Leeds Candle-lit Vigil Peace Protest

A very rapid and badly written little note to tell you about last night's v positive candle-lit vigil in Leeds. Called by Leeds Coalition Against the War, the vigil started at 5pm in Dortmund Square and between 200 and 300 people attended, which is quite stonking for a very badly publicised event.

Students from the main universities gathered at the University of Leeds' main steps at 4.45 to march down to the Square at 5pm. Predictably, and to the dismay of many (including myself), our local SWP student organisers had come prepared with dozens of those one-dimensional, homogeneous, crude sloganised SWP placards and managed to palm them off onto at least half the students there. While the majority of us were not SWP, it looked like an SWP army on the march and, in my opinion, this was neither 'democratic' nor 'appealing'.

Congratulations then to the SWP on another successful hijack of another event and their successful alienation of yet more people. Of course, the predicted hijack should have been pre-empted by a mass 'alternative' and 'original' banner and placard-making session. But as so many of us are so far behind with our work, its difficult to compete with full-time paid organisers and mass-produced identikit placards.

Anyway, I digress. Around 70 students walked down into the town centre, holding up traffic here and there on the way. One very irate motorist, clearly of a 'hawkish persuasion', beeped at us and then gave us what can only be described as a 'vigorous masturbatory gesture'. In response, a student who might well be the present writer, was suddenly overcome with rage and shouted back quite aggressively in fact: "Fuck off you wanker". Sorry Leila mate.

Once in town, in fact just as we approached 'that' fastfood shithole, a couple of police vans suddenly appeared in something of a hurry. We saluted her majesty's constabulary, and also gave a wave to the resident plain clothes copper or university security guard (we haven't found out yet). His legendary disguise of 'studenty' clothes, however, do give the ‘???’ away a bit when combined with his age, size and ear-piece/microphone. And the fact that he’s always following the lefties around campus.

Dortmund Square was already quite full by 5.30 when we arrived. A group of youngsters were playing their little drums, candles were being lit, there were banners and placards and 100s of people from literally all backgrounds and walks of life. Local teachers, parents and kids, council workers, students, councillors, trade unionists, activists, students; there were Christians, Muslims, socialists, greens, anarchists, liberals, labour party members; and a real ethnic mix of white, black and Asian people of all ages.

For the next hour, we chatted, chanted, sang, danced, blew our whistles and just had a nice time. The various groups had put their banners facing the road so that passing traffic could see us, and had placed lit candles in front of them. The police presence was intially small and fairly distant.

Until, that is, a 'spontaneous' movement forward from the square and into the road where some 50 people sat down for around 10-15 minutes, blocking traffic on one direction, and then in both as buses were redirected around us. The police suddenly appeared in more numbers and started trying to scare the inexperienced by saying we would be arrested if we didn't get up. But, no, we stayed sat down and had a good old chanting session - no prizes for guessing which old favourites came out ('how many kids', 'Tony Blair Terrorist' etc) - before some more vans arrived delivering more cops and we all decided to get off the road. Yeah, cowards, I know, but we don't want to use up all our 'get out of jail free' cards too soon.

Excitement over and with the police stood in a line in front of the road, some of us began having debates about what the anti-war 'movement' should be doing next, and about the prickly subject of ‘how do we help Iraqis get rid of Saddam?’. And then, at around 7pm, the vigil/protest/demo petered out, we had a quick address by Chair of the Leeds Coalition Frances Jones thanking us/telling us about next events, and then everyone pissed off home or to the pub.

I am trying to upload some photos from the vigil so look out for them!