and still paid out bumper bonuses. The March for the Alternative asks people to protest essentially out of self interest, because this government does not have the interests of any one but their own privileged elite in mind.

The Conservatives campaigned for change in May 2010, but all they have delivered are the same old policies they devastated this country with back in the 1980's, privatisation and public spending cuts, tax breaks for the rich and wage slavery for everyone else, the demonisation of public sector workers and the scapegoating of immigrants and ethnic minorities. All they've done is call in a slick Etonian PR executive to re-brand it and hope that most people are too distracted, too apathetic and too dumbed down to notice.

But we have noticed 　

That is why I suspect the March for the Alternative on the 25th of March is going to be a record breaker, and hopefully, a government breaker.

If you have kids, if you are a student, if you are approaching retirement, if you are old, if you or someone close to you works in the public sector, the NHS, the fire brigade, the police or the armed forces, if you depend on the NHS, if you are at risk of redundancy, if you are worried about crime, if you think that selling off the forests AT A LOSS is a bad idea, if you care about other people and are concerned that the people running the country are millionaires who only care about other millionaires, you should be on this march! If you or anyone you care about has a disability you should be on this march. If you think the governments plan to boost the economy by making it easier for your employer to dismiss you and harder for you to take them to court if they do it unfairly is a crock of shit, you should be on this march. If you think its a bit rotten that we will subsidise foreign banks, but we won't subsidise our kids higher education, you should be on this march.If you think its wrong to make major structural changes to the NHS when, prior to their election, the Conservatives promised not to make any major structural changes to the NHS, you should be on this march.

Hell, if you've never had the pleasure of going to London, and finding that they've closed roads across half the city so that you, and hundreds of thousands of your friends can walk down them as if you own the place...you should be on this march.

It promises to be quite an exhilarating experience!

Still Not In Our Name (Part One)

With the "March for the Alternative" just weeks away, I want to share my memories of the last time I joined a protest on a scale that this one promises to reach, back in February 2003, during the build up to the invasion of Iraq, when tens of millions of people thronged the streets of cities around the world to deliver a single clear message to another coalition, the "coalition of the willing" - NOT IN OUR NAME!

The fraudulent election of George W Bush in 2000, and the tragic events of September 2001 had already extinguished any sense of optimism that the start of a new millennium may have heralded. Even people with little or no interest in world events were left with an encroaching sense that the world had taken a new turn towards something dark, dangerous and frightening - with terror alerts, anthrax attacks and patriot acts. The invasion of Afghanistan in 2002 saw the birth of the Stop The War coalition and, even though the perpetrators were known to be of Saudi Arabian origin, and it was quite obvious that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11, or even with Al Quaida, and that any weapons of mass destruction we might have sold him in the 1980s had been used up or destroyed during the 1990s, it was becoming increasingly clear that Iraq was next.

The Daily Mirror had run a campaign promoting the march in London on Saturday the 15th in a positive light, but by and large the news media was filled with hysteria at the cost of all the police who were being drafted in to control what they called a "rent-a-mob of demonstrators", veiled accusations that our protest was unpatriotic, was unsupportive of "our boys", that it played into the hands of a brutal dictator like Saddam and was an obvious target for a terrorist "dirty bomb" attack. The Murdoch press in particular did everything they could to scare people away, but nevertheless, people were headed in their hundreds of thousands towards the nations capital. My brother Andy and I were even interviewed and photographed (looking distinctly red-eyed) by the Bury Times at a service station on the way down, and a quote from me was used as the headline for the papers coverage of the demo - "It's time to stand up and be counted!"

And stand up we certainly did!

Octogenarian nuns, tiny children in prams, world war two veterans in their wheelchairs, CND, Socialist Worker Party and Trade Union activists, members of the Women's Institute, students, church groups, anarchists, communists, conspiracy theorists, people of all races and denominations, old and young, imams, rabbis and at least one Church of England bishop, hippies, crusties, the people who you always expect to see at that kind of event and many, many thousands of people who had never even thought about their right to protest before, whole families from the middle and working classes alike, doctors, teachers, barristers, numerous politicians and celebrities - it was easier to find a group that wasn't represented that day than list all those that were, we filled the city to capacity, we took over the streets and the atmosphere was absolutely breathtaking!

It was like a politically charged marde gras, jubilant, exuberant, enthusiastically defiant but overwhelmingly positive and peaceful, funny, humane, extremely colourful and above all, deafeningly loud!

It seemed like everyone there was equipped with something that made lots of noise, a whistle, a bell or a drum, turning the protest into the worlds biggest spontaneous guerrilla samba band, clapping hands and united voices, mobile bicycle powered sound-systems toured up and down blasting out music, megaphone powered chants were taken up and passed around gleefully, and periodically drowning out this cacophony there was what can only be described as a Mexican roar. It could be heard approaching from miles away like street thunder, surging back down the massed line of people towards us, voices raising into a deafening crescendo of freedom and resistance, engulfing us as we added our own voices to the uproar then fading off into the distance as it passed us by, only to return half an hour later, just as loud, going the other way back down the line. The entire length of the march was a dense forest of waving flags, banners and placards, a riot of colour and witty improvisation, "No War" and "Bliar" placards were everywhere, others exclaimed "Make Tea Not War" or condemned "The War Against Terror" in cheeky foul mouthed parody of Bush and Blair's modern crusade. A piece of paper stuck to the back of a little girl's coat as she was carried through the demonstration on her fathers back proclaimed "I'm not a terrorist, and neither is my daddy!"

Yes, that was exactly what the newspapers, the Sun in particular, had called us - terrorists and supporters of terror.

The police presence was immense, all leave had been cancelled, reinforcements had been drafted in from across the country and they were out in force, but the day was ours, and it and entirely peaceful with only a handful of minor arrests reported. There were undoubtedly people with extreme views in the crowd, and people who were of course extremely angry, but they were diluted to near homeopathic levels by the overwhelming majority of ordinary people, protesting peacefully against an invasion we all knew would lead inevitably to bloody tragedy for the people of Iraq. It was difficult to visually gauge exactly how many people were there, although the news and police helicopters patrolling the skies above us must have had a pretty clear overview, but although it was impossible to see how many people where there, it was impossible to ignore that the turn out was simply staggering. We may not have been able to see the forest for the trees, but we could feel it all around us and as Hyde Park began to fill for the rally, the procession of people heading there still stretched for miles, snaking back through the packed streets of London.

I believe that the rally was fantastic, with speeches from Tony Benn and George Galloway amongst many others, but we never actually made it there in time. My group, like hundreds of thousands of others, remained embedded in the mass of protesting humanity, most memorably in Piccadilly Circus where the separate strands of the demonstration met like the confluence of two mighty rivers. It wasn't a kettle as such, although some of the exits to the square where certainly blocked by dense lines of police, leaving only the route down Piccadilly open to us, and it took what felt like hours to clear the choke point. The guerrilla samba band went into carnival overdrive and kept us dancing on the spot the whole while, teaching the Met's finest a few lessons in crowd control. It was surreal, like something out of a dream. Overhead, waved by a protester stood on top of one of the booths where tourists normally queued to buy tickets for open-top bus tours, flew an enormous flag depicting a dove made up of the word "peace" repeated over and over, whilst off to one side a group of extremely angry sounding bearded men chanted something in Arabic.

The organisers of the demonstration say that there had been nearly two million people protesting in London. The police claim that there were only 750.000 has been widely derided by anyone who was there, and even if you split the difference between the two, as most of the news agencies appear to have done, there were still something like a million and a half people out on the streets of the capital that day. It was incredible, it was glorious, it was a wonderful day, a day that will always remain fresh in my mind and that I will always be proud to have been a small part of.

And now we have the opportunity to do it again, protesting against a different coalition this time, against a ConDem coalition government who are making the most savage cuts in the history of public spending, for their own ideological reasons and without any electoral mandate for the worst of them, including what amounts to the privatisation of the NHS. We protested against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and we must now protest against this war of the wealthy against the middle and lower classes in our own country.

They will tell us that we are foolish, and that we are somehow criminal for using our legal right to protest, they will tell us that it is dangerous at worst and pointless at best, and I will address each of these criticisms in my next article, but for the time being I will be content to say that if you do not take this opportunity to join something huge, powerful, peaceful and above all for the common good, to walk through the streets of your capital city as if you really do own the place, you may well regret it for the rest of your lives.

Join the March for the Alternative on the 26th March.