The last time I went to Manchester was just after Friedrich Engels published his book about the place and it was every bit as squalid as he described it. So the Stop the War Coalition demonstration yesterday at the Labour Party conference was an opportunity to re-visit the place to see what had changed. However I hope this madness of having major political events more than forty minutes’ travelling time from my house does not catch on.

Yesterday I travelled up on the “peace train” (what an awful hippy-liberal name) that had been chartered by the Stop the War Coalition. It was packed. The first part of the journey was a real bazaar of ideas with an opportunity to buy, or decline to buy, every single left publication in Britain from the strolling vendors.

For an awful couple of minutes I thought that the stewards were going to use the tannoy system to make speeches for the whole three hours. This didn’t happen. Instead we got something short and uplifting from Tony Benn, one of the UNISON NHS Logistics strikers and something inoffensive from Bianca Jagger. Listening to her I found myself wondering if she would be allowed to speak in public so often if she was called “Bianca Jones”. Is that cynical?

The pre-march rally and the march were very impressive. A Manchester comrade whose judgement I trust estimated that there were about 50 000 there. There was a significant, but not overwhelming, union presence, Lots of local peace groups and the entire far-left. (I mean the ENTIRE far left. I picked up a leaflet from the Posadist Fourth International, an outfit I’d never seen before.) Solidarity from Scotland had a good-sized contingent. I’m told that the SSP had a few people down but I didn’t see them.

Both sides of the Workers Power split were there. The new journal Permanent Revolution is one of the best looking things on the far left though I can’t comment on the content yet. In common with some religions it seems to share a distaste for images though the design is so good it’s not a drawback.

Respect had a more higher profile presence than normal, with a good sprinkling of banners, a few stalls and a newspaper which I must get around to reading. But it was the SWP which was overwhelmingly hegemonic both in terms of visual profile, bodies at the event and contributing to the success of the day. Certainly in this area the mobilisation to the demo would have been much smaller without their input.

From what I’ve been told the event didn’t get quite as much TV coverage as one would have hoped. Yet here was democracy in action. This movement is still crying out for an adequate political vehicle in which the plurality of its views can be expressed. My guess would be that everyone there at one time or another had voted Labour and now finds themselves looking for a political home but that’s another discussion.

Here’s another account but with more alcohol. http://stroppyblog.blogspot.com/