Anti-war demonstrations seem to bring out a peculiar type of creativity in some of the participants. As you can see from the photos The Non-Aligned Lefty Cat Lovers for Peace have produced the most wonderful banner ever seen. Here one feels is an organisation with a future. More details can be found here.
On the other hand you do get some downright inexplicable attempts to communicate something or other. One woman was trying to hasten the end of the imperialist slaughter by wandering around in her knickers and bra. Admirable but stupid since it was pretty cold. Someone else decided that the thing to do was dress up in a tiger costume. At least he was warm. The most kickable fool of the day was the white Rastafarian, dressed in the colours of the Ethiopian flag reciting prayers in a mock Jamaican accent. I hope that does’t sound intolerant.
My impression was that this demonstration was younger than many of the previous ones. There were lots of groups of school age young people and students who seemed to have made their own way there. At a rough guess there may have been forty thousand demonstrators. At no point was Trafalgar Square completely full. But in the interests of accurately establishing the numbers I did find out that many of the neighbouring pubs were packed with resting marchers.
There was an awful lot of religion from the platform. Some dreadful singer sang about how we are all children of the same god. Someone from the British Muslim Initiative droned on about Allah the compassionate. A bishop had something to say about Jesus as though it was relevant. Just as grating as this were all the appeals to international law, tolerance and mutual respect. It was Ken Livingstone, making one of his increasingly rare nods to the left, who gave the best speech of the ones that I heard. He even managed to bring climate change into it. 
This was a big and a successful demonstration. There is still a lot of passive resistance to the war, especially amongst youth. (Of the left groups the Socialist Party’s youth contingent was easily the most impressive with a hundred or more young people marching in it.) But, and it’s a big but, the US Democrats are having a more forthright debate on the options for American imperialism than is happening in any British party and no substantial political force has emerged from this movement in Britain.
Liam redux 
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