Apparently the May Day demonstration in Vienna (pop. 1.7 million) normally has about 100 000 participants. London’s (pop. 7,556,900) pulls about 2000 of whom at least 300 are not selling papers, journals, handing out leaflets or marching in the drilled formations and uniforms preferred by the exiled Kurdish organisations. They do add a lot of colour and it really is quite rousing to amble into the square to a massively amplified version of the Internationale.
Also adding something to the mix are the small Maoist groups you never see during the rest of the year. My theory is that they are in hiding in inaccessible mountainous strongholds and use the cover of the demo to sneak into the city to judge whether the time is right to launch an insurrectionary general strike.
You would have to have great imaginative powers to convince yourself that London’s May Day event has much more than symbolic significance. It has a fairly tiny smattering of real union contingents. The bulk of those present are connected in some way to the organised hard left and while the age profile was younger than one might have anticipated it was the émigré contingents which added most of the spectacle and dynamism.
On a musical note – someone must really have a word with Class War. God knows what they were playing but it was a bloody awful racket and I say that as someone with a taste for bloody awful rackets. They are at serious risk of alienating the Kasabian / Coldplay demographic in the workers’ movement more with their music than their politics. Maybe that’s their intention.
Today’s demo had a sense of keeping a tradition alive more than rallying the militant working class vanguard. Here’s hoping next year’s is bigger and angrier. There will certainly be lots to be angry about.
Comrade Harpy was there and she’s a much better photographer than me so you might find more here.
Liam redux 
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