UK Indymedia | StopWar march

mini mouse | 18.10.2004 12:12 | London | World

RAIN RUINS RIOT

If you ever wanted to know what’s put the knockers on revolution in England, you should have been in a storm drenched Trafalgar Square at half five on Sunday.

International demonstrators

Wide spectrum of people

and all ages

Crossing Waterloo Bridge

Shameful cop defending Downing Street

Anti capitalists enter the square

Forward Intelligence Team do their bit

and after a bit of jostling one is led away

IndyMedia reporter arrested

Follwed by further arrests

Massive provocation from the police, especially the hated Forward Intelligence Units (fast becoming the SPG of the twenty first century) led to running battles to the south of the Square. Italian and French activists - no strangers to winkling out the cobblestones - reacted promptly and fiercely to a number of arrests, including an indymedia reporter and member of the ESF co-ordinating committee.

An indymedia photographer was knocked to the ground - I myself was grabbed by a female officer and told to “piss off or be nicked”. When I later complained of assault I was told to shut up or be arrested - then it would be “reasonable force”. (I was photographing a violent arrest at the time).

Then came torrential rain. And everything ground to a halt.

New police tactics emerged today. Stop the War estimated 100,000 protestors, police say 20,000.

How come?

The march left Russell Square at 2pm. I walked the route (stopping off for several photo ops) and arrived at 3pm. Maybe 10,000 people followed me in to Trafalgar Square.

I telephoned friends to see where they were. They hadn’t even reached Aldwych (less than a mile from the start) and it took them until 5pm to finish. Meanwhile groups of maybe a couple of thousand would arrive into the Square, followed by stragglers - implying it was all over.

Twenty minutes later another few thousand would arrive, complaining of seemingly pointless hold ups along the route.

Only after all the speakers were finished was the march freed up. At about 4.45 Whitehall erupted with people, probably enough to fill the Square on their own.

This was a clear attempt to diminish the importance of the demonstration.

This has been an enlightening four days. I don’t blame the individual policemen (well, some I do), but the fact remains that they must have been under orders to harrass protestors (mainly guests from abroad), surround and intimidate mermaids and squids (Rising Tide on Friday) and be generally inhospitable and aggressive to the indigenous population who elect their bosses and pay their wages.

Their ultimate boss is of course Blunkett.

How on earth did he evolve from Labour leader of the “Republic of Sheffield” to a Home Secretary even worse than Michael Howard?

And with that thought in mind, what about :

Peter Hain (onetime scourge of the apartheid movement)
Jack Straw (ex-lefty President of the NUS)
Patricia Hewitt (powerful Age Concern campaigner), and
John Prescott (calls a spade a shovel, yet still happy to shovel shit).

mini mouse

Additions

Comments

Hide the following 8 comments

What do you expect? A Miracle?!

18.10.2004 16:41

The answer to that last question (about the MPs) is simple.

They got:

1) Places on various boards of directors as 'advisors' and 'consultants'.
2) Corporate Sponsorship (partly as a result of the above item).
3) Superannuated paycheques from Whitehall.
4) A Career.
5) A pension.
6) The promise of a knighthood...
7) ...And most of all, POWER!!

In others words, they've been co-opted by the very same system they set out to change.

As the old saying says:
"Don't vote, you'll only encourage them"!

As for the state-sponsored uniform fetishists - well, you don't think they were there for our welfare, do you?!

I too was there, and saw very little trouble, but, what I did was many people united in the name of one cause and enjoying themselves.

So, don't believe all the hype, as it wasn't all bad, although I'm sure the cops did try it on with a few people - it's expected of them.

Activista

Good report

18.10.2004 20:08

Thanks for the report - one of the better ones on Indymedia. If you were near the front of the march then you may not have seen the Italian band - very entertaining and infectious tunes.

I don't understand why the march took so long to start off. Where I was the march only started moving at 2:25pm. It meant the march took a long time and ended up missing all speeches.

Then there was (irritatingly for some of us) the group who insisted on (repeatedly) stopping the entire march so they could do a running charge. . It also means that the people who run get to push ahead of anyone else, slowing them down.

Brian B

Good photo report

18.10.2004 21:49

Thanks for posting, that's a good set of photos you're shared with us.

I was at the Sunday demo as well, and I'm still trying to piece together some of the things which happened, and your report & photos are helping.

Simon

I've seen the light!

19.10.2004 16:59

ESF UK PLC

I don’t know when I first began to feel the first faint buzz of conversion – perhaps it was listening to Alex Callinicos in the Great Hall on Saturday afternoon damning the imperialist war-mongers, spectacles slipping down his nose, stumbling over his words in excitement and clad (rather suitably, I thought at the time) in a black shirt.

Or maybe it was hearing the high-octane pitch of Faustino Bertinotti, calling for a Europe of peace and justice, a Europe of equals in which war would be a thing of the past, a Europe that wasn’t for sale.

Either way, the road to Damascus began to open for me.

I’d been finding the ant-war rally a sad, depressing and angry experience; here was Alex proposing the RESPECT coalition and George Galloway in particular as a new, exciting and ethical political party of the left. Not a dozen meters away in the same hall, there were groups of women from Iraq campaigning for the victims of torture and the disappeared of Saddam. Wasn’t George Galloway the man we saw in ‘that’ video, cringing and fawning in front of Saddam, praising his bravery and courage, even whilst Iraqis were being tortured and disappeared? Wasn’t it George Galloway who’d received money from that same Saddam through various Iraqi ‘charities’? How could he still be posing as the champion of the Iraqi people?

Alex himself swore blind that the Socialist Workers Party was a model of grass-roots democracy – I wondered, is this the same SWP that colluded with the SA and GLA to exclude the other UK groups in Paris when bidding for London? The same SWP which declared through Jonathan Neale that local social forums weren’t ‘representative’, and sought to exclude and marginalize the ones that weren’t set up by the SWP? The SWP that had already secured agreement on the Alexandra Palace as a venue for the ESF UK even before there was an ESF UK? The list went on…. How could this be?

Pondering this depressing reality however didn’t calm the excitement I felt rising inside me, speech after speech: “democracy… peace…. Justice…. Equality”, on and on in my brain in some mad, hypnotic rhythm.

And then I got it.

Just as the retired Israeli supreme court judge Naim Cohen said that a jew was anyone who said they were, it was a question of will and perception – in the same way that the national socialist german workers party of the 1930s (the nazis) were socialist because they said they were, so the socialist workers party is a workers party because they say they are, Alex Callinicos is a democrat because he says he is, and Redmond O’Neill is a socialist even though he gets paid over £110,000 a year as a consultant to Ken Livingstone. They are what they claim to be, because identity comes through will.

By the time Sunday came I could watch the blue-jacketed Alexandra Palace security and the police confronting my erstwhile colleagues of the truly radical left with equanimity, even a smile. What did it matter if the Marxist-Leninism espoused by Alex is really about as radical as tucking your shirt into your underpants, or that the Socialist Worker paper is as rigid and doctrinaire in its writings as the Daily Telegraph? What did it matter if the bidding and organizing process of ESF UK had been run roughly along the same lines as the recent referendum run by Lukashenko in Belarus?

So I say along with Lenin that the vanguard of the revolution is quite entitled to use the violence of the state to advance the dictatorship of the proletariat! Clearly, property can’t be private if it’s at the service of the Revolution, and so the ESF Trading Regulations are a legitimate arm of the insurrectionary proletariat…..

As the sun came up clear and bright on my Pauline conversion, I found myself standing on the steps of the Alexandra Palace along with my comrades of the Socialist Workers Party shouting: “Lay on with those truncheons, you boys in blue! Clear this anarchist rabble out of the path of the leaders! I’m with the Revolution, and we’ve got an empire to build!”

Jon Cloke
mail e-mail: damage61@hotmail.com

exactly

19.10.2004 23:23

i thought i was joining a movement that could bring about a new, brighter, more positive future. it was only on sunday that i realised i'd come dangerously close to supporting a political party. sunday wasn't a demo, it was an swp rally.

biggup the autonomous spaces! maybe they were a little bit cliquey, in that you had to be in the know to go, but under the circumstances i think you guys did an incredible job.

did they really think we wouldn't notice? or care? were they surprised?

i don't think so.

power leads to arrogance, and pride comes before a fall. the swp have f*cked themselves as far as i can tell.

don't get me wrong, i think there needs to be communication in order to reach deeper understanding and i think some of the people at stop the war are not necessarily as stupid as they might make out.

but you know what they say about one bad apple spoiling a whole barrel?

disillusioned newbie

whatever you think about Galloway we shouldn't parrot right-wing media lies

21.10.2004 12:25

To Jon Cloke: All the stuff about ESF process is legitimate debate, fair enough. But why repeat lies against Galloway?

I don't hold any brief for Galloway, his politics aren't mine, but he is the most prominent anti-war politician in the UK and as such has been the target of a non-stop smear campaign in the right-wing media.

The bribe allegations have been repeatedly disproved, only to be endlessly re-printed. And 'that' conversation with Saddam was at a point when Galloway was trying to get him to make concessions to the UN to avoid war: that was his motive.

Make no mistake, the aim of the smears is to hurt the whole anti-war movement, not just him. You don't have to be a fan of Galloway (nor Respect) to realise that joining in with right-wing attacks on him only helps the pro-war cause.

concerned citizen

Galloway?

21.10.2004 16:05

Meaning that if Galloway was elected Britain would be a better place??

Galloways best mate
Homepage: http://www.socialistwanker.com

a strange demo

26.10.2004 09:41

I came rather late to Russell Square, and as I was with a group (Babels) and wanted to find my people, I went a bit quicker than most of the rest. I met two very powerful drum groups, but I was very astonished about the uniformity of the demonstration. Only boards, thousends of them with anti-Irak-war things and anti- Bush things. Well, I'm also against the Irak engagement and against Bush etc. but we also had other items during the ESF, hadn't we? The only difference was made by a French group called "No Vox": Without papers, without housing, without work. I passed them shortly before the houses of Parliament, and then I had a strange experience: Further on, almost nobody went on though there were no policemen to hinder us. I had the impression that the head of the demonstration had simply run too fast and that they had lost the rest behind. So almost the whole way from the Houses of Parliament to Trafalgar square was quite boring for me, till I came on to the place.

Gerd Buentzly, Germany

Gerd Buentzly
mail e-mail: gerdbuentzly@aol.com

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