Stop the War Demo, Saturday 5th August

Sorry for the delay with this folks, it was a product of taking some recovery time from a particularly athletic beer-and-argument session with some AWL members in the pub after the demo, and of my not being arsed yesterday.

Like I said, what I'm going to offer are a few thoughts rather than a report per se - after all, you probably got those from the news agencies already.

Look, it wasn't all bad. Nobody could reasonably say that this was just a bad demo. Firstly it was bigger - a lot bigger - either than I expected it to be, or than the reports about it claimed. To be honest I think that the STWC official estimate of 100-150,000 may even be a little on the low side, and not be taking into account the vast numbers of stragglers. There were already people leaving when my part of the demo (which was about half way through) arrived at Parliament Square. It wasn't as big as Feb 2003, but it was definitely the biggest since, and by some distance.

There were obviously a lot of people on it who were not part of the usual "march and meeting" circuit, which is another good thing. If all the left ever does is mobilise its own members and periphery, then it will never get anywhere. So it was good to see what I would guess were a lot of new faces.

On the anorak side, there was also a fair bit of train spotting fare on the left as well, with groups that I thought had wound up years ago (the CPGB-ML!) managing to turn out contingents. There was even a rather sad and forlorn contingent consisting of the remnants of Workers' Power, which as Larrycain and I remarked to each other at the time, was somehow just saddening.

But...

It was politically just degenerate. I never thought I would go on an anti-war demo where people would be chanting slogans in support of theocratic militias who progressives ought not simply to be supporting anyway, and who they certainly wouldn't be supporting if they were not safely tucked half way around the world from said militias. And yet there it was, in Arabic or English (according to your taste) - slogans in support of Hizbollah, Hizbollah T-Shirts (I await the CD of Hassan Nasrallah's greatest hits), Hizbollah flags stuck to SWP placards, you name it. And it was down to the political leadership of the demo by the SWP, no mistake.

Let's get this clear - I usually castigate people on the left who gratuitously bash the SWP. It seems to me a cheap stunt by people who would do better to talk to the odd working class person. But the SWP's craven search for a short cut to progressive anti-imperialist politics, to replace the difficult spadework of actual internationalist class politics, has led them to support groups like Hizbollah. The sight of SWP members joining in stupid (and oxymoronic) chants like "We are all anti-war! We are all Hizbollah!" - whether one supports Hizbollah or not, "anti-war" they clearly ain't - was just nauseating.

And then came Galloway's speech, during which he lionised not only Hassan Nasrallah as "the real leader of the Arab people", which may come as a surprise to people from Morocco to Dubai, but also Nasser (who's dead) and Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro (who are both Latin American). I therefore proclaim myself, Stroppy and Dave Osler as the "true leaders" of Papua New Guinea. Congratulations, folks.

Here's a video of the speech, so you can see it for yourselves:



One other anecdote. I was also deeply unimpressed to see a middle aged male member of the SWP, fresh from yelling about how "Zionists" like the AWL students whom he was addressing should not have been on the demo, whereas Hizbollah should be, cutting down a 19-year old female AWL member by shouting "shut up" at her when she attempted to reply. Nice to see there's no thuggery and sectarianism in that organisation, then.

The demo overall? Physically big but politically so, so poor. Get your act together, STWC.