Somebody called it a movement. It was not a movement. It was a feeling. A feeling that drove wave after wave of people in a great river which began to flow a few minutes before noon and was still in full flood long after nightfall.
What astonished everyone who marched on Saturday - let's settle on a million, shall we? - was the apparently limitless variety of those with whom they shared the roads of central London. Not just a diversity of banner-bearing interest groups but of individuality, brought into focus by the single underlying feeling that gave this day its resonance.
That feeling was one of a generalized dismay directed squarely at the country's leadership. If you wanted to attempt the impossible task of identifying a typical marcher, you would probably settle for the middle-aged white man who marched past the barricaded end of Downing Street at about 1pm carrying a hand-lettered sign. What it said, in neat black letters about six inches high, came closest to summarizing the message of the day. "Labour Party member no A128368 against the war," the man had written.
For although the river of people carried all kinds of flotsam and jetsam, the undercurrent was a mighty dissatisfaction with the performance of a leader who, 400 miles away in Glasgow, was at that very moment attempting to justify a stance that few appear to comprehend.
Whatever else it may have been, the march was a great shout of protest against a man for whom most of those present had voted in the last two general elections. After the long, alienating years of Thatcher, Tony Blair presented himself as one of us, part of the culture of modern Britain. But now one piece of foreign policy has provided the catalyst for the release of pent-up disenchantment. On Saturday all the dinner-party groans of anger - at the failure to restore the public services to some thing approaching a source of pride, at the corrosion of public trust by the incessant use of spin and at the publicity conscious consorting with charlatans and conmen - finally merged with the dismay over Iraq in this long warning cry.
Slogans dominated the day, but they were beside the point. Simple answers will not do, and the hundreds of thousands of placards distributed at the starting points served to diminish rather than amplify the impact of the gathering of so many people on a single pretext. In themselves, the people were enough. As Lambeth College Students came into view, marching past the Houses of Parliament behind a black banner 30ft wide, their faces were a snapshot of modern Britain, no two seeming to share the same pigment or physiognomy. This is today's reality, a London where three of your next four transactions are likely to be conducted with people for whom English is not their first language. Disturbing to some, this astonishing diversity contains the potential for great beauty, and it was the beauty that revealed itself on Saturday.
The echoes of history were everywhere, many of them relevant to the subject of the day. On the Embankment we awaited the noon start in the shadow of Cleopatra's needle, presented to the British nation in 1819 by Mohammed Ali Pasha, an Albanian army officer who had appointed himself viceroy of Egypt. A year later Mohammed sent his army to invade and enslave Sudan, with British approval. His great-grandson, Said Pasha, ordered the construction of the Suez canal, the location of Britain's last great imperial misadventure.
Around the foot of the needle, and up and down both sides of the boulevard, the preparations were under way. Vendors sold whistles and hooters for a pound apiece, their faces familiar from less exalted events.
Stalls were offering the literature of the Global Women's Strike, the Movement for a Socialist Future, the Palestine Solidarity Campaign. Stacks of placards waited to be picked up, advertising the movement's organizing bodies: the Stop the War Coalition, CND, the Muslim Association of Britain and the Daily Mirror. But it was the home-made banners that bore the most striking messages. "Peace and justice in east London" said one, carried by an elegant woman in a long black cloak. A white dove and a green olive branch adorned the violet silk banner hoisted by the Worthing and Lancing branch of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. Two middle-aged men carrying the bright red banner of the WRP Young Socialists were being followed by a dozen boys of mixed ethnicity, their faces half-obscured by scarves in the manner of the intifada or Italian football hooligans. Humor broke through, much of it very English: "Make Tea Not War", "Who Do You Think You Are Kidding, Mr Blair?", "Stop Mad Cowboy Disease", "Down With This Sort Of Thing", "Peace Not Slogans".
As we shuffled under Hungerford Bridge shortly before noon, a sustained cheer rang off the stone arches. Behind us hundreds of thousands were still making their way to London in coaches and trains, some of them listening to radios as Blair explained why they were wrong.
The first bottleneck came beneath Big Ben, the chimes of democratic freedom striking 12 times as we wheeled through 180 degrees into Whitehall, stepping around photographers lying on the asphalt, looking for shots of banners and the clock tower clustered together against the sky. A chant of "No war! No war!" rose as we passed under the blank gaze of the mother of parliaments.
Beyond the memorial to the glorious dead of wars whose origins are now cut and dried, the barricades narrowed and the pace slowed again as the march ground past Downing Street, guarded by 20 policemen and one police cameraman, the high steel gates and the raised traffic barricade a reminder of other domestic conflicts. Spontaneous cheering and whistle-blowing now swept through the crowd, a kind of Mexican wall of sound.
Turning into Trafalgar Square, past a man standing on the steps of a bank holding a large piece of greenery and a sign reading "English Bush - Harmless", there was the first glimpse of the march's other column, which had descended from Bloomsbury and along Shaftesbury Avenue. On Cockspur Street a red heart-shaped balloon with white doves hand-painted on its sides escaped its owner's hand and soared gracefully beyond the roofs and into the sky, a moment of wordless poetry watched by a thousand pairs of eyes.
As the columns merged at Piccadilly Circus, the color and the noise redoubled. The contrasts between the non-aligned and the activists sharpened, and sudden eddies of activity began to agitate the flow. Outside St James's church, the banners of the Spartacist League proclaimed the many priorities of all good Revolutionary Trotskyists. Two dozen young men and women carrying red flags stenciled with the word REVOLUTION moved into a jog as they passed the Royal Academy, chanting "Who let the bombs out? Blair-Bush-Shar-ON!" and a variation on an old Vietnam jingle: "Blair, Bush, CIA - how many kids did you kill today?" Throughout the march the chants were seldom spreading beyond their groupuscules, emphasizing the diversity.
At Hyde Park Corner the column halted for many long minutes. Then passing through the Queen Mother's jolly wrought iron gates, we were serenaded by an elderly couple with an accordion and a tambourine, singing Give Peace a Chance. Apparently they kept it up all day, which would have amused and delighted its composer.
Inside the park, suddenly feeling the bite of a chill wind under a slate-grey sky, the marchers stood and listened to speakers whose delivery seldom lived up to the occasion.
What we wanted was Hans Blix, with his calm, methodical recitation of facts. What we got was Tariq Ali, his flamboyant silver hair set off by a pink pashmina, declaring that Britain was the country in need of a regime change. And Tony Benn, telling us that we were founding a new worldwide political movement, while Charles Kennedy eschewed populist soundbites in favor of a standard Lib-Dem party political broadcast. George Galloway told us that he would rather be eating cheese and reading Sartre on the banks of the Seine than taking popcorn with the born-again, Bible-belting, fundamentalist (remainder drowned by hoots of glee).
We got Bianca Jagger, sandwiched between Harold Pinter at his most minatory - "American barbarism will destroy the world!" - and Ken Livingstone at his most genial. And we got the star guest, the Rev Jesse Jackson, who was presumably invited to remind us of the great civil rights marches of the 1960s but who is to the Rev Dr Martin Luther King as Gareth Gates is to James Brown. Eventually, he gave way to Ms Dynamite, who sang one of her hits, the lilting Dy-na-mi-tee, to a backing track after reading a poem in which she reminded us of previous US debacles in Vietnam, Guatemala, Nicaragua.
As the first arrivals turned for home in the gathering gloom, tens of thousands were still making their way towards the park. Too late for the festivities, they were none the less a part of the biggest political demonstration ever seen in Britain, an event that went beyond slogans and positions to expose something deep in the nation's core, a cast of a million playing to an audience of one.
© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003
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