Guy Aitchison (London, OK): I only just got back from the anti-war protest that took place outside Parliament this afternoon. It was a lively and good spirited affair, but entirely peaceful as you'd imagine. There was also a decent turn out given it took place at a time you'd expect most protesters to be either at work or in lectures. The timing was designed to coincide with the MPs' first day back after their three month vacation and Brown's big speech on Iraq. And so several thousand of us gathered at one o'clock in Trafalgar Square where we listened to Galloway, Benn, McDonnell, and other luminaries of the anti-war left, before marching down past Whitehall to Parliament. As Anthony has mentioned, the fact that the protest was even allowed to take place represents a significant victory on the civil liberties front. Despite Brown's pledge to reverse the ban on protests within one kilometre of parliament, the police, in dialogue with Stop the War organisers, had been trying to prevent the protest from reaching Westminster. The Met's justification this time was that it would stop MPs gaining entry to the building in contravention of an 1839 law (in February 2003 it was the grass in Hyde Park), but stopping the MPs entering Parliament wasn't the aim at all. Rather it was to communicate to them some of the strength of feeling that surrounds the occupation of Iraq and the possibility of an attack on Iran, in the hope they might fulfil their function as representatives and "Re-Present" these views in the House. I suspect that Brown realized how potentially damaging it would be to have imposed a ban on the march, given the determination of the protestors to assert their right to peaceful protest and the sympathy of most people in the country to their cause. A ban on the protest would have made Brown's "new politics" look much like the old on tonight's ten o'clock news, and in the end the threat probably only served to incerease the turnout. Anyway, here are some photos I took of the event.
PS: Having read a post on the protest on Craig Murray's blog (up and running again) I wanted to add some thoughts. Murray has a more negative take on the whole thing and in particular on the actions of the police. He says protestors were "confined to pens, with a wildly excessive number of policemen herding them like cattle. People were kept crushed in small fenced areas for up to two hours and not allowed to go to the loo. When people sat down (understandable in the circumstances) they were arrested." This wasn't really my experience, although admittedly I was near the front of the protest. I had free movement from the Square to Parliament. When police were stopping people moving on I think it was to stop a crush of people in the small remaining space that hasn't been fenced off in Parliament Square. At one point the sitting down was cleary stopping other protestors from reaching Parliament. I didn't see anyone arrested, although I do agree there was an excessive number of police for the occasion.
Assembling in Trafalgar Square.
Walter Wolfgang has first hand experience of nuLab's anti-terror laws.
The protest reaches Parliament.
