discussion of this article

George B said…

Rarely do I get incensed by police and media estimates of the numbers participating in demonstrations. While there may be a remaining naive element in me, conditioned to expect 'honest' reporting from the bourgeois state and its ideological apparatus (aka the BBC), I have long since come to expect gross underestimates of the numbers taking part in national protests. Similarly, I have come to expect a wilful tendency to inflate the numbers on demos from the spokespersons from the Stop the War Coalition.

For the Saturday 10 January march against the high-tech barbarism of the Israeli assault on Gaza, I will, however, make an exception. The protest was an exceptional combination of enormous size and sustained passion. When I saw an online report from the BBC indicating that the Metropolitan Police estimated the attendance at 12,000 - nearly identical to the figure that was eventually circulated for the previous Saturday's demonstration - I assumed a misprint. It wasn't! The BBC, unusually, presented its own estimate of some 50,000 and eventually the Met revised its figure upward to 20,000, still an incredible understatement. On this occasion the initial figure presented by Stop the War of 100,000 seemed entirely credible to me.

Having arrived more than half an hour before the official assembly time of 12.30 PM at the Speaker's Corner end of Hyde Park, I found there were already several thousand people who clearly had not come for a day's sightseeing. As I waited for other members of my own and other London UNISON branches to arrive midst the teeth-chattering cold, thousands and thousands more poured into the park moving towards the stage erected a couple of hundred metres to the west of Marble Arch. Somehow a workplace comrade and I managed to weave our way through the occasional tree branch and throngs of humanity with the heavy and unwieldy Camden UNISON banner to within earshot of the platform speeches. After what seemed an interminable opening rally we eventually began to move out of the park and into Bayswater Road shortly after 1.45 PM. As we proceeded towards Notting Hill Gate the flat topography of the route made it difficult to gauge the size of the march in front of us, but eventually a traffic island afforded a glimpse of a solid vista of placards and banners stretching for hundreds and hundreds of metres in front of us. Meanwhile, the vast majority of marchers were some distance behind us, still in Hyde Park.

One characteristic of the march on 10 January, in contrast to the previous week, was a substantial and very visible labour movement presence. None too surprisingly, most of the banners were from predominantly public sector unions with large white collar memberships, though I did see the odd battle-scarred T&G banner on the route and doubtless missed quite a few others. In Britain we still seem to a long way from the sort of symbolic stoppage by Norwegian train drivers in solidarity with the people of Gaza staged this past week.

Our makeshift UNISON contingent included banners from at least four London local government branches along with the London regional and national UNISON banners as well as a smattering from branches much further afield, including Plymouth. At one point at least 10 members from my own branch were marching with the branch banner and I was aware of several other Camden UNISON members who simply could not find us. There were still more NUT banners including the teaching union's national standard.

As on 3 January the demonstration included many young people of Arab, North African and South Asian ancestry. The chanting was constant from these sections of the march - sometimes very earnest and laced with some Arabic sloganeering, some quite comical - "George Bush where are you? We want to throw a shoe at you" and "BBC shame on you; Al Jazeera's better than you". The protest ground to a virtual halt as we approached the gates at the northern end of the private Palace Green Road. Some young men with flags and placards had climbed atop the stone pillars by the gates. The acrid smell of burning - an Israeli flag set alight, soon followed by a substantial aerial bombardment of shoes and bits of discarded placards. Thought I could not see for myself at this stage, sections of marchers panicked in the face of a charge by riot police, who were evidently lurking behind the gates. Having managed with difficulty to stabilise the banner and start to move forward again, we found the march apparently bisected and decided to head towards High Street Kensington and the announced destination for the march's end.

After a rapid passage through Kensington Church Street, we hit a human bottleneck extending across High Street Kensington, stretching from just east of the Tube station to just beyond the Embassy gates. As the chanting and drumming continued, the fury of sections of the crowd rose, while riot police stood on the blocked off pavement on either side of the packed road. Horses were evidently in reserve down side streets. After nearly an hour and having dismantled our union banner, we completed a journey of less than 200 metres just to witness the surreal image of George Galloway projected on a giant video screen another 150 metres down the road. Only later did we get confirmation that the stand-off with the cops had turned ugly with at least 15 arrests and an unreported number of injuries among demonstrators.

In time-worn fashion a number of us eventually warmed ourselves in a pub along Gloucester Road, exhausted but pleased at what we had been part of. Obviously, with the threat of an Israeli escalation issued even as we marched through some of the most affluent streets in Europe, it is vital that we sustain and further develop a revitalised movement against imperialist wars and in solidarity with the Palestinians. The horrific events of the past fortnight present us with a challenge and an opportunity to translate paper policies into meaningful actions, not least by advancing a campaign for divestment from and sanctions against Israel, led by the trade unions. As inspiring as the past two Saturdays in London have been, they also illustrate that marching or demonstrating night after night outside the Zionist embassy are not enough.

Finally, it strikes me - especially with the imminent changing of the guard at the White House - that the US Embassy in Grosvenor Square must be on the route for the next national protest. After all, the Zionist terror from the air in particular has been underwritten in no small measure by US taxpayers with the F16s and Apache helicopters coming at knock-down prices from Washington, which earmarks one-third of all its 'foreign aid' for a state with some six million residents.

Sun 11, January 2009 @ 15:32