March goes ahead

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Details, pictures and video here:

http://leninology.blogspot.com/2007/10/ban...emo-report.html (http://leninology.blogspot.com/2007/10/ban-broke-demo-report.html)

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

A friend has just e-mailed me this short report:


As for the march, it went better than I expected. According to what I heard, the ban actually encouraged people to come by lifting it out of the routine. The coach from C**** was nearly full (thanks especially to a student who brought about twenty people from his local sixth-form college). Still, we must have got one of the higher turn-outs, because the overall number was in the very low thousands.

Just after we turned up in Trafalgar Square, the news was being passed around that the police were going to let us through to Parliament. The tactic, I suppose, was to keep saying that the march was going ahead, see how many would turn up on the day, and then ask the police if they still wanted to stop us moving off from Trafalgar Square. There was no information, of course, about whether the reversal of the ban had been taken at police, Home Office or Prime Ministerial level. I suppose if there'd only been a few hundred, they would have continued with the ban (even though the casual observer might expect it to be the other way round).

Still, the cops had their fun, letting the traffic interrupt the march at junctions in order to break it up into small segments, each of which they would keep penned in for about an hour before allowing further movement. Among other things, this meant that no photograph could be taken of the whole march as it made its way along Whitehall. We were also squeezed into a much narrower channel than was necessary for traffic purposes. But all this low-level humiliation made the march many times noisier than it was when it left Trafalgar Square, as people used the chants to vent their anger. I saw three people being marched off to police vans (probably refusing to stay within the designated confines); there was long and loud booing from the rest of the march - a level of confidence you don't usually find on StWC marches (I'd say most of the marchers were veterans of the current anti-war movement, although many of our sixth-formers were an exception).

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

More footage and film of all the speeches have been very helpfull collated here:

http://members5.boardhost.com/medialens/msg/1192019075.html

[Zurdito]

I wrote this on another thread:

There were about 3,000 of us, not a great turnout but a solid, militant, mainly trot crowd (very few anarchists or pacifists, which is encouraging), and we managed to get them to overturn the ban on the march when they saw that there were too many of us gathered in Trafalgar Square to arrest us. Some awful speeches by Tony Benn, some guy from the west wing and a few MP's (one labour one Plaid fucking Cymru), and a reasonably rousing but horribly self-congratulatory speech from Lindsey German. Oh yeah and Mark Thomas hailed the STWC as a success because "who knows where thye'd have bombed if we hadn't marched". Embarrassing stuff that, yeah, the Iraqis must be so grateful to us. Anyway, there was reaosnable solidarity from the crowd int he face of the police trying to divide us, and we blocked a road until they let our comrades pass through a barrier to join us. 4 arrests I think. High police presence. All in all, one of the better marches. Anyone with a different perspective will surely add more info.

that said, this video is good (I saw myself twice!) - the end bit especially - blocking off Whitehall traffic by force and singing "we all live ina terrorist regime" in the cops faces was fun - took me back to the anti-cap days. :P

http://www.stopwar.org.uk/

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Thanks for that Z!

Wish I could have been there!